When first coming across the books of the New Atheists I heard many criticisms about their allegedly flawed arguments and research. To try to discover the truth for myself I read several anti-New Atheism books and researched them to try to figure out who was right and who was wrong. During my research I found that the New Atheists’ arguments were largely accurate, with a some minor errors here and there, but nothing that would harm their overall case.
I recently came upon a now defunct blog called Deeper Waters that hosted a piece titled “The Shoddy Research of the New Atheists.”
In this post the author accuses the New Atheists of failing to do their homework in their attempts to poke holes in the Christian faith. To do this the author simply went through the indexes of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and listed how many Christian sources they consulted for their research. How thorough!
After listing the books Dawkins cited the author writes,
Note that these are only citations. It does not mean actual interaction with the argumentation. I have been doing some more checking lately and looking at what Dawkins says about Thomistic arguments. For instance, he says the problem with omnipotence and omniscience together is that God cannot change His mind. I really don’t see this as a weakness but as a strength. The point is that Dawkins cites a poem by Karen Owens that shows how apparently silly it is that God cannot change his mind.
Who is Karen Owens? No citation is given. No description whatsoever. A google search of Karen Owens along with Richard Dawkins points to a trustee in Richard Dawkins’s own foundation. What are their educational credentials? How old are they even? Don’t have a clue. Dawkins presents this as an authority, a move I consider dishonest.
If Dawkins is bad however, Sam Harris in “The End of Faith” is worse.
After listing Harris’ sources dealing with Christianity the author writes,
The new atheists in these works are not interacting with Craig, Geisler, Habermas, Licona, Plantinga, Moreland, Kreeft, Zacharias, and numerous others. The argument is entirely one-sided.
As a student who still writes research papers, one of the first things I do when I have decided on my topic is to go and order books from the other side. I want my opponents to have their views presented in the best possible light so I can show all the more how weak that they are.
These books do not do that at all. Richard Dawkins does not interact with Alister McGrath, for instance, who is one of his strongest critics being an Oxfordian trained in the sciences. I find it hard to believe that Harris is a graduate from Stanford in philosophy when I read a book with such poor argumentation as the one that he wrote.
If I was a professor and a student turned in assignments to me written like these books are, that student would fail that assignment. The poor research and weak argumentation should have these authors being seen as shameful disgraces. Instead, there are actually pastors who apparently wrote to Harris saying they deconverted upon reading his book, enough to convince me that they should not have been pastors to begin with.
When I encounter an atheist who cites these books as authoritative, I already know that this is someone who does not take research seriously. The sad reality is that their works get absorbed by the atheists on the net and lower the quality of the debates. It’s really hard to have a serious discussion with someone when they think the question of “Who made God?” is an ultimate stumper that Christians have never answered.
While I would agree that the New Atheists have made a handful of errors in their books I find this Christian author’s statements to be ironic given the fact that he fails to provide any reasons why he believes the arguments by the New Atheists are in flawed. The irony is further magnified by the fact that the Christian responses to the New Atheists have made numerous blunders, and have committed many factual and logical errors. Many more than the New Atheists combined!
I should note, too, that Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith was mostly targeting Islam, not Christianity, so it’s not too much of a surprise that Harris doesn’t cite too many sources about Christianity.
I find it horribly ironic how this author berates the New Atheists for their allegedly “shoddy” arguments but then fails to address any of these major errors in any detail whatsoever. Going by an author’s citations is not an effective or coherent rebuttal to the books by the New Atheists.
In the next piece I’ve decided to take a look at some of the major errors and lapses in fact checking that Christians have made in their responses to the New Atheists.
