Hello Benjamin,
Sorry for the late response. I was caught up at work and just generally busy lately.
I simply disagree with this claim. IMO, there is no excuse to not believe in God. Dawkins and Hitchens and Krauss have/had no real answers for the ultimate questions in life. What they do (did) is ridicule literalist interpretations of Genesis and rail against the violence of the Old Testament, without offering or being open to any context whatsoever. If you read The God Delusion, that’s most of what Dawkins does (along with mentioning every evil deed ever done in Christendom) - there is relatively little on the existence of God, and what he does have is weak, even leaders in atheism have conceded that.
As a freebie, I’m going to list what I have noticed that are some, “unwritten principles of atheism” from the Dawkins crowd that are taken as givens, and that some skeptics here have clearly been influenced by (there are more but these are the ones I have at the top of my head):
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Evolution disproves the bible
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Evolution disproves God
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The fact that the bible was written before recordings existed proves its not from God
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Because God doesn’t show up in the sky, on TVs or on cell phones proves that He doesn’t exist
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Because God doesn’t prevent every act of evil, He doesn’t exist
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Because there is no modern science represented in the bible, it can’t be from God.
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The fact that the biblical God promises eternal life to true believers means that humans made up what they wanted to hear.
Notice that none of the above statements are true, but New Atheists feed off of these sentiments and they are, as I mentioned, unquestioned in the movement.
What Dawkins in particular does is 2 things. One, he proceeds on the grounds that the only legitimate interpretation of early Genesis is a literal one (he usually doesn’t explicitly state it, presumably not wanting a debate on something he knows little about and that there are legitimate alternatives). Consequently, he spends much more time on eviscerating the bible and only spends a couple of sentences in all of TGD on TE/EC, saying that their proponents try to, “get God in through the back door”. But, elsewhere (perhaps in an unguarded moment), he says that a God to have created a universe to have evolved man would necessarily have to be, " intelligent…beyond all imagining". Sounds like God to me!
Two, he says that since there is such complexity in the world that God would necessarily have to be too, “complicated” to exist, since someone would have had to create Him. It completely alludes him that God could simply be a simple entity that had the power and intelligence to create physical things that evolved humans would see as, “complex”.
From a believer’s perspective, God speaks to all of us, but originally inspired people that we would say were of the, “ANE”, (Ancient Near East), and He spoke to them in ways that they could understand, like any father would to a young child.
What are you talking about, Benjamin? That line is from the bible! You seem to put your trust more in the teachings of Dawkins, Hitchens and Krauss than in the Creator! Saying that there is no God has no more weight than saying drunkenness isn’t a sin.
“Literally” everyone? In a Catholic or mainline protestant church I would agree. But I’m sure there are plenty of more bible-oriented churches in Australia where many if not most are at least trying their best to live as a followers of Christ. But don’t forget, Jesus himself said that only, “few” would make it to heaven, so truly authentic Christianity will never be mainstream.
Hmm, it would have been interesting to see what the rest of that sentence said. But in any case, the Dawkin’s crowd has no answers to the big questions in life. They all have gone all in on the multiverse, but they have failed to account for its existence, outside of God, or why it would be necessarily fine-tuned.
So, I’ll give you a quick summary of how I see the evidence stacked up for God and the bible:
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There exists a universe that produced intelligent, conscious life.
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There are real signs of intelligence behind the laws of nature as they are unreasonably described by beautiful math.
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Most in history have recognized a spiritual component to existence, a sign of a spirit.
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There exists love, sacrifice, and emotions, a sign of a loving, emotional being beyond the physical.
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There exists purpose in the universe, a sign of a purposeful being.
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There are messianic prophecies in the OT, that we know were written before Christ, that closely describe the circumstances of his life.
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The hygenic laws in the Mosaic code were centuries ahead of their time.
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There is no coherent explanation for evil, other than that there exists a spiritual force in opposition to God.
All of the above are in addition to feeling connected to God through Christ and seeing the fruit of being an authentic Christian in our lives and the lives of other believers.
Evidence that opposes the New Atheist view:
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There is not one electron’s worth of evidence to support the existence of any universe other than ours.
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If there is a multiverse, there is no explanation for its existence
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If there exists a multiverse, there is no explanation for the fact that it is fine-tuned to produce an infinite amount of universerses, each with its own set of physical laws
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Even there exists a multiverse, it doesn’t explain the sense of the spiritual that every culture in history has felt ans has tried to explain. The same can be said of love, sacrifice, purpose, beauty, etc.
At least IMO, Genesis 1 was not meant to explain science, but used the science of the day, the 3-tiered universe, to explain God and his purposes for His creation. Similarly, I see in Genesis 2 plenty of signs that it is more of a origins tradition than the history of human origins. If true, that takes away some huge straw-mans that New Atheists have built their houses on.
FINAL ADVICE: Get away from the idea that SCIENCE explains everything. It doesn’t. But that’s where the New Atheists want us, feeding off of the false notion that the bible gave us, “science” and that it contradicts what we find in the study of the universe. But they have no explanation for what initiated (created) this universe. And Krauss’ book doesn’t explain anything. Outside of the science book their laws break down, so they want to keep us there. THAT’S why Romans 1 is as true today as it was 2,000 years ago, just like Jesus is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow!