The New Atheist Movement is destructive

source: http://www.fritanke.no/ENGLISH/2009/The_new_atheist_movement_is_destructive/

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– The antitheism of the four horsemen is for me a backwards step. It reinforces what I believe is a myth, that an atheist without a bishop to bash is like a fish without water, Julian Baggini writes.

Text: Julian Baggini
Published: March 19. 2009

What do you think about the four horsemen?” It's a question I often get asked, quite understandably, since I wrote the Very Short Introduction to atheism. That book provides no answer, because it came out before Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens unleashed their apocalypse. But surely I must have an opinion on the biggest phenomenon in popular atheism since Bertrand Russell?

Well I do, but it comes with one huge caveat: I have not read any of their books. That does not, however, disqualify me from having an opinion about them. Let me defend both apparently intellectually disreputable confessions.

Not reading The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and The End of Faith is perfectly reasonable. Why on earth would I devote precious reading hours to books which largely tell me what I already believe? These books are surely mainly for agnostics and open-minded believers. In fact, I think atheists who have read these books have more of a responsibility to account for their actions than I do my inaction. 

As the posters on the sides of British buses rather simplistically put it, “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” God's non-existence is a fact atheists live with, not something that they should obsessively read about.

But if I haven't read these books, surely I should have no opinion about them? I think you’d be less sure of this if you had read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard (or even not read it). In any case, my opinions are not so much about these books as the general tone and direction the new atheism they represent has adopted. This is not a function of what exactly these books say, but of how they are perceived, and the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews. All this, I think, has been unhelpful in many ways. 

In short, the new atheism gets atheism wrong, gets religion wrong, and is counterproductive.

How does it get atheism wrong? When I wrote my own book on the subject, I believed that atheism was widely misunderstood as being primarily a negative attack on religious belief, on which it is parasitic.

But this can’t be right. Imagine for one moment that atheism triumphs and belief in God is eradicated. On the view that atheism needs religion, then this victory would also be atheism’s extinction. This is absurd.

It is only because of historical accident that atheism is not widely recognised as a world-view in its own right. This world view is essentially a very general form of naturalism, in which there are not two kinds of stuff, the natural and the supernatural, but one. The forces that govern this substance are also natural ones and there is no ultimate purpose or agency behind them. Human life is biological, and thus does not survive beyond biological death.

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The Oldie Review of Books

The Oldie Review of Books

THE THIRD issue of our quarterly The Oldie Review of Books is free with the April issue of The Oldie. .. features an overview of the best 'God and Mammon' books (all those responses to Richard Dawkins, plus the business memoirs that the papers unjustly relegated to the financial pages)..

GOD …
The God Delusion Richard Dawkins; The Dawkins Delusion Alister McGrath; Darwin’s Angel John Cornwell; The Secular Age Charles Taylor; The Bible: The Biography Karen Armstrong; In God We Doubt John Humphrys; Tokens of Trust Rowan Williams; Once More with Feeling Rupert Christiansen; A Little History of the English Country Church Roy Strong; Field Work Ronald Blythe

The New Atheists The OUT Campaign

reposted from: http://newatheism.org/

Intolerance of ignorance, myth and superstition; disregard for the tolerance of religion.
Indoctrination of logic, reason and the advancement of a naturalistic worldview.

The New Atheists by Tina Beattie

Tina Beattie has a talk at Royal Holloway College, Egham, University of London on February 5th at 1.30pm
"Enemy in the Mirror: Richard Dawkins, (and Polly Toynbee) the New Atheists and their Crusade against Fundamentalism". All are welcome!

The new v old atheism

The new atheism

There is more humanity in the 'superhuman' delusions of the devout than there is in the realism of the hectoring atheists

Brendan O'Neill

"New atheism" was the surprise political hit of 2007. God-bashing books by Hitchens, Dawkins and other thinkers who come out in a rash when they hear the word "religion" flew out of the bookshops. Philip Pullman's anti-divine Golden Compass hit the big screen. Everywhere, God was exposed as a fraud and God botherers were given an intellectual lashing.

I am as atheistic as it gets. But I will not be signing up to this shrill hectoring of the religious. The new atheists have given atheism a bad name. History's greatest atheists, or the "old atheists" as we are now forced to call them, were humanistic and progressive, critical of religion because it expressed man's sense of higher moral purpose in a deeply flawed fashion. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant; they see religion merely as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring God crashing back down to earth, but also to downgrade mankind itself.

