New Atheism: More emotional than academic?

Recently, I’ve been reading through Justin Brierley’s book Why I’m Still a Christian, a very good book unpacking why after two decades of hosting the radio show, Unbelievable?, Brierley still holds fast to his Christian faith. Many of the conversations he facilitated include conversations with skeptics and atheists. In his chapter title “Atheism 2.0,” Brierley addresses the New Atheism movement of the early 2000s spearheaded by celebrity atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens among others. He mentions a 2008 debate between Dawkins and fellow Oxford professor John Lennox.

I had actually watched a recording this debate when I was in high school. I recall my feelings as I began watching the debate: nervous, braced, ready for my faith to be shaken. However, by the end of the conversation, I was rather disappointed. My exact thought was actually “Was that it? That’s the best the atheists have got?” I had been hoping for a more academically rigorous engagement (not that it wasn’t) that actually dealt with the “real” problems with science, faith and the existence of God. Instead, Dawkins’s main quip with God was philosophical in nature: “Why is there evil and suffering in the world if you exist?!” Though this is a legitimate question for God, it falls into the category of philosophy when I had been expecting a scientific throw down.

I gave the Horsemen another chance and watched a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Frank Turek, but the results were the same. Hitchens’s main argument was once again about evil and suffering. He simply could not believe in a God who would permit such atrocities to be present in this world.

I was surprised. I thought all along, the atheists were guarding some corner on the truth and science that Christianity needed to contend with. But really, it was a philosophical and theological debate: if God exists, and is good, then why does evil and suffering exist? This was not scientific. Not even testable by science! So why on earth did atheists act like they had the market on science? I was a little disappointed (ironically) because I had expected their argument to impact me more. It wasn’t that their arguments were bad, they just did not feel very substantial to me personally.

Not to say that the dilemma of evil and suffering does not pose a good argument against God, but I believe there are actually a number of good explanations of how both God and evil could exist. Perhaps my disappointment was not with the particular argument they used, but the nature of the argument. The problem of evil has both an academic and emotional side to it. I can present the best academic arguments to explain the problem of evil, but there is an emotional side of the problem too.

We are emotional creatures as well as rational. Just as we want to reason how evil and God could exist, we also long to find an answer to the why of the actual pain of suffering experienced in our own lives. This is not something that can be argued, but something that must be dealt with on an individual level. For myself personally, the existence of God and the truth of the Christian faith answer both aspects of the problem of evil.

Engaging with the views of skeptical atheists did not challenge me in the way I was expecting, but it did make me realize that the Christian worldview actually does make sense of reality, both scientifically, philosophically, and emotionally.