'A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists' reviewed

Despite my disappointments, the letter is well worth a read, if only for the interesting facts that it turns up, and the occasional parry to uninformed argument that it provides.

He makes good points about Western science owing its pre-eminence to the Christian view that the mind of God can be discovered through the workings of his creation. He has some interesting incursions into theology to show that early Christians probably didn’t believe in Platonic dualism or a soul that lived after death. (But we are not arguing about early Christians, rather present day Christians.)

There is some examination of empirical evidence to see whether Christians are better or worse than other people in terms of civility, safety and health. We appear to perform better than most, although I’m not sure that his statistics adequately control for age, income and class.

Even so there is a promising empirical response here to Hitchen’s argument that religion “poisons everything”.

There are also some psychological insights into theological issues, such as the doctrine of grace, and how atheists and sceptics can prefer straw case arguments about the nature of Christianity because of “out group homogeneity”.

But for me the ultimate failure of this book is that it relies on its own straw case.

For me it is not enough to defend Liberal Christians like Myers and myself from criticism. Christianity is not even a broad church, but often a seething mass of denominational theological debate. While one cannot condemn science on the basis of “eugenics, nuclear warheads and pollution” no defence of science would be complete that did not deal with these things either.

Likewise a defence of Christianity that refuses not only to deal with religious extremism but the sort of evangelical Christianity that dominates outside of Europe, Canada, Australia and the north-east and the west coast of the USA, is flawed. All Christians are not creationists, but many are. This cannot be ignored.

Some Christians may not believe that God answers prayers, but most do, and what’s more that he pushes aside the laws of nature and creates miracles. They cannot be ignored.

And his book neglects the transformative power of Christianity, which challenges those of us who think rationally and empirically about our faith, by the exuberance of those touched in this way and the knowledge that they have something that we may never have, but that, despite our sophisticated shudders, it is Christianity too.