Review by Daniel W. Muth
A friend advises one contributor to Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: “You seriously need to get yourself some better atheists.” Dawkins is Richard Dawkins, the noted zoologist, author, and atheist. The vignette illustrates one of my chief concerns about this book — Dawkins is not a particularly formidable opponent of the Christian gospel.
Some background: in the mid-2000s, the New Atheist foursome of Dawkins (author of The God Delusion), the late journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), neuroscientist Sam Harris (The End of Faith), and philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) produced a set of bestsellers and became somewhat unaccountably famous. Panned by unbelieving and devout intellectuals alike, these authors, especially Dawkins and Hitchens, became well-known for offering rhetorical bombast in lieu of careful argument, and for telling certain types of fellow nonbelievers what they wanted to hear rather than what could be demonstrated as true.
Dawkins, in particular, stands out as a superb writer about fauna and their development through Darwinian evolution, while at the same time being sufficiently contemptuous of both theology and philosophy as to have bothered to learn next to nothing about either. While this does not affect his scientific writings, The God Delusion suffered from a gross surfeit of skillful argumentation. The other New Atheist authors have similar problems. Careful attention to theist claims and philosophical analysis thereof simply isn’t in much evidence in any of these works.
Hence my difficulty. Is there anything to be learned from people who have rejected an atheism propounded with Dawkins’s justly infamous callow and hubristic sloppiness? Well, yes, as it turns out, in no small part because the book focuses relatively little of its attention on the shortcomings of Dawkins. He acts as a foil for most of the authors of this anthology, and yet at the same time he plays largely a bit part.
The 12 essays consist of first-person accounts of intelligent, thoughtful people struggling to find some meaning in life. Most of them try out a youthful atheism and find it both intellectually and spiritually unfulfilling, particularly when contrasted with the gospel. The authors are pretty much all either Americans or from the British Commonwealth; educated, though not all highly so; and (most of all) middle class. While few are Anglican, they are kindred spirits to most TLC readers.
In the first essay, Sy Garte, a Ph.D. biochemist, had recently converted to Christianity when the New Atheist books came on the scene. He records having read them carefully in light of his scientific training, and concludes that, had he not been a Christian already, their shaky logic and poor use of science may well have convinced him of the truth of the gospel. Certainly nothing of his newfound faith was threatened by anything in these books.
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, professor of history at Australian Catholic University, records an early adult crisis of meaning that neither academic achievement nor atheist truisms à la Dawkins could address nearly as satisfactorily as C.S. Lewis and the Christianity he proclaimed. Peter Byrom grew up nominally Christian, abandoning the faith as a theatre major at the University of Kent. He found an ideological champion in Dawkins, before finding much better arguments in American William Lane Craig, for whom he now works.
One of the more illuminating chapters is by Oxford’s Andrew Gosler, professor of ethno-ornithology and an Anglican priest, whose studies involve birds that have developed cooperative behaviors with other species, especially humans. He notes particularly the relationship of the Greater Honeyguide to the Sub-Saharan Boran or Yao tribesmen and the symbiotic relationship of man to bird. His resulting critique is less of Dawkins per se (though Dawkins receives his fair share) than of Neo-Darwinism’s fixation on competition, “selfish genes,” and the like. This reductionism simply misses too much of what goes on in the natural world, the cooperative dynamics of which are better explained by the gospel. Again, the book is full of testimonies of Christians who somewhere along the line tried out Dawkins’s atheism and rejected it as inadequate.
The question remains of whether these authors are coming to Christian faith by way of Dawkins and company simply because the latter are inept apologists for their faith. Might these accounts be more of the sort one encounters of people who have escaped from “fundamentalist” (as the term is widely — and inaccurately — used) households into secularism? Just as a more intellectually formidable Christianity might withstand doubt, might a more robust atheism do the same?
I don’t think so. Atheism, it seems to me, suffers from two insurmountable problems. It requires knowledge that no mere mortal can have. It is by definition impossible to know that there are no gods out there beyond the realm of human knowing. Certitude of this sort could only come by way of divine revelation, and atheism by definition denies this possibility. It thus asserts knowledge that is simply impossible to come by.
There is also Aquinas’s third way of proving God, which I would paraphrase into an argument against atheism thus: (1) By definition, dependent beings require necessary beings; (2) atheism denies the existence of necessary beings; (3) therefore, atheism must deny the existence of dependent beings; (4) the physical universe consists entirely of dependent beings; (5) therefore, atheism requires that the physical universe not exist; (6) but the physical universe exists; (7) therefore, atheism is false. Sure, there are ways to dance around it, but the argument as stated is as unanswerable, as it is demonstrably true.
In the end, I don’t think it matters all that much whether Dawkins, Hitchens, or whoever are good at what they have purported to do. Atheism, given its call for engagement and thought, has always been a gateway drug to the gospel. Indifference is currently a far truer enemy of Christ. What this book makes clear is that God can use even the unwitting to draw souls into his saving embrace. Herein are a dozen stories, well-told and reassuring, of winsome, thoughtful people who have come from an empty atheism to a life of divine grace.
Daniel W. Muth is a retired nuclear engineering manager who lives in Windermere, Florida, and attends St. Alban’s Anglican Cathedral in Oviedo.
