Why God won't go away by Alister McGrath

Why God Won't Go Away: Engaging with the New Atheism

This book's title is prehaps a little misleading as it is not really about God at all, it is about "New Atheism", and in particular the reasons why "New Atheism's" arguments against God and against religion fail.

McGrath is careful to draw a distinction between "New Atheism", which is made up of polemical attacks on religion, such as Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion', and more classical Atheist and Agnostic formulas, and so while the book concludes in favour of the probability of a God it does not deny the coherence of the classical Atheist position. McGrath tries very hard to avoid falling into the trap of becoming polemical in his own unpicking of Dawkins et al's standpoint - however he often fails and the overall argument of the book is thus diminished (this is especially true whenever he refers to New Atheist "foot soldiers" of the bloggisphere).


The core argument is that the New Atheists conflate empirical science with rationality - they deny that you can rationally assert anything that can not be proved through empirical scientific observation. McGrath methodically shows this depends not only a misunderstanding of rationality but also on pretty poor science.  He also rejoices in the great irony is the perhaps in the last decade, when New Atheist writers have found fame, "science" has become much more disposed to the possibility of 'God' than at any time in the last century.

The other key area of weakness McGrath focuses on is the New Atheists failure to show a positive case for human society without God and/or religion, they are defined by their attacks on religion not the offering of an alternative.  The fact that all the examples of 'officially' atheist societies, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and China under the Cultural Revolution, were characterised by far greater levels of violence and cruelty than most societies with religions and Gods is explained away by classifying Communism and Nazism as religions.  While this might be a fair assessment we are left without an example of a religionless society.  The evidence points to human beings being inherently religious creatures and so the burden of proof must be on the New Atheists to show humanity can exist in a state recognisable as 'humanity' without being religious about something - and so far they have failed to come up with the goods.