This crisis within atheism series is really a response to the profusion of writings against God which have hit the shops this past two or three years. I am, of course, speaking of the efforts by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and one or two others (which I have not read). 

 

Now it would be very easy to do two things in this message - pick out the enunciations in these books with which I agree (usually the criticisms of immoral acts and mass credulity) and pick out the faults and errors of thinking (which I have written about before). But here I intend to do neither. Whatever flaws appear in these works, they are still (usually) the heartfelt convictions of these authors, so I thought it might be more interesting to approach this subject from a different, and less-obvious, vantage point - examining what might be behind their thinking. 

 

As regards the authors, the differences in style and in zeal are obvious to anyone who has read all four books - but there is one distinct commonality; they are all of the belief that faith is an irrational and unreasonable departure from coherent logic. It is not always understood by atheists that the real nature of faith involves something transcendent of human reasoning - for even in our greatest moments of cerebration, we are relying upon an engine which is itself part of a much bigger machine. Everyone, from Abraham and Job - right throughout to Tennyson and Niebuhr - have had to take a reductionist approach to faith and reason; that is, each has had to use one as a concession to the other when one became too strong for the other. 

 

Even Christ Himself reached a point when He enquired as to why the Father had forsaken Him. But it is quite obvious that this issue of faith and reason, alone, tells us only part of the problem that these authors are finding hard circumventing. It seems evident that much of their criticisms of faith are really a disguised manifestation of a personal distaste towards the concept of God. Nowhere is this best exhibited than by professor Dawkins, when commenting about God’s reproach for Adam and Eve, says that the sin ‘seems mild enough to merit a mere reprimand’. Here we see a perfect example of a fatuous implication becoming commingled with an already existent human understanding of a cognitive imperative. In other words, we see that Dawkins, using a method of reasoning - itself distilled from the divine imperative - is applying it to an objection against the thing being examined. 

 

To understand the true nature of God’s reproach, one must understand the real implication. Only an action which was, by later standards, trivially bad, could constitute a true appraisal of man’s disobedience and God’s grace; for any action which was itself despicable could only be despicable by human standards, thus implying an already existent sin. Faith in resisting the apple cannot be based upon the fallen nature of man, for it is precisely the fallen nature of man which causes the need for resistance.

 

Having established that the common thread of objection is indeed the thread that holds together almost all of the other material, it is important that we have now exposed it as a weak thread. It is important to clear that up straight away. I do not think that these books are bad because they attack religion, nor do I deny that other books by the same authors are very good. No, they are bad, not because they attack religion, but because they are self-refuting, philosophically weak, and reliant upon a partiality wholly conditioned by personal desires. 

 

It would be a shame if these books were to undermine the quality of their author’s previous efforts, but there is a big difference between enlarging a quality already present and undermining that quality by seemingly uncontrollable partisans. No book is bad because it attacks something good or good because it attacks something bad. If the efficacy of the thing attacked were the only distinction between a positive and negative review then we should have no business reviewing any philosophical books, or theological books, or scientific books.

 

In other words, it is not going to be helpful to attempt an analysis when the distinction between that which is true and that which is well written is being misused; for I do not doubt that some books by atheist polemicists are better written than some books by Christian apologists. Furthermore, we must be careful about the comparisons we make. A book about Christianity by Nicky Gumbel has much less literary merit than, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost, but an ordinary 12-year-old-boy would gain much more from the former than he would the latter. Thus when we talk of value, we are talking about something only partially related to meritorious things. 

 

Neither Gumbel’s book nor Milton’s book are badly written, but we do not deduce quality from such methods. If value is going to be the criteria of a book, we would be wise to enquire as to what value can be given to the works of Dawkins and Hitchens and what value can be given to the works of Gumbel and Milton. Already we have reached a point of convolution - not because such comparative measures are impossible but because any such comparisons would tell us only a very small part of what we want to know in our search for truth. We will not, in fact, find out as much as we need to know from mere analysis of the contentions alone, for the moment we do this we see that the validity of each contention is itself dependent upon the primary question of God’s existence. Thus, if supernaturalism is false, the argument to extirpate religion from all world affairs becomes a strong one; whereas if supernaturalism is true, the argument remains a weak one - but each is based upon a bigger premise. 

