Book Review

Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists

By R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (Crossway Books, 2008)

Reviewed by Steven Tramel Gaines

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1, NIV)

Mohler provides a helpful overview of New Atheism and critiques it from an Evangelical perspective, but he only hints at a possible constructive Christian response. He serves as President and Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a leading spokesperson for conservative Christianity.

His well-organized and readable book, Atheism Remix, begins with a coverage of the historical development of secularism, mentioning the “four horsemen of the modern apocalypse—Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud” (p. 19) and their influences upon the modern worldview of Western Europe, the USA, and other cultures they have powerfully penetrated. Nietzsche declared that Christianity was a virus that was harmful to society. Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses.” Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, which others have applied to religion and human nature. Freud believed “that religion is merely an illusion that would eventually pass away” and boldly stated that “God is dead” (p. 20).  Similarly, in the works of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Auguste Comte, modernity “was understood as humanity come of age, and religious faith and belief in God were seen as recidivist, backward, and limiting beliefs that would inevitably recede” (p. 29). This intellectual trend led to a British motto that is finding a home in North America: “My mind is no longer Christian even though my body is” (p. 23). Faith is becoming a “belief in belief” instead of a belief in God in the personal form found in the Bible, and the next chapter more fully develops this idea.

The second chapter informs readers that a new version of atheism has built on the early foundations. “Four horsemen” also lead the New Atheism. Richard Dawkins, arguably the most famous scientist in the world, teaches at Oxford University and established his reputation with his 1976 book entitled The Selfish Gene, the major theme of which Mohler paraphrases: “the basic unit of natural selection is the gene” (p. 40). Dawkins proposes that Darwinism is the only reasonable worldview, and has even named himself the “Devil’s Chaplain.”Daniel Dennet is a philosopher at Tufts University. Although not as popular as his comrades in New Atheism’s leadership, his “great life project is to prove that evolution alone explains human consciousness” in every area of life (p. 44). Sam Harris studied neuroscience at Stanford, and his The End of Faith was published in 2004 and remains a bestseller. It claims that belief in God is evil, due to God’s violence in scripture, and dangerous because it “makes persons self-centered. To believe that God cares about you as an individual, Harris would say, makes you a narcissist” and causes a “sense of superiority” (pp. 49-50). Christopher Hitchens is the only one of the “four horsemen” of New Atheism who is not a scholar in a university context but is “an intellectual author, pundit, commentator, and critic” (p. 52). His 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, proposes four objections to faith in God: (1) that it “misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos,” (2) that it combines maximum servility (slave-likeness) and maximum solipsism (self-centeredness), (3) that it causes sexual repression, and (3) that it “is ultimately grounded in wishful thinking” (p. 52). Mohler states that these authors do not attempt to convert believers but seek “to create cultural momentum, to encourage others to be more vocal in their unbelief” (p. 54).

Chapter 3 reviews Christian criticisms of New Atheism, specifically the works of Alister McGrath, an Oxford theologian and scientist, and Alvin Plantinga, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame. Mohler agrees with both McGrath and Plantinga that the leading voices of New Atheism show a weak understanding of (1) philosophy and theology and (2) the relationship between science and religion. However, Mohler disagrees with the liberal theologies underlying those authors’ willingness to accommodate on the issue of evolution. In the fourth chapter, he also criticizes the liberalism of Christian responses from Tina Beattie and John F. Haught, who claim that the major weakness of the New Atheists is that they attack conservative Christianity as if it were the only form instead of recognizing that many theologians no longer interpret the Bible literally.

Mohler ends his book with a call to action for conservative Christians whose “task is to articulate, communicate, and defend the Christian faith with intellectual integrity and evangelistic urgency.” He rightly points out that the task is not easy and that Christians must not “withdraw from public debate and private conversation in light of this challenge” (p. 107).

Atheism Remix provides sufficient information and stimulating analysis of the foundations and themes of New Atheism, and it is beneficial reading for Christians ministering with students at universities and colleges that expose them to the New Atheists’ ideas. It adequately delineates the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas in a relatively short and readable manner. However, the book suffers two weaknesses of its own. First, it recognizes only a narrow section of Christian theology as worthy of serious consideration in the conversation. Second, it fails to answer the challenge of presenting a constructive and conservative alternative to the New Atheists. (Timothy Keller has offered such an alternative in his recent book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.)