Perhaps you have come across these titles:

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Mariner Books (January 16, 2008)

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group (May 1, 2007)

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, W. W. Norton (October 10, 2005)

I haven't read these books, but have come across these "thinkers" in other media. I have read the books, below, by Haught and Kung. Haught addresses these authors directly. Kung speaks of others, like Hawking, Sagan and Monod. They do not measure up, whatsoever, with Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, Camus, Sartre et al and they are not engaging Haught, Kung, Lonergan, Gelpi and Peirce et al. They are playing and fighting and pouting in a theological sandbox, giving good old fashioned atheistic critiques a bad name, critiques that were deserving of response. These folks should be somewhat happy that someone like Haught condescended to slum with them at all.

Succinctly, as I view things, the chief problem with these "new" atheists is that they engage a caricature of atheism against a caricature of theism. In other words, what we have is a shallow, Enlightenment fundamentalism, or scientism, engaging the shallow theistic fundamentalisms, or mostly fideists and naive foundationalists.

quote:

I cannot speak for other college professors today, but in my own classes the new books by Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens would never have made the list of required readings. These tirades would simply reinforce studetns' ignorance not only of religion, but ironically also of atheism. page 16 of God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens by John Haught Westminster John Knox Press (December 31, 2007)

quote:

Beyond question, the critique of religion offered by these "new materialists" does not remotely reach the depth of their classical predecessors. page 49 of The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion by Hans Kung, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (June 15, 2008)

So, there you have it. Don't waste your nickel.

Note: I do want to say that I do not ever mean to suggest that all Folk Religion is at bottom fundamentalistic. The authenticity of one's engagement of reality is NOT measured solely in terms of one's ability to articulate one's justifications and/or beliefs in rigorous philosophical arguments. There are no too few people (billions) whom I'd consider to be unconsciously competent, philosophically, due to the efficacies of their early formation (e.g. catechesis & evangelization), a formation that allows them to be broadly competent and hugely authentic in the way they live and move and enjoy their being.

pax!
jb

I do have one quibble with Haught's charge that naturalism is inherently self-contradictory, a retorsive argument that does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. I mention that because he repeats that argument again in God and the New Atheism, after having urged it rather extensively in Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, May 2006, Cambridge University Press - which I exhaustively critiqued here.

Thanks for posting this topic, JB. I've examined some of Dawkins' work and read a few reviews of his atheistic critique. The impression I was left with was that he was pretty much indulging a straw-man approach, which you've noted above as well.

Evangelical geneticist Francis Collins took Dawkins to the woodshed in this article published in "Time" magazine sometime back.

quote:

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

And . . .

quote:

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.