"The New Atheism and the Old Church: A failing apologetics" Lecture

I recently attended a lecture, "The New Atheism and the Old Church: A failing apologetics" by Peter Erb, which is the first in a three-lecture mini-course offered by Saint Jerome's University (an on-campus religious university affiliated with the University of Waterloo). From the description, I was expecting a moderate religious look at the "new" atheism, our increasingly secular world, and what moderate religious folks could learn from these.

I was very disapointed.

The use of the term "new atheism" seemed to just be a buzz word used to draw interest and make the lecture seem relevant. The lecture spent all of about 5 minutes talking about the new atheism. In this time, all that was said was that the "four horsemen" (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett) are - without any explanation of why this was judged to be the case - arrogant, shallow and not worth reading.

The lecture's thesis was as follows: The new atheism isn't anything new, and actually comes directly out of Christianity. However, this thesis seemed more like a pretense set up in order to talk about the real meat of the lecture: old Catholic art.

The basic structure of the lecture was showing how, throughout the years, various revolutions occurred within theology and the arts which showed a growing gap in people's minds between the natural and the supernatural. People (well, European Christians) became more focused on the natural world, the subjective, and on the human sphere. This led, naturally, to people questioning whether the natural world could stand alone - perhaps God just set the world in motion (deism). But then we've seperated God out even more, and we could ask why believe that it was even God that set things in motion.

The historical analysis was, I think, very shoddy. The focus was narrow (on Christian developments in the medieval period). This misses the many atheists and deists that predate Christianity, and whose philosophy greatly influenced Christianity. The historical arguments were incredibly weak - at one point Erb claimed that Galileo was a big factor in the subjective revolution, since by looking through the telescope and seeing what was "out there", he was subjectively observing the universe, turning the focus on subjectivity (if this sounds nonsensical, don't be worried that you aren't getting it - it didn't make any more sense in the context of the lecture).

I found it rather silly that Erb seemed to think that the fact that the new atheism isn't new is a way of criticizing the new atheism - those who are identified as the "new atheists" are well aware that there is nothing new about what they are saying.

So, I left the lecture quite disapointed. I had received a lecture about some old art, a tiny bit of theology, and some bad historical analysis. Other then disapointment, I felt another emotion. I was actually a little bit sad for the attendees and the lecturer. The audience was overwhelmingly older, Catholic people (when I arrived for the lecture, I initially thought I must be in the wrong place. There was a sea of gray hair, and - I don't say this as a jest - I thought I had mistakenly walked into a room running an event for seniors). I got the general feel throughout the lecture and during some of the questions that Erb and his audience were really trying to make sense out of a world that was no longer as traditional as the one they are comfortable with, a world to which their Catholicism seems increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps I was reading more into the situation than was actually there, but I still couldn't help feeling a bit bad for them.

Needless to say, I did not find the lecture particularly insightful or illuminating, and I don't plan on attending the next one.