How does 'New Atheism' downgrade mankind?

There's something bitterly ironic in the fact that the new atheists pose as the successors to Darwin. Darwin himself had little interest in baiting the devout. In the early 1880s, he was asked by the radical atheist Edward Aveling to endorse a new book on evolutionary theory. Darwin, caring little for Aveling's "anti-religious militancy", refused. He wrote to Aveling: "It appears to me ... that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion ... "

Things have moved on since the 1860. Why shouldn't New Atheists bait the devout - who believe in faith - without reason or evidence.

Marx, too, believed that direct assaults on religion were pointless. He argued (pdf) that religion existed as spiritual compensation for social alienation, and believed that once the true nature of religion as a comfort blanket in an alienated society had been revealed, it would become clear that religion is merely a secondary phenomenon dependent for its existence on socioeconomic circumstances. Radical critics should focus their intellectual ire on the degraded society that sustains religion rather than on attacking religion itself: "The criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."

Old atheists sought to "illuminate men's minds", through advancing science or deepening our understanding of capitalist society. New atheists take exactly the opposite approach. They expend all of their energy on attacking the institution of religion and its ridiculous adherents.

New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris) promote scientific method and science.

Consider their bizarre and fevered obsession with religious symbols, such as crucifixes worn around the neck,

secularism - separation of church and state.

or statements of religious belief by public figures like Tony Blair or Nick Clegg: their distaste for anything that looks or sounds vaguely religious exposes the shallow anti-intellectualism of their new atheism.

Their opposition to religion is not driven by a profound or radical vision, as was Darwin's and Marx's, but rather by a dinner-party disdain and moral revulsion for the stupidity of the religious. Where old atheism was driven by a passionate belief in progress, new atheism springs from today's crisis of secularism. It is because new atheists have lost their own belief in progress and Enlightenment

just the opposite! New Atheists do believe in progress and want to defend the advances made by the Enlightenment.

that they turn harshly against those who still cling to visions of a better society or "kingdom".

The inhumanity of the new atheism is best illustrated by its move from the world of social critique into the realm of sociobiology. Some new atheists believe humans must be genetically predisposed to believing in a higher being.

Was this study endorsed by New Atheists? Evidence?

Marx and others saw religion as the product of socioeconomic circumstances, and thus believed that religion would wither away as humanity proceeded along the path of progress. New atheists see religious belief as a kind of animalistic instinct, driven by DNA.

Not so simple as that!

Where Marx viewed people's turn towards religion as an understandable response to the harsh reality of alienation in capitalist society, new atheists see it as the product of mankind's twisted genetic makeup.

So what is their solution? Mass genetic therapy? Compulsory injections of the correct DNA - you know, the kind possessed by intelligent and well-bred people who can see through religious delusion? The new atheists' abandonment of a social outlook leads them to adopt some very grim, anti-human views.

None of the 'New Atheists' have argued for mass genetic therapy.

The key difference between the old and new atheism is in their views of mankind. For atheists like Marx (pdf), religion expressed, in a backward and limited form, human aspirations to greatness: "Man ... looked for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself." He continued: "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being ... " Today, Hitchens says of religion's destructive impact: "What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees?" For Marx, religion had to be abolished because it made man despicable; for new atheists religion exists precisely because man is despicable, little more than a monkey.

Man is much more than a monkey; man is not despicable.

New atheists will continue to ridicule the religious in 2008. But there is more humanity in the "superhuman" delusions of the devout - in their yearning for a sense of purpose and greatness - than there is in the monkeyman realism of the hectoring atheists.

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brendan_oneill/2007/12/the_new_atheism.html
Chris Street comments are in bright green;

highlights in yellow blockquotes.

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2007, a bad year for God squadders

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,2053,n,n
Chris Street comments are in bright green;

highlights in yellow blockquotes.

by Times Online

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article3080429.ece?Submitted=true

2007, a bad year for God squadders

It was the believers that did most to discredit religion this year, not the atheists

Nothing better measures the retreat of religion in our postmodern society than the diminished intensity of the war over Christmas.

This fight — waged for decades by a dwindling band of religious insurgents against a prevailing secularist consensus — used to be fought with a real passion. People actually once got quite upset about saucy Christmas cards or television schedules that omitted even a hint of religion between the comedy classics and the game shows.

