I have just started reading Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart. While reading the first paragraph of the first chapter, I realised that I was going to like this book, both for its style and its content. It was published in 2009, but is perhaps even more relevant today. The paragraph starts with the fact that today newspapers and book publishers have never before been so open to those who will denounce faith in general and Christianity in particular because it is such an easy target. To quote:
“As I write, Daniel Dennett’s latest attempts to wean a credulous humanity from its reliance on the preposterous fantasies of religion, Breaking the Spell, has arrived amid a clamor of indignant groans from the faithful and exultant bellowing from the godless. The God Delusion, an energetic attack on all religious belief, has just been released by Richard Dawkins, the zoologist and tireless tractarian, who – despite his embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning – never fails to entrance his eager readers with his rhetorical recklessness. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method. Over the past few years, Sam Harris’s extravagantly callow attack on all religious belief, The End of Faith, has enjoyed robust sales and the earnest praise of sympathetic reviewers. Over a slightly greater span, Philip Pullman’s evangelically atheist (and rather overrated) fantasy trilogy for children, His Dark Materials, has sold millions of copies, has been lavishly praised by numerous critics, has been adapted for the stage, and has received partial cinematic translation; its third volume, easily the weakest of the series, has even won the (formerly) respectable Whitbread Prize. And one need hardly mention the extraordinary sales achieved by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, already a major film and surely the most lucrative novel written by a borderline illiterate. I could go on.”
Of these, I have only read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I do not consider that I was a Christian at the time I read it, though as stated elsewhere in this blog, I did at the time believe it probable that God existed. This book was so bad that it tended to reinforce my belief rather than consider it a delusion. I do not doubt that those already of an atheist mindset thought that it justified their opinion.
Christopher Hitchens I have heard in debate, but I have not read anything of his. I did not find him particularly convincing.
His Dark Materials was turned into a television series, and I only know it through having watched a few episodes. It was clearly a fantasy for children and, for me, unwatchable. I did not see enough to know whether it was “evangelically atheist”.
I saw the film of the Da Vinci Code, which was clearly nonsense and it in no way encouraged me to read the book. I was not a Christian at the time I saw it, which is perhaps why I did not see it as overtly anti-Christian, even though it is.
Resurrection
Still in the first chapter of Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart goes on to say something that is very important and that we should never forget:
“Harris is quite correct to say, for instance, that Christ’s resurrection – like any other historical event – is known only by way of the testimony of others. Indeed, Christianity is the only major faith built entirely around a single historical claim. It is, however, a claim quite unlike any other made, as any perceptive and scrupulous historian must recognize. Certainly it bears no resemblance to the vague fantasies of witless enthusiasts or to the cunning machinations of opportunistic charlatans. It is the report of men and women who had suffered the devastating defeat of their beloved master’s death, but who in a very short time were proclaiming an immediate experience of his living presence beyond the tomb, and who were, it seems, willing to suffer privation, imprisonment, torture, and death rather than deny that experience. And it is the report of a man who had never known Jesus before the crucifixion, and who had once persecuted Jesus’s followers, but who also believed that he had experienced the risen Christ, with such shattering power that he too preferred death to apostasy. And it is the report of countless others who have believed that they also – in a quite irreducibly personal way – have known the risen Christ.”
Beautifully expressed. I like this book.
Addendum
I have now finished reading this book and am very impressed. I certainly liked the way he dismissed the pronouncements of prominent atheists. As the book goes on, the author clearly outlines many of their errors in logic and their lack of knowledge of history. David Bentley-Hart is amongst other things, both a historian and a philosopher and he has put together an enthralling history of Christianity – the good and the not so good – in the context of the times. A very scholarly work.