No peace between "science" and "religion," prof warns

This post was about an atheist facing death, and it is inspiring.

This one is about an atheist blowhard - an evolutionary biologist who seems determined, so far as I can see, to collapse in the ruins of Darwinism. Some excerpts from Jerry A. Coyne's "Religion in America is on the defensive" (USA Today, October 11, 2010):

Atheist books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith have, by exposing the dangers of faith and the lack of evidence for the God of Abraham, become best-sellers. Science nibbles at religion from the other end, relentlessly consuming divine explanations and replacing them with material ones. Evolution took a huge bite a while back, and recent work on the brain has shown no evidence for souls, spirits, or any part of our personality or behavior distinct from the lump of jelly in our head. We now know that the universe did not require a creator. Science is even studying the origin of morality. So religious claims retreat into the ever-shrinking gaps not yet filled by science. And, although to be an atheist in America is still to be an outcast, America's fastest-growing brand of belief is non-belief.

As neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I demonstrate in The Spiritual Brain, materialist explanations have utterly failed in explaining the human mind. They continue to fail even as I write and you read, with one limp speculation after another.

But soft! There is ancient evil about:

But faith will not go gentle. For each book by a "New Atheist," there are many others attacking the "movement" and demonizing atheists as arrogant, theologically ignorant, and strident.

Well, if so, you just heard from Exhibit 1.

It gets better:

Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority rejected. No finding is deemed "true" - a notion that's always provisional - unless it's repeated and verified by others. We scientists are always asking ourselves, "How can I find out whether I'm wrong?"

To that, I can only reply "Climategate," which made clear that a number of key climate scientists were willing to manipulate the system to advance their opinions versus evidence. And in the age of Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), Expelled (a documentary about attempts to suppress findings that contradict atheist materialism) did not help the new atheists' image.

My favourite lines from Coyne's screed are

And this leads to the biggest problem with religious "truth": There's no way of knowing whether it's true. I've never met a Christian, for instance, who has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus. (I would have thought that the Holocaust could do it, but apparently not.) There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself. But how can you be sure you're right if you can't tell whether you're wrong?

Well, if one does not believe that one's mind has an independent reality, one cannot tell whether anything at all is true, or right or wrong. After all, if morality is all about survival of the fittest, then there is no morality, only survival of the fittest. Many Darwinists have said that our brains are adapted for fitness, not for truth.

The funniest part is this:

Out of 34 countries surveyed in a study published in Science magazine, the U.S., among the most religious, is at the bottom in accepting Darwinism: We're No. 33, with only Turkey below us.

Well, the United States put men on the moon, mapped the outer planets, and generally leads in science. And it is more religious than other countries. So, if religion makes a difference, bring it on.

The real lesson is that leading nations lead. They can lead in both science and religion. There are nations out there having a fit about both.

More on the new atheism (atheism on stilts):

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

Salvo 7: Just released edition features batty bioethicists, suckered scientists, senseless psychologists ...
(And we don't mind sayin' it either.)

Imagine no Religulous

The New Atheists are God's Prophets?

It is Sunday, so I allow myself one religious story.

One is informed by the Reverend Michael Dowd, and evangelist for Darwinism, that the "new atheists" are God's prophets:

According to Dowd, God is speaking pointedly to Christians today through some very unlikely messengers outside the church—namely New Atheists, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. These bestselling authors mock the biblical view of a God who, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s definition of terrorism, is a cosmic terrorist.

“The God that Richard Dawkins says is a delusion is a delusion!” asserts Dowd. “That way of thinking about God reflects an outdated, Bronze Age worldview that we have blindly believed for generations simply because someone said so and because our traditions taught us to. Biblical literalists are driving thinking Christians out of the church.”

Dowd claims that the central religious issue of our time is where people go for guidance and inspiration to deal with “this-world issues,” such as addictions and collapsing economies, not what might happen in “an imaginary, unnatural afterlife.”

No wonder liberal denominations are declining so fast. I can hear about how Darwinian evolution explains everything via the "evolutionary agony aunt" who shows how my complex series/matrix of problems can be understood by comparing my life with that of a chimpanzee somewhere.

I can't think of anything I needed more.

Professor Antony Flew dies at 87

Roy Varghese has just notified me of the death of Professor emeritus Antony Flew, the rationalist philosopher who died on April 8 aged 87, spent much of his life denying the existence of God until, in 2004, he dramatically changed his mind.

