Mike Ovey, Principal of Oak Hall College, gave a talk a little while back on the history, convictions and impact of atheism, also offering some hints on how Christians might interact with atheists today.
Of particular interest was his division of atheism into four types:-
1. Protest Atheism. Someone might say, in the face of personal tragedy or global disaster, “An all-powerful and all-loving God would never allow that to happen, and therefore such a God cannot exist.”…
The best short summary and discussion that I have seen of Richard Dawkins’ view that science has ‘eliminated’ God is that of Alister McGrath in an article published the journal Science and Christian Belief.
Although published in 2005, and not interacting directly with Dawkins’ The God Delusion, the article nevertheless takes account of the opinions of Dawkins as they have developed from 1977 (The Selfish Gene) onwards.
McGrath expresses admiration for Dawkins’ scientific writing, but notes that when he touches on the subject of God, evidence-based reasoning seems to have been left behind, to be replaced by over-simplification and, not infrequently, misrepresentation.…
Self-confessed atheists are likely to be infuriated by the suggestion that there is really no such thing as atheism. But the idea that everyone, at heart, believes in God is a soundly biblical one.
To be sure, we should offer unbelievers sound reasons for the existence of God. But we should resist the idea that their professed unbelief is as deep-seated as they might have us suppose.
As has often been pointed out, the Bible never tries the prove the existence of God. …
In chapter 4 of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins attempts to demonstrate that the existence of God is extremely improbable. He gives pride of place to his ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit’. This argument, he says, is ‘the big one’.
The starting-point is the comment attributed to Fred Hoyle that the probability of life originating on earth by chance is no greater that a tornado in a junk-yard asembling a fully-functioning Boeing 747. Theists often like to say that that the universe is so complex that only God could have brought it into being.…
It is not only theists who commit God-of-the-gaps fallacies (“I can’t explain it, therefore God must have done it”).
Stephen Hawking, in his new book ‘The Grand Design’ claims that there is no need to postulate a god who lit the blue touch paper and set off the Big Bang:-
…Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
‘For seven years,’ (writes Tom Wright) ‘I was College Chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford. Each year I used to see the first year undergraduates individually for a few minutes, to welcome them to the college and make a first acquaintance. Most were happy to meet me; but many commented, often with slight embarrassment, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in god.”
‘I developed a stock response: “Oh, that’s interesting; which god is it you don’t believe in?”…
Antony Flew, the noted philosopher, died in April of this year. Albert Mohler has a helpful post explaining why Christians can be encouraged by Flew’s rejection, at the age of 81, of atheism, but why we should also be warned by his rejection of Christianity.
Flew was the son of the Methodist minister, and until his mid-teens regarded himself as a conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian believer. But reflection on the problem of evil (how can God be both all-loving and all-powerful?)…
Arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens repeatedly held out the following challenge to religious people:-
“Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”
Hitchens seems to think that he has religious folk stumped. “As yet,” he claims, “I have no takers.”
I am very far from wanting to defend ‘religion’ in general. So I would respond by asserting that it is not difficult to find multiple instances of moral acts that would only be performed by followers of Jesus Christ, and others that would more prevalent amongst followers of Jesus Christ than among non-believers. …
It was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who first popularised the notion that religious belief is merely the projection of human longing, the objectification of a false idea that people wish to be true. ‘God’ is, according to this view, an entirely human invention, ‘a dream of the human soul’, brought into being to give comfort along life’s difficult and dark path.
Religious people are unaware of this. They think that the God they have imagined has some objective existence. …
According to Richard Dawkins, religion is ‘the root of all evil’, and the teaching of religion to children is tantamount to ‘child abuse’. Not to be outdone, Christopher Hitchens declares that ‘religion poisons everything’.
Now, I do not hold a brief to defend either the truth or the goodness of religion generally. We must distinguish between what is good, what is neutral, and what is actually evil in religion.
But we should not assume that the blanket condemnation of all religions by Dawkins et al is condoned by all atheists.…
