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Sixth Sunday of Easter
27 April 2008
Dear Friends in Christ,
Do you remember shag carpeting, avocado appliances, bell bottoms, leisure suits, platform shoes, and five-inch neck ties? These are good examples of fashion fads that cause all who lived through them to look back and ask, What were we thinking? Well, intellectuals are subject to fads of just this sort, and at the moment the fad du jour is “the new atheism,” which is really not new at all and will, in due course, prove to be just as embarrassing to the folks who are earnestly discussing the possible non-existence of God as those photos you don’t want the kids to see.
The leading impresarios of the new atheism are two Englishmen, both of whom are brilliant and well-spoken. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, are impressively accomplished professionals who reckon religion of every sort, but particularly the Christianity from which they are apostates, to be one of the principle obstacles to human flourishing in the world today. To these men, and lesser lights like them, religion is an ignorant superstition left over from the childhood of our race, and now it constitutes an irrational barrier to the continuing evolution of human society into a paradise of enlightened toleration.
Now, please remember that I was once a very serious and sincere atheist, and I do not for a moment hold in contempt the honest questions about the existence and nature of God which quite naturally come to the minds of curious and thoughtful people. To such questions there must be answers, and the Church welcomes honest conversation about these matters. But that is a different thing from the intellectual fad currently sweeping through our chain bookstores and afternoon talk shows, and it is important for Christians not to be stampeded or bamboozled by the latter. Because a glib master of sophistry offers a quick demonstration that the Bible is unreliable or that the supernatural is indemonstrable, do not conclude that religion is irrational.
Of course, the best defense against the shoddy ideas masquerading as profound insight in “the new atheism” is a deep, mature knowledge of Christian thought, and acquiring such knowledge requires patient, serious, sustained study. It is not enough for the pope or your pastor to be able to refute Christopher Hitchens or the village atheist; you need to know why the Gospel is true for yourselves and be able to explain to others why your faith is reasonable and perfectly in harmony with the demands of scientific knowledge and personal maturity. A library of extraordinary Christian books awaits you, and a good place to start is anything published by Ignatius Press. You can find them at www.ignatius.com.
Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!
Father Newman