He isn't giving arguments in the link I posted. It's an interview. Someone asked him how he became Christian and he told the story.
You can't look at everything anyone says as if it's the defining argument about their beliefs. That just doesn't make sense.
I do have to wonder why you have such a strong beef specifically with Christians, but that might be getting off topic.
I understand it's an interview. I also understand it was over the phone, which is less than ideal for making statements that I can nitpick. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since I haven't read his book (although it sounds interesting). But things like this rub me the wrong way:
But I did ultimately go and knock on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith.
He took a book off his shelf -- "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, "I've got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core."
Not to sound like an ass, but if you talk about C.S. Lewis to most theologians (even christians), they aren't going to think you're serious. The man was a brilliant writer, but he was not an rigorous theologian. I have
Mere Christianity, and I've read it, and I simply can't believe that was the sole driving force of a conversion. Again, I would hope he would tell more in his book.
On a side note, that is not how I would define religion-an atheist might claim that such an impulse is the cause of religion, but I don't think that one can claim the impulse itself is religion. Unfortunately many terms, like religion, have only vague formal definitions which allows for some people to manipulate how they define terms when making arguments, which I always thought was somewhat dishonest.
Obviously I can't say whether I think the author of your book was being dishonest or if he simply thinks of religion very differently than I do, since I don't even know which book it is let alone read it.
I went and dug it up. It was
Sacred Worlds by Chris Park. The part I said was actually a paraphrase of a quote by Yi Fu Tuan. If it seems odd, it's probably because I stripped it of its context. But I assure you, neither Tuan nor Park are raving atheists out making absurd claims.
