The Mythology of the New Atheists

Christianity Today reviews David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies :

Much of Atheist Delusions reminds readers of the importance of remembering what Christianity has done for us—not just for the believer in personal salvation, but also for the nonbeliever in human history. Would we have had medieval leper hospitals if not for Christ’s teachings of kindness and his charge to seek the good of those less fortunate? Would almshouses, orphanages, and hospitals have come into existence without the Christian message that God dwells in “the least of these”? Hart finds no precursor in pagan society that shows that Christ’s message was anything but revolutionary.

He also refutes many of the New Atheists’ unjustified charges regarding witch hunts, the Inquisition, wars of religion, the destruction of the Alexandrian Library (which supposedly symbolizes Christians’ antipathy toward learning), and so forth. You might think, as I did, that saying that much of Christian history has been distorted in this debate is hardly revelatory. But Hart goes further, asserting that itself has a mythology of its own, according to which the Age of Reason came to birth during the Enlightenment (Genesis), scientists such as Galileo have been sacrificed (as martyrs) for the cause, and the superstitions of religion (evil) must be fought in order for science and reason (good) to prevail. Modernity has rewritten the past, editing out the role of the church, the cradle of many triumphs of scientific inquiry.

Related: R.R. Reno discusses the book in For Christ and For the World and Hart reviews Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God in this month’s issue.