Tag Archives: New Atheism

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What Christians Can Learn From A Bible-Belt Pastor Who Became An Atheist Leader

“All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion, intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”

The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people….(read the rest of this article here)”

There is a lot here. But I just want to make a few observations:

  • The problem of personal evil and suffering was a huge factor in his de-conversion (this was the case for Bart Ehrman as well).
  • He had no one who shared his Christian convictions to honestly share his doubts with and that could help him process intellectually or emotionally.
  • The article assumes that once he started “reading more broadly” and being ‘rational’, he began to move away from Christianity and lose his faith. The implied assumption is that thinking more means believing less. This is simply not true.
  • He came from a highly emotional stream of Christianity. Emotions aren’t bad; bud neither are they the appropriate foundation of faith. There is a difference between emotional doubt and intellectual doubt and they are not treated or resolved in the same way. (for more on dealing with doubt)
  • The new atheism is not going away anytime soon. Christians need to be ready to engage and understand why they believe what they believe. Faith is not blind. But the Christian life does allow for honest doubts. However, we must have the courage to doubt our doubts and invite others who share our convictions in to help us process–not just let the darkness grow in isolation. Sean McDowell and I wrote a book to help Christians young and old to engage the honest questions raised by the new atheists. You can learn more about that here. Our prayer is that this resource will help you or a friend / family member on the journey of faith.

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Religion Is Not The Problem…People Are

Throughout history, power has been used in disturbing ways and religious beliefs have been co-opted for personal or political gain. Philosopher Keith Ward’s comments are helpful:

“No one would deny that there have been religious wars in human history. Catholics have fought Protestants, Sunni Muslims have fought Shi’a Muslims, and Hindus have fought Muslims. However, no one who has studied history could deny that most wars in human history have not been religious. And in the case of those that have been religious, the religious component has usually been associated with some non-religious, social, ethnic, or political component that has exerted a powerful influence on the conflicts.”

This observation about the history of warfare reinforces the critical point that all ideals, religious or irreligious, are capable of being abused. Upon reflection, most would agree that people are the problem, not religion. There are deeper issues at work. The human heart is corrupt.

The prophet Jeremiah’s words are as true today as when they were penned: “The heart is deceitful above all things,and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Sean McDowell and I go into more detail on this and other issues in our book:

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The Projection Theory Cuts Both Ways

If it can be argued that humans created God out of a need for security or a father figure (cf. Freud), then it can just as easily be argued that atheism is a response to the human desire for the freedom to do whatever one wants without moral constraints or obligations. Perhaps atheists don’t want a God to exist because they would then be morally accountable to a deity. Or maybe atheists had particularly tragic relationships with their own fathers growing up, projected that on God, and then spent most of their adult lives trying to kill a “Divine Father Figure” (for more on this point, see the chapter by Dr. Paul Vitz here).

Moreover, perhaps the idea that humans invented God to meet their desires is precisely backward. Perhaps the reason humans have a desire for the divine is because something or someone exists that will satisfy them. C. S. Lewis powerfully articulates this point: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water…If I find in myself a desire, which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

But is there good, positive evidence for God? Yes. I write about that here with Sean McDowell:

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Six Key Questions to Ask an Atheist in a Conversation

Ravi Zacharias offers a very helpful list of questions, here are a couple of them: “Many times, as Christian theists, we find ourselves on the defensive against the critiques and questions of atheists. Sometimes, in the midst of arguments and proofs, we miss the importance of conversation. These questions, then, are meant to be a part of a conversation. They are not, in and of themselves, arguments or “proofs” for God. They are commonly asked existential or experiential questions that both atheists and theists alike can ponder.

1. If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? This question was asked by Aristotle and Leibniz alike – albeit with differing answers. But it is an historic concern. Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life? If there is meaning, what kind of meaning and how is it found? Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, whose opinion does one trust in determining what is good or bad, right or wrong? If you are content within atheism, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

2. If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault? These three philosophers, who also embraced atheism, recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. The crisis of atheistic meaninglessness is depicted in Sartre’s book Nausea. Without God, there is a crisis of meaning, and these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

3. When people have embraced atheism, the historical results can be horrific, as in the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? In other words, what set of actions are consistent with particular belief commitments? It could be argued, that these behaviors – of the regimes in question – are more consistent with the implications of atheism. Though, I’m thankful that many of the atheists I know do not live the implications of these beliefs out for themselves like others did! It could be argued that the socio-political ideologies could very well be the outworking of a particular set of beliefs – beliefs that posited the ideal state as an atheistic one….”

Read the rest here.

Sean McDowell and I respond to the 18 most challenging questions atheists raise here.

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow
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True Reason and the Reason Rally

Whose side is reason really on? A new book ($2.99) will help you think through these issues for yourself:

“The New Atheists are convinced that good thinking means disbelief in God and that their leaders are models of good reasoning. They’re planning a “Reason Rally” for March 24. Richard Dawkins heads up a “Foundation for Reason and Science.” Sam Harris is founder and chairman of “Project Reason.” The American Atheists define atheism as “the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason . . .” John Loftus tells us “Faith and Reason are Mutually Exclusive Opposites.”
In this they are quite mistaken. 

They are wrong because their claims to good reasoning do not match the evidence of their performance. Dawkins’ book The God Delusion is rife with logical fallacies and demonstrably anti-scientific prejudice. Sam Harris devoted most of a recent debate to avoiding logic, advancing an argument based on emotional appeals instead. John Loftus says that his “Outsider Test for Faith” shows that belief is irrational, when his test actually demonstrates the opposite. 

They are also wrong because Christianity is built on a foundation of evidence and thought. The Bible is a record of what God has done. It tells us through and through to see what he has done, and to trust him based on what we know to be true of him. Jesus requires his followers to love God with all of their minds. The Apostle Paul reasoned in the synagogues and with the Greek philosophers. Down through history, many of the world’s greatest thinkers have been Christians. It’s still true today. 

And they are mistaken in not seeing how Christianity leads people to treat each other reasonably. Sure, there have been exceptions, but on the whole Christianity has been the world’s greatest force for freedom, peace, human rights, and of course the highest good of all: knowledge of God. 

This is not the party line. Even Christians may not know this is true. If any of this seems surprising to you, then it’s time for you to discover True Reason.”

Learn more and order the book here…

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow