Summary and comments on True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism

This is not a full review but more of an outline along with some comments. True Reason is a recent book written to re-establish a claim by Christians to reason: “Reason rightly belongs to God and to the Way of Christ. We who follow that Way want to claim the word back again.” The occasion is the perception that the New Atheists have claimed reason as their own and made it appear as if Christianity is not reasonable.

Chapter 1—The Party of Reason (Tom Gilson)

Shows the unreasonableness, or irrationality, of some popular atheists’ statements. “Christian faith is a friend to reason.”

OK, so what?

Chapter 2—The Irony of Atheism (Carson Weitnauer)

Ironies include: Dawkins argues that evolution favors the selfish gene, not the reasonable group; Sam Harris argues that our thoughts and actions are not products of free will; atheists ignore the fact that, without religion, the future always ends in death; materialism seems to exclude the transcendent including rules of logic and the mind.

Quotes from atheists to imply that

• Many atheists reject Christianity in order to justify political and sexual desires (Aldous Huxley, referring to “most of my contemporaries”)
• “what is ‘responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time’ is a fairly widespread ‘cosmic authority problem.’ ” (Thomas Nagel)
• most arrive at most of their beliefs for non-rational reasons (Michael Shermer) and that their belief systems “are certainly ‘coloured by desire’!”

In fact, like everyone else, atheists are prone to the same cognitive traps as others, even though to outsiders they appear to have “convinced themselves that they are an exceptional group . . . who are uniquely governed by reason.”

Chapter 3—Dawkins Delusion (William Lane Craig)

In The God Delusion, Dawkins made a logical argument that God “almost certainly does not exist.” This argument is picked apart on several grounds, including the claim that God is not in fact complex (as Dawkins says he would have to be to create a complex universe), but “startlingly simple.”

Dawkins’ argument is labeled as “the worse atheistic argument in the history of Western thought.”

Chapter 4—Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason (Chuck Edwards)

Argues that in The God Delusion Dawkins is guilty of faulty argumentation including “poisoning the well” by calling God names; knocking down straw men; unwarranted dismissal of the cosmological argument for God’s existence (showing his failure to grasp it); “sophomoric smugness”;

Dawkins is also faulted for failing to account for the origins of life, or rather, for simply attributing it to “an initial stroke of luck.” Somewhat bizarrely, in my opinion, the author appeals to the “law of biogenesis” which “states that life only comes from pre-existing life.” “Since the law of biogenesis is confirmed scientifically, why does Dawkins insist that life originated from non-living matter? Isn’t that a contradiction of well-established scientific law? This is the fallacy of wishful thinking . . . .” So why do we need all this debate, anyway? Science has proved that life can only begin from life, so God must have created us, QED.

The author criticizes Dawkins for claiming, against the facts, that religion causes child abuse or is worse than sexual abuse. Several studies are cited to show that people growing up as Christians (or in religious homes) are better adjusted than others.

Chapter 5—Unreason at the Head of Project Reason (Tom Gilson).

This whole, sad chapter is a critique specifically of one debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. Gilson argues that Harris failed miserably to reply in a rational way to a killer point by Craig. The end of the chapter does extend the same kinds of criticism to Harris’ writing.

Side-track: Here is an example of the kind of annoying, inane, nit-picky arguments that are used by both sides in the debate. Gilson quotes Harris, “Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian,” and Gilson replies, “Do Muslims really believe in Allah because of the historical evidence for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection? I think they would be most surprised to learn that.” Here Gilson ignores Harris’ obvious meaning and uses a play on words, in essence, to mock Harris.

Overall, some of Gilson’s criticisms seem justified while others, like the one above, are just petty and seem to show Gilson as more interested in racking up points than in confronting the issues. I think he does establish, though, that Harris may be guilty of intellectual sloppiness in his argumentation on some occasions.

Chapter Six—John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith” (David Marshall).

