“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and WITH ALL YOUR MIND” (Matthew 22:37).

“False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.” -J. Gresham Meacham

The word “sophist” originally meant a paid teacher of public speaking and argumentation especially with respect to morality or politics.  The sophists often only cared about teaching their students how to persuade audiences regardless of whether their arguments arrived at true conclusions or not.

For this reason, the word “sophist” is now derogatory because it indicates someone who makes fallacious arguments but due to appealing to his or her audience’s emotions, is able to persuade them to change their thinking or take action even if his or her argument is not valid.

Introduction: The Old Sophists

In the early 6^thcentury B.C., the Greeks saw the birth of philosophy.  Philosophers back then asked questions about the nature of the world such as the following:

• Do we understand the natural world through our five senses alone or do we need immaterial thinking (such as deduction and mathematics) to understand the world?

• Do things in the world change, and if they do, then why do we perceive something permanent about the character of the world.

In a nutshell, in their examination of nature, they came up with very difficult questions, and these questions caused endless debates between schools of philosophy.

In the mid-5^thcentury B.C., a group of thinkers called the Sophists rose up (also among the Greeks) and claimed that all these questions about the natural world were nonsensical.  They declared that no one would ever arrive to answers on these questions, and we should spend our time focused on questions of morality, character, and governments, that is on practical matters.

The Sophists did not contribute much to these new questions because they also believed that these new questions would not have clear answers, but relativistic ones.  For that reason, they focused on teaching their students public speaking and how to win arguments even when their conclusions were not valid.  The focus was: learn how to persuade your audience to further promote yourself to public office.

This style of teaching was based on the Sophists’ worldview, which was relativism.  They denied the possibility of hard knowledge, and for that reason they also denied the absolute character of truth in any area of life.  The Sophists were hardcore agnostics and some were outright atheists.

An example of such a style of thinking can be found in Protagoras declaration that “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that man is the source and origin of all truths.  It is appealing, but totally unsupported.

Or in Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus argues that injustice is better than justice and that there is no true justice.  He argued that things perceived as just such as a shepherd taking care of sheep is nothing more than a way of giving the shepherd the ability to fatten, slaughter, and eat the sheep.

As you can see, this type of thinking is not helpful to the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth.

Atheists held to this type of relativism until science became an undeniable example of the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth about the natural world.

In the mid to late 5^thCentury B.C., a new philosopher rose up who responded to the Sophists.  His name was Socrates.  He affirmed the possibility of hard knowledge and came up with a method for determining the truth of this knowledge, which was by observing multiple examples of an idea, and then coming up with a universal definition based on those observations. Often, this was hard, and sometimes no clear answer emerged.  An example of this is in the Platonic dialogue of Euthyphro where Socrates does not arrive at any clear conclusion about the definition of piety.

Regardless, he showed that when we are faced with a difficult question, we should not give up by saying things are relative or impossible to understand.  He affirmed the absolute and universal character of truth and often succeeded at discovering the truth by putting forward valid arguments.

Socrates’s philosophy started a new flourishing of thinking, led the increase of knowledge, and led to the beginnings of methodological science. For example, his student, Plato, picked up where he left off and started applying this critical thinking to morality, the physical world, law, government, and even to perception and psychology.  Plato’s student, Aristotle, refined the ideas of the philosophers who came before him, and this led to the increase of early scientific thinking.  Aristotle produced the largest body of scientific work in the ancient world.  Although it was not modern science, it was the beginning, and all because science becomes possible when one believes there is absolute and universal knowledge and that that knowledge can be accessed by rational thinking.  If this belief is not firmly held, then science is impossible. It would be a useless and self-defeating endeavor to try to discover universal truth when one does not even believe in universal truth.

The New Atheists

“New Atheists” does not mean the atheists of today.  It refers to a specific type of atheism that is characterized by the preaching of atheism through argumentation based on disciplines such as science, history, and philosophy.  Most popular atheism books are written by New Atheists.

