In my last post I briefly looked at a very poor attempt at a response to the New Atheists, which just consisted of the author counting the number of Christian sources in Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, and because there weren’t enough Christian sources there for this Christian blogger, he calls the New Atheists’ arguments “shoddy!” If the irony couldn’t get any worse, in part two I’m going to look at some of the biggest blunders made in a few of the books that have looked to respond to the New Atheists. Due to space limitations I cannot list them all but I will list what I believe to be some of the funniest and/or outrageous errors I’ve come across in my several years of writing book reviews.
Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God, by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Emmaus Road Publishing, 2008
1. On page 45 these two authors seek to “rebut” Richard Dawkins’ analogy that monkeys, given enough time, could type the works of Shakespeare. Hahn and Wiker cite an experiment that was done in which monkeys were put in a cage with computers and the monkeys “did very little typing” over the course of several months, along with a “fair dose of computer abuse.” They end this sound thrashing of Dawkins’ analogy with the following: “Real monkeys don’t generate much of anything literarily, let alone something of the caliber of Shakespeare.”
My head is spinning. Dawkins’ illustration was meant to demonstrate the effects of time plus natural selection! This experiment demonstrated precisely what Dawkins has always said in his books. Without natural selection the random mutations will not do anything! In that case it would just be chance, but that’s not the case when natural selection takes over.
2. In Chapter 8 Hahn and Wiker make use of a “thought experiment” and tell a little fairy tale about the big, bad, “King” Richard Dawkins, who, if given half the chance, will “outlaw all religious instruction,” close religious schools, ban religious holidays and replace them with secular equivalents like Darwin Day, and the winter solstice. They continue to argue that, following Darwinian logic, eugenics would be legalized, and that Dawkins would prosecute anyone who spoke out against evolution to stifle any “irrational criticisms” against Darwinism, and that doubting “evolutionary atheism” “must be considered a kind of treason.”
I’ve dispelled this blatant misrepresentation of Dawkins’ views on so many occasions I’m shocked that these Christians who write these anti-New Atheism books haven’t gotten the memo already. Dawkins is all for freedom of thought. If perhaps they would have read The God Delusion a little more carefully this mess could have been avoided.
The Delusion of Disbelief: Why the New Atheism is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, by David Aikman, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2008
1. On page 156 Aikman writes, “It is hard to ignore the evidence that the Jewish and Christian Bible provided the clearest sources of inspiration to [the Founders]. Scholars have looked at what the original source material was of the quotations in the Founder’s writings, and they have discovered that by far the largest percentage came from the Bible: 34 percent. The next largest source, 22 percent, were the Enlightenment authors […]”
Oddly, Aikman lists no citation for this claim. However, later on after reading another book titled The Origins of American Constitutionalism, by Donald S. Lutz, I find the exact same study mentioned by Aikman. The numbers given by Aikman are accurate, however, he failed to cite Lutz’s explanation for these figures. The chart from Lutz’s book can be seen below:
On page 140 of The Origins of American Constitutionalism Lutz explains these percentages:
If we ask which book was most frequently cited in that literature [the public political literature], the answer is, the Bible. Table 1 shows that the biblical tradition accounted for roughly one-third of the citations in the sample. However, the sample includes about one-third of all significant secular publications, but only about one-tenth of the reprinted sermons. Even with this undercount, Saint Paul is cited about as frequently as Montesquieu and Blackstone, the two most-cited secular authors, and Deuteronomy is cited about twice as often as all of Locke’s writings put together. A strictly proportional sample with respect to secular and religious sources would have resulted in an abundance of religious references.
About three-fourths of all references to the Bible came from reprinted sermons. The other citations to the Bible came from secular works and, if taken alone, would represent 9 percent of all citations – about equal to the percentage for classical writers. Although the citations came from virtually every part of the bible, Saint Paul was the favorite in the New Testament, especially parts of the Epistle to the Romans in which he discusses the basis for and limits on obedience to political authorities.
In other words, three-quarters of the 34% total came from a sub-category of published writings in the study, which consisted of religious pamphlets printed for public consumption. This would cause the bible to be knocked down to about nine percent, more in agreement with another historian in Frank Lambert, who says in his book The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, that “almost 90 percent of the references are to European writers who wrote on Enlightenment or Whig themes or who commented on the English common law. Only about 10 percent of the citations were biblical, with most of those coming from writings attributed to Saint Paul.”
The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, by Vox Day, BenBella Books, Inc., 2008
1. On pages 82-83 Day writes,
Harris frequently points out the extreme religiosity of American society compared to the rest of the world, which therefore makes the United States an ideal subject of investigation on this particular point. Fortunately, the FBI not only keeps track of how many murders take place in the United States in its Uniform Crime Reports every year, but also records who committed them, how they were committed, against whom they were committed, and why.
In 2005, there were 16,692 American murders. Of these, precisely six were attributed to hate crimes, a definition that encompasses all racial, religious, sexual orientation, ethnic, and disability motivations for criminal actions. Of the other 10,283 murders for which the motivations have been determined, none were attributed to anything that could conceivably be related to a belief in a deity’s desire to see a particular individual dead. Instead, the two most frequent motivations were arguments (36.7 percent) and felony offenses such as robbery and narcotic drug laws (21 percent). Unless the vast majority of arguments that end with one interlocutor murdering the other are inspired by erudite debates between individuals belonging to divergent schools of soteriological thought, it is obvious that Harris is wildly incorrect about the frequency with which religious faith inspires murderous actions.
