=> Vox PopuliŠ wrote:
<sneeeeyeerp>

This is relevant to alt.atheism, and a few other groups, but why post
it here?

(I notice you posted it twice to alt.atheism to. Trying to draw
attention to yourself or something?)

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett.htm

The authors of the three atheist books, Richard Dawkins [The God
Delusion], Sam Harris [Letter to a Christian Nation], and Daniel
Dennett [Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon],
apparently reject God on the grounds that religions perpetrate
actions that are harmful, and religious doctrine is incompatible with
science. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and string/M theory
are harder to explain without God than with God. All of nature, from
quarks to human consciousness, is so exquisite and awesome that it is
foolish to contend that it all came out of nowhere and evolved by
chance. It did evolve, but by the laws of chemistry and physics. The
God of Scripture is also the God of natural laws. Even if we live in
a probabilistic universe, those probabilities operate within the
constraints of intelligently designed natural laws. What we need is
not to abandon religion but to modernize our
understanding of God. BILL KLEMM
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett_2.htm
No one can deny that religions and religious adherents have their
faults. Even so, one only has to look back on the 20th century to
realize that whenever and wherever atheism prevailed, the death and
destruction that followed was on an unprecedented scale. Stalin's
atheistic Soviet Union and Hitler's atheistic Third Reich were
responsible for millions of deaths. If history is a guide to
atheistic dominance, I'd just as soon stick with the
flawed faithful. PEGGY MULLER
Sam Harris casts a bad light on all religious people, saying that
they don't think about suffering. I disagree. Although not a model
person, I am characterized by some as "religious," and I care very
much about suffering. Mother Teresa was "religious" and dedicated her
life to serving and trying to relieve suffering.
TARA WOLF

Being an atheist is a logically untenable position. If a person is
absolutely certain there is no God, he/she would then know everything
and would qualify for the title. I am a bit more comfortable with
some assumed humility in agnosticism.
TOM BAKER

It is important to differentiate between "religion" and "faith,"
especially in a discussion about whether religion harms people more
than helps. "Religion" is outward expression of belief in God, and
"faith" is one's personal belief in God. There are plenty of people
who are "religious," that is, they practice religion but do not have
true faith. Religion without faith, by definition hypocritical,
certainly can lead to the abuses decried by the atheists in the
article. However, true and humble faith in a creative, loving,
merciful, judicious, and all-powerful God inspires and empowers
believers to build a better world for all people.
ALEXANDRA MEZZINA


The New Unbelievers
Books on atheism are hot. But do they have anything fresh to say?
By Jay Tolson

Posted Sunday, November 5, 2006

'Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that
persons may live to a great Age in that Country, without having their
Piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel."

