Reddit reviews Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

You and u/Keln78 might really like this book by David Bentley Hart. It's red-pilling about the supreme influence of Christ's teachings reshaping civilization as we know it.

Try not to judge the book by its awful title. It was changed by the publisher to try and compete with "The God Delusion." The book isn't anywhere near as arrogant as the title makes it seem.

For all things science and religion I recommend: Where the Conflict Really Lies by Alvin Plantinga and Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart (please forgive the title, it was the editor's choice not his).

For the "problem" of Evil I suggest God, Freedom, and Evil again by Plantinga and Evil and the Justice of God by NT Wright.

As a general primer on theology and philosophy go look at Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by JP Morgan Moreland (not the banking institution) and William Lane Craig.

I know that this wasn't your question, but it's worth mentioning to anyone who stumbles upon this thread with a similar experience.

Philosophical materialism (i.e. Richard Dawkins and his ilk) is also based on premises that are both unproven and, by their very nature, unproveable. Pick your poison, but don't pretend that one is based on pure reason while the other is based on pure fantasy. Both positions (religious and atheistic) can be rational ones.

Edit--
This is also one of the finest books dismantling a number of new atheist authors and common fallacious claims about theism: http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300164297

>Name me fucking one.

I said I would, and I am:
Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty?

Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

Nonsense of a High Order:: The Confused World of Modern Atheism

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

Against Atheism: Why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris Are Fundamentally Wrong

The Atheist Delusion


Furthermore though, Christian rehtoric is often explicitly anti-atheist in its messaging without having to be specifically about that. They attiribute morality to themselves and imply that atheists are necessarily immoral or that their values are the only true way to think. If you want proof of this, you need look no further than how much prejudice there still is against atheists in the U.S. statistically.

Yes, and also a good writer. Erudite and entertaining. He's probably best known for a book he did several years ago called Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, which is a response to some of the NuAtheists, particularly correcting their many historical errors.

He did another book called The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami, which is an expanded version of this article on the problem of evil.

And he recently published a book called The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which I haven't finished reading yet, but is basically an attempt to give an account of what it is that monotheists (and some Hindus) are actually talking about when they talk about 'capital G' God. So far, it's really good.

It's a massive load of bantha poodoo, and only goes to illustrate the person's ignorance of history.

You might take a look at a book called Atheist Delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies by David Bentley Hart. He addresses basically this exactly line of reasoning and dismantles it.

Another fun book is The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather. That's a more secular work, focused on the history, not on Christianity, though you simply cannot discuss the end days of the Western Roman Empire without addressing Christianity in some sense. It will give you a bit more context as to 1) why, exactly, the Empire fell, and 2) what led to the so-called Dark Ages.

Here's a hint, though: The reason most any knowledge at all was preserved during the "Dark Ages" was due to its being preserved both in Christian monasteries in the West and in the Christian Byzantine Empire in the East (the Renaissance being partly kicked off by the flight of Byzantine humanists to the West as the Turkish invaders were approaching Constantinople).

In fact, the Medieval Period was very much not a time of stagnation; there were advances in metallurgy and agriculture, for example, the latter, combined with a period of warmth, led to a population boom which, ultimately, led to the devastation of the Black Death, which caused a massive upheaval in European society helping to pave the way to the modern world. Also cannons!

There’s a lot of good responses here already but I wanted to offer some resources and ideas that have helped me.
First of all, despite what the new atheists say, you don’t need faith to believe in God, which is why there are so many deists in academia. The weight of the scientific evidence alone is enough to conclude that there must be some kind of intelligence behind reality. This includes the fine-tuning argument, a variation of which convinced Antony Flew, a life long atheist academic and strong critic of religion to change his mind about God and embrace deism, and quantum mechanics, which doesn’t prove God’s existence but rather undermines materialist assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. These findings have convinced others in the scientific community such as lifelong atheist, Richard Conn Henry, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT to embrace deism.
So just based on what’s happening with physics, it’s reasonable to believe that there’s some kind of intelligence behind reality. However, this in no way proves the existence of the God of the Bible.
To support the Christian view of God you can look at the evidence for the reliability of New Testament accounts. This is where faith comes in. You have to decide whether or not you believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Obviously, there isn’t a scientific way to definitively prove whether or not an historical event happened. But if you want support for the idea that miracles happen and are relatively common, even today, I’d recommend Craig S Keeners magisterial 2 volume work “Miracles” which details hundreds of modern day miracle accounts.

Other reading:
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard who was a professor of philosophy for many years at USC, helped me to understand my faith at a deeper level, which has helped immensely. It turns out it’s much easier to believe in something when it actually makes sense to you.

On Guard by William Lane Craig explains many of the logical proofs that other commenters have offered here, which are great but can be really difficult to understand without spending a good amount of time with them.

