God Gave You Brains …

 Hidden amid the needle-leaf conifers of a Siberian forest, sixty captured priests marched at gunpoint. A detachment of soldiers, most likely from the local concentration camp, led the prisoners through the trees towards a freshly dug trench. Nearby, a group of Soviet geologists, who by chance had pitched their tents in the same area, watched them approach until the soldiers warned them to vanish. The soldiers explained that they were going to liquidate the priests—“an element alien to the Soviet system”, one said.

Out of sight, the soldiers lined up the priests next to the trench. A gun was pointed at the first priest, who was ordered, “Say there is no God and your life will be spared.”

Summoning all his courage, the first priest replied, “God exists!”

A sharp crack reverberated through the forest, quickly followed by the unmistakable thump of a collapsing body.

The soldiers then turned their attention to the second priest and repeated: “Say there is no God and your life will be spared.”

With gun smoke still in his nostrils, the priest could be forgiven a moment’s hesitation. But with his last breath, he answered: “God exists!”

Another gunshot. Another martyr. By the end of the day, all sixty priests had chosen the same grave.

The details come from Dimitry Pospielovsky’s essay in Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine. It was 1933. The bloody boots of Soviet communism had long crushed down on the windpipe of faith. Teaching religion had been banned in schools, places of worship confiscated or destroyed, mock trials held, and believers arrested, tortured or murdered. According to one estimate, by the beginning of the Second World War, about 500 bishops, 40,000 clergy and an equal number of nuns and monks alone had been annihilated or perished in Soviet camps and prisons.

The Soviet Union collapsed long ago, but Christians in other parts of the world continue to be persecuted or murdered. However, in stark contrast in the West, the weapon favoured most by the church’s enemies is not the gun, but the microphone. New Atheism is winning widespread media coverage with little critical analysis, especially in Australia, where Christianity’s best and brightest are seemingly shying away from publicly arguing, “God exists!”

This was shown in March when ABC television’s controversial talkfest show, Q&A, featured the topic “God, Science and Sanity”. Roaring lion of New Atheism and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins joined three politicians, a rabbi and a mental health expert to answer vetted questions from an audience, which, judging by the black “All love is equal” T-shirts, was clearly filled with interest groups. The colosseum was set, so which Christian was pushed before the cameras to champion the faith? Family First senator Steven Fielding.

After the initial buttering-up of egos, the first topic was creationism and evolution. The grey-haired Dawkins turned to Senator Fielding, sitting next to him, and asked: “Do you believe the world is less than 10,000 years old?”

Amid the audience’s laughter, Fielding said, “Look, I think that there are a lot of questions in this area and I think people will come to their own conclusions.” The colosseum groaned with disbelief. “I don’t want to force people into one way or the other,” Fielding added, realising he was outnumbered.

“You’re not being asked to force [people],” Dawkins said.

Fellow panellist, Liberal politician and “church-goer” Julie Bishop piped up: “You’re either a new Earth creationist or an old Earth creationist, so which is it, Steve?”

Smelling early blood, Dawkins toyed with his man. “So you’re a young Earth creationist who believes the world is less than 10,000 years old? You’re a parliamentarian in Australia, who believes the world you live in is less than 10,000 years old?”

“I didn’t say that, by the way,” Fielding answered, fighting to be heard above the clapping audience. “You’re saying that I said it was 10,000—”

“Do you? Do you believe it?”

“Look, I think—”

“Is that what you actually believe?” asked host and emperor Tony Jones.

“Look, I think that the science today will discover more and more but I think that most Australians come to a view,” Fielding said. “They either believe that we evolved or we came from creation and I think that, you know, people can believe whatever they like on that issue. I’m not trying to force that issue onto anyone, Tony.”

“So where did human beings come from?” Emperor Jones pushed.

“Well, you may well ask this guy,” Fielding said, touching the sleeve of Dawkins in an act of surrender. It wasn’t so much a case of the Christian being fed to the lions, but to slightly peeved cats.