Little seems to have changed since Benjamin Franklin penned those
words of advice to would-be immigrants in 1782. Most polling data
suggest that some 90 percent of Americans believe in God or a supreme
spirit. And a recent University of Minnesota study finds that
atheists-or at least that lonely 1 percent of the national mix that
dares to identify itself as such-are the least trusted group in
America.
So why in this land of the God-fearing have the gloves-off arguments
of a few God-denying intellectuals been garnering such wide popular
attention? Consider book sales alone: Richard Dawkins's well-stocked
arsenal of antireligious thought, The God Delusion, currently claims
the No. 7 spot on Amazon and No. 10 on the New York Times list, while
Sam Harris's polemical Letter to a Christian Nation bids fair to
equal the sales of his 2004 bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason. Meanwhile, Daniel Dennett's
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, though
published last winter, continues to spark controversy with its
Darwinian take on the all-too-human urge to believe. Beyond the world
of books, magician Penn Jillette's paean to godlessness, first
broadcast a year ago on NPR's This I Believe, continues to be among
the most frequently visited stories on the NPR website
Rising skepticism? Do the polls simply have it wrong when it comes to
Americans and religion? British-born pundit Christopher Hitchens,
author of the forthcoming God Is Not Great, thinks so. "People lie
about their beliefs all the time," says Hitchens, who adds that he
never gets more praise for his talk-show appearances than when he
goes after religion. Anecdotage may not trump polling, but surveys
exploring religious convictions in more nuanced terms lend some
credence to Hitchens's skepticism. One recent Harris Poll study found
that 42 percent of adult Americans were not "absolutely certain"
about the existence of God, up from 34 percent three years ago.
If doubt is on the rise, Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of
the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, thinks he
knows why: "Six years of Bush, which seems to be a step in the
direction of theocracy, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism seem
to suggest that the world is moving toward two extreme religious
views." Confessing to surprise at the size of his audiences on his
current U.S. book tour, Dawkins suggests that even moderate and
liberal believers are beginning to see that the slide into extremism
may not be an aberration but a recurrent tendency within religion.
Possibly. But do Dawkins and the other atheists add anything to a
vigorous tradition of skepticism and unbelief that includes the witty
satire of Voltaire and the brilliant cultural and psychological
probings of Friedrich Nietzsche? What is so new about "The New
Atheism," as the November cover story of Wired magazine dubbed the
phenomenon?
Well, extremism, for one thing. Not only do the new atheists find
religion intellectually irredeemable, morally dubious, and socially
unnecessary, they judge it a clear and present danger, maybe even the
greatest threat to the survival of the species. If Voltaire wanted to
"wipe out the infamy" of religion, he really meant that he-like
Thomas Jefferson and a number of America's founders-wanted a more
reasonable deism, a philosophical religion that acknowledged an
original designer but got rid of all the supernatural stuff,
including revealed truths and moral dictates that ran counter to
reason. But religion made reasonable or understood symbolically will
not do for Dawkins or Harris (though the latter sees some Eastern
spiritual disciplines as acceptable, and possibly even helpful to the
moral life). Both are intent to show, as Dawkins puts it, "that
moderate religion makes the world safe for fundamentalism."
It does so, they argue, by fostering an ethos of excessive deference
and restraint (some would say civility) when it comes to matters of
faith. "It insists that people not examine or subject their religious
doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that scientific doctrines
receive," says Harris, who is currently completing graduate work in
neuroscience. (He keeps the name of his university and where he lives
a secret, perhaps fearing retribution for his own unrestrained swipes
at religious shibboleths, particularly those of Islam.)
The idea of peaceful coexistence between religion and
science-characterized by the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould
as respect for their "nonoverlapping magisteria"-holds no appeal to
most of the new atheists. Dawkins insists that the religious
magisterium is always overstepping its bounds, making claims of
scientific fact about the origins of the Earth, for example, that fly
in the face of all scientific evidence. Those scientists who are also
religious believers resort, Dawkins and Harris say, to the kind of
specious arguments for God that they would never tolerate within
science. Both refer to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome
Project, who makes the old argument-ridiculed by Bertrand Russell as
the "celestial teapot argument"-that God's existence cannot be
disproved. (Neither can the existence of a teapot orbiting the sun,
Russell tweaked.)
Philosophical arguments for or against God are more sophisticated
than one might learn from Dawkins, who sometimes comes close to
confirming Francis Bacon's adage that a "little philosophy inclineth
man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds
about to religion." But he and the other new atheists are more
interesting when they challenge the unexamined confidence some
believers have in the adequacy, if not the necessity, of religion as
a guide to the good and moral life.
Two sides. To be sure, religionists and antireligionists go back and
forth citing their own statistics to make their respective cases.
Dawkins and other atheists charge that the religiously intense "red"
states have higher rates of violent crime and social breakdown than
do the liberal "blue" states, while believers claim that statistics
suggest better behavioral outcomes among religious people.
Sociologist Penny Edgell, one of the authors of the University of
Minnesota study on attitudes toward atheists, finds that the
statistical data is inconclusive: "Religious involvement is closely
related to socially productive behavior. But does it cause or simply
accompany socially productive behaviors? Dawkins would say the
latter." At the very least, the new atheists make a compelling case
that moral and socially productive behavior is in no way dependent on
religious belief.
Indeed, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris argue that religious beliefs,
particularly those derived literally and selectively from religious
texts, can lead to behavior that is dubiously moral according to more
universal principles of right and wrong. The killing of innocents in
the name of holy war is only the most obvious instance. Discouraging
the distribution of condoms in societies plagued by AIDS on religious
principles is another. "Religious people are able to talk about
morality without thinking about suffering," says Harris.
For those and other reasons, Dawkins and Harris conclude that
religion itself has outworn its social utility and should be retired
from the field. They know that religion cannot be banished
politically, as past attempts (for example, in France under
Robespierre) have shown. The only way forward is for unbelievers to
make an unapologetic stand for unbelief. Dennett, by contrast,
extends a conciliatory hand to believers so long as they are willing
to subject any purported God-given moral edict to "the full light of
reason, using all the evidence at our command." Hitchens, for his
part, sees "no chance for a final victory over religious
superstition." Hence the necessity of keeping it restricted to the
private sphere, he argues. "We have done so," Hitchens says, "but
secularism will always have to be defended."
Needless to say, many find the new atheists' indictment of religion
misguided. "Take religion out of the world," says Robert Wright, a
visiting lecturer at Princeton University, "would there be any less
belligerent groupishness?" Nationalism, he points out, can also
produce monsters. At work on a book about the changing character of
religion, The Evolution of God, Wright says that material, historical
conditions always shape the way religious dogma and scriptures are
interpreted. "I am trying to find the circumstances conducive to
religious belligerence and those conducive to more benign expressions
of the religious impulse." What worries him most about the new
atheists is that they might undercut the very thing that makes
America work as a civil society. "We restrain ourselves from saying
bad things about religion, from talking about it at the dinner table.
These guys want to talk about religion at the dinner table."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett.htm