Here is Britain’s Telegraph’s obituary.

I feel lonely now. I remember sitting in the window seat at the U rez in about 1968, studying Flew. He really made people think.

Varghese is kind enough to thank me for contributions I have made to the discussion - essentially defending Flew.

For the record, here are some of them:

Flew calls Dawkins a bigot - and I would say he has a pretty good case. On that point, also here.

New atheists vs the ex-atheist

Response to hit review of Flew’s “There IS a God” in The New York Times.

Antony Flew: Is emotion really better than reason in religious matters?

Antony Flew: The authorship controversy

Antony Flew: Author or puppet?

Antony Flew: Is he too old to believe in God?

Why lifelong atheist Antony Flew decided there must be a God

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 8: Do the “new atheists” help or hurt the cause of Darwinism? Winner announcement

Recently, we asked Uncommon Descent Contest Question 8: Do the "new atheists" help or hurt the cause of Darwinism?

The new atheists' impact in general is often debated. What exactly have they contributed to atheism? Many traditional atheists or their sympathizers think not much.

Bryon R. McCane, Professor of Religion at Wofford College, asks,

Has something gone wrong with the new atheism? For awhile, it was really on a roll. Several best-selling books aggressively attacked religion, calling it a “delusion” (Richard Dawkins), and a “spell” (Daniel Dennett) that “poisons everything” (Christopher Hitchens). Bill Maher’s movie “Religulous” warned that humankind must get rid of religion or die. New atheism looked like the wave of the future. But not anymore. “Religulous” got mixed reviews and disappeared quickly. Rebuttals to Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens have appeared, culminating with Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. Sales of atheist books have fallen off the charts, literally. Months have gone by since one appeared on the best-seller list.

To me, the key problem was that they had a new level of hate, not a new idea. I wrote about that here.

Winner announcement: Jerry at 91. I especially enjoyed this observation:

There is an old maxim in marketing. Nothing kills a bad product faster than extensive advertising and good distribution. The faster people realize how bad a product is, the quicker it is rejected. The new atheist movement has accelerated the communication and distribution of their product but in the process open themselves up for intense scrutiny.

I must arrange for more prizes, as I would have liked to offer StephenB and Adel DiBagno a prize for their entertaining and useful discussion; however, I have only five copies of Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), hardcover, and if I burn through 60% of them in one contest, the publisher might not be very anxious to help me restock.

Jerry, I need a snail address for you.

I am a bit behind, judging contests, due to unrelated uproars. But here are the entries that seemed, to me at least, to shed light: Go here for more.

An event I did not happen to attend: British atheist graces Toronto

The author of The Six Ways of Atheism advises,

Venue: The Bond Place Hotel (Oxford Room), 65 Dundas Street East, Toronto.

Time: 10.00 am (Toronto time) Friday, 5 June, 2009

Journalists and media wishing to interview Geoffrey Berg on an individual face to face basis may request such an interview slot of 15 minutes with Geoffrey Berg in Toronto for lunchtime or afternoon on Friday, 5 June. Interviews exceeding 15 minutes, if granted, will be charged for.

The Bond Place is a nice little downtown hotel, but I am not Crimestoppers, and can't pay anyone to tell me what they think they know.

Here are Berg's attempted logical disproofs of the existence of God. They don't make any sense to me, but I will leave critique to others, more knowledgeable.

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

In The Ottawa Citizen, Robert Sibley advises

From New Age cults to murderous fundamentalism, these are dark times for religion, and the 'new atheists' are in the ascendant. The problem with their movement is that they don't understand the source of their hostility ... (December 26, 2008)

Oh? In the ascendant? In the legacy mainstream media, maybe, but not in the world at large.

In fact, this year - for the first time in a long while - I noticed a decisive pushback against their efforts to stop people from saying "Merry Christmas!"

Be a Christian, don't be a Christian, ... it's your choice. But December 25 is Christmas Day. In Canada, both December 25 and December 26 are statutory holidays - and pretty popular ones, too, so you need to keep that fact in mind if you intend to try litigation. No one is going to thank you for forcing them to work on one of those days, if they are not in an essential service field.

Anyway, I don't think the new atheists' movement is really going anywhere because what they don't have is any important new ideas.

I mean, once you get past Richard Dawkins explaining to Ben Stein in Expelled that space aliens might have created life - but not God - or Lee Smolin's zillions of flopped universes, theirs are not new ideas that we can compare with, say, the discovery of neuroplasticity in the brain.

