When asked for my position on the Creationism/Evolution spectrum, I usually punt to the television series, Friends. In Season 2, Episode 3, "The One Where Mr. Heckles Dies," Ross the paleontologist urges his skeptical friend Phoebe to concede evolution is the only viable scientific option for explaining the genesis (small "g") and diversity of life on earth. Phoebe replies:

I'm not denying evolution …. I'm just saying that it's one of the possibilities. Ross, could you just open your mind …. [W]asn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat? And, up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open …. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?

When Ross admits a "teeny tiny" possibility, Phoebe chides, "I can't believe you caved. You just abandoned your whole belief system …. I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you …. [H]ow are you going to go into work tomorrow …. [H]ow are you going to face the other science guys…how are you going to face yourself? Oh! That was fun. So who's hungry?"

Underlying Ross and Phoebe's repartee are significant points. Despite a vocal and sometimes sophisticated minority, contemporary scientists overwhelmingly acknowledge the available evidence and explanatory power of evolutionary theory far outpaces rival accounts for the origin of life. Yet in a few hundred years, the brightest biological minds may chuckle at "evolution" as a historical gaffe of cosmic proportions. They may also perceive erstwhile varieties of "Creationism" and "Intelligent Design" as well-intentioned but misguided. Perhaps a new narrative vying to explicate the emergence of life will not just modify but render all current controversies obsolete. Or, perhaps one of our present models will be expanded and vindicated.

But for Phillip E. Johnson, a UC-Berkeley Law Professor, Emeritus, and author of the Intelligent Design primer Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity, 1991), Phoebe's time-will-tell retort to Ross is insufficient. Johnson avows that historical atrocities associated with Social Darwinism, Stalinism, and Nazism are inseparable from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to use New Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett's phrase. For Johnson, scientists like Francis Collins, who affirm biological evolution as complementary to Christian faith, make fascinating conversation partners and stymie atheist evolutionists, but they remain purveyors of a flawed and perilous philosophy.

With Biola University philosopher John Mark Reynolds, Johnson is recently coauthor of Against All Gods: What's Right and Wrong About the New Atheism. Johnson penned the introduction, epilogue, and five of eight chapters. Reynolds contributed three chapters and edited the final manuscript.

Johnson addresses a range of aggressive New Atheists, including bestsellers Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris and University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. In addition to deriding Darwinism, Johnson encourages university discussion of issues raised by the New Atheists, whom Johnson describes as posing excellent questions but proffering pitiful answers. As with Johnson's advocacy for teaching Intelligent Design in American public schools, fostering dialogue is a dominant trope. Reynolds echoes Johnson's vision for dialogue, and adds insights illuminating how the Christian story harmonizes humanity's deepest intuitions and longings. As C.S. Lewis in "Is Theology Poetry?" testified, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

To modify Johnson and Reynolds' subtitle, Against All Gods is one example of "What's Right and Wrong About many responses to the New Atheism." Skewering the New Atheists as a whole or individually has burgeoned into a minor publishing phenomenon promulgated since 2007 largely though not exclusively by Christians, at the pace of over a dozen books per year.

Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler" in the tradition of 19th-century polemicist Thomas Huxley (who called himself, "Darwin's Bulldog"), uncharitably characterizes self-styled refutations of the New Atheists by adapting W.B. Yeats, "Was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?" Put simply, critical interlocutors (fleas) are parasites leaching off Dawkins' dogged success to make money or to establish superior names for themselves.

Dawkins' ad hominem rebuff is unfair in sweeping aside principled and spirited disagreement, and in dismissing potentially sincere concern for the New Atheists and for the people and societies that the New Atheists influence. Does Dawkins deem himself beyond criticism and see all opponents, including Johnson and Reynolds, in (pardon the pun) bad faith? Would Dawkins' critics without him be reduced to draining themselves and each other dry?

As for money and fame as motivators, it is noteworthy that no riposte to the New Atheism has yet achieved bestseller status, though books marketed as ripostes generally do not. The closest exceptions which in part respond to the New Atheism are Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity (Regnery, 2007) and Tim Keller's The Reason for God (Dutton, 2008). But even D'Souza and Keller are much less successful than Christopher Hitchens' #1 New York Times bestseller God Is Not Great, Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, or Dawkins' The God Delusion, which Dawkins reports as selling over two million copies in English. Dozens of book-length responses, debates, spin-off documentaries, and thousands of articles (like the one you are reading now) supply free publicity for Dawkins and his comrades to religious audiences who will purchase and peruse copies of New Atheist bestsellers in an attempt to discover the basis for all the fuss.