 

If it is argued that both sets of authors are preoccupied with a passionate search for the truth, it is going to have to be admitted that one set of authors must be hindered by a limitation which is, all the time, inconspicuous at virtually every step of the enquiry. To whichever set this impediment applies, it is evident that ‘truth’ itself is expressed as a conception that is neither static nor invariable. Furthermore it is evident that those who are hindered by such an impediment invoke some form of imagined reality by familiarity and pretension. It may be perceived by those impeded as something which is beneficial, edifying, and approved by the moral imperative, but we should not be surprised, for falsity itself has to appear to those deluded as something wholly true and realistic. I do not mean, of course, that the suggestion of error is necessarily to the discredit of their character; for to be unaware of such errors argues merely ignorance not indecency. 

 

And here we have begun to see the real reason why these books are bad. The writers are attempting to explain something of which they have no experience. They are attempting to denigrate Christians without having the first clue about the realities of knowing Christ. In such cases, we should not be surprised to encounter flawed analyses, but we owe it to ourselves to search for the truth in a different way to the way in which our atheist counterparts have attempted a successful structure of thought. But how can they ever find a sound structure when they have a profound dislike for the thing about which they are trying to enquire? St Paul tell us that flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:50), thus it has to be an experience of Christ that will reveal the true nature of knowing God, not external analyses. 

 

It is, thus, easy to see that those who do not wish for Christianity to be true will find it externally difficult to formulate an objective rational enquiry, and I think we see this happening with some of our atheist polemicists. Aversion obscures all distinctions and all credible analysis. I dislike soap operas and reality TV; therefore their distinct demerits all seem the same to me. If I were to write about them I should have to admit straightaway that I am one of the least qualified to do so. If I were forced to write about them, I would be forced to comment on each aspect of them, but I would reveal more about my aversion than I would a worthwhile evaluation. 

 

The atheist polemicists are in much the same position. Let fans of soap operas write the best reviews of them, and equally let Christians write about what is wrong with Christianity. Only then shall we learn about the merits and demerits of the Christian faith; we shall never receive a sound enquiry from those whose aversion elicits in them an impassioned desire for it to be exposed as false. Who wants to hear marriage denounced by a persistent adulterer, or healthy eating denounced by an obese antagonist?

 

This type of unreliability remains a significant cuckoo in the rationality nest. If you have never experienced the glorious results from knowing Christ, you will hardly know the best way to object to it. By experience, I do not mean visits to Sunday school as a child, for if you ever want to meet those who are most against Christianity, you shall very likely find them amongst those who have become disillusioned after bad childhood experiences. No, I am talking about experiencing Christianity as Christ meant us to experience it. 

 

Those who cannot comment on the real delights of wanting Him are no more qualified to form a valid criticism than I am qualified to form a valid criticism of aircraft maintenance. Because I have said that aversion assimilates all the objects to which one has the aversion, it then naturally groups them all together - all the time failing to demarcate the proper distinctions between each of them. This leads them to form erroneous conclusions about the objects that are being considered in the context of bigger pictures. 

 

In this sense, whatever is present but unsound in the books of the antagonists is superfluous and gravely disfigures the case against Christianity. The presumptuous allusions only blur the efficacy of the better points. I presume that these polemicist are not entirely comfortable in their new skin - for who in their right mind would consider Dawkins’ The God Delusion superior to his The Selfish Gene or River Out Of Eden, or Hitchens’ God is not Great superior to his The Trial of Henry Kissenger or Why Orwell Matters? Once an author strays from his specialised field, he is at the mercy of better men. Even the best scientists would struggle to argue with the best parts of Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, but the flawed parts of the same book could easily be exposed by a man with average intelligence. 