Now THAT was a discovery - oh my heavens, what a discovery! Just think of all the old people who realize that they are not consigned to involuntary senility after all! But that discovery did not help materialist atheism one bit. Neuroplasticity makes way more sense if your immaterial mind is real and directs your brain.

Which reminds me: What discoveries would have helped materialist atheism? Here are some:

1995: It is conclusively proven that there is a single gene switch that causes people to be gay or straight. Soon after, the single switches that cause people to be fat or thin, faithful or unfaithful to their partners, and liberal or conservative in their voting patterns are quickly found.

1996: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a chimpanzee.

1998: Major science geek gets Nobel Prize for discovering the God gene, which causes people to be religious.

1999: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a computer.

2000: A rogue module is found in the brain that controls the sense that one is an "I" rather than an "it." Everyone is really an "it" after all, and the "I" factor is a delusion caused by a glitch.

2001: Evolutionary psychologists lead the way in developing effective treatments for mental disorders, using their theories, including the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, which wins a Nobel Prize for its sheer cogency.

2004: A computer program is developed that can predict within 99.99999% certainty who will commit a crime - or do a variety of other things - in the next twelve months, all based on hormones and similar factors.

2007: Most people worldwide agree that belief in God is harmful because it leads to bad ideas like right and wrong, and the harmful practice of accepting responsibility for one's own actions. Billions of people urge their governments to take over intimate details of their lives to prevent further harm.

Okay, obviously, none of this happened. And Bill Maher's Religulous came and went.

The real reason for the spate of New Atheist books, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is that they want you to become an atheist now - before you figure out that atheism is a crock. There is no way out of the desperations of human existence through atheism.

Look, I am NOT one of those feel-good Christians who try to tell you that God has a wonderful plan for your life. Maybe he does, and I am glad for you. But the figure at the front of my own church is of a crucified man (depicted above), and it is in that knowledge that I am instructed to live the rest of my life.

There is no escape from the glory and tragedy of being human, not an animal, and the "new atheist" movement is a paltry cheat and a waste of your time.

If you want to be an atheist, be an old atheist, not one of these new atheists, looking for the latest buzz from the popular science press to bolster lame ideas. Believe in God or don't believe - you are still accountable for what you do. You really are.

New atheism: Widely read but mostly dead, commentator says

Here's Salvo Magazine's interview with Dinesh d'Souza on the "new atheist" movement:

You write that "God is the future, and atheism is on its way out." How can you be so sure?

It's a matter of demographics. For example, one could make the argument that democracy is the future, and totalitarianism is on the way out. This doesn't mean that there won't be totalitarian governments, but it does mean that the ratio of totalitarian governments to free governments has been declining. A hundred years ago, there were only a dozen or so democracies in the world. Most other societies were governed by monarchs, tyrants, or inherited rulers. But by the 1940s and 1950s, you began to see an expansion of democracy. Another huge wave of democracy came along in the 1980s, and today, if you look around the world, you'll see that over half of the governments in existence are democratic. Clearly, democracy is the future. It's a prediction rooted in data.

Go here for the rest.

See also:

Spirituality and the arts: High time someone said this

Spirituality: Is this a trend? Guy tries Judaism "on spec" - discovers 7-day no-refund policy, ends as famous pulpit rabbi

Spirituality: Is this a trend? Guy tries Judaism "on spec" - discovers 7-day no-refund policy, ends as famous pulpit rabbi

In "Responding to Neo-Atheism" (American Thinker, September 21, 2008), Rick Richman - editor of Jewish Current Issues - notes that the "new atheists" are starting to get mail:

Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens ("god is not great"), Sam Harris ("Letter to a Christian Nation") and Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion"), among others. But this year there has been an equally impressive counter-phenomenon. Three recent books, written from three widely divergent perspectives, have responded to the arguments of neo-atheism with both intellectual force and literary grace.

He highlights agnostic mathematician David Berlinski, Catholic scholar Michael Novak and rabbi David J. Wolpe. Wolpe's case is especially interesting:

Wolpe is the senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and teaches modern Jewish religious thought at UCLA, but he was -- at an important stage in his life -- an ardent atheist. He grew up in a rabbinical family, initially rebelled against a religious future and, influenced by the works of Bertrand Russell, fell into atheism during his college years. He eventually rejected Russell's views decided to try rabbinical school -- "on spec," as he told his friends. One of his brothers predicted it would be "a phase."

