Donate Now

Links

Atheist Delusions and the Irrational Atheist

David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) and Vox Day's The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (BenBella Books, 2008) are two very different books linked by a similar goal. Both authors assure us that their work is not intended to convince anyone that deism or theism, much less Christianity is true. Day even opens his book by declaring, provocatively, that he doesn’t care whether the reader goes to Hell or not! Instead, both authors simply are trying to correct popular but erroneous views of the history of Christianity and its cultural influence. Both authors regard the “New Atheists,” particularly Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, as contemptible propagators of factual errors who either are unable or unwilling to do the hard work of historical scholarship. To that list, Hart adds Jacques Le Goff (despite referring to him as otherwise brilliant), Edward Gibbon, Jonathan Kirsch, John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, Charles Freeman, and Ramsay MacMullen. Day does concede that despite Dennett’s egregious errors, he distinguishes himself from his compatriots by admitting that there are some things he does not know.  

Despite their common goals and common foils, the authors differ in their approaches. Hart focuses primarily on the early history of Christianity while Day covers the waterfront from the time of Jesus to the present day. Hart is concerned with ideas and their consequences. Day also critiques a variety of ideas, but is concerned primarily with data, and presents reams of it, some of it original and intriguing.  

Hart is an academic historian. Day represents the new generation of investigative bloggers who wears his lack of advanced degrees on his sleeve and mocks the errors of his academically-certified adversaries. While both authors’ impatience with the new atheists leads to a bit of name calling, neither engage in mere ad hominem attacks or what C.S. Lewis labeled “Bulverisms,” e.g., “you say that only because you are a (fill in the blank).” Both authors have an engaging writing style. Hart’s will appeal to a more academically inclined audience, while Day’s is entertaining, in-your-face, sprinkled with jokes (hopefully the reader will be able to distinguish the jokes from the serious critiques), and likely to appeal to younger readers.  

The two authors emphasize different themes and offer different views of a “post-Christian” secular world. One of Hart’s general themes is that what many people think of as religion-inspired violence really is state-inspired violence in which the church was willingly or unwillingly complicit. He reminds readers that the Crusades were episodes in a history of conflict beginning with the Muslim conquests of the 600s. (Oddly overlooked by critics of “colonialism.”) Similarly, the Spanish inquisition was a matter of Crown policy and an office of the state. The Grand Inquisitor himself was a civil, not ecclesiastical, appointee and civil courts prosecuted heresy as treason. The Catholic Church often intervened to dampen the secular courts’ excessive cruelty. During the “religious” wars of Europe, the state regularly accepted help from religious rivals and received none from regimes with similar confessional stances. And, interest in witchcraft actually coincided with a decline in the authority of the Christian church. Thus overall, violence increased as the state became more powerful and as the church surrendered its moral authority, reaching its climax (we can only hope) in the twentieth century when the state achieved true cult status, demanding unwavering support from its citizens, purging the public sector of its religious influence, and in the case of atheistic regimes, murdering 100 million of their own citizens in less than 50 years. Hart characterizes the current state of affairs within these regimes as “absolute state” and “total war.”  

As Hart shifts his focus to Christianity’s relationship to reason, he shows that rather than impeding science, Christianity facilitated it and preserved it in the monasteries during the Middle Ages. Pope Urban III’s confrontation with Galileo was a clash of colossal egos, not the ecclesiastical suppression of rationality. Urban actually funded Galileo’s research (and that of some of his relatives) and ironically it was the Church that insisted on scientific evidence that the Copernican model was correct, proof that Galileo was unable to provide because Urban was correct on a technicality. Hart also notes that states unchallenged by the authority of the Christian church have produced more than their share of horrific “science” and had the Church been successful in

 

COMMENTS