I suspect the reason is that they realize they are really trying to defend a position that they themselves take on faith: that the ground-of-being, the reason there is something, rather than nothing, is not enough like a person that we ought relate to It personally.
There is no actually rational basis for that belief, despite all their appeals to reason and science. So they must argue against the contrary belief — that the ground-of-being is sufficiently person-like that the old Scriptural verse “come let us make man in our image and likeness” makes sense, that we ought to relate to It (traditionally Him) personally (e.g. pray), and naturally that we ought be in awe of Him, He being the basis for existence, particularly in its radical form, that the the ground-of-being’s decisive self-revelation is a person, Jesus Christ, not a book of rules — by irrational means.
First among these irrational means is the reduction of God from the ground-of-being, transcendent in nature, properly incomparable with anything in our ordinary experience, to a grouchy, magical old man in the sky. (What I characterize as mistaking monotheism for “one god paganism”.) If one is really talking about the “straw god” the atheists set up to knock down, I dare say, all of the Fathers of the Church disbelieve in the existence of such a being.
What is most curious, is that the very intelligibility of the world, without which science, which atheists invariably assert they revere, would be impossible, is potent evidence for a likeness between the human mind and the ground-of-being.
Exactly.
The Subtitle of this article is the Hitchen's statement:
“RELIGION SHOULD BE TREATED WITH RIDICULE, HATRED AND CONTEMPT”
Notice the "should". Atheism is necessarily foundationless. So any time an atheist utters words such as "should" or "ought" he is appealing to a transcendent moral standard, which is an implicit affirmation of the very thing that he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of the transcendent.
Atheism as a theory is incoherent and groundless.
Cordially,