His new book is his seventh he has written during the phase. His first book, "The Healer of Shattered Hearts," was a lyrical summary of rabbinic Judaism that established him, in Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's words, as "the poet of Jewish theology." His mother's stroke at age 52 led him to write "In Speech and Silence," a book-length meditation on words and song in religion. His most remarkable volume, "Making Loss Matter," described a way of capturing meaning from the most painful moments of life. It was written in the midst of the cancer that struck his wife at age 31, preventing her from bearing further children.

See also:

Dismantling Dawkins's Case Against God

Atheist bigots: Avoiding serious questions and targeting ignorant religious folk

Philosophy: God is not dead yet - but some haven't gotten the memo

Atheist bigots: Avoiding serious questions and targeting ignorant religious folk

Antony Flew, the formerly atheist philosopher - who now thinks that there must be a God because of the design of the universe in which we live - has offered some stinging criticisms of the New Atheist movement, calling its best known figure, Richard Dawkins, a "bigot".

The fault of Dawkins as an academic was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form. Thus we find in his index five references to Einstein. ... But he makes no mention of Einstein's most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics has led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it.

Flew here raises an important point. Anyone can trash a position that is presented in a weak form by an incompetent person. For example, if a questionable popular guru asserts the reality of the mind, anyone can attack his position and declare the reality of the mind refuted.

It is more difficult to refute serious theorists of the mind like Roger Penrose or the non-materialist neuroscientists. Then you must actually study. Flew goes on:

An academic attacking some ideological position which s/he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot.

Many of us would not consider that an impossibility, actually. Here's an example of just such bigotry. In "Expect 'Religulous' and Bill Maher to raise Oscars hell" (August 20, 2008), Tom O'Neil reports on atheist bigot Bill Maher's documentary Religulous:

In order to catch on widely like religion itself, what atheism has needed for a long time is a popular preacher to rally 'round. Maher just volunteered for the job that's been vacant since Madalyn Murray O'Hair vanished in the 1990s (eventually found murdered in 2001). Richard Dawkins has been a fine temporary stand-in, but not flashy like O'Hair. Bill Maher kicks things up a notch. He's a pop culture hipster who already has a large, anti-establishment flock, and he has a bully pulpit that O'Hair didn't: his own HBO show plus vast presence across all media.

Actually, Dawkins is classy compared to O-'Hair, who was shrill cubed.

You get some idea what you can expect from Maher's attack on Christianity from O'Neil's report:

In "Religulous," you can see lots of shocked faces when Bill Maher mentions casually that none of the people who wrote the Bible — including Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, even St. Paul — ever met Jesus. They're flabbergasted. They can't believe what they're hearing.

Well, if they are flabbergasted, I don't know why - unless they have spent more time watching reality TV than learning about their faith.

Matthew did meet Jesus. He was one of his original disciples, converted from the hated profession of collecting taxes for the Romans. (He must have been delighted that someone would actually be his friend.)

Mark doesn't say he met Jesus, though he was one of the early disciples.

Luke, the "beloved physician," never claims to have met Jesus; he was an associate of Paul, an educated man who sought to provide a coherent account of the remarkable events around the founding of the early Church.

Luke is also considered the author of the Acts of the Apostles, the book in the New Testament that recounts the earliest days of the Church.

There he introduces us to the apostle Paul, and his account makes clear that Paul did not know Jesus, apart from his vision, generally known as the Damascus Road conversion.

John was one of Jesus' original disciples, and part of his inner circle of Peter, James, and John.

As one might expect, the New Testament accounts were not written until the people who had known Jesus were beginning to die off. So if Maher is having a big influence on Christians, they must be Christians who do not know much about the history of their religion.

Apparently, Religulous will premiere in October, to immense hype.

(Note: The image is from Deism.)

A friend writes to add:

The dating of the NT writing used to be a great liberal playground, until the evidence, archaeology and a growing number of scholars began to fight back.

Jesus died around AD30. Paul wrote in AD43. There's no gap. The Gospel wiriters, who people used to plonk off unil the lat 1st century, can be argued to have written in the late 50s-early 60s for Mark (Rome), Matthew (Antioch?) in the 60's, Luke late 60s, early 70s, John in the 70s (as the final, completing Gospel). Eyewitness apostolic Gospel preaching went on into the 70s.

So with that in mind, we've got a little over a decade until Paul; 10 years after that for the First Gospel, and three more in succeesion over the next 20 years.

