In 2006, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The God Delusion in which he asserted that belief in God or gods was a delusion because it wasn’t scientific. Not long thereafter theologian David Bentley Hart wrote a book called Atheist Delusions, in which he countered the thrust of Dawkins’s book (and those of other celebrity atheists then sharing a certain limelight) not with a philosophical or theological argument — after all, Dawkins never made any really philosophical claims or anything as rigorous as an argument — with an account of the history of the early Church. (Hart describes Dawkins in the book’s first chapter as a “tireless tractarian, who — despite his embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning — never fails to entrance his eager readers with his rhetorical recklessness.”)
As Hart summarized the contents of his book: “The arrangement of my argument is simple and comprises four ‘movements’: I begin, in part 1, from the current state of popular antireligious and anti-Christian polemic, and attempt to identify certain of the common assumptions informing it; in part 2, I consider, in a somewhat desultory fashion, the view of the Christian past that the ideology of modernity has taught us to embrace; in part 3, the heart of the book, I attempt to illuminate (thematically, as I say) what happened during the early centuries of the church and the slow conversion of the Roman Empire to the new faith; and in part 4 I return to the present to consider the consequences of the decline of Christendom.”
Before Hart begins with his narrative of the radical effects of the rise of the Church, he inserts a chapter titled “The Gospel of Unbelief,” in which he summarizes the then-fashionable expressions of disdain toward religion. He clearly finds the task to be tiresome. “A note of asperity has probably already become audible in my tone, and I probably should strive to suppress it. It is not inspired, however, by any prejudice against unbelief as such; I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.”
Daniel Dennett’s 2006 Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon serves as a case study for Hart of a dreary atheist fundamentalism. “Daniel Dennett — a professor of philosophy at Tufts University and codirector of that university’s Center for Cognitive Studies — advances what he takes to be the provocative thesis that religion is an entirely natural phenomenon, and claims that this thesis can be investigated by methods proper to the empirical sciences. Indeed, about midway through the book, after having laid out his conjectures regarding the evolution of religion, Dennett confidently asserts that he has just successfully led his readers on a ‘nonmiraculous and matter-of-fact stroll’ from the blind machinery of nature up to humanity’s passionate fidelity to its most exalted ideas. As it happens, the case he has actually made at this point is a matter not of fact but of pure intuition, held together by tenuous strands of presupposition, utterly inadequate as an explanation of religious culture, and almost absurdly dependent upon Richard Dawkins’s inane concept of ‘memes’ (for a definition of which one may consult the most current editions of the Oxford English Dictionary). And, as a whole, Dennett’s argument consists in little more than the persistent misapplication of quantitative and empirical terms to unquantifiable and intrinsically nonempirical realities, sustained by classifications that are entirely arbitrary and fortified by arguments that any attentive reader should notice are wholly circular. The ‘science of religion’ Dennett describes would inevitably prove to be no more than a series of indistinct inferences drawn from behaviors that could be interpreted in an almost limitless variety of ways; and it could never produce anything more significant than a collection of biological metaphors for supporting (or, really, simply illustrating) an essentially unverifiable philosophical materialism.
“All of this, however, is slightly beside the point. Judged solely as a scientific proposal, Dennett’s book is utterly inconsequential — in fact, it is something of an embarrassment — but its methodological deficiencies are not my real concern here (although I have written about them elsewhere). And, in fact, even if there were far more substance to Dennett’s project than there is, and even if by sheer chance his story of religion’s evolution were correct in every detail, it would still be a trivial project at the end of the day. For, whether one finds Dennett’s story convincing or not — whether, that is, one thinks he has quite succeeded in perfectly bridging the gulf between the amoeba and the St. Matthew Passion — not only does that story pose no challenge to faith, it is in fact perfectly compatible with what most developed faiths already teach regarding religion. Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to deny that? It is ubiquitous in human culture, obviously forms an essential element in the evolution of society, and has itself clearly evolved. Perhaps Dennett believes there are millions of sincere souls out there deeply committed to the proposition that religion, in the abstract, is a supernatural reality, but there are not. After all, it does not logically follow that simply because religion is natural it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented toward ultimate reality (as, according to Christian tradition, all natural things are).
“Moreover — and one would have thought Dennett might have noticed this — religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it. Rather, there are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call ‘religions,’ though they could scarcely differ more from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature. Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord. This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual, and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious. As for ‘religion’ as such, however, Christian thought has generally acknowledged that it is an impulse common to all societies, and that many of its manifestations are violent, superstitious, amoral, degrading, and false. The most one can say from a Christian perspective concerning human religion is that it gives ambiguous expression to what Christian tradition calls the ‘natural desire for God,’ and as such represents a kind of natural openness to spiritual truth, revelation, or grace, as well as an occasion for any number of delusions, cruelties, and tyrannies. When, therefore, Dennett solemnly asks (as he does) whether religion is worthy of our loyalty, he poses a meaningless question. For Christians the pertinent question is whether Christ is worthy of loyalty, which is an entirely different matter. As for Dennett’s amazing discovery that the ‘natural desire for God’ is in fact a desire for God that is natural, it amounts to a revolution not of thought, only of syntax.”
You can listen to David Bentley Hart discussing his book Atheist Delusions on Volume 98 of the Journal.