In Professor Louis Markos’ new book, Atheism on Trial: Refuting the Modern Arguments Against God, Dr. Markos confronts the modern-day atheists’ claims that new evidence disproves the existence of God. He writes that the “proof” claimed by new atheists is not new at all—but rather, recycled claims already disproven by Christian thinkers of the past.
Houston Baptist University
Back around the year 2000, I had the privilege of producing two Great Courses with The Teaching Company. The first of these, From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author, gave me the opportunity to survey the major philosophers, theologians, and literary critics who had wrestled, in an aesthetic way, with the big questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?
As each thinker contributed his own unique gifts and insights to this 2500-year-old wrestling match, both the nature of God, Man, and the Universe and the proper role of the arts and the artist in defining the nature of such things emerged in the form of a Great Conversation about Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.
My second lecture series, The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, allowed me to focus in on a single philosopher-theologian-critic who combined in himself and his work the full Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian legacy of the West.
As the foremost Christian apologist of the twentieth century, Lewis not only defended such key doctrines as the Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection, but helped to reconstruct for modern readers the complex and coherent worldview that dominated the major thinkers of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Early Church, and those pre-Christian, Greek and Roman authors that Dante referred to as the virtuous pagans.
Atheism on Trial: Refuting the Modern Arguments Against God
In my new book from Harvest House, Atheism on Trial: Refuting the Modern Arguments Against God, I take the kinds of apologetical arguments for which Lewis was famous and re-view them through a historical lens that, in true Teaching Company style, takes in the full depth and breadth of the Great Conversation.
I show that all the major arguments of the new atheists are not, in fact, new, but have been around for 2500 years, cropping up in the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Epicureans and Stoics, the Arians and Gnostics, and the nominalists and deists. I show further that these arguments were all addressed and answered a long, long time ago, not only by such Christian apologists as Athanasius, Tertullian, Augustine, and Aquinas, but by such pre-Christian philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