Today, we've still got living witnesses of World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, and those memories are seared into their souls-- we're not dealing with celebrity gossip news here. If we say Jesus died in 1930, Paul started witing in 1943; Mark wrote in 1958; Matthew in 1965, Luke in 1972, John in 1979, we've got some perspective on timing. We also have to remember the recital and reading and worship-context of the message, and the fact that leaders were in place who knew the story, to prevent error or heresy from pushing out the truth. Were' also dealing with a memory-based society, not a bunch of internet scatterbrains.

The liberals-- or atheists, or libertarian mockers like Mahar-- don't have much wiggle-room in there.

Investigating atheism?: Start here

Rupert Sheldrake, whose books I have just ordered from the library, has put up a site called Investigating Atheism. He seems to be even-handed, though I gather he thinks that the "New Atheism" is as much a crock as I do (it is the "New Coke" of atheism):

the 'new atheists' have had a mixed reception, not only among the religious (as is to be expected) but also among fellow atheists and agnostics, who have often accused them of oversimplifying the issues.

The purpose of this site is to set these contemporary 'God Wars' in their historical context, and to offer a range of perspectives (from all sides) on the chief issues raised by the 'new atheists'. We hope this will encourage more informed opinion about the issues, discourage oversimplification of the debate, and deepen the interest in the subject.

Sheldrake provides many useful references and links. Note especially, the New Atheist goals, where we learn, for example, that

Belief in God and evolution are not compatible.

Religion tends to subvert science.

Atheism is not discredited by the 'atheist tyrannies' of Hitler and Stalin.

Religious education of children is 'child abuse'.

Hardly a recipe for social peace.

Books: Decline of secularism leads to panic among "new atheists"?

John Gray, author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, has some interesting thoughts on the sudden spate of "new atheist" books in the last half decade. He thinks it is a panicky response to the decline in secularism:

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian. However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

The trouble with secularism is that it isn't about anything. After City Hall has put a stop to Christmas, Succoth, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali, and all that, what will we celebrate? City Hall? That's what destroyed the twentieth century materialist regimes (fascism, communism, etc.) People want to reach beyond themselves, and certainly far, far beyond City Hall.

Also

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

One for my reading list, and maybe yours.

Atheists on the "new atheism"

So the new atheism is to the old atheism what lo-fat marge is to butter, according to Utne Reader?

Dalrymple’s basic, but crucial observation is that this latest spate of antireligious book lack originality. “[They] imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat,” he writes. “They advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14.”

Where have I heard that before? By the way, hat tip to Stormbringer who sends me a summary of his own views in these matters - quite different from theirs.

The main thing that concerns me is that people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins - popular new atheists - have a viewpoint about life that would make much that most people believe - for what they think to be good reasons - a crime, or next thing to it.

Just thought you might want to know.

I am currently reading "old atheist" Antony Flew's book, There IS a God, explaining why he abandoned five decades of atheism. I'll say more about his book shortly, but the most remarkable thing about it is the vastly superior civilization Flew inhabited to anything the "new atheists" seem to offer. If their idea is not catching on, that's probably why.

Whatever are the new atheists thinking of?, a friend asks

I received this letter from Gil, a West Coast software engineer, who has been thinking, as Theodore Dalrymple has, about the spate of anti-God books recently put out by new atheists. He writes to say:

Dear Denyse,

Our church is getting involved in Angel Tree, a ministry reaching out to children whose mothers or fathers are in prison. This is being organized by Tristan Greth, our youth pastor, a former rock star who ended up in prison for drug use many years ago. Angel Tree volunteers give gifts, in
person at Christmas time, to the children of people in prison, with personal notes from the inmates to their children. Check it out:

Tristan is an amazing guy. He is an extraordinarily talented bass player who has gotten our praise band involved in Teen Challenge, a Christian drug rehab program with an 85% longterm success rate, unheard of in the secular world.

Here's the thing that mystifies me: What are the "new atheists" thinking when they talk about Christianity as the source of evil? What kind of alternate multiverse are they living in? Where are the atheist-inspired Angel Tree ministries? Where are the transformed lives, like that of
Tristan Greth (and mine, I might add)?

The most ironic thing of all is that the nihilism and despair of atheism is based upon a lie -- a materialistic world view that the science upon which it is supposedly based is progressively refuting with each new discovery.

You are free to share my comments in any way and with whomever you like.

As you wish, Gil!

