It doesn't take the majority of Christians long to realise that debating faith with most online atheist commentators is an ill-advised use of our time and effort. There's a good reason for this, and it's a subtle one that not everyone might have picked up on. It's to do with the type of atheist that these people are, because experience shows that they are the most difficult kind when it comes to having fruitful dialogue. Here's why I think this.
There are roughly four kinds of atheist - two implicit types and two explicit types. Implicit atheism means those who do not hold a belief in God but also do not actively speak out atheist tropes, and those who simply haven't given much thought to the subject, but would say they do not believe if asked (we'll leave this latter group aside in this article). Explicit atheism means openly rejecting the existence of God, speaking out against God's existence, and in some cases going further in trying to influence the faithful in the world to turn away from God.
Now, there have been some brilliant minds who just happen to be implicit atheists or agnostics; people like Henri Poincaré, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing and Richard Feynman. They all made prodigious contributions to the world, but they just happened to have professed no belief in God. Then there are explicit atheists who've made impressive contributions in their specialised field, but who've also been overt in their professed atheism; people like Bertrand Russell, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Douglas Adams. There are also the very vocal explicit atheists with less distinguished CVs, but who've risen to fame and have come to be defined by their atheism more than anything else; people like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss.
And then we have the last kind - the explicitly atheist online commentators - who make up the majority of the explicit atheists, and who regularly descend upon Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Twitter to parrot the views of their more well-known secular icons, and try to seek superficial confidence and self-aggrandisement by dismissing all belief in God as foolish, irrational, uneducated, unenlightened nonsense. Scour the comments sections of articles about the Christian faith, or in Facebook groups created to debate God's existence, and you'll get hit with a morass of the rude, the dismissive, the confused, the spiteful and the hateful - thousands of attention-seeking atheist provocateurs, zealots and trolls getting a kick out of being dismissive of religious faith, in a vain attempt to puff up their own egos and make themselves feel better by insulting and deriding believers.
I'm not suggesting that every one of these individuals is deeply unpleasant - but I do think that in virtually all their cases, there is an insuperable barrier that prevents the flourishing of good conversation and honest enquiry. They pay a hidden price for a visible deceit, if only they could realise it. And it remains one of the sad ironies, in my view, that these are many of the people who most urgently need the gospel, yet are doing more than most to push it away.
A more in-depth psychological analysis of why debating with them is a waste of time is beyond the scope of this article. But I think the primary reason is that as much as they show willingness to discuss these matters, they want to do so only to sneer and scoff, not to engage, consider the topics deeply and seek edification. If you like, they call forth the birds of the sky, only to raise their gun and shoot them away again. With such people, the likelihood of heat is greater than the likelihood of light - which is why it's so often wise not to get involved.
Recently I heard a great line in If Beale Street Could Talk: “Fonny liked me so much that it didn't occur to him that he loved me". Perhaps, for these atheists, the opposite sentiment is being expressed, that they dislike religious faith so much that it doesn't occur to them how much they hate it, and are no longer open to discussing it honestly and giving it the depth of attention it deserves. As D.H. Lawrence once said, “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer" - and that is the reward of giving things the attention they deserve.
Further reading: New-New-Wave-Atheism: The Rise of Promethean Ego Apostates
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