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The New Atheists - the Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion

Author:	Tina Beattie
Published By:	Darton, Longman and Todd (London)
Pages:	209
Price:	£8.95
ISBN:	978 0 232 52712

Reviewed by Terry Hinks.

Tina Beattie wades bravely into the contest between recent atheist writers (such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) and Christian theologians, with a book which challenges both sides. Writing from a Christian feminist perspective, she exposes the historical and cultural context in which the ‘new atheists’ write, showing that it is a largely Western male phenomenon. In her words, “the new atheism is a product of a post-Protestant intellectual environment associated with white conservative men and primarily concerned with questions of evidence, proof and rationality”. She describes much of the debate so far as a rather wearisome “stag fight between men of Big Ideas”.

In the series of eight papers which make up the book, she exposes the poverty of the arguments put forward by the ‘new atheists’ - the deliberate misunderstandings, the shoddy polemics and the aggressive undertones. She becomes impassioned when she considers that the place of reasoned debate and arguments is being put into jeopardy by extremists on both sides. In her introduction she writes: “If we are to preserve our modern liberal culture and its intellectual traditions, we also need to rediscover the forgotten virtues of civility, courtesy and respect in which we conduct our public debates, for it is dismal to see some of our most popular thinkers descending to the level of the gutter press in their polemics”.

She provides an interesting overview of the enlightenment, the development of science and the relationship between science and religion, faith and reason. She recognises the seriousness of challenges to belief especially in the light of human suffering, epitomised by the holocaust. She has considerable respect for atheisms “forged in the crucible of human suffering”, but very little for the new atheism with “its hubristic confidence in the power of science”. She ends with a helpful chapter on ‘Creativity and the Story of God’ recognising the power of narrative in the post-modern age. In this she prefers to describe God as a creative genius (a messy picture of risk and involvement) rather than an intelligent designer (a more controlling rational and distant picture).

This book is an immensely personal set of papers, for all its academic background and integrity, which reflect the place from which Tina Beattie is speaking (she regularly moves into using the personal pronoun). Many readers will disagree with some of her arguments and some of her more provocative statements. She is not immune from a few generalisations and polemics of her own. But it is a valuable addition to the debate and a timely one in its call for a more reasoned and respectful dialogue between people of different approaches and backgrounds.