Reason is a secular libertarian magazine, so it was a surprise today to find an article there by Emma Camp on, “How the Elite Changed Its Mind on Christianity.” Camp, a 2022 college grad, includes the usual unfair jabs at Evangelicals, favoring Catholicism instead, even “the ‘tradcath’ resurgence,” but her conclusion caught my attention: “The cool kids aren’t the smug, strident atheists anymore — they’re the Christians.”
That tracks with this new video on the Science Dilemma YouTube channel, aimed at younger people, that I just watched. Jay Richards talks with host Allan CP about that icon of intelligent design, the perfect solar eclipse, and about his book with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, The Privileged Planet, which came out in 2004 and then in an updated 20th-anniversary edition in 2024.
Dr. Richards describes how the evidence for the Privileged Planet thesis grew stronger over the course of two decades, while generally, scientific evidence for theism also solidified. He points out that the dispute between materialists and theists has been “the perennial discussion in the West for 2,500 years.” Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle argued against the materialists of their time, whose identities we wouldn’t even know if it weren’t for them. (See my book Plato’s Revenge for how a Greek philosopher is being vindicated by new science.)
The last twenty years have brought other changes. Richards would agree with Emma Camp that the New Atheism “couldn’t last forever.” Even Richard Dawkins is “still an atheist but now he’s talking about the importance of Christian civilization.”
More broadly, Jay sees a sort of bifurcation in the culture. On the one hand, you have the “deranged” ideology of gender. On the other hand, that ideology itself has produced a “Wake up!” reaction from many people. If wokeness leads to promoting surgical sexual mutilation of children, maybe we need to rethink the whole thing.