"One Shot Mega-Luck"...?

A few years ago, I asked for the book "The God Delusion" for Christmas. This is a book about atheism by the world's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins. For the last few years, I've been looking into atheism. I've been reading books and articles, and listening to podcasts etc, trying to get a handle on it. I'm quite a critical thinker, and I don't like the idea that I've fallen into Christianity just because it's the religion of my childhood. At the same time, I wouldn't want to reject it for that reason either... I have been genuinely interested in what atheists have to say and I like to make sure that I haven't just been kidding myself that Christianity is a viable worldview option to own for my life.

I have to say that I've been a little disappointed with what I've found on offer by the "new atheists", and I'm quite fascinated by my level of disappointment. Megan, my life (typo - I meant my wife), laughs at me when I tell her how disappointed I am that the atheist's arguments haven't been able to sway me. I think she thinks there's something strange about that - not that the arguments haven't swayed me, but that I was so disappointed that they hadn't. My disappointment comes from three main things...

The first disappointment is that the level of argument against God hasn't been very sophisticated. I was genuinely hoping for more and hoping to be deeply challenged by the latest, cutting edge thinking in atheism - and it just wasn't there. Some of the arguments could have been refuted by Sunday School kids and others just demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the nature of religion and spirituality in any form or expression across most of the world. I thought it might be just me, but then I heard two different people on two separate occasions on podcasts say that the arguments of the "new atheists" weren't as good as some of the great atheists of the past (and one of the people who said this was an atheist himself!)...

The second disappointment is the continual use of "straw man" arguments. "Straw man" arguments are when someone who disagrees with a point of view, weakly and erroneously builds up a picture of that point of view (the straw man), and then sets out to tear down the point of view bit by bit with apparent ease. Some of these guys are talking about strokes, hallucinations and being swept away by mega-church experiences as religion and then coming across like they've said and done something significant when they've talked down these things. It would be like bringing up the recent "Climategate" email scandal or CSIRO research scandal and then claiming that you've brought the field of science to its knees. It's kind of sad and funny at the same time...

But the third and biggest disappointment is the lack of an answer as to our origins or anything's origins for that matter. I was thinking that surely there would be some new insight into this or some new scientific discovery about this to back up this new zeal and fervor of the new atheists. I can appreciate a lot of the talk from atheists about how amazing evolutionary processes might be, but I've never heard any good response to the question of how the process began - which to my mind, undermines the whole credibility of the process as a useful theory. This seems like a pretty important piece of information to have a grasp of if you are going to be confident in your a-theism. But I was listening to Richard Dawkins talk at the Global Atheists Convention last month about evolution, and in this particular podcast his description of the origins of the universe and then of life was that there had been a does of "one shot mega luck"...

What? What did you say? One shot mega luck? - that's what you've replaced the notion of God with... You, what?... One shot mega luck? You must be kidding... This is what the world's most prominent atheist travels the world armed with as he confidently dismisses the existence of God. Sorry Richard, I was looking for more from you and the crew. I'm feeling a little more confident about where I'm at... but ever watchful. Truth can turn up in the most surprising of places.

Shalom...