This article is not a repudiation of all types of atheism. There are some atheists out there who are sincerely seeking the truth and are willing to believe if they have their questions adequately answered; the New Atheists do not belong to that group. The New Atheists are not willing to believe.  They only feign to be open to evidence.

The younger generations of atheists who argue for atheism belong to the category of New Atheists and a number of college professors employ New Atheistic arguments even if they are not consciously aware of it.

What led to the rise of the New Atheists?

It is debatable what led to the rise of the New Atheists because the New Atheism is a recent phenomenon going back to the late 1990s and exploding in the 2000s following the publication of popular atheistic works. In those works, they argue things like Christians have perpetuated violence, have been superstitious, and have slowed down the progress of learning, and that these things are characteristic of Christianity throughout its history.

Yet, the reality is not that Christianity is not guilty of anything that the New Atheists accuse it of whether perpetuating violence, or being superstitious, or slowing down the progress of learning.  A little reading on the subject from the true scholars in those fields (and not the popular New Atheists who are not qualified to comment on those fields), shows that their arguments do not represent what really happened in the past.

The reason they have become so popular and have convinced many people is because of Western Christians’ poor engagement with intellectual culture and scientific discoveries.  Christians do not know how to answer these arguments because they are unread in their own history.

An American professor named J. Gresham Meacham wrote a prophetic article in 1913 titled “Christianity & Culture,”in which he explained what he saw as the decline of Christian engagement with philosophy, academic disciplines, scholarship, and learning in general, and he painted a roadmap of what the future would look like, and that future he predicted is the present we are living now.

He wrote, “Careful preparation for Sunday-school lessons as for lessons in mathematics or Latin was unknown.  Religion seemed to be something that had to do only with the emotions and the will, leaving the intellect to secular studies.  What wonder that after such training we came to regard religion and culture as belonging to two entirely separate compartments of the soul, and their union as involving the destruction of both?” (Meacham, 3)

The New Atheists are the New Sophists

So how do the New Atheists succeed in convincing masses of people? They generally do so through four methods: bad logic, name calling, distortion of facts, and lying.  These methods are the modern versions of the ancient Sophists’ style of argumentation.

Here are some examples showing each method in use by the New Atheists.

Method # 1: Bad Logic:

The Old Sophists were known for using the fallacy of equivocation. Equivocation means that you use a word with two different meanings.  First, you make an observation using one meaning of the word, then second, you apply that observation to the second meaning of the word.  This is not valid.

Here is an example of equivocation from the New Atheists:

Christopher Hitchens often used this following argument in his debates with Christians.  He would say,

“Think of an evil action done in the name of faith.  You have already thought of one.  Now think of an evil action an atheist would do just because he is atheist.  You can’t think of one.”

The Christian would then feel frustrated and would not have an answer while the atheists in the audience applauded.

Yet, when one stops and thinks, he or she would realize that Hitchens has no valid argument against Christianity because he is using the world faith with two meanings.  The first faith he is arguing against is Christianity, but his supporting argument, and the faith the audience just thought of (including you the reader) is radical Islam.

These two “faiths” are not the same, and you cannot use radical Islam to argue against Christianity.  This is the Fallacy of Equivocation.  It is a mistake in logic that leads to an invalid argument and a conclusion that cannot be supported based on the evidence one gives.

If Hitchens were honest (or had known how to think logically), he should have reworded the argument to say, “Think of an evil action done just because one is a Christian.”  He would have had difficulty getting people to think of an action that could not be debated unlike the example he gave above.  But Hitchens, like the New Atheists, is not interested in arriving at the truth, but for spreading his religion of New Atheism.  This makes the New Atheists the New Sophists; they are only interested in making their audiences atheists.

