Mark Shea on New Atheism
February 5, 2008
The talented author reminds us once again that the arguments of the New Atheists (Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, to name but four) are nothing new. The only two good arguments for atheism were done away with by St. Thomas Aquinas some 900 years ago…and all the New Atheists have to offer is rehashings of old, already useless arguments.
Seventy-thousand eyewitnesses (including atheists and skeptics) to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima are told by the stay-at-home dogmatist that it was spontaneous mass hallucination unprecedented in history.
People who have experienced scientifically documented and inexplicable healings at Lourdes are commanded by New Atheists to believe they are victims or perpetrators of some sort of unnamed “excess.”
A Host begins bleeding human blood at a Mass in Betania, Venezuela, and the whole thing is caught on video by an ordinary tourist? Conspiracy and trick photography, despite the fact that the Host (still preserved in a monstrance after being subjected rigorous tests) continues to bleed now and then to this day.
And when the resolve to Just Not Look begins to crumble under the suspicion there might be something to the supernatural after all, the solution is “Pop in a DVD of the Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller debunking something and repeat to yourself ‘Some claims of the supernatural are bunk, therefore all are.’”
Atheists might have had a chance at convincing me that my faith was just superstitious bunk back in my early teens, when I was having the obligatory adolescent crisis of doubt. Fortunately, someone hooked me up with a copy of the Summa Theologica, and there was never again any risk that I’d fall in to such lunacy.