The authors of the three atheist books, Richard Dawkins [The God
Delusion], Sam Harris [Letter to a Christian Nation], and Daniel
Dennett [Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon],
apparently reject God on the grounds that religions perpetrate
actions that are harmful, and religious doctrine is incompatible with
science. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and string/M theory
are harder to explain without God than with God. All of nature, from
quarks to human consciousness, is so exquisite and awesome that it is
foolish to contend that it all came out of nowhere and evolved by
chance. It did evolve, but by the laws of chemistry and physics. The
God of Scripture is also the God of natural laws. Even if we live in
a probabilistic universe, those probabilities operate within the
constraints of intelligently designed natural laws. What we need is
not to abandon religion but to modernize our
understanding of God. BILL KLEMM
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett_2.htm
No one can deny that religions and religious adherents have their
faults. Even so, one only has to look back on the 20th century to
realize that whenever and wherever atheism prevailed, the death and
destruction that followed was on an unprecedented scale. Stalin's
atheistic Soviet Union and Hitler's atheistic Third Reich were
responsible for millions of deaths. If history is a guide to
atheistic dominance, I'd just as soon stick with the
flawed faithful. PEGGY MULLER
Sam Harris casts a bad light on all religious people, saying that
they don't think about suffering. I disagree. Although not a model
person, I am characterized by some as "religious," and I care very
much about suffering. Mother Teresa was "religious" and dedicated her
life to serving and trying to relieve suffering.
TARA WOLF

Being an atheist is a logically untenable position. If a person is
absolutely certain there is no God, he/she would then know everything
and would qualify for the title. I am a bit more comfortable with
some assumed humility in agnosticism.
TOM BAKER

It is important to differentiate between "religion" and "faith,"
especially in a discussion about whether religion harms people more
than helps. "Religion" is outward expression of belief in God, and
"faith" is one's personal belief in God. There are plenty of people
who are "religious," that is, they practice religion but do not have
true faith. Religion without faith, by definition hypocritical,
certainly can lead to the abuses decried by the atheists in the
article. However, true and humble faith in a creative, loving,
merciful, judicious, and all-powerful God inspires and empowers
believers to build a better world for all people.
ALEXANDRA MEZZINA


The New Unbelievers
Books on atheism are hot. But do they have anything fresh to say?
By Jay Tolson

Posted Sunday, November 5, 2006

'Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that
persons may live to a great Age in that Country, without having their
Piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel."