Another weak chapter, but I give it special attention because of the importance of the question. In a nutshell, John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) says that when evaluating the validity of their religious views, believers should try to analyze its claims as would an outsider, impartially weighing the claims of any religion. For example, a Christian should apply the same rigor to the claims of Christianity as she does to those of Islam, a Protestant should be as critical of the evidence for his beliefs as he is for those of Mormonism, and so on.

To many people, this seems a rather basic and non-controversial recommendation. After all, if we expect outsiders to convert to Christianity, we might suppose that the evidence for it is stronger than for other religions. On the other hand, some theological positions would imply that people become Christian for non-rational reasons (predestination, the witness of the Spirit, etc.) and pre-suppositional apologetics explicitly states that one is rationally justified in believing the Gospel even when, on the whole, the evidence appears to her to be contrary. The OTF would seem to be less useful (or even useless) given those positions.

Marshall finds the OTF “somewhat amusing, coming from an atheist from Indiana” with limited experience of the wider world (i.e., an ad hominem already detracting from the argument because of who proposed it). Marshall, on the other hand, with has extensive experience “far from the Christian ghetto” will give us a better perspective.

Marshall’s critique is too long to be summarized here, but it is mainly directed against the reasons Loftus gives to justify the need for the OTF. In other words, Marshall does not, for the most part, give reasons why Christianity passes the OTF but rather why the OTF is not strictly speaking necessary.

For example, Marshall disputes Loftus’ claim that people “overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage.” Loftus is saying, in other words, that people tend to follow and defend a religion not because they have selected it after careful consideration of its merits but because that is how they were raised. Not so fast, Marshall says, “Peel away the labels, and many beliefs seem to be universal or at least very widespread.” Furthermore, some people do rationally evaluate their faith and some do convert. “So cultural dependency is real, but not ‘overwhelming.’ ”

Next, Marshall claims that Loftus is saying, in effect, that beliefs we adopt from our culture are generally false. Marshall implies that under the OTF principle we would have to question all our knowledge and be critical of everything passed down by our culture, including scientific knowledge. We would need to prove for ourselves that the earth circles the sun, that we have two lungs, etc.

I don’t see this at all. Loftus is not arguing that we should reject all cultural knowledge, but only that we should be willing to examine it in certain cases. Of course we cannot prove every bit of knowledge for ourselves from first principles, as Marshall says in reduction ad absurdum. Marshall gives several examples of useful, trustworthy cultural knowledge. The overall argument appears to be, “We don’t need to rationally examine our faith, it’s just one of those things we can accept from our culture.” Ironically, this line of thought suggests that no one of any religion needs to critically examine it; let us all accept our cultural religion and just be happy!

Marshall then sidesteps the OTF entirely with the claim that Christianity’s validity is proven by the number of its converts. Honestly, this is what he claims: “Is not this vast movement of hearts and minds over centuries and continents, a more objective test of the Christian faith than the abstract mental exercise of an Indiana skeptic?” (gag). To explain why demographic success does not likewise justify other popular faiths, Marshall says that Islam and Communism were spread mainly by violence, few Chinese were really serious Buddhists by modern times, and secular humanism (which he counts as a faith) “is watered-down Christianity, a weed that grows in fields plowed by the Gospel.” He says nothing about Mormonism or other Christian derivative sects/religions. Neither does he address the issue of why, if Christianity spreads because it is true, there are so many incompatible versions of it.

Marshall ’s central argument in the chapter’s final section, “Fulfillment,” is that religions are really not all that different, anyway. He blames atheist Loftus for thinking we have to choose which one is true:

Loftus makes the same fatal mistake James does in his theology of religions: “At best there can only be one true religion in what we observe to be a sea of hundreds of false ones . . .” (99)

Imagine that, who could be so closed-minded as to think that there is only one true religion? Not a thinking Evangelical Christian, apparently. Marshall goes on to “demonstrate” that Christianity is the fulfillment of all religions. For example:

• “John Mbiti describes African perceptions of God that agree with what the Bible says about him in rich detail. . . . Jesus came to fulfill, not destroy, the most fundamental foundations of African religion.”
• “It is a singularly ‘fundamentalist’ way of thinking that insists one must choose one religion and simply dismiss everything in the rest.”
• “The deepest truths in each great tradition find themselves not only fulfilled but strengthened in Jesus, and great errors corrected, while he ‘takes away the sins of the world’ in a collective, social sense as well as for individuals.”

