Decade of New-Atheists is Over?

James Kushiner:

You might be interested in this radio debate between Michael Shermer and Greg Koukl today on the Hugh Hewitt Show, and the website includes a link for on-line listening. I am not sure if Shermer really is an atheist. He's been sounding more and more like an agnostic. I recall the lines of Doug Wilson from the DVD (Collision) with Christopher Hitchens, that go something like this: Atheists have two basic principles: First ,there is no god. Second, I hate him. I believe many who claim to be atheists do so for theological reasons: They have a very clear idea of what sort of God there should be if there were one, one to their liking of whom they would approve, and/or how he would have designed the world, and so on. They disagree with what they have been told about him--in some cases, the face of God they've been shown has been a very poor imitation, or even an idol. Many embrace a "pure" materialism, which is a protection against any sort of supernatural realm, for which the evidence is, however, simply overwhelming, yet dismissed as mass superstition or hallucinations of the gullible. For myself, pure materialism, or the belief that all THIS came into existence by chance and of itself is simply beyond the pale of reason. The entire cosmos and life as we know it has all the markings of design and engineering and software programming, and the evidence for this is piling up. The Word turns the cosmos from mute chaos to an intelligible entity and the Word is able to span the cosmos physically and temporarily so that we have the beginnings of a grasp of it. Indeed, even our feeble utterance of a Word changes everything, even for atheists, who are quite attached to the Word, even if they do not know its Name.