Fides Quaerens Intellectum

A few days ago a I picked up highly acclaimed atheist Christopher Hitchens’ book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (no, that’s not a typo…he chose–or perhaps the publisher did– a lower-case “g” in coming up with his title). Hitchens, a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in NY and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, has joined the ranks of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett in the attempt to popularize atheism in American culture. Although he uses his book as a megaphone to rail against seemingly any kind of transcendent religion (from evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Greek Orthodox to Islam), he points out that his “particular atheism is a Protestant atheism” in that “it was with the splendid liturgy of the King James Bible and the Cranmer prayer book–liturgy that the fatuous Church of England has cheaply discarded–that I first disagreed” (11-12). I’m only a couple of chapters into the book at this point, but I would say that young university-bound evangelicals need to sit up and take notice of the book, and they need to take Hitchens seriously. This is the kind of atheism they will find for the four or five years they spend in academia. It isn’t that Hitchens’ arguments are the most brilliant I’ve ever come across. In fact I’ve actually read much more compelling arguments from leading atheist philosophers whose publications are read typically only by other philosophers and students of philosophy. What makes Hitchens compelling is his raw authenticity in explaining why he believes what he does, as well as in recounting his own faith journey. That’s the challenge. The appeal to authenticity often wins the day with the Mosaic generation. More to come…