I recently compared the contribution of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to atheism as analogous to the contribution of Ann Coulter to the republican party. In other words, if you want to read a nuanced and sophisticated defense of the mainstream political and economic philosophy of Republicanism you don’t read Coulter’s If Democrats had any brains they’d be Republicans. And by the same token, if you want to read a nuanced and sophisticated defense of mainstream atheistic philosophy you don’t read Dawkins God Delusion or Harris Letter to a Christian Nation.
Beetle replied: “I submit that your dismissal of lucid and contempory challenges is a blatent farce. If you could demonstrate one tenth of your insult (“rank amateurs, glorified village atheists”) you would be a famous author indeed!”
Well Beetle, you could start by reading my most recent book. I spend half a chapter identifying evidence of indoctrinated thinking in the work of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens and a couple others. Interestingly, neither of the atheists who have reviewed the book — John Loftus and The Atheist Missionary — flagged the analysis as problematic.
But I am not one merely to curse the darkness. I’d be more than happy also to point you toward atheistic light. There are some very capable books out there defending atheism. But they are not by the loudest, most obnoxious non-specialists. Rather, they are by cautious, restrained, rigorously trained academic philosophers. Let me list three.
For years J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982) was the standard systematic treatise to read in defense of atheism. More recently it has been joined by J. Howard Sobel’s Logic and Theism: Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God (Cambridge, 2003). And finally, I have heard some positive buzz over a book I haven’t read, Graham Oppy’s Arguing About Gods (Cambridge, 2009). I recommend it with some confidence based on some Oppy essays I’ve read in the past.
So there you have it Beetle.
In closing, imagine a republican insisting that Coulter is the best thing to put on the reading list of a political science class in favor of american conservatism. Now wouldn’t that be silly?
