Three Blind Brights

Michal Novak looks at the "Big Three" of popular atheism in an article in the current issue of National Review (sub req) and isn't much impressed :

Alas, it is extremely difficult to engage on the same level with Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. All of them think that religion is so great a menace that they do not have much disposition for dialogue. The battle flags they put into the wind are Voltaire's Ecrasez l'infame! Meanwhile, all three pretend that atheists "question everything" and "submit to relentless, almost tedious, self-criticism." Yet in these books there is not a shred of evidence that their authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism. Self-questioning about their own scholarly indifference to their subject; about the horrific brutalities committed in the name of "scientific atheism" during the 20th century; about the restless and mercurial dissatisfactions in atheist and secular movements during the past hundred years; and about the demographic weaknesses thereof--all such questions are notable by their absence. Moreover, although an atheist zeitgeist dominates university campuses in America, it has not proved persuasive to huge numbers of students, who hold their noses and put up with it. Why does atheism persuade so few? Our authors never ask.

And:

Finally, our three authors fail to think carefully about what Jews and Christians actually have to say about God. Their own atheistic concept of God is a caricature, an ugly godhead which anybody might feel duty-bound to reject. Dawkins makes fun of an omniscient God who would also be free. If an omniscient God knows now what future actions He will take, how will that leave room for Him to change His mind--and how does that leave Him omnipotent? Isn't He caught in a kind of vise? But, of course, this is to imagine God living in time as Dawkins lives in time. It is to fail to grasp the difference between a viewpoint from eternity, outside time, and a viewpoint from within time. It is also to fail to grasp the freedom that the Primary Cause, outside of time (simultaneous to every moment of it), may allow within time crucial roles to secondary causes, to contingencies, and to particulars.

God's will is not before human decisions are made. Rather, it is simultaneous with them, and thus empowers their being made. When Catholics celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass, for example, we imagine that our moment of participation in that Mass--as it is on every other day of our lives--is in God's eyes simultaneous with the bloody death of His Son on Calvary. In our eyes, it looks like a "re-enactment," but in God's eyes both moments are as one. No doubt, for some minds this is all too mystical, and its underlying philosophy a bit too sophisticated, especially to those of literal and purely empirical tastes. Our three authors, in any case, present a quite primitive idea of God. If the rest of us had such a view, we, too, would almost certainly be atheists.

Novak's last statement is very similiar to what Father Richard John Neuhaus said when asked about Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins on the Northern Alliance Radio Network last Saturday. It would be refreshing if proponents of atheism argued against actual religious belief instead of basking in the pride of knocking down strawmen.