Little seems to have changed since Benjamin Franklin penned those
words of advice to would-be immigrants in 1782. Most polling data
suggest that some 90 percent of Americans believe in God or a supreme
spirit. And a recent University of Minnesota study finds that
atheists-or at least that lonely 1 percent of the national mix that
dares to identify itself as such-are the least trusted group in
America.
So why in this land of the God-fearing have the gloves-off arguments
of a few God-denying intellectuals been garnering such wide popular
attention? Consider book sales alone: Richard Dawkins's well-stocked
arsenal of antireligious thought, The God Delusion, currently claims
the No. 7 spot on Amazon and No. 10 on the New York Times list, while
Sam Harris's polemical Letter to a Christian Nation bids fair to
equal the sales of his 2004 bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason. Meanwhile, Daniel Dennett's
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, though
published last winter, continues to spark controversy with its
Darwinian take on the all-too-human urge to believe. Beyond the world
of books, magician Penn Jillette's paean to godlessness, first
broadcast a year ago on NPR's This I Believe, continues to be among
the most frequently visited stories on the NPR website
Rising skepticism? Do the polls simply have it wrong when it comes to
Americans and religion? British-born pundit Christopher Hitchens,
author of the forthcoming God Is Not Great, thinks so. "People lie
about their beliefs all the time," says Hitchens, who adds that he
never gets more praise for his talk-show appearances than when he
goes after religion. Anecdotage may not trump polling, but surveys
exploring religious convictions in more nuanced terms lend some
credence to Hitchens's skepticism. One recent Harris Poll study found
that 42 percent of adult Americans were not "absolutely certain"
about the existence of God, up from 34 percent three years ago.
If doubt is on the rise, Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of
the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, thinks he
knows why: "Six years of Bush, which seems to be a step in the
direction of theocracy, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism seem
to suggest that the world is moving toward two extreme religious
views." Confessing to surprise at the size of his audiences on his
current U.S. book tour, Dawkins suggests that even moderate and
liberal believers are beginning to see that the slide into extremism
may not be an aberration but a recurrent tendency within religion.
Possibly. But do Dawkins and the other atheists add anything to a
vigorous tradition of skepticism and unbelief that includes the witty
satire of Voltaire and the brilliant cultural and psychological
probings of Friedrich Nietzsche? What is so new about "The New
Atheism," as the November cover story of Wired magazine dubbed the
phenomenon?
Well, extremism, for one thing. Not only do the new atheists find
religion intellectually irredeemable, morally dubious, and socially
unnecessary, they judge it a clear and present danger, maybe even the
greatest threat to the survival of the species. If Voltaire wanted to
"wipe out the infamy" of religion, he really meant that he-like
Thomas Jefferson and a number of America's founders-wanted a more
reasonable deism, a philosophical religion that acknowledged an
original designer but got rid of all the supernatural stuff,
including revealed truths and moral dictates that ran counter to
reason. But religion made reasonable or understood symbolically will
not do for Dawkins or Harris (though the latter sees some Eastern
spiritual disciplines as acceptable, and possibly even helpful to the
moral life). Both are intent to show, as Dawkins puts it, "that
moderate religion makes the world safe for fundamentalism."
It does so, they argue, by fostering an ethos of excessive deference
and restraint (some would say civility) when it comes to matters of
faith. "It insists that people not examine or subject their religious
doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that scientific doctrines
receive," says Harris, who is currently completing graduate work in
neuroscience. (He keeps the name of his university and where he lives
a secret, perhaps fearing retribution for his own unrestrained swipes
at religious shibboleths, particularly those of Islam.)
The idea of peaceful coexistence between religion and
science-characterized by the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould
as respect for their "nonoverlapping magisteria"-holds no appeal to
most of the new atheists. Dawkins insists that the religious
magisterium is always overstepping its bounds, making claims of
scientific fact about the origins of the Earth, for example, that fly
in the face of all scientific evidence. Those scientists who are also
religious believers resort, Dawkins and Harris say, to the kind of
specious arguments for God that they would never tolerate within
science. Both refer to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome
Project, who makes the old argument-ridiculed by Bertrand Russell as
the "celestial teapot argument"-that God's existence cannot be
disproved. (Neither can the existence of a teapot orbiting the sun,
Russell tweaked.)
Philosophical arguments for or against God are more sophisticated
than one might learn from Dawkins, who sometimes comes close to
confirming Francis Bacon's adage that a "little philosophy inclineth
man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds
about to religion." But he and the other new atheists are more
interesting when they challenge the unexamined confidence some
believers have in the adequacy, if not the necessity, of religion as
a guide to the good and moral life.
Two sides. To be sure, religionists and antireligionists go back and
forth citing their own statistics to make their respective cases.
Dawkins and other atheists charge that the religiously intense "red"
states have higher rates of violent crime and social breakdown than
do the liberal "blue" states, while believers claim that statistics
suggest better behavioral outcomes among religious people.
Sociologist Penny Edgell, one of the authors of the University of
Minnesota study on attitudes toward atheists, finds that the
statistical data is inconclusive: "Religious involvement is closely
related to socially productive behavior. But does it cause or simply
accompany socially productive behaviors? Dawkins would say the
latter." At the very least, the new atheists make a compelling case
that moral and socially productive behavior is in no way dependent on
religious belief.
Indeed, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris argue that religious beliefs,
particularly those derived literally and selectively from religious
texts, can lead to behavior that is dubiously moral according to more
universal principles of right and wrong. The killing of innocents in
the name of holy war is only the most obvious instance. Discouraging
the distribution of condoms in societies plagued by AIDS on religious
principles is another. "Religious people are able to talk about
morality without thinking about suffering," says Harris.
For those and other reasons, Dawkins and Harris conclude that
religion itself has outworn its social utility and should be retired
from the field. They know that religion cannot be banished
politically, as past attempts (for example, in France under
Robespierre) have shown. The only way forward is for unbelievers to
make an unapologetic stand for unbelief. Dennett, by contrast,
extends a conciliatory hand to believers so long as they are willing
to subject any purported God-given moral edict to "the full light of
reason, using all the evidence at our command." Hitchens, for his
part, sees "no chance for a final victory over religious
superstition." Hence the necessity of keeping it restricted to the
private sphere, he argues. "We have done so," Hitchens says, "but
secularism will always have to be defended."
Needless to say, many find the new atheists' indictment of religion
misguided. "Take religion out of the world," says Robert Wright, a
visiting lecturer at Princeton University, "would there be any less
belligerent groupishness?" Nationalism, he points out, can also
produce monsters. At work on a book about the changing character of
religion, The Evolution of God, Wright says that material, historical
conditions always shape the way religious dogma and scriptures are
interpreted. "I am trying to find the circumstances conducive to
religious belligerence and those conducive to more benign expressions
of the religious impulse." What worries him most about the new
atheists is that they might undercut the very thing that makes
America work as a civil society. "We restrain ourselves from saying
bad things about religion, from talking about it at the dinner table.
These guys want to talk about religion at the dinner table."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett.htm

