At Real Clear Religion, Notre Dame’s M. Anthony Mills critiques Victor Stenger’s book, God and the Atom:
Stenger argues that, since its inception, atomism and atheism have gone hand in hand. To accept atomism, ancient or modern, is to accept atheism.
Such proclamations are familiar to those who worship at the altar of the “new atheism.” If Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens are its high priests, Stenger is minor nobility. A physicist, Stenger’s numerous books argue that modern science is, inexorably, shining light into the last crevices in which God has taken refuge. Anyone who disagrees is no “free thinker,” but an anti-scientific slave to authority and superstition.
But God and the Atom fails to deliver on its promise. Instead, it exemplifies some careless historical scholarship and a philosophical confusion that plagues new atheism generally. Is science a purely empirical discipline? In that case it would be ill equipped to answer non-empirical (for example, theological) questions. Or is science itself somehow metaphysical, providing definitive answers to age-old questions?
Stenger, like all new atheists, wants it both ways: atomism is a good theory because it is purely empirical; but it nevertheless licenses sweeping non-empirical judgments: atoms and void are all that exist.
It is a tiresome yet neverending task for believers to point out that an empirical method like science cannot be used to evaluate nonempirical claim, so it’s simply a tautology to point out that science (as such) doesn’t and cannot discover God, because God is not an object in the universe available for scientific investigation. But as valid as that point is, as devil’s advocate, I think that the skeptic’s real point is that he just doesn’t know what else besides science an be used to discover valid, objective truth—science is the only thing he knows of that works. Thus it’s time for religious defenders to move just beyond pointing out the logical failures of skeptical objections, and to start developing ways to show the validity of knowledge gathered beyond bare empirical science. One of the most fruitful ways of doing this, I think, is in showing that in order to do science at all one must beforehand accept a prescientific metaphysical and philosophical system that is very much supportive a theistic view of things. The task is to get the skeptics to examine their own presuppositions explicitly, rather than glide over them unconciously. We must point out the truth that without God, science is impossible.