Books & Culture: A Christian Review recently extended me the privilege of reviewing replies to the New Atheism, including one co-authored by Intelligent Design guru, Philip Johnson. Although it inevitably rankles some interlocutors, when I’m asked for my place on the Creationism/Evolution spectrum, I usually punt to the television series “Friends.”

In Season 2, Episode 3, “The One Where Mr. Heckles Dies,” Ross the paleontologist urges skeptical friend Phoebe to concede evolution is the only viable option for explaining the genesis (small “g”) and diversity of life on earth. Phoebe replies:

I’m not denying evolution …. I’m just saying that it’s one of the possibilities. Ross, could you just open your mind …. Wasn’t there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat … [and] thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open? …. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can’t admit that there’s a teeny tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?

When Ross admits a “teeny tiny” possibility, Phoebe chides, “I can’t believe you caved. You just abandoned your whole belief system …. I didn’t agree with you, but at least I respected you …. How are you going to face the other science guys?…How are you going to face yourself? Oh! That was fun. So who’s hungry?”

Underlying Ross and Phoebe’s repartee are significant points. Despite a vocal, sometimes sophisticated minority, contemporary scientists overwhelmingly acknowledge the available evidence and explanatory power of evolutionary theory outpaces rival accounts for life’s development. Yet in a few hundred or few thousand years, the brightest biological minds may chuckle at “evolution” (as twenty-first century folk understand it) as a historical gaffe of cosmic proportions, and erstwhile varieties of “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” as well-intentioned but misguided. Perhaps a new narrative vying to explicate the emergence of life will not just modify but render obsolete all current controversies. Or, perhaps one of our present models will be expanded and vindicated.

But for Phillip E. Johnson, a UC-Berkeley Law Professor, Emeritus, and author of Intelligent Design primer, Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity, 1991), Phoebe’s time-will-tell retort and Ross’s reply are insufficient. Johnson avows historical atrocities associated with Social Darwinism, Stalinism, and Nazism are inseparable from (to use New Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett’s phrase), “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” For Johnson, scientists like Francis Collins who affirm bio-logical evolution as complementary to Christian faith stymie atheist evolutionists and make fas-cinating conversation partners, but they remain purveyors of a flawed and perilous philosophy.

In addition to deriding Darwinism, Johnson encourages university discussion of issues raised by the New Atheists, whom he describes as posing excellent questions but proffering pitiful answers. As with Johnson’s advocacy for teaching Intelligent Design in American public schools, fostering dialogue is a dominant trope. Johnson’s co-author, Mark Reynolds, echoes Johnson’s vision for dialogue, and adds insights illuminating how the Christian story harmonizes humanity’s deepest intuitions and longings. As C.S. Lewis in “Is Theology Poetry?” testified, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

To modify Johnson and Reynolds’ subtitle, Against All Gods is one example of “What’s right and wrong about many responses” to the New Atheism.” Skewering New Atheists has burgeoned into a minor publishing phenomenon, largely though not exclusively promulgated by Christians since 2007, at the pace of over a dozen books per year.

Richard Dawkins, dubbed “Darwin’s Rottweiler” in the tradition of 19th-century polemicist Thomas Huxley (who called himself, “Darwin’s Bulldog”), uncharitably characterizes these self-styled refutations by adapting W.B. Yeats, “Was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?” Put simply, critical interlocutors (fleas) are parasites leaching off Dawkins’ dogged success to make money or to establish superior names for themselves.

Quite frankly, Dawkins’ ad hominem rebuff is unfair in sweeping aside principled and spirited disagreement, and in dismissing potentially sincere concern for the New Atheists and for the people and societies that the New Atheists influence. Does Dawkins deem himself beyond criticism and see all opponents in (pardon the pun), bad faith? Would Dawkins’ critics without him be reduced to draining themselves and each other dry?

As for the money and fame motivators, no riposte to the New Atheists has yet achieved bestseller status, though books marketed as ripostes generally do not. The closest exceptions, which are ripostes only in part, are Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great about Christianity (Regnery, 2007) and Tim Keller’s The Reason for God (Dutton, 2008). But even D’Souza and Keller are much less successful than Christopher Hitchens’ #1 New York Times bestseller god Is Not Great, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, or Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which Dawkins reports as selling over two million copies in English.

Dozens of book-length responses, debates, documentaries, and thousands of articles (like the one you’re reading now) supply free publicity for Dawkins and his comrades to religious audiences who will purchase and peruse copies of New Atheist bestsellers in an attempt to discover the basis for all the fuss. Click here and here to finish reading this post.