A Brighter Enlightenment

A Review of Atheism on Trial: Refuting the Modern Arguments Against God by Louis Markos

Louis Markos became interested in the history of ideas in high school. While in college, he learned from reading C. S. Lewis about the widespread phenomenon Lewis called "chronological snobbery," the ill-founded assumption that current beliefs are ipso facto superior to those of the past. As a graduate student, then, inundated with the prevailing modernist assumption that "enlightened" ideas had long been held back by ignorance, superstition, and religious hierarchy, he tossed the textbooks aside and started reading the actual works that gave rise to Western civilization.

It was an enlightening endeavor. He discovered that the secularist isms of our day—materialism, empiricism, skepticism, and the like—had not been held back by a corrupt church, as the meta-narrative goes, but rather by such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and more. "Long before the days when Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett helped make atheism a household word," he writes, "these great philosophers, theologians, and apologists had put atheism on trial and uncovered its faulty logic, its inconsistencies, its special pleadings, and its decidedly mixed motives."

In Atheism on Trial, Markos doesn't specifically put atheism to the test again. That trial has been held and reheld. (God wins.) Rather, he surveys this historical discussion around ten common arguments for secular perspectives that trace back to antiquity. They fall into four categories:

• The Nature of the Universe addresses the longstanding assertions that everything can be explained by natural causes, that nature is a closed system, and that miracles are not possible (philosophical naturalism).

• The Nature of Knowledge explores the age-old arguments that we can only acquire knowledge through our senses (empiricism) and that there are no absolutes (relativism).

• The Nature of God takes up challenges to God's character, such as that he is not good on account of the atrocities of the Old Testament, or that he can't be both good and all-powerful on account of the evil in the world.

• The Nature of Man looks at two secularist views that purport to ennoble man but end up dehumanizing him: that we are merely products of our environment, and that we are by nature good and therefore perfectible.

The upshot of it all is that the history of ideas has not followed the ever-evolving, out-of-darkness ascent secularists call "Progress" but rather has been marked by an ever-lively, rough-and-tumble, back-and-forth exchange of contending and counter-contending argumentation, much like what we see today.

Though it involves the academic, Atheism on Trial reads like an armchair narrative with perceptive flashes of insight that at times wax devotional. Part Three, "The Nature of God," for example, includes a rich discussion of the theological tenet, unique to Christianity, that God is both fully transcendent (existing outside of time and space) and fully immanent (intimately involved in all that happens in his creation), two seemingly contradictory precepts most fully resolved in the Incarnation. This God, Markos says, as opposed to the man-made gods of human religion, is the one

who provokes such wrath from Enlightenment skeptics and new atheists alike. For it is only this God, transcendent and immanent, exceedingly distant and profoundly close, that must be wrestled with, that must be accepted or rejected, obeyed or defied. Not rituals or laws or religion, but a personal, passionate God who would know and be known.

This God is the subject of contention.

In 2003, two California educators launched a movement for atheists called the "Brights." The Brights may be smart, but they'll find a brighter enlightenment in this intellectual history.