Method # 2: Name Calling

The New Atheists regularly engage in calling Christians names.  They call Christians things like “superstitious peasants” among many other things.  This serves nothing more than emotional appeal without substance.  It bothers those who are believers and it makes nonbelievers laugh.  These are nothing more than memes without pictures.  They are distractions to cover up the lack of substantive arguments.  This is also the primary method of an unthinking schoolyard bully.

Method # 3: Distortion of Facts

The third method that gives the New Atheists the appearance of being good debaters and thinkers is distortion of facts.  They do this either through laziness or malice.  I’d like to think it is the former, but due to the nature of many distortions, it leads me to conclude that this is done due to malice.

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusionmischaracterized the five arguments that Thomas Aquinas gave for the existence of God instead of actually familiarizing himself with the original arguments as understood in their original contexts.  For example, he refers to the Teleological Argument as the Argument from Design, and “refutes” it by showing that mutations and natural selection, which together produce evolution are unconscious processes, but that does not refute Thomas Aquinas’s Teleological Argument because Aquinas’s argument is not the argument from design, but it could better be expressed as the argument that all things in the universe tend toward a purpose or an end. Far from being refuted by natural selection, natural selection actually supports the Teleological Argument, and after DNA, it may very well be its strongest piece of evidence in nature that things tend toward a purpose or an end.  But Dawkins didn’t bother to understand the arguments; he thought he understood it by the name people give to it, which is “The Argument from Design.”  It does not mean design like you think of today, and whether Dawkins intended to or not, he distorted the facts.

A good article that explains Aquinas’s Teleological Argument (if you are interested in understanding it) is “Between Aristotle and William Paley” by Edward Feser.  If you have access to a journal database (if you are in college), then you can find this article.

Method # 4: Lying

If you ask college students, maybe even college graduates, if in the Middle Ages people thought the earth was flat, then it is likely they will answer yes.  I recently had this discussion with two friends of mine, and they said “yes, Galileo was the one who showed the earth was round,” so I answered, “No, he didn’t.” The other friend said, “It was Copernicus, not Galileo.”  And I answered again, “No, it wasn’t.”  The answer is the ancient Greeks; Aristotle gave two empirical pieces of evidence in the 350s B.C., and others followed with more empirical evidence in the following centuries.  Here is a video that explains it and has references if you want to look up the sources yourselves.

People who are well-read know this, so the fact that this had been a view up until recently (I remember when I was in elementary school in the 1990s, they taught us that people thought the earth was flat until Columbus and that the Catholic Church had opposed him because he taught a spherical earth). The fact is that the Church thought the earth was spherical, and this was not what caused friction between the Church and Galileo.  It was not until I went to college and in my astronomy and western civilization classes where I was shown the historical sources that I realized I had been taught a lie.  Where that lie came from, I later found out it was by two anti-Christian atheists who had first written this in two textbooks in the late 19^thcentury. Their names were John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.

In his book God is not Great, Hitchens wrote about how the early modern Biblical translators, “Like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations [of the Bible]” (pg. 125).  He does this to show how evil the Catholic Church was.  Yet, the fact of the matter is, neither Wycliffe nor Coverdale were burned alive or even killed for that matter.  Both died of natural causes.  Tyndale was killed by strangling and then his body burned.  Hitchens did not make an honest mistake here.  Hitchens has written this to make atheists even though two thirds of what he wrote here is not true nor is it representative of Christianity.

If you take these four methods away and let the New Atheists argue, then they will have nothing with which to argue.  We must reduce them to what they were in the ancient world which were uneducated countercultural self-boasters of their own importance.  How they came to be seen as the intellectual and the educated is beyond me because their atheism is not based on their studies, but on presuppositions that they confuse with the conclusions of their studies.

The New Atheists have been called out by fair-minded atheists.  An example is Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, who wrotethat Dawkins’s book The God Delusionmade him “ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.”

How Did We Even Arrive to This Point?

