God, guns and gumption; plus 'Why atheists hate God'

Gotta share a couple of columnists from Townhall.com this morning. First Doug Giles writes about his top three interests that give calm to his soul in these trouble times: God, Guns & Gumption.

In these times of uncertainty in which everything that can be shaken will be shaken, I’m not banking on big government wet-nursing me into Nirvana. I believe this suckulus package spawned by the Obama administration is going to leave the Americans who are looking to it as the grand societal salvo more disappointed than Lisa Marie was when she finally locked lips with Michael Jackson.

Nope, I’m fixing my hopes in the coming nightmare on God, guns and gumption. That’s my stimulus package. What’s yours?

Then Frank Turek explains why atheists hate God in Sleeping with your girlfriend.

Certainly the new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have problems with cosmic authority. Hitchens refuses to live under the “tyranny of a divine dictatorship.” Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a “malevolent bully” (among other things) and admits that he is “hostile to religion.”

It’s not that Hitchens and Dawkins offer any serious examination and rebuttal of the evidence for God. They misunderstand and dismiss hundreds of pages of metaphysical argumentation from Aristotle, Aquinas and others and fail to answer the modern arguments from the beginning and design of the universe. (Dawkins explanation for the extreme design of the universe is “luck.”)

Instead, as any honest reader of their books will see, Hitchens and Dawkins are outraged at the very thought of God. Even their titles scream out contempt (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The God Delusion). They don’t seem to realize that their moral outrage presupposes an objective moral standard that exists only if God exists. Objective morality—as well as the immaterial laws of reason and science—cannot exist in the materialist universe they attempt to defend.

In effect, they have to borrow from a theistic worldview in order to argue against it. They have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face.

While both men are very good writers, Hitchens and Dawkins are short on evidence and long on attitude. As I mentioned in our debate, you can sum up Christopher’s attitude in one sentence: “There is no God, and I hate him.”

Despite this, God’s attitude as evidenced by the sacrifice of Christ is: There are atheists, and I love them.

Good stuff. Read both of them.