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart: Hart is a leading Orthodox theologian and philosopher who spends a lot of time talking about the logical incoherence of materialism. All his stuff is great but it’s difficult.

This is just a small sample of what’s out there in terms of apologetics but it’s a start. There’s enough that you could spend your entire life reading compelling arguments for the God’s existence. However, the most effective way to strengthen your faith, in my opinion, is to see how effective the teachings of Jesus are for yourself, to ACTUALLY DO what he says and see how it transforms your life first hand. This is how you make your faith unshakable. Nothing beats personal experience.

Judging by your list, I'd say you should check this out.

Forgive the Title, Publishers love a provocative title, but this book is outstanding as it won the Ramsey Prize in 2011

Athiest Delusions by David Bentley Hart

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart is really awesome. It doesn't spend much time on much of the New Atheist arguments, because honestly they don't take very long to refute. But he does spend a lot of time talking about the historical impact of Christianity, and dispelling historical myths about Christianity and the sciences/thought in general. It's also a hilarious read, Hart is a great polemicist. Only read if you can stomach stuff like, "The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) god is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket of his book than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steading itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere all over those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything?"

Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution is also really good. It's a cheat for me to mention him, since he's not a Christian but a marxist; he does a terrific job of showing how Dawkins and Hitchens (what he calls, Ditchkins) make their argument on the cheap, however. In the end, he concludes that the problem Ditchkins has is that Christianity is far too radical for them. And that the Church has strayed from its radical roots. So it happens to be a good pro and anti-Christian work. Since I gave you an excerpt of Atheist Delusions, I may as well give you one from Reason, Faith, and Revolution: "With dreary predictability, Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,” which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake. Predictably, Dennett’s image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus."

I personally wouldn't recommend C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, to be honest. He does a good job of arguing within Christianity, but his arguments for Christianity are rather lacking.

If you want a really good response to The God Delusion, I have two recommendations. The first is a book review by Terry Eagleton, who is kind of an atheist, as I understand it. It's a relatively quick read, but it's a fantastic apology for Christianity, I think, plus it highlights Dawkins' weaker points.

My other recommendation is the book Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart. He doesn't spend much time on Dawkins in particular, but spends the entirety of the book critiquing New Atheist scholarship (particularly their historical scholarship, as he is primarily an historian). Hart is a bit more conservative than most Christians you'll find on reddit (or most you'll find with a Ph.d, I think), but not in the same way you're thinking, which is hard to explain unless you've read him. He can be a bit vitriolic, but no more than Dawkins ever was.

I don't see any need to 'prove' anything. My position is that God is not susceptible to proof and that religion actually teaches this.

Atheists might deny God but asking for proof is intellectually dishonest. It's like if I play Baseball and you play Football and I keep asking you to prove Football exists by showing me a Footballer getting a Home Run.

In essence they are trying to force their rules on to you rather than trying to disprove your position by your own rules - which is what they should do if they are rational. No-one would ever construct a scientific model that tried to prove something by rules that don't apply to it.

Anyway, I digress. I never read atheist books any more as I find them insulting to my intelligence but I do read a lot of theology. Actually, most problems about God have been far better addressed by theologians than atheists.

David Bentley Hart is good on Atheist 'thought'. This is a good one:

Bart Erhman is good on alternate readings of Christian scripture.

This is good too - a discussion on how atheists see the world as material 'things' and assume God does not exist because He is not material. That's the whole point though... God is NO THING

If you want a logical proof though The Kalam Cosmological Argument is probably the nearest to it and I think no atheist really wants to discuss this.

It's an early Islamic 'proof' of God which has been take up by theologian William Lane Craig. He actually has repeatedly asked Dawkins for a public debate on this but Dawkins continually refuses.

The argument is simple

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
  
• The universe began to exist;
  
• therefore: the universe has a cause
  
  To falsify it the atheist would need to point to one example of an existent thing that has no cause (which actually would be God)
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

You should have hit Joe Rogan with some knowledge from Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. I was cheering for you there, but it is a tough topic if you aren't fully ready for battle.

Have you since decided to keep religion a bit closer to home? It's best not to cast pearls before swine after all.

>Once you deviate from the ideals of medieval catholic dogma, your life would become worthless.

This entire paragraph conveys so much ignorance of Christian history in general, and Catholicism in particular, I don't even know where to start, except to recommend a book to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300164297

>It seems you are conflating nationalism with humanism. These are very different things.

The former was only intellectually possible due to the latter.

>Did it promote them? No. Humanism maintains that the center of society should be human rights and the value of the individual life.

Just keep repeating that tired old dogma, at least the Catholic dogmas were lived by. Humanist ones are just claimed loudly and repeatedly until everyone else acquiesces.

>I would argue that humanism supports the creation of a society that prioritizes human rights and liberties, but it is not a philosophy that supports the violent action to create that society.

No, it spawns nationalists to do the dirty work for them.