Playing too much the politician rather than a man of conviction, Fielding left rank-and-file Christians incensed. With a background in electronic engineering and superannuation, not science, it appeared the senator was deliberately chosen as part of an age-old ABC tactic to host a weak, opposing debater who is guaranteed to alienate the audience and, hence, lose. And sure enough, Fielding delivered. He appeared emasculated next to his opponent, Dawkins, who offered nothing fresh or even taxing to say about religion. The host and panellists were equally subdued. Only the then federal Agriculture Minister Tony Burke had the corncobs to rebuke Dawkins, but only in regard to the biologist’s level of disrespect for people who didn’t share his worldview.

Fielding’s embarrassment didn’t stop there. A few days later, a tent-revival meeting of 2500 hardcore non-believers packed the 2010 Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne to listen to Dawkins indulge in some Bible-basher bashing. He again laid into the senator, calling him more stupid than an earthworm—ironic, considering, if it was true, it would debunk the biologist’s own unshakable faith in evolution.

Naturally, debates have winners and losers, but after a decade of religion being a red-hot topic, Australian Christianity faces a serious credibility problem if the highest-profile person called upon to defend the faith is a federal politician. Its biggest threat may not be New Atheism, but complacency. Either the media’s reporting of religion is shallow or the church has completely failed to nurture a culture of public intellectualism. Plainly speaking, if God created brains, isn’t it time Christians used them?

New Atheism is a modern movement that not only publicly rejects the existence of all gods, but also tries to “liberate” believers from their faith. Many of the old heresies it recycles are attracting new ears, thanks largely to post-September 11 anxiety, which has turned religion into the scapegoat for most of society’s woes. To aid its arguments, celebrity New Atheists such as Dawkins tell us that scientific testing fails to find proof of a living God, and instead crowns natural selection as an infallible idol. These are then employed, alongside poorly-informed theology, to belittle faith.

To such opponents, Christian intellectualism is an oxymoron. (It’s all right, they’ll soon stop rolling around the floor laughing to pound out another angry blog.) The common myth gaining traction is that reason and religion—specifically Christianity—cannot coexist. Religion allegedly equals ignorance, and to believe in God is to lose all credibility. Believers might as well drop their grey matter in the offertory bags each Sunday morning. As Dawkins writes in The God Delusion: “atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind”.

However, this separation between reason and religion is pure fabrication. It corners people to choose whether they are smart secularists or dumb “faith-heads”, and, obviously few want to wear “I’m with Stupid” T-shirts. A quick rollcall of the pointy end of biology, physics and mathematics counters this erroneous presumption of mind-over-manna. School textbook names such as Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, William Thomson Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel and Charles Babbage not only believed in God, but many of them wrote theological works championing Him. Then there’s Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed what we know as the Big Bang theory. His day job? A Roman Catholic priest. Attempts to lock out the Creator from His own universal laboratory aren’t new. As Louis Pasteur, another practising Catholic, once said: “A little science estranges men from God, but much science leads them back to Him.”

A modern intellectual who has never worn a dunce cap is American physician-geneticist and former atheist Dr Francis S. Collins, who led the Human Genome Project that mapped the sequence of three billion chemical base pairs that form the building blocks of our DNA code. In an interview with the US Public Broadcasting Service, he said:

I think there’s a common assumption that you cannot both be a rigorous, show-me-the-data scientist and a person who believes in a personal God. I would like to say that from my perspective that assumption is incorrect; that, in fact, these two areas are entirely compatible and not only can exist within the same person, but can exist in a very synthetic way, and not in a compartmentalised way. I have no reason to see a discordance between what I know as a scientist who spends all day studying the genome of humans and what I believe as somebody who pays a lot of attention to what the Bible has taught me about God and about Jesus Christ.

