You’re right on both scores, but that’s not the point. I have read other Dawkins and watched Hitchens debate, but have not purchased these books. I’m frugal and am leery of bestsellers (particularly when they are so “in your face”), what can I say? I know enough to know that rhetoric is rhetoric and that the atheism/theism debate is older than the hills.

More to the point, I can’t believe all of these books and movies are succeeding on their merits alone. Much like the success of The Passion of the Christ or The Da Vinci Code, I don’t think religious or anti-religious polemics succeed on their inherent rationality (or aesthetics). What else is going on in the world? What prompted Time magazine to declare God dead in April 1966 and why are we still talking about that grey-bearded fellow?

Could what I call ‘pop’ atheism have something to do with the fact that for the last 8 years, the U.S. had one of it’s most ruthless pro-war pro-God governments ever? And possibly that some other guys who believe in God as fiercely blew up the WTC?

Or is it that Dawkins et al really are smarter than thou and thee and all the rest and that religion is a virus to be stamped out?

As for Plantinga, I do take (what I remember of) him seriously in his criticism of positivistic worldviews that rule out theism unequivocally. We don’t reason our way up to God or atheism for that matter, these beliefs are ‘properly basic’ in a similar way as belief in other minds.

I also do recall him writing that theism or atheism isn’t contingent on people reading the latest articles in philosophy journals to see who has cobbled together the best argument.

Life ain’t that simple. Yeah…