Michael Novak likes to attack atheism and blame atheists for the ills in the world. His arguments are never any good and he commits logical fallacies all over the place, but that doesn't seem to stop him. I don’t think he really cares.
Novak wrote recently about the critiques some have made about theism in the wake of the recent tusnami:
[F]aced with a horrendous natural disaster, in which thousands of innocent human beings die irrationally, for no reason, the rationalist atheists and the nihilists alike blame God first. It is important for them to do that. They do not blame just any God. The God of the Maya and many other religions of nature has always been known to be cruel, as Nature itself is cruel, and heedless of human emotion, aspiration, and hope. Rather, it is only the God of Judaism (learned of and spread round the world by Christians) that they blame. No, perhaps more, they blame the God of Christianity, for in Christ the world has been given an even more vivid image of divine concern for the poor, the lowly, and the needy, and of divine gentleness, friendship and love. They are blaming the God of the Sermon on the Mount. That is the God that there is true joy in blaming.
Of course, in order for anyone to blame any particular "god" for something (a tsunami, leukemia, a stubbed toe), one must first believe that this god exists. Novak isn't talking about some sort of metaphorical "blame," an idle shaking of one's fist at the skies out of anger. No, this is real blame for a real being.
But wait, atheists don't believe in any gods, do they? No — that's the nature of atheism, not to believe in any gods. So atheists (whether rationalists or nihilists or other -ists) can't very well blame any gods for something, can they? Of course not. That's incoherent. If someone is blaming God for something, then by definition they aren't an atheist. Coherent critiques of atheism are, apparently, a bit too much to ask for from Michael Novak.