Lighthouse Community Church

Jojo Ma serves as associate pastor at Evergreen Baptist Church of San Gabriel Valley.

Spend a few minutes at your local Borders bookstore and you’re bound to come across books like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett. Who are these men? What are they writing about? And what do they share in common?

These men are the pillars of a movement known as New Atheism, a view that holds to the likely non-existence of God. Do they believe religion, and Christianity in particular, is false? Yes, they do. However, their main thrust isn’t so much that religions are untrue; rather, religions are bad (morally, not Michael Jackson-ly). So there’s more an emphasis away from epistemology and toward ethics as the basis against the existence of God. Interesting.

This is interesting because morality doesn’t have a foundation apart from religion (or more specifically, Christianity). CS Lewis commented in Mere Christianity, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” Precisely.

New Atheists argue against Christianity by asserting it is harmful to humanity, that it produces wars, oppresses women, and indoctrinates children with delusions of fairy tales and the like. Hence, Christianity is evil and bad. But what is evil? Who decides? And on what basis do they make this objective moral judgment? The New Atheist has his feet firmly planted in mid-air.

For a good read and rebuttal to Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I highly recommend Alvin Plantinga’s “The Dawkins Confusion." It’s on the mark…and very funny too.