Anti-religion books and books on atheism have been bestsellers this year. John Cornwell writes of his struggles with his faith and why he thinks Richard Dawkins and others fail to understand what it means to believe.
Cornwell writes in The Guardian:
It is a year since Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion prompted a torrent of adulation and anguished riposte. The crucial issue he raised is not so much that religious believers can morph into violent extremists (which they patently can), but what is to be done about it. Dawkins thinks that religion is irrational, because it means accepting truths without logic and evidence; and dangerous, because such systematic irrationality can lead to extreme acts of violence. So hideously irrational and dangerous is the disease of faith, he claims, that faith instruction to the young is worse than paedophile abuse. Dawkins wants to rid the world of religion.
Cornwell’s response to Dawkins et al is:
As someone who had wavered between agnosticism and atheism for two decades, before having returned queasily to Christianity, I empathised with Greene’s faith as “doubt of doubt” as opposed to faith as certitude. Faith is a journey without arrival, complicated by false turns, breakdowns, dead ends and wheel-changes. Faith, like love, is seldom entirely constant; nor is it irrevocable. While frequently assailed by doubt, faith is open to provisional, symbolic interpretations (most Christians outside the American bible belt do not take the book of Genesis literally). Those who pursue a religious vocation are not spared vicissitudes of faith and doubt, any more than card-carrying atheists. Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who worked for the poor in Calcutta, left letters in which she spoke of her doubts right up to her death: “Where is my faith?” she once wrote to a confidant. “Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God – please forgive me.” By the same token, Professor AJ Ayer, the most ardent atheist of his day, proclaimed that he believed in an afterlife following a near-death experience in 1988 when he was clinically dead for four minutes. After a few days, and an outcry from the atheists’ society, of which he was the president, he partially recanted: “What I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my attitude towards that belief.” Doubt of doubt.
Dawkins’ recourse to the analogies of disease and medicine is, of course, entirely well meant, and I know him to be a man of the most liberal sympathies, but has he considered the far-reaching consequences of similar metaphors employed by far less well-meaning figures? It was only to be expected that a bold thesis that condemned religion en masse would have profound socio-political implications. Dawkins is a brilliant natural historian, whose science books I have celebrated in a string of reviews. The God Delusion has been criticised for trespassing clumsily in the realms of theology; but my own objections are more in the ambit of socio-politics. Put bluntly, The God Delusion is liable to persuade religious fundamentalists that a pluralist secular society is every bit as hostile to the practice of faith as they ever thought it to be. By urging the elimination of religion in the name of all that civil society holds dear, Dawkins is inviting fundamentalists to be even more fundamentalist. His book, then, is a counsel of despair as well as an incitement to the very thing he deplores and seeks to remedy.
More thoughts by John Cornwell here.
Christianity Today’s John Wilson lists his top 5 books on atheism.
On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius
So you are a little weary of reading Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and such? Take a break with Lucretius—not an atheist, strictly speaking, but a first-century B.C. materialist forerunner of Dawkins & Co.
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
For bright young Christians who are engaging the atheist boomlet of 2007 and for whom existentialism is merely one of many isms in the last century’s garbage dump, it would be instructive to read this novel, first published in French in 1938.
Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America
by James C. Turner
There’s a Catholic argument that blames the Reformation for the rise of atheism. Aha! That’s where the trouble started. Turner offers a subtler version, showing how developments within Christendom prepared the ground.
Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
by Timothy Larsen
Larsen tells the fascinating story of Victorians who renounced their faith, campaigned vigorously for atheism—in print and on the speaker’s platform—and then reconverted to Christianity.
Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life
Louise M. Antony, ed.
This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists.
I find that Dawkins and others set up a God is not recognizable to this follower of Jesus Christ. He attacks and trivializes this “non-God” and in the process sells books.
What books would you recommend for seekers with doubts?