A book review by Charlton Hillis: Edward Feser’s ‘The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism’
It has been said that you can’t teach an atheist with the Bible. This simply means if one does not see the Bible to be anything more than fairy tales, it is futile to expect him to respect its authority. The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism, by Edward Feser, goes beyond the field of apologetics (defense of the Christian faith) into philosophy. Feser himself was an atheist who came to a belief in God through his studies in philosophy—in particular, the works of certain secularists, who in spite of themselves, argued for unexplained abstracts that naturalism fails to answer.
Care is taken by Feser to lay out the basics for the reader unfamiliar with philosophy, giving what he calls a “highly selective crash course” in the history of Western philosophy.
Rather than a war between science and religion, he argues that the conflict of belief vs. atheism is between two philosophical world views. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas took the view which can point only to the existence of God, while the relatively modern philosophers went in the opposite direction.
Feser wipes the floor with popular atheist authors such as Dawkins, Hitchens and the like (he calls them the village atheists), as he shows the existence of God, the immortal soul, and the unchanging natural laws of morality can be seen through the eye of reason. His writing is clear and focused, with an unapologetic conservative interpretation.
A summary on the book’s back cover reads, “In particular, it involves a recovery of the forgotten truths of classical philosophy. When this is accomplished, religion can be seen to be grounded firmly in reason, not blind faith. And despite its moral and intellectual pretensions, the ‘New Atheism’ is exposed as resting on very old errors, together with an appalling degree of intellectual dishonesty, philosophical shallowness, and historical, theological, and scientific ignorance.”
This is not a book about the Bible or Christianity, per se. It is a priceless study of the indisputable evidence of God underlying all creation and an intellectual approach to the age-old Christianity vs. atheism debate.
“The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism” by Edward Feser is available in bookstores and online at Amazon.com and iBooks. For more information, you can check out the publisher’s website at www.staugustine.net or the author’s website at www.edwardfeser.com.