What does any of this have to do with the Outsider Test for Faith, anyway? Remember, the OTF simply says that one ought to evaluate the claims of one’s own faith with the same rigor as he applies to outside faiths. How has Marshall answered this challenge so far? To summarize his arguments,

• The OTF is “amusing, coming from an atheist from Indiana.”
• Some people do rationally evaluate their inherited faith, and some convert.
• Culturally-inherited knowledge is sometimes (usually??) valid.
• Christianity’s popularity proves it to be valid (or at least a major contender). Other popular religions don’t count because they’re not popular for the right reasons.
• Religions are not all that different, anyway, and Christianity is the fulfillment of all of them, so why stress about comparing them!

Now suppose that as a growing or questioning Christian you have been confronted by the OTF. “Interesting,” you think, “I had not thought of things that way. Why have I chosen to be an Evangelical rather than a Mormon or Roman Catholic or Muslim? Is it just because of the way I was raised? If I had been born in Sudan, would I be a Christian? If I grew up in Spain, what would I think of the arguments for evangelical Christianity?” It seems to me that the only Marshall’s dizzying arguments might help you is by distraction.

In case all these arguments were unclear or inadequate, however, Marshall adds a final summary of “four versions of the [OTF]” which affirm Christianity:

1. “The test of history: In a straightforward sense, Christianity has attracted more believers from more ethnic and cultural groups than any other religion.”

2. “The insider test.” A restatement of the fulfillment principle above.

3. “The test of prophecy” [wait, where did this one come from!]. Not prophecy in general, but the prophecy (actually “hundreds of prophecies”) that the earth would be blessed through the seed of Abraham. Amazingly, they have come true.

4. “The Insider-Outsider Test. The Gospel also fulfills specific archetypes and prophecies, beginning with the Jewish Scriptures, but even prophecies among Gentile writers who foresaw such a Savior.”

So there you have it, the OTF answered once and for all.

Chapter 7—The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism (David Wood).

Summarizes the usual arguments against naturalism/materialism.

• Cosmological argument
• Fine tuning
• Biological complexity and the origin of life
• Consciousness and reason
• Logic (“Naturalism . . . entails that there are no transcendent logical laws.”)
• Natural uniformity (science assumes uniform laws of nature, an unwarranted assumption unless the universe was put together by a rational mind; apparently Marshall doesn’t consider the empirical nature of science but thinks it needs a philosophical basis of uniformity).
• Origin of values

Conclusion: “Naturalism is bankrupt as a worldview. . . . Hence, if science tells us anything, it tells us that Naturalism is a dead option.”

Chapter 8—By It, We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics (Samuel J. Youngs).

The impossibility of meaning and value in a purely natural universe. “Only a few atheists have understood that if there is no ultimate purpose behind existence, then ultimately none of the alleged purposes in existence have a basis.” Really, so few understood that?

Our lives show that we believe in meaning and value. Furthermore, we judge the “pre-morality” of some animals (chimps) by moral standards. Without external standards, we can’t judge one set of values as better than another.

Christianity provides a basis for morality and values with the image of God, the Fall, sacrifice.

Chapter 9—Reason in a Christian Context (Peter Grice).

Reason is “the act of engaging the mind.” It is not reasonable to claim that the nonreligious perspective is the only rational one, nor that reason is itself a virtue, nor that reason is only associated with one particular perspective.

Some people are using carelessly some terms like “faith” and “truth.” True “Faith is always intended as faith in something” objective. The Bible often appeals to evidence and reason, and tells believers to think, use their minds. “In Christianity, faith is an active, justified trust in God. It is neither ‘blind’ nor irrational . . . . Rather, it simply follows upon sufficient evidence of trustworthiness.”

