The Light of Day

Over the past four years, bookstore shelves around the country have displayed some prominent anti-religious tomes written by a trio of men termed the "New Atheists": The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Collectively, but in their own respective manners, the authors make the case for the "liberation" of modern society from religious (namely Christian) dogma, maintaining that the adherence of so many people around the world to religious faith has not only retarded technological progress, but is even putting the very future of humanity in peril. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens imagine that a world set free from such restraint would be a scientific utopia – a glorious world where there would be no limit to the potential of man's endeavors – a world where science would supplant religion.

In The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Vox Day examines and considers the respective claims of the New Atheists, and responds to them with sharp, logical criticism – effectively enough to show that the arguments of the New Atheists are neither scientific nor logical, but instead are based upon an irrational and ignorant view of science, religion, history, and human nature. Day points out that the New Atheists, instead of relying upon scientific studies, logical analyses, or independently verifiable facts, try to prove their case for the non-existence of the divine and/or the alleged anti-intellectual and anti-civilizational nature of religious faith by way of hyperbolic emotional pleas and circular reasoning.

Among the examples of New Atheist circular reasoning that Day highlights is a tautology (an argument constructed so that it cannot be contradicted) known as the "No True Scotsman" argument. For those unfamiliar with the "No True Scotsman" argument, it was so named by British philosopher Antony Flew, and proceeds as such:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris resorts to this logical fallacy when he tries to downplay the historical fact that atheist-led regimes have been far more murderous than those led by religious believers. A fact that is even more striking when one considers that throughout human history, there have been far fewer of the former than the latter. To extricate himself from this unpleasant (to him) fact, Harris claims atheist tyrants Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong only "paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion." Such a statement also begs for a definition of rationality, for the mass murders ordered by Stalin and Mao could be seen as perfectly rational in consideration of their desire to see their respective utopian political goals fulfilled.

Day is similarly sharp in critiquing the irrational arguments of Dawkins and Hitchens, and even other prominent atheists like Daniel Dennett and Michel Onfray. Dennett and Onfray are spared the eviscerations meted out to the former three, however. Day gives much credit to Dennett for asking what religion can offer to humanity, and appreciates Onfray being honest in rejecting Judeo-Christian ethics along with belief (something the Unholy Trinity refuse to do).

Unsurprisingly given my own background, it was on the subject of history that I found Day's critiques of the New Atheists – and of anti-Christian arguments in general – to be most convincing. Not only does Harris in particular get it wrong when it comes to understanding the relationship between religious beliefs (or the lack thereof) and warfare, but atheists in general often distort such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Adolf Hitler's personal faith, and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice in their zeal to demonize all religious believers as troglodytic and potentially homicidal maniacs. For purposes of brevity, I'll limit my summary of Day's historical analysis to the Crusades and Inquisition.

From an historical standpoint, the first of the nine military campaigns loosely known as the Crusades was a reaction to nearly four centuries of Islamic expansion, during which two-thirds of what had been western Christendom were lost to the Muslim world. It was not until the eleventh century than the remaining lands of Christendom were in a strong enough position to strike back. However, in the decades following the First Crusade (which included the violent sacking of Jerusalem in 1099), the nature of the Crusades began to shift – by the mid-1100s, politics and economics had supplanted religion as the prime motivating factors. Religious fervor dwindled and by 1291 the enterprise was abandoned entirely. Not even the imminent death of the Christian Byzantine Empire in 1453 at the hands of the Muslim Ottoman Empire was enough to motivate further Crusades.

Regarding the Inquisition, Day writes that there were actually four Inquisitions: Medieval, Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman. It is the Spanish Inquisition that is the most infamous of the four – the one most often referred to by atheists in their efforts to cite examples of Christian bloodthirstiness. The Inquisition's origins though, were not religious, but political. The Spanish Inquisition was created in 1478 by Pope Sixtus IV at the insistence of Queen Isabella of Castile, who believed that many former Spanish Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity had done so in bad faith, and were actively plotting treason against the crown.

Mao's Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of 43 million people from 1958 to 1963, Hitler's Holocaust murdered up to 6 million people between 1941 and 1945. How many were killed during the entire breadth of the Spanish Inquisition, from 1481 (when the first death sentences were carried out) until 1834 (when the Spanish Inquisition was formally closed)? 3, 230 people – an average of nine per year. As Day writes, "the dread Spanish Inquisition was less than one fourteenth as deadly on an annual basis as children's bicycles."

Even with all I have written in this review, I have just scratched the surface of what Day offers to his readers. I found his theological ruminations to be particularly illuminating – questions as to the supposedly omniscient nature of God, and whether or not God can be considered omnidirigent; that is, all-controlling in addition to potentially all-knowing. To what extent does God know of and involve Himself in the affairs of the temporal world? It is a question that has bedeviled theologians and philosophers for centuries.

But the most thought-provoking item I found in Day's book was this one concerning the nature of evil:

[Jesus] indicated that Satan was skilled in the art of deception and specifically referred to Satan as the Deceiver on several occasions. And significantly, the Apostle Paul mentions how "the god of this age" has exerted himself to blind the minds of unbelievers.

So put yourself in the hypothetical position of this evil being ruling over all the Earth. Is it in your interest to reveal yourself to humanity? Or is it better to lie in wait, hidden in the shadows, as the mortal world convinces itself that neither you nor your plane of existence is real? Given the disastrous results of this past century in parts of the world that intentionally turned away from the Christian God and His truth in favor of Man and his scientific proofs, the evidence would seem to suggest that unbelief in the supernatural serves the evil being.

Does this Deceiver possess the power and to hide the spiritual world from us? The logical answer, given his apparent power over the physical world, would appear to be yes…

A good point indeed, and one to which no atheist, new or old, could begin to give a convincing response.