Atheism turns fashionable: the new missionaries of unbelief.

The April 2007 editorial of Catholic Insight was entitled "Culture: with or without God" (p. 3). We noted that atheistic secularists would like nothing better than for Christianity to disappear, with some of them thinking that this has happened already.

In June contributor Richard Bastien of Ottawa examined Canada's secularism more closely (pp. 37-38). In this September edition he Focuses on the larger attack launched by professional atheists in America and England. Readers of the National Post and other dailies will be aware that over the last three months or so the issue of atheism has been given considerable publicity in Canada as well.

For some time, the dominant view among the chattering classes has been either that there is no God (atheism) or that one should go about one's life as if the question of God's existence cannot be answered (agnosticism). Those who share the atheistic view also think that its propagation is best achieved by treating it as a comfortable fact of life, in keeping with Freud's famous dictum that "the more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."

However, it seems that this low-key approach has turned out to be less convincing for millions of people who just as comfortably accept advances in science and technology alongside a growing interest in religious faith. So a new strategy based on proselytizing in favor of atheism is now gradually taking shape. That at least is the impression given by the publication in recent months of a spate of books by reputed atheists--among them Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett, The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens and The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, by Victor Stenger. According to the Wall Street Journal, these authors have collectively sold one million books in the last 12 months.

Their proclaimed intent is to accelerate the elimination of all remnants of the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Sam Harris puts it, the name of the game is "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity." As for Hitchens, he seeks to show "how religion poisons everything."

Atheists as true Believers 

The irony of this new desire to accelerate the spread of atheism is that, unlike the cool and laid-back atheists of an earlier age, these new atheists write like true believers. Indeed, reading them produces the feeling of being lectured, hectored, and scolded by fundamentalist atheists. This impatient zeal surely stems from the fact that, for them, history has not unfolded exactly as intended. Accordingly, Sam Harris ends his Letter to a Christian Nation with something that smacks of a personal confession: "This letter is the product of failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures--failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently." From people who claim to be driven solely by reason, one would normally expect at least some attempt to understand the deeper human reasons for refusing to bury God, as demanded. But such an attempt has yet to be undertaken.

For Christians who take their faith seriously, there is both a downside and an upside to this new wave of atheistic proselytizing. The downside is that it will reinforce already widespread liberal prejudices according to which there is no point in trying to know God. Instead of encouraging people to maintain an open mind about religion, these books will further encourage a closing of the mind to any possibility of the supernatural, which they gratuitously equate with superstition. Yet, they are written by people who, while they cannot explain what gravity is, nor predict the behaviour of subatomic matter, nor tell us how the human mind arises from the material of the brain, nonetheless think they know everything about the existence or non-existence of God.

The upside is that these books help draw more clearly than ever before the battle lines in the ongoing culture wars. Until recently, most Christians assumed that modern culture was at least neutral with respect to the basic tenets of Christianity, and that it was possible to adhere to the creed while at the same time accepting the philosophical heritage of the "modern" age. In short, one could view oneself as being both a child of God and a child of the Enlightenment.

Christianity or atheism

Thanks in part to these books and others of the same ilk, it is now becoming increasingly clear that Nietzsche was right: the only true alternative to Christianity is nihilism and atheism. Nietzsche inferred from this that morality can only be based on the human will. Anyone familiar with European history of the 20th-century will know the disastrous outcome of that alternative. It is in this sense that the new missionary atheists help us to understand why the 150-year-old attempt by mainline Protestantism and (so-called) progressive Catholicism to find some accommodation between the Christian creed and the basic tenets of the Enlightenment have led to a gradual erosion of the faith. Thus, there is now a growing realization that the only meaningful choice is between orthodox (Roman) Catholicism and atheism. As the intellectual dust and confusion caused by the collapse of liberal Protestantism and progressive Catholicism settles, one finds there is no way around this choice.

All this does not mean, however, that Christians and atheists are soon to find themselves locked into some kind of unrelenting battle. Whether the more zealous atheists who have adopted the missionary posture of these books like it or not, there are other atheists who do not subscribe to their views and who even seek a dialogue with Christianity. Jurgen Habermas, considered by many as a most "methodical atheist" and an icon of postmodernism, wrote in a 2004 essay titled A time of transition that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter." A similar view is held by atheist Marcello Pera, professor of philosophy and President of the Italian Senate in a book published jointly with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) and titled Without Roots.

The paradox is that this desire on the part of some atheists to engage in a dialogue with the Church comes at a time of wholesale abandonment of the faith and Christian culture by virtually all Western nations, the only exceptions being the United States and Poland. The Catholic Church in particular has witnessed the apostasy, explicit or implicit, of the majority of her baptized members and one of the most important outbursts of heresy among her intelligentsia since its foundation 2000 years ago. Those aware of this situation might thus be tempted to conclude that the new Crusade in favour of atheism can only further weaken what remains of the lived faith.

Yet, this is not the first time that Christianity has been thus threatened. Indeed, one could say that Christianity has already suffered many deaths, only to emerge stronger than ever. According to historian Christopher Dawson, the pattern of Christian history is illustrated most vividly in the early age of the Church, when from the first moment "it became involved in a life-and-death struggle with the Roman Empire and with the civilization of the pagan world." And when, after three centuries of conflict, the Empire became Christian, the Church almost immediately had to face a new enemy in the form of a Christian heresy officially supported by temporal rulers. In other words, the Church has survived not only the most violent external persecutions, as testified by the shock of Roman persecutions in the first three centuries, the shock of Islam in the early Middle Ages, or the shock of the French Revolution in the late 18th-century, but also its own internal weaknesses and decay. As G.K. Chesterton put it, "at least five times ..., with the Arian and the Albegensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died."

Mediocre arguments

The new atheists fail to provide any solid argument in support of the non-existence of God, not because of a lack of intellectual sophistication, but rather because non-existence is something that can never be proven. Christopher Hitchens, considered the most knowledgeable of the five authors mentioned, argues that God does not exist because "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule."

In making this claim, Hitchens makes two mistakes. First, he fails to account for the fact that a large proportion of scientists (as many as 50 percent according to the late Stephen Jay Gould) do believe in God. Second, and more importantly, he is oblivious to the fact that, in the order of natural (i.e. non-revealed) knowledge, the idea that God exists can only make sense as a philosophical answer to a metaphysical question. Throughout history, the concept of God has always appeared as one having to do with the why of a certain existence. And the question as to why something exists is not a scientific one because whatever its answer might he, it does not lend itself to empirical verification. In short, religion has nothing to do with what things are--that is the realm of natural science--but rather with why they happen to be at all.

By ignoring this distinction, Hitchens and other new atheists show themselves to be mediocre missionaries for atheism.

Additional notes by the Editor: Father John Flynn, LC., in Rome mentions two other books which continue the atheist's polemic: In God: the failed hypothesis, retired Hawaiian professor of physics and astronomy, Victor Stenger, argues that God does not exist because if he did, science would detect his existence.

And English philosopher A.C. Grayling, in a collection of brief essays titled Against All Gods, contends that religion is now in its death throes, soon to be replaced by a Far more benign humanism (Zenit, July 22, 2007).

Richard Bastien is a regular contributor to the Quebec quarterly Edgards, and director of the Catholic Civil Rights League for the National Capital Area.