[This is the third article in a series on New Atheism. Read parts 1 and 2.]
The second main group relating to New Atheism is ‘Joe and Jill Average’. This is the average Aussie or English or American, etc. They are not signed up members of New Atheism, but they aren’t signed up believers in anything in the way of organized religion either. They’re the bread-and-butter target of our evangelism.
This group has an interest in New Atheism, but for different reasons than the true believer New Atheists. ‘True believers’ are looking for something to believe in, something to live for, something out of which they can forge their sense of who they are. Almost none of those are pressing concerns for ‘Joe Average’. They might be smart, but they value more about themselves then their brains, so New Atheism’s whiff of intellectual elitism is not much of an attraction. They might be very pro-science, but they don’t think all real questions can be answered only by science. They might be down with the idea that people should think for themselves and be rational, but they distrust ideologies—which they interpret as pretty well anything that claims to be able to answer everything. And so while they might dislike Christianity’s absolute truth claims, they aren’t all that much more fond of New Atheism’s either. New Atheists are, for them, just as disturbingly confident about their views as religious believers are. Irrespective of whether people’s confidence is based on reason or religion, this group distrusts all absolute pontificating.
And most of what New Atheism pours scorn on—people’s fear of death, their desire for meaning in life, their wrestling with questions of right and wrong—are wrapped up in the parts of life that are what gets the average person out of bed. The average person isn’t that interested in stories about natural science, let alone interested in studying any of it. They are interested in what science offers to make life liveable—technology. And that’s because they are interested in all those bits of life that New Atheism dismisses—walks on the beaches with friends, family life, finding a sense of purpose to frame one’s decisions over a lifetime, getting enjoyment out of the activities of living, researching their family tree, going on overseas trips to encounter other human cultures. None of that has much to do with the natural sciences.
That is, there is very little that New Atheism offers that they want. Most people find it thin gruel when it comes to offering a platform on which to live life.
What New Atheism does offer, and the reason why I suspect it is appreciated, is that it offers people reasons to not believe in God. In the face of various religions and sects who challenge people’s relaxed approach to just focusing on making the most of life as they find it, and who strive to get them to take seriously the prospect that the meaning of life might be found outside of the things that make up normal life, New Atheism is a useful defence.
Few people have probably read any of the books by the New Atheists; still fewer have become New Atheists as a result. But what New Atheism does is give people a reasonably easy way to justify their desire to not have to consider seriously becoming religious freaks. They probably haven’t followed Dawkins’s or Hawking’s arguments carefully, but they know they’re pretty smart guys who are very good scientists, and since those guys think religion is bogus, that means it’s a safe bet to do so. In the same way that they don’t follow the details of science, but just use its results, so they hook into the scientific status of the New Atheist spokesperson, and don’t sweat the small stuff.
For the person who doesn’t want to be bothered by religious claims, but doesn’t want to have to go and investigate for themselves (and that’s most people not currently signed up to an organized religion), New Atheism is very useful, because it gives a license for that. It does in the scientific realm what Dan Brown does in the historical—offer a vague sense that something out there has disproved Christianity (or any other organized religion that makes demands on people).
It can be tempting to then think that because most people are only using New Atheist ideas for their own purposes, and aren’t really paid-up believers, that New Atheism’s arguments can therefore be ignored, or bypassed. Sometimes that is appropriate. If people don’t have genuine intellectual difficulties with the gospel (and many don’t—answer every question they raise and they still won’t believe) then often it can be a good strategy to sidestep the red herrings and go for the real reason—for example, the way most secularly-minded Aussies want to live a ‘Hedonism Lite’ kind of life, with minimal intellectual, religious, or ethical baggage making demands upon them.
However, I think it can still be good to play the ball where it lies. Precisely because many people are drawing upon a fairly vague sense that the smart guys are against religious belief, and haven’t sweated the details, it is worthwhile to pick off some of the views of New Atheists and nail them properly to the wall. While New Atheism might be a flag of convenience for people, they’ve still invested some of their resistance to the knowledge of God in New Atheism. Shake it a bit, let alone rip the tablecloth out from under it, and it can sometimes disturb people’s complacent view that they don’t need to wrestle with Christianity’s truth claims.
It’s a limited pre-evangelistic step, but it has its place. Every time someone like William Lane Craig or Alister McGrath has a debate with some big name New Atheist, the Christian cause invariably moves a small step forward in my opinion. The New Atheists have invested so much into portraying Christians as intellectual bantamweights who struggle to marshal the neurons to be able to breathe and walk simultaneously that all a Christian apologist has to do is turn up to a debate and not dribble on themselves to undercut some of New Atheism’s effect. New Atheism has lowered the bar so very far by its contempt for religion and religious people that it is fairly easy to walk over it without breaking stride, and by so doing show that New Atheism is out of touch with reality in at least one area. And that undercuts New Atheism’s plausibility as a whole, at least a bit.
But more often these apologists do more than just hold it together. They usually have a sufficient grasp of science to hold their own in that field, while almost always having a far superior grasp of philosophy, history, the social sciences, and even literature, to be able to outflank the fairly unreflective arguments of New Atheists. People mightn’t turn up to the debates, or be able to follow all the details if they go; nonetheless they get a sense of who had a better sense of the issues as people discuss the outcome. And when news gets out that someone like Richard Dawkins turned down the opportunity to debate someone like William Lane Craig, the credibility of New Atheism takes another small but significant crack. Not among the true believers (they have too much invested), but amongst the ‘muddled middle’.
So the fact that we have ‘world-class’ apologists, and that Christian publishers churn out one book after another on some variation of Has Science Disproved God? is something for which we should be thankful. It is, in the scheme of things, a small contribution to the cause of the gospel, but it is still something to be grateful for. We would be in a much worse position if we didn’t have these resources so easy to hand. It is also worth looking at investing some time in our public ministries—our sermons and evangelism—to addressing the issues raised by New Atheism, and doing it properly. New Atheism has set the debate up in such a way that one doesn’t actually have to ‘win’ the argument to make it profitable—all one has to do is show that New Atheism’s approach doesn’t hold all the answers to questions people care about and that another perspective has something going for it to neutralize New Atheism’s influence, and so take away one of the fig leaves people were hiding behind.
How much time and energy one invests in explicitly dealing with New Atheism will vary depending on one’s preaching style, one’s view of the place of apologetics, and the degree to which one’s audience seems to care about what New Atheists say. I’m not particularly trying to advocate for a position on that (in fact, as far as I can remember, I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly addressed New Atheism in a sermon myself). My point is that if one thinks that New Atheism is making things hard in one’s patch and that it is valid to address the ‘yes but’ that people say in their heads, it really isn’t that hard to address New Atheism, nor does it need to take up a lot of time or energy in one’s public ministry. The very features that have meant that New Atheism has made a small contribution to people’s resistance to listening to a Jesus-botherer (i.e. the vague sense that smart people think that religion is wrong) are the very things that make it relatively straight-forward to undo New Atheism’s influence once they do listen to a Christian message.
[This article is part of an 8-part series: read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.]
