David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions

One of my good friends put me onto William Lane Craig a while ago. Craig is a Christian apologist who, in his debates, often provides a summary of his opponent's shortcomings in a fairly blunt manner that can be rather amusing. I'm currently reading a book by another man who goes by three names: David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions, which does in print what William Lane Craig is wont to do in person.

Some of you may have heard of or read Allister and Joanna McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion; I've only skimmed it, and found it OK, but Hart is on a whole other level. I'm planning a post at some point based on a passage on Christian freedom that I found especially illuminating, but for now I just wanted to share a couple of examples of Hart's mastery of the scholarly put-down.


On the first page of Chapter 1:

As I write, Daniel Dennett's latest attempt to wean a credulous humanity from its reliance on the preposterous fantasies of religion, Breaking the Spell, has arrived amid a clamor of indignant groans from the faithful and exultant bellowing from the godless. The God Delusion, an energetic attack on all religious belief, has just been released by Richard Dawkins, the zoologist and tireless tractarian, who - despite his embarassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning - never fails to entrance his readers with his rhetorical recklessness. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method. Over the past few years, Sam Harris's extravagantly callow attack on all religious belief, The End of Faith, has enjoyed robust sales... And one need hardly mention the extraordinary sales achieved by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, already a major film and surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate. I could go on.

I especially like the description of Sam Harris as 'extravagantly callow' - he was always my least favourite of the lot.

And here's Hart again on page 23, talking about modern humanity's tendency to pick and choose religious bits of stuff we're comfortable with:

This is especially obvious at modern Western religion's pastel-tinged margins, in those realms of the New Age where the gods of the boutique hold uncontested sway. Here one may cultivate a private atmosphere of 'spirituality' as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a volume of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or Robert Graves, a Nataraka figurine, a purse of tiles engraved with runes, a scattering of Pre-Raphaelite prints drenched in Celtic twilight, an Andean flute, and so forth, until this mounting congeries* of string, worthless quartz, cheap joss sticks, baked clay, kitsch, borrowed iconography and fradulent scholarship reaches that mysterious point of saturation at which religion has become indistinguishable from interior decorating. Then one may either abandon one's gods for something new or bide with them a time, but in either case without any real reverence, love or dread. There could scarcely be a more thoroughly modern form of religion than this [...] No-one really believes in the gods of the New Age; [...] they are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god - the will - at once conceals and reveals itself.

* I had to look this up too. Wiktionary says it's 'a collection or aggregation of disparate items', from Latin congeriēs, 'heap, pile or mass'. Hooray for learning new words!