I think we have arrived to this point (and it has been aggravated) by the fact that children are no longer taught formal logic until their last year of high school and only if they are in advanced classes.  Otherwise, they receive their first lessons in formal logic sometime in the first two years of college in their Gen. Ed requirements. When I took my first course in logic, which was taught by a teacher who was one of the clearest explainers I have ever met, half of the class regularly failed the assessments.  This illustrates the state of logical and critical thinking in the United States; it’s very bad!

On the contrary, in Europe and America logic was part of early secondary education and revisited and used throughout the school years.  This continued until the early 20^thcentury.  That’s the same century you find the explosion of atheism.  There is a clear correlation between the disappearance of logic in the school curriculum and the explosion of atheism, and with further research work, we may be able to show causation as well.

Here is one more example of such nonsensical illogical thinking.  I often hear atheists saying, “All babies are born atheist.”  When I hear that, it causes me to wonder about what exactly is it that they are trying to argue?  Is the implied conclusion, “Therefore, everyone should be atheist”?  I reflect on the fact that babies are born knowing nothing at all, and to compare atheists to babies in this state is not something to be celebrated.  Where is the reverence for knowledge?  I thought they argued that atheism was based on knowledge?  So if they try to argue for atheism by saying that all children are born atheists, this is deplorable.  See what I mean about that they, like the Sophists, argue with the intention of making others atheists whether their arguments are valid or not.

With the abandonment of the intellect, which uniquely makes us human, which separates us from all other creatures, and indeed has always been identified in Christianity with the Image of God, it thus comes as no surprise when people have abandoned the ability to use the intellect as they do their legs that it is only a matter of time before they lose belief in God in the same way that if they abandoned their ability to use their legs, they would lose their ability to walk.

What this means is that people are left to make decisions based on how they feel and not on how they think because that faculty of intellectual reasoning is not quite there due to a total lack in education of logical thinking in modern times.

The Old Apologists and the New Apologists

The new philosophical reaction to the New Sophists can be found in Christian apologetics.  But one first must understand that apologetics was practiced from the earliest days of Christianity.  In many ways, Paul the Apostle was the first Christian apologist.  When he went to Athens, he went to the Areopagus (Mars Hill) to engage with the Greek philosophers (who were the intellectuals of the day) including Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.  The Epicureans were atheists; the Stoics were pantheists.  It is interesting that you find large portions of the secularized population today drawn to these two worldviews.  When Paul the Apostle met them, he referenced Nature and their impulse to respond to Nature in a religious way.  He even cited a poem written by a Greek, “For in Him we live and move and have our being,” which can be seen as Stoic in order to use a common and familiar starting point to lead them to Christ.

The following century saw several Christian apologists rise up. Athenagoras and Quadratus of Athens among the lesser known apologists and whose works survive as fragments. But we have three lengthy apologetic works from St. Justin Martyr who wrote in the 150s-160s.  He engaged Greek philosophy and Judaism in these works to clarify, explain, defend, and argue for the Christian faith.  You can get a copy of these writings by clicking here.

In the 3^rdcentury, Origen the scholar wrote voluminous work answering a critic of Christianity named Celsus.

In the late 350s, a philosopher emperor named Julian left Christianity and converted to paganism becoming the last pagan emperor of the Roman Empire.  He wrote several works against Christianity attacking Christian teaching.  This drew the response of multiple Church Fathers in various works titled Against Julian.

St. Augustine in the late 300s wrote a book called Against the Academics (sometimes known as Answer to Skeptics).  He wrote this book as he was considering converting to Christianity, and in his days, at the Academy of Plato, the predominant opinion was that we can never know the truth.  Yet Christianity claims to be the truth and to present truthful claims.  Is there truth and how do we determine truth?  The answers are found in this book.  He addressed those Sophists of his day, defeated their arguments, and that paved the way to his own conversion to Christianity. The Academics’ same arguments have turned up again today.  If you want to address them, then this book is an indispensable resource, and it is not that long either.

