Religious Responses to the Challenge of New Atheism

Title: Religious Responses to the Challenge of New Atheism

Date: 17th November 2023

Topic: Philosophy of Religion

Keywords:

Class notes:

New Atheism has not gone unchallenged by theists. Their general defence against New Atheism is two-fold:

• New Atheism fails to advance an alternative of its own, it is just anti-religious. It is like Erik ten Hag saying why Manchester City are terrible but not explaining why Manchester United are better.
• New Atheism only attacks basic stereotypes of religious belief and degenerative forms of religion, ignoring the depth of religious belief and mainstream religion.

Below are three specific rejections of New Atheism that incorporate the above:

Rejection by religious groups of New Atheist claims regarding incompatibility of science and religion:

New Atheism takes an extremist scientific view i.e. they do not believe that anything other than science can explain the universe. Therefore, they deny the possibility that science could be aided by religion in explaining the complexities of how and why the universe exists.

Examples you can use here are:

• Tennant’s Anthropic and Aesthetic Principles, you learnt when looking at the Teleological Argument.
• Both these theories use a mixture of theology and science

Alister MacGrath argues that evidence and belief in religion is similar to evidence and belief in the natural sciences. He points out that there is a distinction between the “total absence of supporting evidence” and the “absence of totally supporting evidence.

• Religion and science fit into the latter.
• Increase in fundamental religious activity relating to morality and community

Religious fundamentalism can be defined as an unwavering attachment to a set of religious beliefs.

• Each major religion has always had religious fundamentals e.g. in Christianity groups like the Amish have always had an unwavering attachment to their beliefs.
• However, some Sociologists believe that as society has moved away from religious beliefs, so many religious groups have become more fundamentalist in response to this i.e. they have become more active in promoting their belief systems.

Organisations in the UK such as ‘The Christian Institute’ promote a conservative Christian viewpoint founded on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The institute campaigns on social and moral issues seeking to influence Parliament and on occasions taking legal action to support Christian issues.

• For example, it helped fund the legal battle of ‘Asher’s Baking Company’. The bakers were being prosecuted because they refused, on religious grounds, to decorate a cake with the slogan: “support gay marriage.”

Increase in religious apologists in media:

The rise of New Atheism has led to an increase in religious apologists in the mass media. Religious apologists are religious people who present rational and evidence-based arguments to justify their beliefs.

→ For example, Shabir Ally (check him out on YouTube) is a Canadian based Muslim apologist, who regularly appears on television to debate Islam and express

commonalities with Christianity.

The advent of social media has also enabled Christian apologists such as Williams Lane Craig and Alastair McGrath (again check them out on YouTube) to raise their media profile and open up their arguments to a wider audience.(Also check out the ‘Unbelievable?’ podcast.

It is also reductionist as it generalises religions to the extremist groups like islam is generalised into the 9/11 attack in the US - so then people generalise many muslim into ‘terrorists’

Many academics who invented and discovered many academic ideas were/are religious

• For example, Francis Bacon who was a christian who created the scientific method

New atheism is hypocritical as it suggests that religion is close-minded whilst also being very close-minded themselves.

• There is evidence for religion as there is evidence for scientific explanations so we cannot pick and choose what we choose to acknowledge as evidence

Questions/retrieval:

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