The authors of the three atheist books, Richard Dawkins [The God
Delusion], Sam Harris [Letter to a Christian Nation], and Daniel
Dennett [Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon],
apparently reject God on the grounds that religions perpetrate
actions that are harmful, and religious doctrine is incompatible with
science. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and string/M theory
are harder to explain without God than with God. All of nature, from
quarks to human consciousness, is so exquisite and awesome that it is
foolish to contend that it all came out of nowhere and evolved by
chance. It did evolve, but by the laws of chemistry and physics. The
God of Scripture is also the God of natural laws. Even if we live in
a probabilistic universe, those probabilities operate within the
constraints of intelligently designed natural laws. What we need is
not to abandon religion but to modernize our
understanding of God. BILL KLEMM
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/letters/articles/061126/4lett_2.htm
No one can deny that religions and religious adherents have their
faults. Even so, one only has to look back on the 20th century to
realize that whenever and wherever atheism prevailed, the death and
destruction that followed was on an unprecedented scale. Stalin's
atheistic Soviet Union and Hitler's atheistic Third Reich were
responsible for millions of deaths. If history is a guide to
atheistic dominance, I'd just as soon stick with the
flawed faithful. PEGGY MULLER
Sam Harris casts a bad light on all religious people, saying that
they don't think about suffering. I disagree. Although not a model
person, I am characterized by some as "religious," and I care very
much about suffering. Mother Teresa was "religious" and dedicated her
life to serving and trying to relieve suffering.
TARA WOLF