“The biblical pattern of coming to faith always begins with evidence.” Early Christians believed in Resurrection because of the evidence available to them.

Foundational basis of teleology for knowledge—Plantinga’s argument that we need a brain functioning “according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief.” Naturalism’s exclusion of teleology. Naturalism claims that there is no real “purpose” of physiologic systems, but this undermines foundation of evolution. [?!] According to Naturalism, the brain “is not ‘for’ thinking reliable thoughts at all” so it can’t be trusted and this “eventually topples reason itself.”

Chapter 10—The Marriage of Faith and Reason (David Marshall)

Faith for Christians usually means “holding firmly to and acting on what you have good reason to think is true.” Reason and faith are both necessary for perception of truth, but reason needs faith in (1) the mind (2) the senses (3) other people and (4) God.

Contradicting Richard Carrier’s claim that early Christians accepted the Gospel on faith without rational inquiry, the NT gives seven ways which tied reason to faith in Jesus: “historical investigation, rational argument, critical accounts of Jesus’ life, miraculous ‘signs’ . . ., prophecy, convincing depictions of Jesus’ character, and the resurrection.”

“Trust in God is the ultimate act of rationality.” “[B]y reason we ascend the steps of faith—from minds (memory, thought), to senses, to cautious trust in good human testimony,” and, by implication, finally to God.

Note that in all these chapters on the relationship between faith and reason there is no discussion of what to do when the two conflict. It is simply a given that a reasonable person, considering the evidence, will agree that Christianity is the truth. There is not even any consideration of which Christianity is the truth.

Chapter 11—Are Science and Christianity at Odds (Sean McDowell)

“There is no inherent conflict.” Argues that science required the nurture of Christian beliefs. “Most scientific pioneers were theists. . ..” Countering Dawkin’s claim that Christian scientists are now a rarity, McDowell brings out Owen Gingerich, Paul Davies, and Francis Collins (wow, three real scientists!).

Debunking the story of Galileo as paradigmatic for religion and science. Science only works because the universe is orderly. We can’t trust our senses or rationality if we are products of chance. Atheists “can do science only if they abandon their naturalistic worldview and borrow from theism because theism provides the necessary foundation for the logical, orderly nature of the universe and the powers of reason.”

Chapter 12—God and Science Do Mix (Tom Gilson)

“Far from being foreign to the Christian faith, nature’s predictable regularity is an essential aspect of God’s work in the world” because

• we could not perceive God’s miracles if they were frequent, because we would not appreciate the background of a perfectly orderly nature; we would just perceive the world as chaotic.
• we could not be true moral agents if there were not consistent consequences to our action, i.e. if God often intervened.
• God wants us to learn from experience, and this cannot happen unless the world is orderly and regular.
  “God made the world friendly for science, not for the sake of science alone, but to accomplish the whole scope of His purposes for us.”
• Science could not have moved forward unless the world was “de-animized,” i.e. the capricious animistic elements removed.

Only the Genesis creation account gives us a world that is governed by the Creator’s mind but separate from it. Hence, the Bible gives science its foundation.

Chapter 13—Historical Evidences for the Gospels (Randall Hardman)

Why historians should not exclude miracles. “We can and should take the Gospels on their own accounts need inquire into whether there is a sufficient basis to judge their reliability and trustworthiness.”

Gospels as eyewitness testimony. Hardman looks at Form Criticism and says that its assumption of a long period of the gospel’s entirely oral tradition is unwarranted. Literacy was more prevalent than previously thought. It is not unlikely that some of Jesus’ teaching could have been taken down in writing, as notes, by some of the disciples. Furthermore, oral transmission was stronger, less prone to innovation, than assumed by Form Criticism. At the same time, the model of a strictly-controlled rabbinic-type oral transmission has its own problems including handling the existing diversity among the Gospels.