Other Christian thinkers of note include St Paul, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, philosophers Francis Schaeffer and Søren Kierkegaard, reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, British politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce, G.K. Chesterton, John Bunyan and C.S. Lewis just to mention a few.

To dismiss all these educated men as deluded is just another churlish game of my-brain-is-bigger-than-your-brain. It’s the sort of intellectual hubris that is common among the New Atheists, who claim Christians need to be rescued from a belief structure indoctrinated into them since childhood by their parents or school. Take this Dawkins howler for example: “[I] suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realise that non-belief is even an option.”

He might be right—if students are straight out of the horror movie Children of the Corn. Such patronising is completely out of step with reality in the West. Both public and private schools teach evolution, state education departments are regularly accused of pushing liberal views, God is normally only heard in the classroom when someone blasphemes, Hollywood has more influence on teenage culture than churches, and, surprise, surprise, people still learn once they leave school.

The real angle New Atheism is pushing is “blind faith”—a faith that ignores evidence and avoids asking questions. Again, this bears little resemblance to reality, as Christianity is and always has been a thinking faith.

Indeed, the first act of belief is a question: “Is there a God?” No one just says “Yes” then ticks it off their bucket list. It is usually followed by more questions: “If so, which god is real?”, “Who is Jesus?”, “Did he really exist 2000 years ago?” and “Is there any historical proof?”

And why wouldn’t questions be part of faith? Christianity makes the most outrageous and unique claims: that God so loved the world that He took human form and was called Jesus, a man who offered eternal life to those who placed their faith in Him, was crucified so as to atone for their sins, and then conquered death by being resurrected, appearing to more than 500 witnesses. At an unknown time, Christ will return; not as the long-haired hippy from South Park, but as conquering king and judge of all souls. That’s no Mills-and-Boon ending. People are going to raise plenty of logical and heated objections, including, How does a man rise from the dead? Or how can a loving God send both bad and good people to hell?

Difficult questions also continue far into the Christian walk, as people of faith don’t live in protective bubbles. When things don’t go as planned, they drag God into the witness stand and badger, plead or demand answers from Him. Many questions will be met with silence. Any personal faith that hasn’t grown since childhood will collapse under adult trials in the adult world.

Rank-and-file Christians may not be able to settle deep philosophical arguments about God, but the church has built up 2000 years of thought—plenty of it good, some downright atrocious—to engage both the faithful and its critics. Likewise, the intricacies of palaeobiology and the Cambrian explosion might stump a believer at the check-out at Woolworths, but Christians exist in all walks of life, who, if prepared to enter a mainstream debate, would be able to answer questions from both biblical and professional angles.

Parodying Christians has become a sport for critics. And Christians themselves are providing plenty of material for cheap shots. Take for instance, Florida preacher Terry Jones, who recently incited hatred worldwide by threatening to burn copies of the Koran. The global media ran stories for a week focusing on this one man in charge of a congregation of fifty, while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of clergy who happily engage with other faiths and people of no faith. Maybe Jones needed to read Matthew 5:9—“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” Likewise, every time a natural disaster strikes, an angry preacher grabs a microphone and condemns the devastated country for its sinful ways. Maybe they should read Luke 13:2–5, which calls for repentance but also warns against judging other sinners as worse than oneself.

Add to the equation faith healers with private jets who beg television audiences for money, heretical prosperity gospel pastors, and liberal priests who don’t care much for the authority of Scripture, and it’s not surprising the media present Christianity in a poor light. By default, the wrong people have become the public face of faith, not because of their biblical knowledge or righteous living but because they stir up conflict.

Uncritical local media coverage was clearly apparent in the lead-up to the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, when one newspaper ran a feature that opened with:

Something you will never see: an atheist boarding a plane with a bomb strapped to him, waving a copy of On the Origin of Species, before he blows himself up in a violent attempt to further his cause. So says David Nicholls, the head of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, the man at the increasingly pointy end of the reinvigorated and freshly vocal atheism movement.