Being an atheist is a logically untenable position. If a person is
absolutely certain there is no God, he/she would then know everything
and would qualify for the title. I am a bit more comfortable with
some assumed humility in agnosticism.
TOM BAKER

It is important to differentiate between "religion" and "faith,"
especially in a discussion about whether religion harms people more
than helps. "Religion" is outward expression of belief in God, and
"faith" is one's personal belief in God. There are plenty of people
who are "religious," that is, they practice religion but do not have
true faith. Religion without faith, by definition hypocritical,
certainly can lead to the abuses decried by the atheists in the
article. However, true and humble faith in a creative, loving,
merciful, judicious, and all-powerful God inspires and empowers
believers to build a better world for all people.
ALEXANDRA MEZZINA


The New Unbelievers
Books on atheism are hot. But do they have anything fresh to say?
By Jay Tolson

Posted Sunday, November 5, 2006

'Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that
persons may live to a great Age in that Country, without having their
Piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel."

Little seems to have changed since Benjamin Franklin penned those
words of advice to would-be immigrants in 1782. Most polling data
suggest that some 90 percent of Americans believe in God or a supreme
spirit. And a recent University of Minnesota study finds that
atheists-or at least that lonely 1 percent of the national mix that
dares to identify itself as such-are the least trusted group in
America.
So why in this land of the God-fearing have the gloves-off arguments
of a few God-denying intellectuals been garnering such wide popular
attention? Consider book sales alone: Richard Dawkins's well-stocked
arsenal of antireligious thought, The God Delusion, currently claims
the No. 7 spot on Amazon and No. 10 on the New York Times list, while
Sam Harris's polemical Letter to a Christian Nation bids fair to
equal the sales of his 2004 bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason. Meanwhile, Daniel Dennett's
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, though
published last winter, continues to spark controversy with its
Darwinian take on the all-too-human urge to believe. Beyond the world
of books, magician Penn Jillette's paean to godlessness, first
broadcast a year ago on NPR's This I Believe, continues to be among
the most frequently visited stories on the NPR website
Rising skepticism? Do the polls simply have it wrong when it comes to
Americans and religion? British-born pundit Christopher Hitchens,
author of the forthcoming God Is Not Great, thinks so. "People lie
about their beliefs all the time," says Hitchens, who adds that he
never gets more praise for his talk-show appearances than when he
goes after religion. Anecdotage may not trump polling, but surveys
exploring religious convictions in more nuanced terms lend some
credence to Hitchens's skepticism. One recent Harris Poll study found
that 42 percent of adult Americans were not "absolutely certain"
about the existence of God, up from 34 percent three years ago.
If doubt is on the rise, Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of
the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, thinks he
knows why: "Six years of Bush, which seems to be a step in the
direction of theocracy, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism seem
to suggest that the world is moving toward two extreme religious
views." Confessing to surprise at the size of his audiences on his
current U.S. book tour, Dawkins suggests that even moderate and
liberal believers are beginning to see that the slide into extremism
may not be an aberration but a recurrent tendency within religion.
Possibly. But do Dawkins and the other atheists add anything to a
vigorous tradition of skepticism and unbelief that includes the witty
satire of Voltaire and the brilliant cultural and psychological
probings of Friedrich Nietzsche? What is so new about "The New
Atheism," as the November cover story of Wired magazine dubbed the
phenomenon?
Well, extremism, for one thing. Not only do the new atheists find
religion intellectually irredeemable, morally dubious, and socially
unnecessary, they judge it a clear and present danger, maybe even the
greatest threat to the survival of the species. If Voltaire wanted to
"wipe out the infamy" of religion, he really meant that he-like
Thomas Jefferson and a number of America's founders-wanted a more
reasonable deism, a philosophical religion that acknowledged an
original designer but got rid of all the supernatural stuff,
including revealed truths and moral dictates that ran counter to
reason. But religion made reasonable or understood symbolically will
not do for Dawkins or Harris (though the latter sees some Eastern
spiritual disciplines as acceptable, and possibly even helpful to the
moral life). Both are intent to show, as Dawkins puts it, "that
moderate religion makes the world safe for fundamentalism."
