Book Review: The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail

Becky Garrison’s book isn’t really necessary, and I mean that in the nicest-spirited way possible. The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (deep breath) is Garrison’s jab back at the new atheist polemicists and their proposition—if I understand it correctly—that religion is no good because it produces people that do bad things. I feel like I’m simplifying the argument but on the basis of what I’ve read from them, this is really the bare bones of the proposition.

The issue with these kinds of arguments is that 1) it doesn’t necessarily, and often doesn’t, address whether or not religious propositions about God/god/gods are correct, and 2) “bad apple”, one of many cognitive bias fallacies, argumentation is easily refuted. Garrison’s book accomplishes the latter quite well but I say the book is unnecessary because, since religious belief is widespread and diverse, all one needs is to know a few kinds of people and a smattering of inductive logic to counteract it.

Garrison notes, among others, as the frontrunners of the new atheist intellectual movement: Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Anne Coulter’s antipode, Richard Dawkins. She cites their main arguments (take your pick…”religious people are stupid” or “religious people are neocon warmongers”, et al.), and then offers up counterexamples as proof. This avenue of the discussion of the desirability of religious belief consists of finding as many bad examples of the “other side”, throwing both piles on a scale and seeing which one weighs more. The heaviest is judged the winner. It is an abysmal, base state of affairs for debating something so complicated and philosophically involved. Attention-deficit, TV-raised populations are unable to get involved at that level so this may be why Garrison’s new atheist apologist opponents, along with their religious counterparts, are so popular.

I had to learn to look past Garrison’s writing style, which can be too alliterative and cutesy for my taste. She seems to have a likable personality and she has a base of knowledge and the writing chops/experience to back it up. As I have said, her counterarguments are effective because the original arguments aren’t very good in the first place; they are demonstrably untrue. And some are just plain bad history, like the idea that the church was anti-science during the Dark Ages Medieval Period (pg. 104). Sometimes Garrison skirts into left-wing politics as proof as a “Hey, at least I’m not one of those conservative Republican people!” framing of her argument (as if conservative statists were somehow less Christian that liberal statists by default), which I believe is leaning towards the wrong disposition to adopt. But again, she is addressing specific arguments that have already been proffered, not offering a comprehensive philosophy for Christian socio-political activity.

New Atheists isn’t without it’s touching or humorous moments, which is where Garrison is at her best. There were times I wish she would throw some ontological fisticuffs. She almost came close when she mentioned Dawkins’ interesting but kinda flaccid argument for why God is improbable^*. Still, the book is effective in the Boggle debate, where one side needs to find more words (bad examples) of the other side to come out the winner. Whether or not she actually does is up to the reader.

^*A quick note on this argument. Assuming Dawkins is applying this to monotheism, where God exhibits properties to the maximal degree (all-loving, all-knowing, etc.), that God’s existence is to be improbable is to be expected. One is not very likely to come across a being that would have these kinds of properties to the maximal degree, by the very nature of being maximal. Regardless of that, all that is needed for God’s existence, statistically, is a chance—of any amount&mdashgreater than zero. For Dawkins’ God to not exist it would be better to argue for a zero chance, because God would only need to occur once to invalidate the argument. See another short refutation about Dawkins’ argument here.