People won’t see Christians strapping themselves with explosives and Bibles either, but the article never made a distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and other religions, even though most criticism was levelled at Christianity. Nicholls is entitled to his views, as are all atheists, who are just as diverse in their views as the different faiths, but readers are poorly served when such statements go unchallenged.

The same paper ran a front-page report on the convention a month later, giving several speakers what amounted to an open microphone. The paper quoted Dawkins attacking Mary MacKillop’s impending sainthood, ABC broadcaster Robyn Williams’s belief that earthworms were more useful than Senator Fielding, British philosopher A.C. Grayling criticising religious scholars who had the outlandish gumption to defend their faith using science, Bangladeshi Taslima Nasrin claiming there was no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, and the president of the Rationalist Society of Australia saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll speak really slowly,” when one brave soul outed themselves as a convert. How many centimetres were given in the same article to Christians, Muslims or even Senator Fielding to defend themselves in the name of fairness? None.

This was picked up by the foreign media. Conservative British journalist Melanie Phillips, who is Jewish and an outspoken critic of Dawkins, claimed in an opinion piece for the Australian that the local press “uncritically lapped up everything he said”. She wrote: “This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.”

Days later, the rival Fairfax newspaper stable had to correct those same Nazi claims about Pope Benedict, a German. Apparently, Dawkins had really referred to Pope Pius XII, who reigned during the Second World War. No small mistake, but then again they’re all silly old white codgers in robes swinging incense orbs, right?

The ABC religion department’s blog on the conference was far more insightful, giving platforms to both non-believers and believers, and encouraging readers to ask questions like: Why do so many religious adherents think atheists are bad people? Why was the convention full of mainly middle-class white males? Why did attendees deride religion but they themselves suffer from a group-think mentality more interested in quips and comic routines than critical questioning of the speakers? Unfortunately, its coverage was trampled under the greater media’s herd mentality.

Aunty will forever be the Right’s favourite piñata donkey. Critics will continue to beat the national broadcaster until all the Lefties spill out, while conveniently forgetting that it voices hundreds of conservative views across its myriad of radio, television and internet platforms daily. However, some of its highest-profile programs, such as Q&A, undermine the ABC when they ignore the journalistic principle of fairness.

If the Dawkins episode of Q&A could be overlooked because the Christian speaker floundered, then the following week’s episode had no excuse. In “Conservatives, Comedians and Political Correctness”, panellist Catherine Deveny, “columnist and self-confessed atheist eye candy”, was first asked about Aboriginal welcoming ceremonies at public events. But after one sentence, the squeaky wheel of the barrow she was pushing was loud and clear for all to hear:

quite frankly, I find the fact that we open parliament with the Lord’s Prayer incredibly offensive against our Constitution. I actually find the fact that any civilisation which is based on a book written 2000 years ago with rocks, which is—really if you read it, it’s just deliberately incomprehensible and irrational and discriminatory—sexism, homophobia, racism, xenophobia … nobody can actually explain to me why we’ve based our belief system, let alone our civilisation, on that. And every time that they say the Lord’s Prayer that excludes absolutely everybody apart from people who believe that the Bible is the word of God, which is, you know, only nine per cent of people [who] go to church and they’re not all Christian.

Leaving Deveny’s words to ridicule herself, the Q&A production team cannot feign ignorance about her plan to rail against religion. As Deveny said seconds later: “Well, I certainly wouldn’t be in the medical comedy festival show doing a show called God is Bullshit, That’s the Good News.” Eye candy is easily swallowed at Aunty TV, it seems. Would a comedian who openly slandered Jews, Hindus or Muslims be given the same national forum? Of course not. Ironically, unlike the title of the same episode, that would be politically incorrect.

In October last year, Q&A hosted New Atheist and journalist Christopher Hitchens alongside four others—a social commentator, the deputy director of the Sydney Institute, a former spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, and lastly, Catholic intellectual Father Frank Brennan—on “God, Sodomy and the Lash”. The main drawcard, Hitchens, was given the lion’s share of the fifty-seven-minute episode, while Brennan was allowed to speak for only five minutes. Yet again, the well-polished New Atheist was allowed to be on the front foot, asking the questions rather than being questioned.

