Jesus taught, “A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit? A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:39–40).

This verse is the classic instruction to educators everywhere: when the students are fully trained, they will be just like you. As much as a directive, this verse is also a warning: take care that you spot and overcome your own sins and deficiencies, lest you unwittingly teach them to your children, students, disciples, readers, etc.

Nowhere has this phenomenon stood out more clearly to me than in observing the rise of popular atheism. I have grown steadily more discouraged with the level of response coming from allegedly rational and reasonable atheists on the web. The disrespect and sheer rudeness to faith displayed by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins (and others) have inspired a generation of atheists to spout canned arguments at believers, curse, ridicule and laugh, all under the guise of knowledge and rationality. The stratum of discourse I have encountered stoops to many new lows, and proves nothing except that atheists can be trained to repeat pre-approved nonsense without thinking, yet walk away believing they are the rational ones.

Last Summer American Vision produced a two-minute “commercial” video aimed at the recent push of atheists, particularly featuring Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. The clip was hardly meant as a full refutation of atheism (obviously not in only two minutes), but rather focused on one important aspect of its message: the implicit deification of reason.

While I did not create the video, I posted it on YouTube.com on July 2, 2007, with the title “Tired of Hearing about Atheism? Help end it”[1] Since the posting it has received over 21,000 views (a moderate but healthy amount for YouTube) and over 1,400 comments (a considerably high percentage compared to other videos). Most of these comments have come from angry atheists who have responded in a knee-jerk manner to different aspects of the video. I have had to delete probably 10% of the comments due to some atheists’ apparently insatiable desire to curse. While I could possibly understand someone cursing once in a great while in the heat of a moment, anyone who consciously types out the word, surveys what they have written, and then purposefully clicks “Post Comment,” has to live in a world where sex and the toilet dominate their mind.

Aside from the vulgarity, the responses themselves almost all entirely miss the point of the video. Granted, the argument is a bit subtle (very mildly so), but the comebacks miss so widely that I am convinced modern atheistic authors have done an educational disservice to the use of reason in the name of reason.

In future articles perhaps I will elaborate on the arguments that follow, but here is a very brief summary of the unwarranted reaction so far. The responses almost always include things like:

“Robespierre was not an atheist, you idiot!”

“Hitler was not an atheist! Hitler was a Catholic/Christian!”

“Just because one atheist killed people, that doesn’t mean all of them do! I’m an atheist and I have morals!”

And the apparent favorite: “You forgot to mention the crusades, the inquisition, the KKK, Witch burnings, ad infinitum . . . !”

The point, for now, is not necessarily to answer all of these counterattacks (that is easy to do, and has amply been done in many places already). My discouragement comes from the fact that these responses display such a gross lack of attention to what has actually been said. Even if the video were an atrocious logical failure (and it is not), the commenters do not seem to get the point at all, and if they do, they have done a great job of avoiding it.

Of course we know that Robespierre was not an atheist (he was a deist, however, which I consider practical atheism), but here’s the rub: the video never claims that he was. That so many of these responders have thought it important to point out to me that Robespierre was no atheist shows me that a large number of atheist enthusiasts don’t listen very closely at all, and are apparently unable to follow a simple logical argument. Oblivious! Rather, they impute something to us that we never claimed in order to pretend they have “answered” us. (This is the classic “straw man” fallacy: presenting a weak caricature of your opponent’s argument, as if it were the real thing, and then knocking down the caricature pretending you have defeated your opponent.)

Note to would-be critics: just because you say something in reply, does not mean you have refuted anything.

Likewise, when their immediate comeback is to point to atrocities in Christian history, you can know for certain they are just trying to evade the force of the argument. This also is a classic ad hominem (against the man) fallacy called tu quoque (and you too!). When a case is presented against someone, the defendant cries, “but you’ve done it, too.”

Imagine a person in court on trial for murder: all the evidence is clear that he is guilty. Then he stands up in defense and says, “Look at that guy there in the back row of the jury! He’s guilty of murder, too!” Perhaps that juror is; but even if he is, the fact that anyone else has committed murder does not exonerate the defendant who must face justice himself. We’ll deal with the other guy in a separate episode.

The atheists who respond so confidently in this way must rely purely on emotion and on their ability to distract themselves by pointing to irrelevant claims. This phenomenon, now repeated hundreds of times just to me, shows a trend of impoverished critical thinking skills among atheists who claim to make critical thinking the basis of their way of life.

By this article I do not intend a blanket criticism. I have dialogued with some very intelligent atheists who seem to be interested in learning, and a very few who have forced me to reconsider a minor historical point or two. My deep concern, however, is what some flippant and careless atheist leaders have done to the minds of thousands of susceptible young people: they have made it acceptable to speak before thinking, yet in the name of thinking; to condemn before reasoning, yet in the name of reasoning; to criticize others’ intelligence before gauging their own, yet in the name of intelligence; to follow unethical logic in the name of morals and logic.

In short these leaders have created disciples just like themselves in many regards: cavalier, disrespectful, sharp-tongued and proud of it.

So what do I see as the central argument of the video—that which I claim the atheists have mostly missed? It is this: that Harris and Dawkins have called for a world without religious belief, the foundation of which they want to be reason. It is their exaltation of reason which recalls Robespierre, who went so far as to deify reason. Yes, I know Harris and Dawkins have not called to deify reason, but their worldview is no less the same. If reason is the final arbiter of human life, then whether or not you “deify” it, it must trump all other concerns. Whatever is accepted as “reasonable” at the moment will be accepted as the course of action. Such has been the catalyst for many crimes in history.

This is why morality must come first. We should not look to reason to provide moral background—it cannot. Rather, reason must be the slave of moral laws that already exist. This is why even Sam often writes about “good” reasons versus “bad” reasons, because good and bad exist prior to reasoning about them. What I have not seen from the atheists is an account of where these morals come from or what standard we should judge them by (other than vague Darwinian accounts about cooperation within groups, which does not explain why we are bound to cooperate or why we should, but only why it can prove beneficial in some circumstances).

That this clear concept of the faulty foundation of reason has been missed by so many of the video’s atheist critics tells me that most of them are either not interested or not capable of critical investigation. That an atmosphere exists in which tired epithet and irrelevant arguments are the norm is a cause for concern. It presents an ominous societal warning.

Instead of having the courage and patience to deal with a true argument in all of its force, the illogical and the uncritical create false intellectual images as distractions. Instead of looking into the mirror and confronting the true self, the atheists are throwing rocks at the mirror.

I recall an aphorism by Henri de Lubac, “The denser the ignorance, the more enlightened it thinks itself to be.”[2] This, unfortunately, rings true. I pray that these atheist leaders will make an effort to recover and promote good critical thinking, rather than exemplifying that merely attacking the faith makes one enlightened.