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Dinesh D'Souza is skeptical of skepticism and enthusiastic about the faith. by Tony Snow » There are two types of Christian apologetics. One makes the positive case for faith; the other responds to critics. Dinesh D'Souza's delightful book, What's So Great About Christianity, falls into the second category. It sets out to rebut recent exuberant atheist tracts, such as Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

This is a more difficult task than one might expect: Atheist works tend to combine argument with large doses of bitter biography. Every chapter of Dawkins's book, for instance, describes unpleasant encounters with believing dolts—hate-mail writers, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the like. Hitchens recalls murderous fanatics in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Levant, and his blood-chilling encounters with a childhood schoolmarm.

While the chief atheists write beautifully, their works share a telling defect. They seethe with disapproval of God. Dawkins captures this trend in describing the YHWH of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Such invective clings like chewing gum to atheist polemics and raises the question of why these people are so worked up about a creator they don't believe exists. In any event, D'Souza admirably separates the stickum from the arguments.

Consider Hitchens's complaint that "religion poisons everything." This wild swing places bin Laden, the pope, and Martin Luther King Jr. on equal footing. D'Souza answers on behalf of Christianity. He describes how Christian principles of free choice and human dignity laid the groundwork for democratic political systems built on inalienable human rights. They inspired free markets in economics and intellectual pursuit. Christian theologians fathered modern science. The world even now takes for granted America's uncommon generosity, especially in times of disaster and crisis. These traits spring directly from our faith.

D'Souza also refutes the common charge that Christianity has unleashed humankind's most murderous impulses. The most-cited atrocities are either overblown or misrepresented: the Inquisition claimed 2,000 lives over three and a half centuries. The Salem witch trials produced fewer than 25 executions. Recent wars—the Israel-Palestine conflict, Iraq, and Northern Ireland—stem mostly from ethnic and political discord. While atrocities violate Christian doctrine, they're of a piece with atheism—which largely bears responsibility for the bloodiest century in history.

D'Souza takes up a second major tenet of the New Atheism—that religion and science cannot coexist. He defangs Darwinists by demonstrating the compatibility of evolutionary theory and Christian doctrine, and reiterates Aquinas's assertion that reason and faith complement each other.

Yet science has insurmountable limits. It cannot answer empirical questions about the origins of the universe, for instance. D'Souza quotes Nobel laureate Arno Penzias and astronomer Robert Jastrow to the effect that the Big Bang leads us back to a moment when everything began—and delivers us not to the doorstep of atheism but theology.

Dawkins's shrill dissent is telling. He dismisses as "infantile" the arguments for God's existence offered by Aquinas and Anselm: "The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomatist trickery offends me aesthetically." This is an odd claim, considering it appears in the midst of a "logomatist" polemic. It also dodges the big question: If reason can explain everything, why can't it explain where things come from?

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3