New vs Old Atheists

 

They that deny a God, destroy man's nobility

Francis Bacon 

With what, I suppose, they imagine is withering erudition, the New Atheists often ask believers what is the difference between them and the old atheists.  The difference is that the old atheists - the Nietzsches, the Bertrand Russells and AJ Ayers - at least familiarized themselves with what they were rejecting before they rejected it.  Today, we live in a culture where ignorance and stupidity are classed - in the name of liberal egalitarianism - as a kind of paradoxical intelligence.  It is only in such an atmosphere that the wilful lack of familiarity with Christian belief displayed in such books as The God Delusion (which, according to Michael Ruse, made him ashamed to be an atheist) could thrive.

In such a milieu, where the power in the land is the one who can fill the airwaves with something vaguely articulate, where the unwashed, while feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing,  have not the intellectual tools to challenge their “betters” (and how would they, after 50 years of liberal education policies which deprive them of the very catechises which would arm them against such ignorance, and indeed, even the vocabulary to respond).  For those who might be feeling that unease, but are not quite sure exactly how to address it, here’s my little bit of catechises for the working man.

Atheist Question (accompanied by suitably smug, undergraduate type body language) - if God made the world, who made God?  An alternative formulation might be, eg, “I don’t believe in Thor or Zeus either; I just don’t believe in one god more than you don't”.  You might refer them to Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.  Don’t worry if you haven’t read it; I guarantee our New Atheist friend won’t have either.  It’s over 5000 pages long, is very closely argued, anticipates every objection the New Atheists ever raised hundreds of years before they raised them, and is so far above their intellectual pay grade that the likelihood of one of them being familiar with it is about 0.001% of Sweet Fanny Adams.  What you need to remember of it is this: God is not created like Thor or Zeus.  He is Ipsum Esse - existence itself, not a creature which exists, not a distant First Cause, but actual existence.  Life, in other words.  Accordingly, He sustains your existence from second to second, and when we die, it is because He has left us.  It is also the reason why killing is wrong - we are driving God out of His creation.

It follows from this that all acts against life - including so-called “mercy killings”, for example - are acts against God.  It also follows that all human beings, since they are all sustained by God from second to second, are of equal dignity.  That, usually unspoken and unexplained, fundamental supposition is what has raised humanity out of the moral gutter of the ancient world, the Roman Empire and it’s gladiatorial combats, the Carthaginians and their ritual infant sacrifice, the Aztec death cults and all the rest of it.  When you attempt to drive God out of the public square, you end up with the “compassion” of people protesting outside hospices, as recently happened in Amsterdam, demanding that the dying be given their “right” to expeditious death.  Or rather, I should say, that’s where you start; you end up back in the Roman Empire.