Michael Novak on the Recent Atheist Books

What are we to think about the recent apologia for atheism?  We mean Richard Dawkins’  The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.  How does a believer deal with these withering critiques of religion? Michael Novak, RMC Chappie, has crack at answering them in National Review. 

He uses his daughter to make his strongest argument.  She went off to university at Duke as an atheist, but the professors there cured her of it. 

What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation.

 It’s an interesting paradox, isn’t it?  You do your research and your science with an admirable faith in reason.  But you believe the world is ultimately absurd.  What do you call that?  Religion?

Anyway, Novak’s daughter now calls herself an  “agno-theist.”

There’s a lot more, including a quick Apology for Christianity in four parts:

1. A Theology of the Absurd (to counter the Duke professors)
2. The Burden of Sin (you know, the things you know you shouldn’t do)
3. The Bright Golden Thread of Human History
4. The Point of the Cosmos is Friendship

Atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett are all very well, and they are excellent fellows, writes Novak.

To be sure, some individual atheists “of a peculiar character” and academic distinction, brought up in habits inculcated by the religious cultures of the past, can go on for two or three generations living in ways hard to distinguish from those of unassuming Christians and Jews. These individuals continue to be honest, compassionate, committed to the equality of all, and firm believers in “progress” and “brotherhood,” long after they repudiate the original religious justification for this particular list of virtues. But sooner or later a generation may come along that takes the metaphysics of atheism with deadly seriousness. This was the fate of a highly cultivated nation in the Europe of our time.

He means Germany, for those of you who are historically challenged. 

And in Britain, close by the spires of Oxford where Professor Dawkins lives and works, there are plenty of people taking the metaphysics of atheism seriously.

It’s all very well for the academic elite to be pleasantly aware of the absurdity of life.  But for most of us, the strain is intolerable.  We must know that our life on earth has a purpose.

Otherwise, what’s the point?