It does so, they argue, by fostering an ethos of excessive deference
and restraint (some would say civility) when it comes to matters of
faith. "It insists that people not examine or subject their religious
doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that scientific doctrines
receive," says Harris, who is currently completing graduate work in
neuroscience. (He keeps the name of his university and where he lives
a secret, perhaps fearing retribution for his own unrestrained swipes
at religious shibboleths, particularly those of Islam.)
The idea of peaceful coexistence between religion and
science-characterized by the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould
as respect for their "nonoverlapping magisteria"-holds no appeal to
most of the new atheists. Dawkins insists that the religious
magisterium is always overstepping its bounds, making claims of
scientific fact about the origins of the Earth, for example, that fly
in the face of all scientific evidence. Those scientists who are also
religious believers resort, Dawkins and Harris say, to the kind of
specious arguments for God that they would never tolerate within
science. Both refer to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome
Project, who makes the old argument-ridiculed by Bertrand Russell as
the "celestial teapot argument"-that God's existence cannot be
disproved. (Neither can the existence of a teapot orbiting the sun,
Russell tweaked.)
Philosophical arguments for or against God are more sophisticated
than one might learn from Dawkins, who sometimes comes close to
confirming Francis Bacon's adage that a "little philosophy inclineth
man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds
about to religion." But he and the other new atheists are more
interesting when they challenge the unexamined confidence some
believers have in the adequacy, if not the necessity, of religion as
a guide to the good and moral life.
Two sides. To be sure, religionists and antireligionists go back and
forth citing their own statistics to make their respective cases.
Dawkins and other atheists charge that the religiously intense "red"
states have higher rates of violent crime and social breakdown than
do the liberal "blue" states, while believers claim that statistics
suggest better behavioral outcomes among religious people.
Sociologist Penny Edgell, one of the authors of the University of
Minnesota study on attitudes toward atheists, finds that the
statistical data is inconclusive: "Religious involvement is closely
related to socially productive behavior. But does it cause or simply
accompany socially productive behaviors? Dawkins would say the
latter." At the very least, the new atheists make a compelling case
that moral and socially productive behavior is in no way dependent on
religious belief.
Indeed, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris argue that religious beliefs,
particularly those derived literally and selectively from religious
texts, can lead to behavior that is dubiously moral according to more
universal principles of right and wrong. The killing of innocents in
the name of holy war is only the most obvious instance. Discouraging
the distribution of condoms in societies plagued by AIDS on religious
principles is another. "Religious people are able to talk about
morality without thinking about suffering," says Harris.
For those and other reasons, Dawkins and Harris conclude that
religion itself has outworn its social utility and should be retired
from the field. They know that religion cannot be banished
politically, as past attempts (for example, in France under
Robespierre) have shown. The only way forward is for unbelievers to
make an unapologetic stand for unbelief. Dennett, by contrast,
extends a conciliatory hand to believers so long as they are willing
to subject any purported God-given moral edict to "the full light of
reason, using all the evidence at our command." Hitchens, for his
part, sees "no chance for a final victory over religious
superstition." Hence the necessity of keeping it restricted to the
private sphere, he argues. "We have done so," Hitchens says, "but
secularism will always have to be defended."
Needless to say, many find the new atheists' indictment of religion
misguided. "Take religion out of the world," says Robert Wright, a
visiting lecturer at Princeton University, "would there be any less
belligerent groupishness?" Nationalism, he points out, can also
produce monsters. At work on a book about the changing character of
religion, The Evolution of God, Wright says that material, historical
conditions always shape the way religious dogma and scriptures are
interpreted. "I am trying to find the circumstances conducive to
religious belligerence and those conducive to more benign expressions
of the religious impulse." What worries him most about the new
atheists is that they might undercut the very thing that makes
America work as a civil society. "We restrain ourselves from saying
bad things about religion, from talking about it at the dinner table.
These guys want to talk about religion at the dinner table."