 

Thus Harris wants to warn us against the threat of Islamic fundamentalism by warning us against exacerbating the problem with alternative belief systems. But when faced with the prospect of all cards laid on the table, he regresses back into stultified nonsense about credulity being the biggest catalyst of all kinds of faith. He is not interested in examining the backward, ossified, theocracies or the crime families in power which contributed largely to such unstableness in the Middle East, he is only concerned with attacking faith itself; thus his argument is already swallowed up by his own aversions. His contention has equivalence only with that which he is denouncing, for one relies heavily on the other. He is making up his own rules. You do not form sound analyses by judging things at their extreme. You must start with the imperatives and bring them into your analysis of the contextual corollaries. 

 

The atheist polemicists create their own definitions of sound reasoning based upon their own definitions of convenience. This is easily observable by the time the reader reaches the second chapter of each book, for their definitions of sound reasoning are created to vindicate their claims that religion should be expunged from the world picture. I think it is useful to distinguish between the knowledge Christians have from knowing Christ and the knowledge that atheists have from their research into attacking the Christian faith. When we read about their perception of things like ‘probability’ and ‘experience’ we see straightaway that the former is almost always a substitute for the latter. They have a strong impulse to imagine what Christians must be feeling when they think that God is real rather than imagining which roads a proper, non-partisan, enquiry will lead them down. 

 

Who could say in all honesty that a man with the intelligence of Mr. Hitchens was conditioned not to find the truth if it was so desired? Thus we must reaffirm what we already know, that intelligence is always secondary to a passionate desire for the truth. Thus if Mr. Hitchens took his intelligence into the enquiry and conflated it with a genuine desire to humble himself in the hope of finding the truth and surrendering, we would admit straight away that his intelligence was only secondary to the other parts of the enquiry - the intelligence might have been used to realise the need for surrender, but it would have brought him no closer without the realisation of the true qualities of humility and surrender. But we see none of this with our atheist authors. They are attempting to look at the horizon without any concept of their destination. Once they decided to leave behind all thoughts of an open enquiry, they are relying on the effects their enquiry has on their cognisance within the boundaries they have set. Their faults outnumber their innovations because they are inevitably judged by their own boundaries. 

 

It is absurd to criticise them without due attention to the hermetic consequences of such boundaries. And just as novelists must make the scenes rudimentary if the characters are complex (and vice versa), the philosopher must guard against extravagant zeal causing the ruination of the simple enquiries. We need not take most of these enquiries further than the necessary establishment of truth - we have Occam’s razor, we need not cut too far, for in error, the first cut will be the deepest. That is why a real analysis of Christianity must involve simple things as well as complex things, for if not, one will negate the other. 

 

Too much comedy upsets the balance - you will always need a straight man to make the comedy seem funnier. Love needs stimulating at both ends - unrequited love is far worse than no romantic feelings at all. Of course, our atheist counterparts might not be interested in exploring the true depths of Christianity, but if this is true, they should resist the temptation to castigate the Christian faith. The proper study of Christianity is not one specific thing, it is everything; thus when it is explored to the full it gives a foothold to the deepest parts of human reality - both the deepest parts of human endeavor and human desire. 

 

The real situation of the polemicists compared with that of the Christians; the real force that lurks behind the imputation is, I suppose, something like this. If a man visited a psychoanalyst for therapy and there was trouble with the interaction, we could quite easily conceive the real feeling that the psychoanalyst brings into the interaction, upon hearing that the patient wishes from now on to carry on the analysis by himself. What had seemed on the couch in his office to be the scene of real improvement would now seem like a storm cloud over an element in the patient’s life to which he least belongs. 

 

He could not fail to imagine the thoughts and images occurring in the mind of his patient during the period of self-analysis - for he knows better than most that the heavy weather has real moments of calm when, and only when, the discharge brings about replacements of false things. Of course, they are, in psychoanalysis, very often incomprehensible - but they can do the job without being explicable to the cognition, just as a man can have a healthy food intake without understanding the complex inter-workings of the digestive system. And just as hypochondriacs would be the people most likely to be preoccupied with being well, and the oppressed the most likely to be preoccupied with liberation, our atheist authors are the people who have the most to gain from their own distortions of reason. 