Instead, Hardman commends a newer model propounded by Kenneth Bailey and based on observed patterns of oral transmission in the Middle East. Under this model, the core of important events will be preserved faithfully through many cycles of oral transmission due to informal control by the community. Details may vary with the telling, but the core remains intact.

Hardman turns next to the role of eyewitnesses and the authorship of the Gospels. Eyewitness testimony during the oral-transmission period is important for controlling the core story. Looking at the authorship issue, Hardman says that

• The 3^rd Gospel was probably authored by John Mark, recording Peter’s oral gospel, because it reads as an oral document, it has a particular focus on Peter, and John Mark would have been an unlikely figure for attribution (why not Peter, for example?).
• The author of Luke/Acts was probably Paul’s companion Luke, who would have witnessed many of the events recorded and been able to learn other information from the apostles and other eyewitnesses.
  • The author claims to be writing accurate history based on eyewitnesses.
  • The book of Acts has been shown to be historically reliable on many points, with recent classics scholar Colin Hemer viewing it in a “pillar in Acts scholarship” as “a major, historically substantiated document.” It is reasonable to assume the same level of reliability for his Gospel.
• “Mark and Matthew are not proper historiographies (they are Greco-Roman biographies), yet it remains true they are lined up enough with Luke to suggest that they also preserve very solid historical information about Jesus.”

The arguments for the historicity of the Gospel of Luke would be more convincing for me if not for its birth narrative (which contradicts Matthew’s and is not hinted at elsewhere in the entire New Testament) and account of the post-Resurrection events (which contradicts Matthew’s and John’s and is not hinted at in Mark).

I don’t think Hardman says anything about the non-canonical gospels. How did they arise and become so popular if tradition was controlled by eyewitnesses? Why did they disappear while the canonical ones remained? Nor does he discuss the authorship of John, a book crucial for evangelicalism.

Chapter 14—The Problem of Evil and Reasonable Christian Responses (John M. DePoe)

DePoe describes “two kinds of goods that could not exist without evil,” thus explaining why an omnipotent, omniscient, all loving Creator would allow it. The first is character development. Virtues like patience and courage could not develop in the absence of evil, yet they are of great intrinsic value. For example, “In order to be courageous, one must practice courageous acts. In order to practice courageous acts, there must be some evil that a person confronts in the right way.” Just as parents allow their children to suffer at times in order to help them mature and become virtuous, so God allows his children to suffer to build their character.

The second “good” is free will. Free will is valuable because it “is what makes it possible for people to be morally good or evil.” DePoe does not explain why it is so important to have a world where people are moral agents, important enough to justify suffering; it is simply “an intrinsic good of enormous value.” DePoe addresses the argument that God could have created free-willed people to always prefer good over evil. That would violate our freedom, he says, and ignores the fact that we do not and cannot always act according to our preferences. If creatures are truly free, then “whether they use their free will to bring about good or evil is up to them, not God.”

With character development and free will as morally sufficient reasons for evil, DePoe looks next at the issue of natural evil. He argues that the world must operate by regular, natural law (i.e. without much intervention from God) in order for us to make meaningful moral choices. How could we know the right thing to do if sometimes an action would hurt a person and sometimes help him? “My ability to make meaningful, moral choices depends on the world being a place where I can reasonably predict the effects of my actions.” Take away the natural causes that lead to disasters and suffering, and you take away the possibility of meaningful moral choices.

DePoe’s second answer to the problem of natural evil is that “what is often called natural evil is ultimately due to the exercise of free agency. If people had not chosen to settle in an area prone to tornado activity or on a fault line, there would be no associated evil event.  .  . .” (The event would still occur, but it would not cause suffering.) “God may also permit natural evils in order to preserve the responsibility that comes with free agency.” If he prevented a tsunami, for example, that would blunt the principle that actions (living in a coastal area) have consequences.

