Purchasing One's Atheism Cheaply

[Esquilax]

David Bentley Hart's criticism of atheism is as follows:

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

To begin with, I find it amusing how the main source of contention Hart has seems to be that the theistic responses we atheists have arrayed against us are so weak that there's no challenge to being an atheist.

Well, I agree: unfortunately, the blame hardly lies with atheists that the atheist position is a fleet of tanks and the theist position as squishy and yielding as villager-flesh. If you want the atheist position to be difficult, then you've gotta start mounting a difficult opposition.

Instead, we get pre-suppositional apologetics and nonsense like Kalam.

I have to agree insofar as the "new" atheism rejecting the intellectually rigorous atheism of the old. Modern atheists can't hold a candle to Mackie, Ayer, Flew or Russell. From redefining atheism from the realm of the intellectual rigor into the realm of personal psychology, to forgoing analytical thinking in favor of pusillanimous rhetoric, to rejecting dispassionate examination for emotive expressions.

Do you know what made me an atheist, Vin? It was exposing myself to the arguments of theists. I got to see for myself the dishonesty that was rife in the "science" of creation and intelligent design, the cheap showboating and lies of the famous christians like Hovind and Comfort and Ham, the casual selectiveness of the average christian, and it all drove me in the opposite direction. From there, it was easy: it usually is, when the opposing arguments are so obviously correct.

You complain about how we redefine atheism, but you're ignoring a key point: we might have redefined it into a lack of belief rather than active disbelief, but that doesn't make the theistic arguments any more cogent or valid. You want there to be a burden of proof, you feel it's unfair that we aren't justifying our position? Fine.

The theist arguments are crap, and uniformly rely on logical fallacies to function. That is a satisfied burden of proof, right there: the time to believe in something is when you have a reason to, and all of the reasons theists give us for their beliefs fall flat. Not a one has any real evidence, and their logical proofs.... aren't.

They've been done to death. Debated, solved, put aside, hundreds of times over, in this forum alone. What more do you want?

Atheism has lost the weight of intelligence it used to carry. It has become cheap.

The measure of a man is the quality of his enemies. It isn't our fault that the ones determined to be our enemies are the least fit to do so.