Some tall-profile atheists insist on arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse. This is a spirited corrective,covering the origins of the universe to the utilize of the BibleIn one of his letters, CS Lewis repeats the story of an earnest atheistical school teacher instructing her young charges that all forms of animal life derived from the higher apes, and under the impression that she was teaching them Darwinism. The anecdote is probably too satisfactory to be accurate,but it is a reminder that in any decently reasonable argument it helps to know what exactly it is that is being attacked or defended. Anyone writing off Darwinism on the grounds that the unfortunate teacher’s nonsense was what Darwinists “really” believed would not even begin to engage with Darwins views; there has to be some genuine attention to what is being said and to what it is like to hold it to be accurate – not what it feels like (though that may befriend) but how it “works”, what connections it sets up, or what recent twists it may give to familiar vocabulary,what recent words and patterns of concepts it actually generates.
And this is what Rupert Shortt demands for Christian theology. He is not the first to note with exasperation that some tall-profile atheists insist on arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse. But he has provided in this brief book one of the most concise and sophisticated of recent protests against this tendency. He patiently explains, for example, or what’s unsuitable with at least one argument still advanced as a clincher by anti-devout polemicists. Everything must believe a cause and the cause of everything must be God: so the atheist paraphrases the devout case. But,the atheist continues, if everything has a cause, and so must God. Argument over: the idea of God cannot function so as to avoid an infinite regress,so the devout case falls to the ground.
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Source: theguardian.com