Would a public intellectual for Christianity be given the same fluffy air time as Dawkins and Hitchens on Q&A? A fortnight after the Dawkins appearance, one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals for Christianity, Dr John Lennox, arrived in Australia for a series of lectures at the Katoomba Easter Convention, including a late-night session on science and religion at the request of the audience. The affable white-haired professor in mathematics at Oxford University and fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at Green Templeton College is a Northern Irishman who knows too well what it is like to live in a country scattered with the gun shell casings of sectarian violence. He has successfully debated Dawkins and Hitchens in front of thousands, debunking the myth that one must choose between science and God. “[T]here is a conflict, a very real one, but it is not really a conflict between science and religion at all,” he writes in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

For if that were so, elementary logic would dictate that one would find that scientists were all atheists and only non-scientists believed in God, and this, as we have seen, is simply not the case. No, the real conflict is between two diametrically opposed worldviews: naturalism and theism. They inevitably collide.

He also drew 2500 people to the Katoomba convention—equal to the atheist meeting in Melbourne—but did he appear in the press or on a show that trumpets itself as “Adventures in Democracy”? Unfortunately no. Maybe someone should remind Q&A that the initials “ABC” don’t stand for Atheists Berating Christians.

It’s easy to see why Western audiences are listening to celebrity New Atheists. Many people already harbour strong resentment towards the church for meddling in politics, and hence, social issues such as abortion, homosexual marriages, stem cell research and public funding of religious schools. Oddly, this comes at a time when Christians believe their influence on government and social issues is on the wane. But against a backdrop of Islamic terrorism, paedophile priests, Israeli-Palestinian clashes and mega-churches paying pastors mega-wages, it’s easy to see why religion has replaced communism, the Y2K bug and nuclear holocaust as the latest bogey monster, alongside global warming.

By loudly voicing these sentiments, New Atheism is becoming a big fat cash cow—a golden calf, if you like. What might have started off as an academic exercise in the public promotion of evolutionary science has now spawned a multi-million-dollar industry. Nowadays, no leading New Atheist would be seen on television without a best-selling book—as witnessed by long queues of devotees lining up for the latest popular scriptures to be signed. And while he meets fellow non-believers at cocktail parties to debate where dragonflies fit into the evolutionary chart, Richard Dawkins’s website sells ceramic necklace and earring sets—a trick he no doubt learnt from some Christian bookstores. Jesus-Loves-Me plastic hand-clappers, anyone?

Authors take any media coverage they can get and Dawkins and Hitchens are no different. A higher profile invariably increases sales and invitations to lucrative speaking engagements. However, more often than not, headline names on their global junkets are interviewed by reporters who have never read the subject’s book, mostly due to time constraints, lack of interest or lack of technical skill, let alone their critics’ counter-arguments. And on matters of religion, the overwhelming majority of journalists are non-believers and highly sceptical, which is their free will.

When it comes to the New Atheists, reporting needs to focus more on their claims than on whom they are criticising. The microphone has to linger under their noses a little longer, rather than rushing off to the clergy for a hell-and-damnation quote.

Scratching around for a controversial topic to challenge them isn’t too hard. In The God Delusion, Dawkins asserts:

It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all, as has been done by, among others, Professor G.A. Wells of the University of London in a number of books, including Did Jesus Exist?

Apart from disproving his argument in the same sentence, what he fails to mention is that Wells isn’t a professor of history but of German. The problem for both these men is that an overwhelming majority of religious and secular mainstream historians concur that Jesus was a real, flesh-and-blood person. His life is treated seriously in books such as Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah, Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Craig A. Evans and Bruce Chilton’s Authenticating the Activities of Jesus and Ed Sanders’s The Historical Figure of Jesus, among hundreds of writings. If there were any doubts, one could turn to references to Christ in non-biblical sources written by the Jewish historian Josephus (37–100 AD), ancient Rome’s great historian Tacitus (56–120 AD) or in the Talmud (100–200 AD).

