Answering The New Atheism By Hahn And Wiker

1310 Words3 Pages

Does God exist? That is the question that so many scholars, peasants, governments, and individuals have been trying to answer from the beginning of human civilization to the present and beyond. Every group in the history of mankind, from Taiwan to Jamaica, from the top of Russia to the bottom of Chile, has said yes to a form of divinity. Their religions have ranged from one God to one million Gods to no God and these religions have defined culture, tradition, lifestyle, and the society of the place; they have ruled nations and defined nations, inspired nations and controlled nations. Not every person has been a believer but every culture has had a belief. Yet somehow, despite this vast evidence that there must be something or else everyone …show more content…

In Answering the New Atheism, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker examine his most recognized book: The God Delusion. Is God a delusion? Or are atheists? Many have said “it takes more faith to be an atheist that a theist. “ Hahn and Wiker prove this in their description of Dawkins: “The problem with Dawkins is his against-all-odds insistence that chance be the blind God who brings everything about” (Hahn 50). To phrase this in a more scientific way: “If the odds [of a chance rise of DNA] are this bad [20100] – so bad that they amount to the closest thing next to impossible that’s possible – what could account for Dawkins’ incalculable faith in chance?” (Hahn 31). Dawkins believes fully in chance, but if even a strand of DNA has a one in twenty to the one-hundredth power, how on earth did humans come about in such a short time? Hahn and Wiker explain this idea: “The more complex an effect that the brain produces (such as Pride and Prejudice), the more complex the brain itself must be. The more complex the brain is, the greater number of Mount Improbables evolution would have to have climbed to have produced it, and so the longer it must have taken. But we only have so much time before we bump into the 3.5 billion year barrier when the first cell appeared. The only way around the predicament of time, is to speed up evolution, so that, quite literally, evolution is happening by leaps and bounds. That is …show more content…

All of these head-turning, mind-twisting, western ideas have been explain. What seems like solid evidence to many is dissected and found to be nothing but a façade. “A good part of Dawkins’ urgency and undisguised animosity in The God Delusion arises from his conviction that Christians are under a moral delusion. For him, Christians are fundamentally irrationally, and the fundamental irrationality plays itself out in the public sphere…[Dawkins is worried] about Christians attempting to push through the legislation against abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and so on...Christianly is morally pernicious…He is just as worried about mild and moderate forms of faith as he is about religious extremism” (Hahn 143). This is what so many atheists believe. Is Christianity ruining the world? Perhaps. Feasibly, religion could be both the savior and the destroyer of the world. Religion can be saving people spiritually and making them peaceful, yet religion is the cause of so many wars and conflicts as seen in the Middle East, Japan, India, Africa, China, Russia, and South America. This does not allow atheists to persuade people to flat out stop believing based on false conclusions and straw-man conclusions. This does not give non-believers the right to dismantle Christianity based on the idea that God refuses to be tested as any natural cause would. Answering the New Atheism explains this very clearly.

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