Yet Dawkins' complaint about "fleas" has a certain merit. What's wrong with some of the books billed as responses to the New Atheism is that they border on—if not crossing well into—false advertising. They use Dawkins or the New Atheism as a pretext to promote their own pet projects, which relate at best tangentially to the New Atheists.

One example is the hardcover edition of Jesus for the Nonreligious by the radical retired bishop John Shelby Spong (satirist Becky Garrison insinuates that Spong is a closet wannabe New Atheist himself). Spong's dust jacket claims he "speaks directly to those contemporary critics of Christianity who call God a 'delusion' and who write letters to a 'Christian nation.'" But a text search of Jesus for the Nonreligious reveals no references to Dawkins or to Harris, in spite of their inclusion in Spong's bibliography. Nor is it evident how the substance of Spong's book speaks "directly" to New Atheists. HarperCollins wisely removed this descriptor from the paperback edition of Jesus for the Nonreligious.

Against All Gods falls short of blatant bait-and-switch. But its title and subtitle do function for this reviewer as lures for a loosely related collection of essays that mention the New Atheists but do not live up to a vigorous "cultural analysis and critique of their claims," as one endorser extols. Johnson and Reynolds are witty and insightful, but Johnson mostly rehashes debates about Darwinism without any footnotes. Reynolds footnotes sparingly; his essay on basic hermeneutics, "The Obstacle of Old Books" quotes Dawkins once and alludes to Dawkins and Hitchens once more together, but the rest of this chapter appears to be regurgitated from Reynolds' lectures to undergraduates. I have nothing against rearranging old class notes for publication purposes, but Reynolds' essay ties tenuously to New Atheist criticisms of the Bible.

What's right about responses to the New Atheists such as Mary Eberstadt's The Loser Letters, John Lennox's God's Undertaker?, David Marshall's The Truth Behind the New Atheism, David G. Myers' A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists, and David Robertson's The Dawkins Letters, is that they deal with New Atheist salvos directly, explicitly, and specifically without losing sight of a bigger picture. They rarely if ever meander off onto pre-determined, semi-relevant rabbit trails. What's right about D'Souza and Keller is their adroit incorporation of the New Atheists within D'Souza and Keller's own broad, strong realms of persuasion.

In contrast, Against All Gods: What's Right and Wrong About the New Atheism recycles ancillary material that teeters under the weight of its subtitle. As an aspiring scholar of the New Atheism, I welcome virtually any interaction with its ideas which seeks to winnow New Atheist wheat (legitimate points and grievances) from chaff (careless history, wild accusations, logical fallacies). But in The Truth Behind the New Atheism, David Marshall recounts a letter by Friedrich Engels, who was "pious when young, and lost his faith reading David Strauss' The Life of Jesus. 'Why does not someone write a devastating refutation?' he wrote his friend Fritz Graebar."

My concern is that Christians and non-Christians alike will order or pick up Against All Gods expecting not supplementary musings, but a devastating critique of the New Atheists and their often powerful and compelling rhetoric. I can easily picture the precocious university students Johnson and Reynolds refer to querying, "Is this the best rejoinder Christians have?"

Johnson and Reynolds re-heat literary leftovers to diners who hanker for tastier, stronger meat. D'Souza, Eberstadt, Keller, Lennox, David Marshall, David Myers, and David Robertson for the moment offer better menus. Nevertheless, I am glad for Johnson and Reynolds' place at the table, and I'm still eyeing the kitchen. God is, after all, in the business of multiplying simple loaves and fishes offered by humble and generous hearts.

Benjamin B. DeVan has taught religion, philosophy, and African American literature at North Carolina Central University, Peace College, and a January term mini-course at MIT titled, "Religion: Bringing the World Together, or Tearing the World Apart?" He completed his MA in Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary, his MDiv at Duke University, a ThM at Harvard in World Religions with a thesis on evangelical Christians and Islam, and is now a doctoral candidate at Durham University, UK, writing a dissertation on the New Atheism.

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