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By summarily affirming methodological naturalism in his chapter on the "warfare" between science and religion, McGrath also ignores the significant challenge to naturalism (and boost for theism) posed by the Intelligent Design movement, which claims that certain features of nature are explained better by intelligence than by merely material causes. While the Intelligent Design movement is more a critique of naturalism in science than a positive program of natural theology, its method of design detection contributes significantly to the design argument for God's existence. But McGrath is silent about all of this.
Nor does The Twilight of Atheism have anything to say about the rise of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the significant impact made by Christian philosophers in the academy in the last thirty years. Yet the book offers an entire chapter recounting the dysfunctional machinations of famed atheist Madelyn Murray O'Hair and her fractious disciples—events having little to do with the intellectual issues at hand.
When McGrath does deal with the rational assessment of natural theology, he says nothing more than that God's existence cannot be proved, since faith is required for Christian belief.[2] Having dismissed all progress in theistic arguments, McGrath claims that belief in God is determined more by the imagination than by rational argument. The role of imagination in religious belief cannot be disputed nor should it be avoided, but as Pascal warned in a memorable fragment in his Pensées, imagination can often lead us astray when untethered from knowledge. Some of the best apologetics invoke the imagination liberally (think of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton), but the imagination must illustrate and amplify what reason declares. If reason cannot decisively inform the debate between theism and atheism, then one wonders how a Christian can claim to have any knowledge (justified true belief) about the object of supreme significance (God).
The Twilight of Atheism gives a diagnosis that the patient (atheism) is failing, but offers no philosophical argument as to why the patient should be failing. It claims only that, philosophical arguments for God having petered out, we need a new infusion of religious imagination to do the job. As such, it does little to advance the great debate one way or the other.
Indeed, philosophically inclined atheists seldom take the refusal to engage in natural theology as anything other than intellectual capitulation. Hard-headed philosophers have little patience with appeals to the religious imagination as somehow decisive regarding religious claims such as the existence of God or the afterlife. But when logical arguments for God's existence are proffered, they leap into battle, eager to show that reason can strike the decisive blow. Besides Bertrand Russell, Anthony Flew (now an octogenarian) was probably the most prominent philosophical defender of atheism in the 20th century. While not as famous (or infamous) as Russell, Flew defended atheism more systematically and repeatedly than Russell, who wrote little more than his famous Why I Am Not a Christian.
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