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Authors of new book highlight irrationality of atheists' claim to be defenders of reason

Charlotte, NC, March 12, 2012 -- Leading atheist Richard Dawkins has said, “The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is enough!  Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.” Today, Christian thinkers from around the world announce the publication of the Patheos Press ebook “True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.”

Featuring chapters by Dr. William Lane Craig, Sean McDowell, and eleven other Christian scholars and thinkers, “True Reason” presents a well-reasoned rejoinder to the arrogance of the New Atheists and their upcoming “Reason Rally.” The book:

   - Demonstrates New Atheist leaders’ consistent failure in the use of reasoning.
   - Explains how the Christian faith and good reasoning work well together.
   - Clarifies the reasonability of Christian practice now and throughout history.

“This is a book to encourage, inform, and equip Christian believers. It's also bound to raise controversy,” said general editor Tom Gilson. “The careful reasoning of this book will deliver a tremendous challenge to the New Atheists as they prepare for their ‘Reason’ Rally in Washington. And it will benefit Christians long after that, by equipping them for challenges to the faith that are bound to keep on coming,” added Gilson.

“True Reason” is co-edited by Gilson, a ministry strategist and author working jointly with Campus Crusade for Christ and the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and Carson Weitnauer, director of Telos Ministries, a campus ministry that reaches the intellectual elite at Boston area universities including Harvard.

The book is being released in conjunction with an initiative to bring dozens of thoughtful Christians to the Reason Rally, to create an obvious contrast between the Reason Rally and True Reason. The Reason Rally takes place on the National Mall in Washington D.C. on March 24, 2012, with headline speakers including Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Adam Savage of Mythbusters, and the rock band Bad Religion.

The united Christian outreach to the Reason Rally is being led by: Ratio Christi, ThinkingChristian.net, Reasons for God, The Apologetics Bloggers Alliance, and The Christian Apologetics Alliance.

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(The following excerpt is taken from an article written by Denyse O'Leary)

Recently, a Canadian high school teacher broke the silence about where cultural relativism really leads.

Update: When we celebrate “diversity,” what exactly are we celebrating? And Does a man’s honour really lie between the legs of a woman?

We are told that it means that everyone will accept people of other faiths and sexualities. But what can that mean when it is unpacked?

In “Moments of startling clarity: Moral education programming in Ontario today,” Stephen L. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as if they were fellow human beings with men:

    I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

    I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

    The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions.

    But I was not prepared for their reaction.

    I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

    They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff .”

    Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

Anderson reflects,

    While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

(The articles continues here)

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George Romanes was a highly regarded British scientist in the 1870s's and a personal friend of Charles Darwin. Here is a brief account of his intellectual rejection of Christianity and his return back to God. The following introduction of a short biography of Romanes life should catch your attention. Enjoy!

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A recent book review by Bill Muehlenberg highlights the link between population growth and religion. Bill writes.,

A number of scholarly works have now noted the connection between religion and demographics. Faith and fertility it seems are closely linked. Consider for example sociologist Eric Kaufmann’s 2010 volume, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

Simply put, nations with high levels of religious faith are holding their own when it comes to population levels. But nations which are secular are seeing rapid population decline. But it also makes a difference what kind of religious faith we are talking about. It might surprise many to know that the Muslim world is now in one of the most radical periods of population decline in human history. (article continues here... http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/11/08/faith-population-and-national-survival/)

Hummm, wonder what this tells us about a culture's worldview and the overall attitude toward a culture of life vs a culture of death?

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Maybe you've heard the comment before, "You Christians just accept everything on "faith"!"

Did you notice there is a hidden assumption in that statement? When someone challenges your belief in God in this way, the first thing you should do is to ask the question: "What do you mean by 'faith'?" You may be surprised by the reply.

Examples of Blind Faith

Many people today assume that believing in God is what might be defined as “blind faith.” This is the idea that belief is based on… well, just one’s personal belief. In other words, there is no evidence or logical reason to believe, faith is simply a subjective feeling or emotional response to the idea that God exists.

The latest salvo of atheist attacks on Christianity over the last four or five years assumes this definition of faith. Richard Dawkins, for instance, wrote, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” More recently, Dawkins declared that “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.” Journalist and author of god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens, has written, “Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals.”

The idea that faith is “blind” is found throughout our culture, especially in popular movies. For example, in the film, Indiana Jones: Search for the Holy Grail, Indiana, played by Harrison Ford, must retrieve the cup of Christ to save the life of his father (Sean Connery). He makes it through a long corridor of deadly obstacles only to find himself standing at the edge of a deep chasm. He hesitates, but finally takes a “step of faith” and finds, to his surprise, he is actually walking on a camouflaged footbridge. This scene illustrates the popular notion that “faith” means believing something that you can’t see. It was only after Indy “blindly” stepped out that he felt and saw the solid bridge leading across the chasm.

Is faith blind, is it simply an excuse to evade the need to think, and the surrender of common sense? A biblical worldview analysis answers that question by going back to the source, the Bible.

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We are all called to carry out the great commission, but who really holds the office of an evangelist?

Many Christians would describe an evangelist as someone that travels from church to church to preach messages. Their messages inspire believers to give to ministries that focus on taking the gospel to the unreached. Perhaps they would mention someone that preaches a message to bring revival to the church and convince people we bring to their meetings to become a follower of Christ. The right answer, however, according to Ephesians chapter 4, is that the evangelist is a person who equips believers to “do the work of the ministry so that they may build up the church.” That means the person who gives us the intellectual ability to answer the questions and objections of family and friends is really acting in the office of the evangelist. By training believers to give a reasonable answer, these people are probably doing more to win people to Christ than many traveling preachers. Apologetics is the branch of Christian theology that seeks to address the intellectual obstacles that keep people from taking faith seriously, and therefore it is the apologist who is the true evangelist.

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