In the next sentence, Dawkins sniffs that Jesus “probably” existed but who cares, because “reputable” biblical scholars don’t see the Bible as reliable history anyway. Reputable because they fit into Dawkins’s worldview, maybe?

Dawkins also writes in The God Delusion that: “I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism.” It’s a cute attempt to portray “hypocritical” religion as the leading cause of hatred and mass murder throughout history, while atheism is a peaceful skip away from a rational utopia. True, the different religions have committed horrible acts in man’s thirst for power and greed rather than the will of God, but there’s a sleight-of-hand here. How about a state going to war against its own citizens? One to challenge Dawkins would be Yurii Mikhnovskyi—if he was alive. But the archbishop of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was arrested and shot in Kiev in 1937. Likewise, Bishop Mykola Karabinevych, who was murdered in Moscow in 1935. Then there’s Bishop Maksym Zadvirniak, arrested in 1935 and exiled to a concentration camp, where he later died. They were just three of tens of thousands of religious leaders slaughtered under Soviet rule.

Atheists like to argue such atrocities were done in the name of communism or Marxism, but that sounds too much like a neat textbook definition that bears no resemblance to reality. The Soviet leadership systemically forced non-belief on others by sanctioning soldiers to put guns to fellow citizens’ heads and force them to say there is no God. It supported the murder of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Jews; forcefully closed places of worship; made it illegal to defend one’s faith against atheistic claims; and in the Ukraine, for example, forbade the teaching of religion to all people under eighteen in churches, prayer houses and private homes. Code 31 of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic’s Code of Laws on Public Education (1922) stated: “In order to free the working masses from religious prejudices, all educational, scientific and political educational establishments are to carry out a wide and planned scientific educational and anti-religious propaganda.”

Someone who could try to wash the blood from the streets of history but doesn’t is former head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who in his book On My Country and the World reflects on the barbarity of the communists’ war on religion from the 1920s with the understatement: “Atheism took rather savage forms in our country at that time.”

New Atheists can’t have it both ways. They point to the bloody crimes committed in the name of Christianity such as the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, but play word games when questions are raised about murderous regimes that enforced atheism. Extremists exist on both sides. It’s time for both sides to accept that the overwhelming majority of believers and atheists throughout history bear no resemblance to these fringe examples.

Alternatively, journalists could ask: if the apostles of Jesus were deluded, why were they still professing Christ as God, even as they were being executed? If the gospels are poetic “fiction”, why did Christianity spread so quickly in the face of brutal oppression after Jesus’s crucifixion in the first century (with 500 living witnesses available to verify facts), and not hundreds of years later, when folklore traditionally takes hold? Or, as the church continues to wane in the secular West, who or what is going to shepherd postmodern morality? The courts? Schools? Governments who face elections every few years? Or a referendum of people, who have no real influence on democracy now?

Ultimately, it’s not the media’s role to defend Christianity. It’s the faithful themselves. The squeaky wheels of New Atheism and Christianity-lite will continue getting the media’s oil if nothing is done about the dearth of public intellectuals. To win minds as well as hearts, the church needs to start identifying and cultivating thinkers and leaders among churchgoers. Those sitting in the pews—the judges, lawyers, doctors, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, academics and scientists—also need to step up and explain how intellectual faith coincides with the fields they work in. No wonder many rank-and-file Christians struggle to debate their friends on science, politics and history when the pointy end of modern Christianity is too timid to speak up.

