Refuting the New Atheists: A Christian Response to Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins have built a formidable cultural presence on a simple proposition: religion is the root of the world's worst evils, and a rational age would be better off without it. In this sharp and often witty collection, theologian and apologist Douglas Wilson accepts their challenge, and turns it back on them. Wilson's central argument is as simple as it is devastating: the New Atheists borrow their moral outrage from the very tradition they are trying to destroy. If human beings are nothing more than matter in motion, the inevitable product of blind evolutionary forces, then there is no rational basis for describing anything as evil, unjust, or wrong. Concentration camps and charity are equally accidental outcomes of time and chance. To condemn the Inquisition or celebrate human dignity, Wilson shows, is to think in categories that only make sense within a theistic framework. This volume collects all three of Wilson's book-length responses to the New Atheists in a single edition: his replies to Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins respectively. Each is entertaining, intellectually serious, and grounded in the conviction that the Gospel, not secular humanism, provides the only coherent foundation for human dignity and ethics.