 

I turn now to another important factor. A theme which permeates the polemicists’ books is a grave disliking of anything which departs from the special cognitive conditions of contemporary men. Thus, it is not difficult to see that when they visit foreign regions in search of English speaking people, it is not too long before they head back to familiarity. It is the result of limiting their reasoning to already established comforts, but this, as all good thinkers know, is the quickest pathway to delusion; that is, the less absorbed, the more credible and conceivable their established comforts appear. With this type of reasoning process, the cognitive apparatus employed is to be taken as a damaged machine; that is to say, partisans and personal aspirations for a favourable result cannot avoid the inevitable outcome of fragile and transparent appearances of cogency - the outcome most resistant to sound reasoning.

 

The real suggestiveness of the supernatural only really registers in the cognition of those who are most aware of its impact and implication upon their ordinary lives - ordinary, not anomalous - for any of us can sense the supernatural in moments where a real departure from familiarity has caused us to feel awestruck. No, for God to be accessible to all those who wish to know Him, He has to be sensed in daily routines as much as He is in numinous rarities.

 

These books may be the result of emotional pleas, almost completely free from open-mindedness, but most non-believers probably won’t be swayed by such obvious neglectfulness. The passion of argument is almost wholly lost in the emotions that have arisen from an already existent inner-inculcation - their real approach to analysing Christianity is contingent - and very often such enquiries sully the enquirer with intransigent zeal. 

 

If good science books inform us of scientific innovations, they do so by being true to life. Thus if Christianity is true, information propagated will be both informative and additional - additional in the sense that it broadens the mind and thus the range of possible experiences both emotionally and rationally. I suppose it is easier to locate bad philosophies not by an intrinsic evaluation of each contention (we learn nothing without aligning them next to their correlatives), but by the effect they have or the image they present as regards all the interrelating facets of the situation. If the analysis is evidently disfigured by a desperate emotional plea, we can trust it if, and only if, better and more substantiated corollaries compensate for the weaknesses in the initial argument (and this very rarely happiness). I do not mean that all formal causes are suitable for such analysis, for if the formal cause gives us a sense that reason is not being invalidated at the first step, it can, and often does, justify itself by its own supporting strap. 

 

I am sure that anyone who has pieced together all parts of the big enquiry and thus experienced both the cognitive change and the emotional change, knows full well that incorrectness by emotional intimations matters not one bit. Many of the classical psychologists failed along this road; they produced explanations which were only verifiable as inner-convictions, rather than by transference into a pot of analysis accessible to everyone. But examinations involving water must themselves be dry. You only examine the real nature of an object by examining materials that the naked eye cannot see. The aridity of the landscape upon which their emotional pleas rest reveals merely a distaste for the examination process itself, not for the parts being examined. That is why arguments about good and bad things done in the name of religion tell us nothing about the validity of religion. Once a man comes into contact with hints of the real nature of Christianity, he is bound to feel a sense of discomfort, just as a man who is approaching the doorway to the light must find his darkest moment right before the door. 

 

Those who come close to realising that Christianity might, in fact, be true, very often react to it like they would neuralgia. Instead of one realisation disposing of all triviality, it intensifies it to the point of delusion. It would seem, from the reaction it produces in them, that the denial does something to them at a deep level; thus affecting future analysis of the subject matter. Some are scared of what they will uncover next, some resort to vitriolic antagonism - but this is, in one sense, expected, for nothing so wonderful can fail to have an opposite intensive capable of eliciting such feelings. If the angels are gloriously exalted, the demons must be incomprehensibly tainted. And this leads me back to one of my earlier points, we must expect a valid criticism of the things we do not understand nor the things we detest. A vitriolic reaction to the subject matter is bound to offend and thus impair lucid judgments.