Some time back at Debunking Christianity, there was a good example of a common but bizarre tendency among anti-atheist polemics: take atheism, associate it with some random disliked idea, attack random idea, and declare atheism refuted. The particular example at DC involved the idea of innate human goodness. As Ken Daniels notes over there, there are plenty of counterexamples to the claim that all atheists believe in innate human goodness: he gives Steven Pinker, but you can find examples at least far back as Hobbes.

I’ve seen this same trope in Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher whose work I normally enjoy immensely even when I disagree with him. In his essay for Tom Morris’ /God and the Philosophers/, he set up the attack in terms of “the Enlightenment” vs. Christianity. He had a whole laundry list of views he threw in with atheism to get “the Enlightenment,” but oddly, not all of his representatives of “the Enlightenment” were atheists or even non-Christians: Rousseau certainly believed in human goodness, but from what I understand he spent his life bouncing around various Christian denominations.

This trope could be viewed as a sub-type of the false dilemma, but it’s common enough to warrant discussion in its own right. Especially discussion of why even fairly smart people like van Inwagen indulge in this sort of rhetoric.