But why is there so much suffering? Couldn’t God at least reduce it? First, says DePoe, we don’t know how much evil is enough; we can’t judge that there is too much evil in the world. Furthermore, any given individual only suffers the maximum that one individual can bear—you can’t sum up evil over a mass of individuals—and “it does not seem like any individual experiences suffering that is inconsistent with the morally sufficient reasons provided above.”

Interestingly, DePoe quotes Richard Swinburne as saying, “Unending[,] unchosen suffering would indeed to my mind provide a very strong argument against the existence of God. But that is not the human situation.” Yet is this not the very fate that most evangelical Christians believe awaits all unbelievers? Still, based on that one statement alone, it is likely that Swinburne does not accept the idea of eternal, conscious torment in hell.

It is certainly good that DePoe warned us that he is only answering the rational and not emotional question of suffering and evil, because statements like the following do not seem to come to grips with the reality of suffering: “The limits to human suffering are marked out by the capacity of an individual to experience pain, which have physiological and temporal boundaries. These limits to human suffering seem consistent with the kinds of morally sufficient reasons that God would have for not eliminating evil.”

Finally, Depoe says that “Evil is one way in which God is able to draw people’s attention from the mundane .  .  . and provide the opportunity for them to see their need for God’s love and forgiveness. .  .  . Thus, evil is not only compatible with the existence of God, evil may be part of the way God works to remind people of what is ultimately good and valuable.”

Chapter 15—Christianity and Slavery (Glenn Sunshine)

Sunshine argues that Israel mitigated the very need for slavery by providing social safeguards not found in other cultures, measures such as gleaning, prohibition of usury and exploitative lending, and the cancellation of debts every seven years. Since all [Israelite] slaves were to be set free every 7^th year, they were not so much slaves as indentured servants. Furthermore, they had some legal protections. “Servants who had been injured by their masters were immediately set free (Ex. 21:26-27), and if a servant died soon after being struck by a master, the master was considered guilty of murder (Ex 21:20).” Actually, the injury law applies only to those who lost an eye or a tooth, and verse 20 only says that the slave owner “must be punished.” If he just beats a servant so hard that it takes a day or two for the servant to get back on his feet, but he doesn’t die, then no punishment is needed.

Sunshine then explains how NT teaching undermined slavery by seeing slaves as people and real or actual brothers in the faith. Paul also twice listed slave traders as sinners. Why did the NT not condemn slavery as an institution? (1) It would have been seen as a call to insurrection and created a bloody crackdown and slaughter and (2) slavery was “so deeply woven into the fabric of Roman society that abolition would have led to a total social and economic breakdown.” Sounds rather like some historical arguments against abolition in the US.

Sunshine review the history of slavery and slaves in the early Church, medieval period, and since, showing that the Church always frowned on slavery and treated slaves positively. The Pope actually placed bans on slave trading several times in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, though these were ignored. [Does that mean that the monarchs of Spain and Portugal were actually excommunicated, or did the Pope overlook the infractions?]

According to Sunshine, it was mainly Quakers and later Evangelicals who fought for abolition, “though some free thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were also involved” in America. “Slavery in the British Empire was abolished because of religious conviction, not Enlightenment rationalism,” and it was mainly Christians in America who led the fight as well.

“No other culture, no other religion, tried to end slavery, and even those freethinkers of the Enlightenment who did oppose slavery did so coming from a culture that had been shaped by Christian values and by the idea of the dignity of each human based on their creation in the image of God and on the incarnation of Jesus Christ.”

Chapter 16—Did God Command the Genocide of the Canaanites (Matthew Flannagan)

This chapter can be summarized fairly easily: The accounts of genocide in Joshua and Deuteronomy are only hyperbolic, not literal. Phrases such as “destroy totally,” “not leave alive anything that breathes,” and “left no survivors” were simply common ancient Near Eastern formulas for describing victories. This is borne out by fact that some of the same peoples described as annihilated show up subsequently in the narratives. Some commands for destruction are followed by others, such as the prohibition of intermarriage, that assume the continued existence of the enemy people. In reality, the divine program was more about driving out the Canaanites than destroying them.

