I haven’t read many of the books that have sprung up responding to Dawkins et al.–I think I may make it my next blog project after I finish the philosophical lectures. For that reason, it’s a little hard for me to comment on John Haught’s reply to John Loftus’ review of Haught’s /God and the New Atheism/. Anyway, it’s still interesting enough for me to file it away for comparison’s sake when I actually get Haught’s book:

There is too much in your critique for me to address here, so let me just mention three items. First, I did not wish to give the impression that Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche speak for all atheists, although this is how you read my intention. I simply see their writings as articulating what I consider to be the ultimate implications of any atheism that is thought out with thoroughgoing logical consistency. You do not agree with this, it is clear, but my point is precisely that Nietzsche and Sartre do not speak for most atheists since the latter, in defending moral values they have inherited from a Christian culture, are still theistic at heart.

What I’ll be looking for when I read Haught: does he articulated their supposed logical proofs with any skill? If not, Haught’s guilty of a superficial appeal to authority of the sort that should be beaten out of people in high school.

Secondly, I cannot help noticing your own sincere sense of disillusionment with the biblical God who does not live up to your ideal of how an appropriate deity should behave. In this respect you seem to agree with Dawkins and Hitchens whose moral idealism I discuss in Chapter 8. Like them you are disappointed, even scandalized, that the Bible is so often crude and that its portraits of God don’t always measure up to what most of us now expect of truly moral persons. You rightly point out that scholars have read the Bible with diverse hermeneutical perspectives, but most of them no longer read the Bible in the moralistic and accusatory way that you and the new atheists do. I am by no means alone in holding that the dominant biblical contribution—from Genesis to Revelation—is not moral instruction, but an emphasis on the themes of liberation, promise, and the need to trust in spite of all present doubts about there being any final redemptive meaning to history and the universe.

I’m not sure I understand what Haught is trying to say here. The key question is: is it applicable to the horrible deeds described in Greek myth? If not, why? But if so, why the high language and scolding of people who are doing the basic task of convincing people that mythology, whatever it’s admirable themes, isn’t a good moral guide?