Ben Witherington on Angry Atheism

Ben Witherington is one of my favorite evangelical authors. He is prolific, gracious, erudite, and well respected as an author. All qualities that I admire greatly. Here are some excellent excerpts from his recent blog post: Angry Apostles of Atheism Attack

...
Sometimes what worries me the most about such atheists who think they stand on the intellectual high ground is the fact that they do not realize that their unquestioned faith in their own conclusions is just that--- 'unquestioned faith', in this case in some sort of rationalism, or materialism coupled with a certain view of science which sees it as the key which unlocks the doors to all that is 'really' real. But as A.J. Ayer said a long time ago, imperial empiricism starts from a faith postulate-- namely that the human senses are generally reliable conveyers of data to the human brain. This in itself is an unproved faith hypothesis, unproved because of course, as C.S. Lewis once said "we cannot crawl one inch outside our mortal skin". We cannot escape our own interiority and subjectivity in any complete sense. We can be reached from outside of ourselves, but we cannot step outside of ourselves and our reliance on our senses.

...Yes, friends you see, fundamentalism is not in the end a position on the arc of the religious or theological spectrum. It is a mindset that can be embraced by conservatives or liberals, true believers or atheists. It is what Bloom complained about when he bemoaned 'the closing of the American mind'. It has to do not merely with the lust for certainty, though that is a crucial component, but also the actual belief that you have found that absolute certainty such that faith is no longer required, it has become unassailable knowledge.

...How foolish indeed to confidently deny the existence of a Being simply because one has not yet personally found Him or been found by Him. This is the very definition of a lost, and in the end, unintelligent and unwise creature, standing as he does against the backdraft of the posture and position of most of the most brilliant minds in all ages of history, and spitting into the prevailing wind.