When looking at what Harris was discussing, and placed in context, he was not simply discussing war, but religious violence in general. Once you take this into consideration the amount of religious violence committed just for the year 2005 alone is much higher than Day lets on. After looking at the same FBI hate crime data Vox utilized (as seen to the left) I found something interesting. Out of the 1,314 crimes related to religious bias in 2005, 114 account for acts of assault. If you include acts of intimidation that is another 340 incidences for a total of 454 acts of violence or threats of violence. It’s also noteworthy that, while Vox would like to downplay the role of religious violence in the U.S., the fact is that out of the 7,160 incidences of hate crimes 17.1% were related to religious bias, the second highest motivator. Race was the first with 54.7%.
The Truth Behind the New Atheism:? ?Responding to the Emerging Challenges to God and Christianity, by David Marshall,? Harvest House Publishers,? ?2007
1. On page 42 Marshall argues that Richard Sternberg was “shunned, lied about, and kept from doing research” because he allowed a pro-intelligent design paper to be published in a scientific journal.
The only truthful statement here was that Sternberg allowed a paper on intelligent design to be published in a scientific journal. What Marshall doesn’t tell you is that Sternberg had ties to Meyer and the intelligent design movement. He also bypassed the proper peer review process and published the article himself. There is a lot to this story so that’s all I will say about it and I will direct you to an excellent article on the subject by Ed Brayton titled Creating a Martyr: The Sternberg Saga Continues.
This lapse of Marshall’s research is continued throughout the entire book. Even though information was available about the incident at the time of the book’s writing (even the emails countering these very allegations) Marshall failed to find out the other side of the story and swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. I wonder if Marshall will realize the irony about this and his insistence that “human testimony” is a reliable method of getting information? Doubtful.
2. On page 55 Marshall argues that science confirms the genesis account of the universe having a beginning. Marshall writes, “The Book of Beginnings says the universe came from nothing. We have tried alternative theories: everything from an egg, elephants all the way down, ‘cosmic crunch,’ ‘steady state’ – but the biblical idea of a cosmic origin has now been vindicated.”
If Marshall would have read up on what cosmologists and physicists have been working on the last twenty years or so he would have found out that the conclusion that there was a singularity, thus a beginning, follows from the theory of general relativity, however back in the 80’s it was realized that general relativity breaks down once you begin to talk about the size of the universe before it expanded and quantum mechanics must be used to determine its behavior. When this is done there is no longer a singularity and the equations allow for an infinite past. When you take quantum physics into account there is no longer any beginning. Stephen Hawking said as much about twenty years ago in his popular book A Brief History of Time. He writes,
“[…] I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account.”
3. On page 204 Marshall attempts to prove that secularism is bad for a society by citing the likes of Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger and argues their scientific findings influenced society for the worst. He writes, “If Kinsey was the father of sexology, Sanger can be seen as the mother of the single-parent household – though she spent her own spare time chasing lovers across oceans.”
If secularism was truly bad for the family unit wouldn’t we find that the most religious countries have the most stable families? On the contrary, we see the opposite.
Which countries host the most number of households that contain both parents? How does the united states, one of the most Christian countries compare to some of the least religious countries? Once again, Marshall would rather spew his propaganda than look at the facts. In 2007 the percentage of both parents living together with their children in the united states was roughly 70%. In some of the least religious countries, such as Finland the percentage was roughly 95% and in the Netherlands the percentage was roughly 83%. (Link)
4. On page 148 Marshall writes, “The status of women in a society may even be a function of how strongly the gospel has influenced that society.
[…] Note the United Nations’s Population Briefing Paper. Researchers ranked the status of women in 99 countries by employment, education, marriage and children, and health. In all four categories, the ten countries in which the status of women was highest had a Christian background – except for Taiwan, which came in fourth in the “marriage and children” category. Among the lowest listings, none of the countries had a Christian heritage (apart from the complex case of Mozambique, which has a mixed religious population and came in seventh from the last in health, but fourth from the top in employment).”
If you look at his source this Population Briefing Paper he cites is from 1988, which is a very outdated source if you ask me. The problem is that the facts contradict Marshall’s argument. Put simply, according to an updated 2009 UN “Gender Empowerment” study, the leaders in gender equality are Sweden, followed by Norway and then Finland. These three countries are some of the least religious in the world. For comparison, the united states, one of the most Christian countries, has a gender equality ranking of 37, according to the 2010 Human Development Report. (Link)
Another source we can look at is history for how Christians have treated women. To give an example, allow me to quote historian Howard Zinn,
[A]ll women were burdened with ideas carried over from England with the colonists, influenced by Christian teachings. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled “The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights”:
In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name…A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert…that is, “veiled”; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master…
Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: “The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement…But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife…” (A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, by Howard Zinn, Harper Perennial, 2003; 106)
The above errors are just a very small sampling of the issues I’ve found while reading these books that look to rebut the New Atheists. At the end of his blog post the Christian blogger I cited in the first part of this piece said the following, “As for my Christian brethren, while our opposition is lazy, it is not necessary for us to lower our level of study. We will continue to study and see this as an opportunity. If atheism sees this as its pinnacle, then our serious studies in all fields if we do so can allow us to, as it were, corner the market. We need to have people of high education in every body of knowledge out there.”
It looks as if no one heeded his appeal to take up any “serious” studying.