The point is from the beginning of the history of the Church, Christians have always had an intellectual spirit that engaged with the learning and knowledge of their times.  It is only recently that Christianity has been reduced to a religion of the heart and soul, and the mind has been neglected.  Indeed, Jesus said that the first great commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and WITH ALL YOUR MIND” (Matthew 22:37).  It is time we started following this commandment in full and not only two-thirds of it.

Conclusion

Historically, atheists have not been friends to knowledge.  If one applies the New Atheists’ ways of arguing against Christianity (which were primarily the four methods listed above) to exploring reality instead, then we would never arrive at any knowledge of the world.  These methods are not fit to explore the reality of Christian history, morality, and belief.  Rather, when there were atheists in the past who were friends of knowledge, this was rare and difficult to find.

For modern atheists to pretend that atheism has been the great advancer of knowledge is a Sophistic argument that only wins due to the lack of knowledge in their audiences and it qualifies as a distortion of facts and straight out lying.  If one carefully studies, for example, the history of science, one finds that methodological naturalism was a significant contribution of Christian European philosophers who thought about how to study nature based on what it meant for something to be natural in the context of being created by God.  Methodological naturalism was not based on atheistic premises and conclusions.  Had atheism been the primary system of thought in the Middle Ages, then modern science may have never arisen.

Please note, if you are interested in seeing New Atheistic argumentation firsthand, you will notice that if any atheists react against this article, it will usually be one out of two reactions: calling me names or dismissing this article without giving reasons why.  These are also two Sophistic fallacies: Ad hominem and ad lapidem. They will not actually take points from the article and discuss them and whatever deficiencies they perceive.

That is not to say that some atheists may have reasons, they may very well have reasons for their beliefs.  If that’s the case, then we will begin a dialogue as the Old Apologists did long ago.  The Christian faith has never feared dialogue; that was the main source of how it spread in the first 350 years of its history in conjunction with the example of the way early Christians lived.  The only reason to convert back then (before Christianity became the empire’s religion) was solely based on the message and work of Christ. That was to be communicated through dialogue.

Had people followed the Old Atheists (the Sophists being one group), then knowledge would have never progressed.  There would only have been an ambition to rule, to get your way, and to seek personal promotion.  This is why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked very hard to discover and explain the rules of thinking that allow you to validly examine reality and reach true conclusions.  This type of thinking led to better education, the beginnings of science, advancement in poetry, advancement in storytelling, better governments, led to wisdom, and most importantly, it was utilized by Christian apologists to spread the faith and message of Christ.

If people will follow the New Atheists today, then what we have to look forward to is a society full of ambition, people stepping over others, people seeking personal promotion while rejoicing at others’ falls.

At the very end of his prophetic article, J. Gresham Meacham suggests that “an age of doubt might be followed by the dawn of an era of faith” if the Church does her work (Meacham, 15).

It is time for us to do that work especially with the resources we have available to us today from clear translations into English of the ancient apologists, ease of accessibility to knowledge due to online retailers like Amazon, and books written by new apologists to help us navigate and utilize this knowledge.

Let us rise up and engage with the intellectual culture thus becoming ambassadors of what the Kingdom of God looks like in its intellectual aspect, and then we will continue the work Christ began and entrusted to us to continue. We are ambassadors of the Kingdom of God.  Anyone who is called to be a good ambassador must learn the language, culture, and ideas of the country to which he will go to represent his.  If we are trying to represent what the Kingdom of God is (which is nothing less than heaven on earth), then we must present it so, and that includes intelligent and deep thinking.  By raising generations of emotionally pious believers who do not know anything further than the most basic practical science, basic reading to read signs and menus, and basic mathematics to balance their checkbooks (if they can even do that), then we will not win those who are most influential in society, those who are using their reasoning abilities as God intended for us to use and develop, and those who may sincerely want to love God with their minds.

What will you do?

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