If an atheist group did similar work, would it call itself NO Angels! Tree? Hmmmm. I dunno ... doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?

As Mario and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, a materialist worldview encourages ideas like "it's all in the criminal's genes"(and thus passed on to the children?) Or "there is no free will" (and therefore no hope?). Not a very good prospect for long term ministry.

Gil's own story is remarkable, and I hope to tell it in a suitable venue.

Physician and essayist Theodore Dalrymple doubts God but dismisses "new atheists"

Theodore Dalrymple takes on the "New Atheists" in City Journal, and it is all the more interesting because he himself has doubted the existence of God since a school assembly at age nine.

He thinks but little of this spate of anti-God works, saying, for example:

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.

and also

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

But I will spoil it no more for you.

Toronto journalist David Warren writes to say,

Hitchens & Dawkins are, or were, both capable of charm & wit -- including, even, self-deprecatory wit. It disappears in their atheist tracts. What appears in its place is just the worst sort of narrow, sneering, vindictive,
religious-style bigotry, that any religious person is supposed to be on his
guard against. Which is to say, they do not know what they are talking about; it is "beneath them" even to do the most elementary research into the actual histories & actual beliefs of the people they are attacking; & they will throw any missile that comes to hand, without considering its provenance. It is the flavour of Ulster at its very worst; or worse still, for there is not even a thin pretence of charity.

Dalrymple is by contrast modern, "post-Christian" European at its best. He is not a believer, but he does, actually, know something about Christianity, & he is aware of the need to retain specific virtues -- including charity, including humility -- that were inculcated in the Christian tradition. He is deeply concerned about the preservation of civilization (see his writings on every other subject; for he is a brilliant observer of post-modern life, from the angle of having been a doctor in places like prisons).

I got the same impression as Warren in both cases (the neo-atheists and Dalrymple), but didn't manage to put it half so well.

P.S.: David Limbaugh comments on Christopher Hitchens here.

Bumper stickers from the world of militant atheism

At least they are more obvious than the Darwinfish logo.

For many years I assumed that the Darwinfish was - well - ANTI-evolution.

What fish wants feet? What feet want fish attached to them? I assumed that a Christian group had thunk that one up to attack materialist evolution theories.

Actually, too many of the linked slogans suffer from the same problem. They assume you already know and care about the sloganeer's issues. If not, tahellwitcha!

For example, the "Santa will save me" jibe. Hey, at my age, Santa CAN'T save me. I'M Santa, whether I have money or not.

Without God, gall is permitted?

Thanks to a friend for this link:

To read the accounts of the first generation of atheists is profoundly moving. Matthew Arnold wrote of the "eternal note of sadness" sounded when the "Sea of Faith" receded from human life. In one testament after another--George Eliot, Carlyle, Hardy, Darwin himself--the Victorians described the sense of grief they felt when religion goes--and the keen, often pathetic attempts to replace it by love, by art, by good works, by risk-seeking and--fatally--by politics.

There is no such sympathy among the new apostles of atheism--to find it, one has to look to believers. Anyone who has actually taught young people and listened to them knows that it is often the students who come from a trained sectarian background--Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Mormon--who are best at grasping different systems of belief and unbelief. Such students know, at least, what it feels like to have such a system, and can understand those who have very different ones. The new atheists remind me of other students from more "open-minded" homes--rigid, indifferent, puzzled by thought and incapable of sympathy.

Yes, that’s precisely the part I have found most remarkable - the contented ignorance of most of the current atheist flock. Mario and I discuss that in The Spiritual Brain.

A friend wanted to know when I am going to blog on ...

... this column by Peter Berkowitz in the Wall Steet Journal on the "new, new atheism", because everyone else has:

... Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing.

There, I just did.

Yes, as Berkowitz notes, the remarkable part is that they have nothing much new to say. As Mario and I discovered when we looked into the research underpinnings of a lot of arguments for the new atheism, a lot of the research is pretty shoddy too. We go into that part in some detail in The Spiritual Brain.

Berkowitz also comments,

Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

I'm sure glad he said that. Muslim friends have pointed out to me on a number of occasions that the Islamist fanatics are not spiritually minded people. They don't interact with the spiritual dimensions of Islam; they are, instead, obsessed with trivia like whether they should grow a beard (when they are not in a complete meltdown about everything they hate). For too long, those people have been able to get away with the pretence that they are better interpreters of Islam than other Muslims are. And the unfocused book-length rants of the atheist authors helps maintain the deception among non-Muslims.