As John Lennox enjoys highlighting, Jesus Christ’s first and greatest commandment was to: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” It’s this last phrase—“with all your mind”—that is too often shirked by the faithful. Instead, they rely on the clergy to fight the church’s intellectual battles in the public sphere, rather than mounting a defence themselves. Sydney’s Catholic archbishop George Pell and Anglican archbishop Peter Jensen are smart theologians who can also draw on history and philosophy, but New Atheism doesn’t always fight on those fronts. It normally bunkers down with science. If Christian academics don’t step into the breach and present rational arguments for God, opponents will play the easy creationism-versus-evolution card, which divides people straight away, as clearly shown by Dawkins’s triumph over Senator Fielding.

Academics and professionals who are Christian need to undergo their own Jericho moment—the collapse of the walls of silence. They need to enter into public debates with leading atheists, engage with the media, and be proactive. Three of the world’s leading Christian intellectuals overseas—Lennox, Alistair McGrath and William Lane Craig—have successfully shown how. They have debated Dawkins, Hitchens and other leading atheists in sold-out university halls and museums, including one involving Craig that attracted 7778 attendees and was shown on 117 television stations across the USA.

Locally, it is understood that Christian academics are afraid to speak up for fear of being ostracised by their colleagues. Most enter universities with a keep-quiet policy about their faith so as not to be judged as Jesus freaks and, once their careers are established, stay that way so as to not rock the tinny.

When Christian academics do profess their faith, it is not always well received. In late 2002—a year after September 11—Sydney University’s student newspaper, Honi Soit, ran a full-page advertisement saying Jesus was one of the greatest figures in history, and that his claims to be the Son of God stand up to rigorous scrutiny. It carried the signatures of twenty-two senior academics from law, economics, biosciences and mathematics, among others, including three faculty heads, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. In response, several unnamed critics denounced the stance, claiming that this amounted to proselytising at a secular university, including a student, who, ironically preferring to remain anonymous, wrote to the paper: “The ad is widely believed amongst students at the faculty of law to have damaged both the objectivity and perceived racial and religious tolerance of Sydney University.” Religious tolerance means respecting others’ religious views, not trying to censor them.

Eight years later, the fears raised in reaction to the advertisement never eventuated. Calls for academics to be more open about their faith doesn’t mean sermonising in university lectures or baptising freshmen at the nearest bubbler. It’s a call for an informed dialogue with their employers—the wider public—so people can hear the arguments and make their own decisions. At the moment, the conversation in this country is one-sided.

Intellectuals need an audience. Presently, openly Christian academics can be guilty of just talking among themselves. “Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence,” writes William Lane Craig in his essay “In Intellectual Neutral”:

Most prominent evangelical scholars tend to be very big fish in a very small pond. Our influence extends little beyond the evangelical subculture. We tend to publish exclusively with evangelical presses, and therefore our books are likely to go unread by non-evangelical scholars; and instead of participating in the standard professional societies, we are active instead in the evangelical professional societies. As a result, we effectively put our light under a bushel and have little leavening effect for the gospel in our professional fields. In turn, the intellectual drift of the culture at large continues to slide, unchecked, deeper into secularism.

Small steps are being taken locally to create equilibrium, however. A support structure for Christian academics called the Simeon Network has begun but it doesn’t have the profile yet to attract widespread attention. The independent research and media organisation, the Centre of Public Christianity, is slowly making its presence felt through a series of internet platforms, feature articles and television specials, albeit with a limited staff with solid academic backgrounds. And theological schools like the world-class Moore College in Sydney continue to train the next generation of leaders, but still need to identify talent from mainstream professionals and raise their profiles.

Reclaiming a soapbox in the media will need patience from Christian intellectuals. Too much ground has been surrendered, allowing critics to paint the church as a boys’ club for homophobes, women-haters and, strangely, pro-slavers. Trusted voices are needed to present and debate logical arguments, and to counter New Atheism as well as the enemies within.

Sixty priests professed “God exists” at gunpoint. Can an equal number of intelligent Christians be found to do likewise at the end of a microphone?

Scott Monk is a journalist and novelist based in Sydney.