Book Review: Answering Atheism

Trent Horn writes with great clarity in this Catholic Answers-funded apologetic work, Answering Atheism. He ably summarizes the key reasons for both belief and crucially, for disbelief. He does such a good job of the latter that sometimes I fear he gives the atheists too much fuel with which to burn.

In my experience, most atheists are influenced far more by their dislike of the parents and desire to indulge their passions without a "Big Brother in the Sky" who sees all the doings and misdoings of men and will judge them at the end of time.

Whether we actually live in a universe that bears resemblance to that description is beside the point to them. They don't want it, and they would prefer that there be no moral constraints upon their private lives, most importantly upon their bedrooms.

Reasonable people with access to the historical record will become Christians, because God has made the Church His emissary in the world.

Most have probably already heard of the story of the Jew from Boccacio's Decameron. The Jew goes to Rome and decides he must convert, because the fact that Rome is so corrupt and yet the Church continues to exist demonstrates incontrovertibly that God must be supernaturally holding it together or else it would collapse. Perhaps Boccacio was writing tongue-in-cheek, but I believe there is great Truth in this description. Christianity has taken the naked blue-painted savage tribes of the Northern European wastes literally drinking blood from their slain enemies' skulls and turned them into the Christians who abolished slavery throughout their dominions not because it was uneconomical, but because it was wrong. The detractors from the Faith hate this fact and highlight the excesses of colonialism in the attempt to avoid the truth that the West is still the most civilized and free collection of lands in the world. And it is so because of Christianity.

So while I would tend to argue more heavily based upon Christianity's influence and endurance in the World than upon armchair philosophy, and even in engaging in such philosophy, I would tend to make a distinction Trent does not between private one-on-one debate and public debate, as changing the social dynamics of an exchange necessarily affect the correct rhetorical strategy. There is no dialectic in a vacuum. Rhetoric is always a factor. Nevertheless, it is a great book and one I highly recommend.