This book is about the intellectual poverty of the claim "New Atheism" makes to exclusive possession of reason in the great debate of our secularized time: does God really exist, and can the Christian Revelation for Man be true? Reason, claims the no-God crowd, decides, and it belongs to them alone. Dictate the terms, win the debate.
Maybe one should first ask a fundamental question. In our time, why do atheists think as they do, and do they even know why? What makes an atheist tick? Though it's at least as old as the Scriptural observation, "the fool says in his heart there is no God," atheism was a rarity in our civilization before the philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment center-staged the "cult of reason", which developed in the next century into a steadily growing materialism--the idea that the material world is all there is or ever was, and its corollary that God is a human invention. Then in 1859 came a philosophical game-changer, "The Origin of Species." Darwin's immediately influential tract fertilized readied minds. Its theory that a blind natural process accounted for the origin and development of life and all human reality appeared to place a seal of science on the growing materialist worldview.
If not "settled" science, Darwinian evolutionary theory was convincing to much of the educated world through the late 19th century, and even more so in the 20th. It also proved most welcoming as a materialist affirmation for new, totalist class, race, and human behavior theories--ideologies freed from the moral guides of Christian belief to define new moral notions. The 20th century bears tragic witness to the terrible human harvest of the God-denying ideologies ("substitute religions", Churchill called them), whose theory and practice claimed its own higher moral authority to justify the gulags, killing fields, and extermination chambers needed to clear the way for Communist utopias and a Nazi racial order to last a thousand years.
That descent into modern barbarism is history, but the atheist strain in the church of materialism endures, producing new acolytes, notably in the New Atheism advocates who, in March 2012, staged a "Reason Rally" in Washington, D.C. that prompted the writing of this book.
"True Reason" is the brainchild of the student apologetics alliance Ratio Christi's national field director Tom Gilson and Christian Apologetics Alliance president Carson Weitnauer. Readers will find rewarding the eighteen informed, astute and often witty essays they collected on topics such as atheism's irony, its gaps in logic and reason, and the emptiness of naturalistic explanations of reality, for example for human consciousness. Reason, it's pointed out, is ingrained in the Scriptures, pervasive in Christian theology and apologetics from the writings of St. Paul and the early Church Fathers, through Augustine and Aquinas, down to modern apologists like Etienne Gilson, C.S. Lewis and, one might add, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Other essays treat the unique intellectual home that Christian Western Civilization provided for scientific inquiry, hence the birth of modern science in the West and nowhere else. Christian doctrine posed a God-created universe and world of purpose, an ordered Creation that was thus discoverable and comprehensible by the inquiring mind. A historic unity of Christian theism and scientific inquiry marked the work of the major science pioneers of the Western World.
Among further topics are history's evidence in the Gospels, a textual analysis of the quixotic nature of the Israelites' conquest of Canaan, Christianity's historic role in ameliorating and ultimately ending the ancient institution of slavery, and the resolution of the problem of evil--in free will and, citing C.S. Lewis, as God's reminder of man's dependence: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Not missing in these interesting selections is a dismantlement of the illusions and "free speech for me but not for thee" nostrums of New Atheism's avatar of intolerance, British biologist and militant atheist-writer Richard Dawkins. All together the essays of the Christian philosophers, historians, and writers presented in this volume provide an eminently reasoned and learned handbook of Christian apologia which, with scholarship and skill, effectively dismantles the tendentious materialist screeds of the Dawkinses of our time.
In the third millennium of the Christian Era, a funny thing has happened to materialism--and atheism--on their way to the future. They have encountered an unexpected shock: the sub-cellular world of the DNA double helix. In that startling meeting with a dawning 21st century biological science, we witness the highest of ironies. Philosophical materialism and its secular acolytes stand before new and staggering realities.
We are today witnessing an ongoing collapse of the natural selection-random mutation mainspring of Darwinian evolutionary theory under the impact of the revelations of the molecular biological revolution. An unsuppressible inference flows from the fact that the encyclopedic information that directs the great plenitude of living cell types through the data-storage and transmission mechanisms of the DNA double helix, that that information is non-material, thus can have no material origin, but must originate in design by a great, super-ordered intelligence orders of magnitude beyond the collective mind of humanity.
We are entering a transition to a new paradigm of science and human reality. Attention, New Atheists: The returns are in. The philosophy of materialism that underwrote your atheism is dead. Read this handbook--and turn your life around.
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