Selling the Soul of Science for a Pot of Message: Evangelizing Atheism in The God Delusion

Authors

Steven C. Walker

Keywords

Mormon studies, book review, science and religion, atheism

Abstract

Bestseller lists for the past two years chart a swelling tide of interest in a long-standing backwater: atheism. Nothing so tame as old-fashioned agnostic doubt, the new wave floods readers with outspoken scientific atheism. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004) was the earthquake that triggered a tsunami swollen by urgent tributaries from Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) and Marc D. Hauser’s Moral Minds (2006), swelled all the more by Harris’s reprise Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). That atheist tidal wave has yet to crest—Carl Sagan hectors us from the grave in The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006), Lewis Wolpert castigates religion as one of his Six Impossible Things before Breakfast (2006), and Christopher Hitchens decries “how religion poisons everything” in God Is Not Great (2007). There is getting to be so much scientific atheism that Victor J. Stenger sounds redundant with God: The Failed Hypothesis (2006). For all the flotsam crowding their antitheological surfaces, these atheist spokesmen sound, bottom line, a lot alike: science is the sole reliable truth source, so if scientists cannot find him, God is not there.

Recommended Citation

Walker, Steven C. (2008) "Selling the Soul of Science for a Pot of Message: Evangelizing Atheism in The God Delusion," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 47: Iss. 1, Article 8.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol47/iss1/8