This makes some sense, but is hard to accept in view of the passage in Deuteronomy 20 about the rules of warfare. Verses 10­–15 describe the “nice” way to fight against more remote enemies—offer them a chance to surrender then, if they refuse, kill all the men and take the women and children as wives or slaves. The next verses, however, say, “However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.” This seems to show clearly that the divine purpose was for the Israelites to annihilate the inhabitants of the land.

Finally, Flannagan offers an apologetic explanation for Numbers 31. In that passage, thousands of captured Midianite women and children are brought back from battle. Moses is angry that the women have been spared, and orders, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” Flannagan suggests, “Moses’ command to kill women and children occurs after this and appears to be on his own authority.” In other words, it was not God’s idea, and we can safely include this incident along with the many others the Bible records but does not approve of.

That explanation seems to me to be crippled by the fact that a few verses later God himself gives Moses detailed instructions about how to divide the booty, including women and children, with 32 women going to Eleazar the priest and 320 to the Levites. There is no hint of God’s anger or even mild reproof for this unauthorized, illegal killing of thousands of women.

Summary

What can we take away from all this? Sorting the wheat from the chaff, only as I see them, leaves me with these points:

1. Some atheist populizers use faulty logic and irrational rhetoric in their argumentation.

2. There are several problems for atheism, issues that are difficult or impossible to explain more satisfactorily from an atheist than a theistic perspective. These include the origin of the universe, fine tuning, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. While meaning and values might also fall in this category, it seems to me that their materialistic explanations are coherent though not comforting.

3. Maybe the Israelites did not kill all the inhabitants of Canaan, but just killed or vanquished the men and drove out the women and children. Undoubtedly, if the war occurred at all, this is what happened historically, since surely no population would wait around to be slaughtered, and no army would be so thorough as to kill every last person. However, I am not convinced that the Bible’s words were intended to allow this less-malignant scenario, especially given Deuteronomy 20.

4. Evil and suffering in the world might be explained primarily by God’s desire to create morally autonomous persons.

5. Christianity is not opposed to reason but endorses it. Faith is the response of the heart to what is known to the senses. I don’t agree that this assessment covers most of biblical theology or Christian practice, but there are instances that support it. Left unaddressed are the Bible’s hostility to reason when it reaches different conclusions than the “revealed” ones, and the question of how to handle the case where one’s reason does come to such different conclusions.

6. Christianity is not as responsible for the continuation of slavery as some have claimed. It may have taken nearly 2000 years, but ultimately its teachings were used to support the abolition of slavery. On the other hand, one could ask whether a simple verse or two in the New Testament, perhaps word from Jesus, or even better from Moses, might have spared millions from a life of suffering and bondage. Maybe just “Cursed is anyone who takes a slave from any race of men, and does not give him freedom after seven years.”

Overall, I find this book depressing because it seems to just pick at the edges of atheism, while I need something more robust. The first five chapters are a complete waste of time unless you think that Harris and Dawkins are the intellectual leaders of atheism. They are equivalent to atheists writing a serious challenge to Christianity based on a critique of C. S. Lewis and Dinesh D'Souza.

The chapter on the Outsider Test for Faith not only totally fails to address that challenge, but also minimizes the need for anyone to rationally assess the religion of their birth. The one on theodicy has some logical merit but, it seems to me, pales beside the many questions raised by all kinds of suffering in the world (maybe the best we can do in the face of suffering is keep silent, like Job’s friends). The attacks on metaphysical naturalism seem to indicate at most that it undermines our common sense view of the world. So what if it eliminates the philosophical basis of uniformitarianism? We have several thousand years of experience in how the world runs, and it appears pretty likely that it will continue to run that way in the foreseeable future.

I agree that the origin of the universe, fine tuning, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness are thorny issues for atheism. However, as many have pointed out, even if we granted that they make atheism impossible, they still lead to nothing more than deism or at best some form of theism. In fact, any kind of creator including an advanced intelligence from another universe could account for those things.