Now it just amounts to a few feeble skirmishes, a couple of barmy Christians railing outside the shopping malls, while everybody else gets on with their daily worship at the shrines of the modern trinity: shopping, eating and drinking.

The Christmas war, in fact, is rapidly acquiring the status of historical curiosity. In a few years' time, we'll have to stage re-enactments, like those Civil War buffs who gather in soggy fields:

"Look, George. Those people over there with the lanterns and the hymn books actually used to believe in the whole Christmas Story."

"Wow. They look so real. What was the Christmas Story, Mum?"

The retreat continues, despite the best efforts of the Anglicans to keep making concessions to disbelieving modernity, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did again this week with his observation that we were obliged to treat the Christmas Story really as just a legend. Like Alfred and the burnt cakes, I suppose.

Christmas closes another year that has been pretty brutal on the God squadders, a year in which the swelling tide of unbelief crashed further through the structures of our cultural architecture.

If you measure intelligent sentiment by book-reading habits alone, then atheism was a big winner in 2007. Richard Dawkins continued to wave an angry Darwinian fist in the faces of carol singers (before, it turns out, rather oddly, lining up with them for a quick rendition of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen) with his exposure of the God Delusion. He was joined by Christopher Hitchens, whose God is Not Great will be filling many Christmas stockings.

But the atheists didn't confine their advances to the rather narrow field of non-fiction for grown-ups. Seizing on the old Jesuit principle of getting them while their young, Philip Pullman went Hollywood this year with the Dark Materials trilogy.

Mr Pullman, knowing a commercial opportunity when he saw one, described Catholics who objected to the adaptation of his books, which feature as the principal villain a thinly disguised Papacy, as "nitwits".

This seems to be wanting to have your polemical cake and eating it. You can hardly blame Catholics for feeling a bit defensive. He told an interviewer a few years ago that the main purpose in writing his books was to undermine belief in God. Now belief in God may be increasingly optional these days for the more lukewarm leaders of Anglicanism but it is still pretty much a prerequisite for Catholics.

As ever, though, when it comes to discrediting religion, the efforts of atheist polemicists and fantasists were no match for the behaviour of believers themselves.

A certain brand of fanatical Islam continues to lead the world in advertising the deep unpleasantness of religion as it can be practised — whether submitting rape victims in Saudi Arabia to the lash or threatening the same against aberrant teddy bear teachers in Sudan, all in the name of God.

The unprepossessing brand of exclusive evangelicalism followed in some parts of America ( the "I'm Saved, You're Not" approach to salvation) has never been far from the headlines this year and is also very effective in turning people away from religion.

But this year also seemed to produce the most unlikely addition to the ranks of the unbelievers. In September we learnt that Mother Teresa, even while she was saving millions of souls in Calcutta, was apparently losing her own.

Her posthumously published autobiography, Come Be My Light, much of it in the form of anguished letters to priests and others, recounted how the Blessed Teresa (she was beatified in 2003) had endured what theologians call a long, dark night of the soul. She repeatedly expressed the most excruciating of doubts about the existence of God and the faith to which she had dedicated her life.

The reaction to the book was predictable. She was denounced as a fraud and a hypocrite by some, welcomed posthumously into the ranks of the unbelievers by others. Few bothered to read through to the end and discover that Teresa recovered her faith before she died in 1997.

That someone as self-evidently devout as Mother Teresa could have been tormented for so long by such doubts should not be read as confirmation that the atheists have got it right. The lesson of Mother Teresa's long, dark night of the soul is precisely the opposite, in fact. That faith, by its very nature, entails doubt. If we could be really, truly certain, about the existence of God, what, really, would be the point of it all?

It is the Christmas Story, or legend if you will, as much as anything we believe, that underlines this essential tension between faith and doubt.

You'd have thought (and certainly the pre-Christians did) that the Son of God, when He chose, would enter the world in a way that would leave no doubt who He was or that He existed.

But He chose instead to come in a way that ensured just about the maximum room for doubt; merely another barely noticed nativity in the most miserable of circumstances. If you were lucky enough to be one of those shepherds on the hills around Bethlehem who got the news from the angelic host, or one of the wise men who followed that star, you were lucky. No long, dark night of the soul for you. Instead, just one brilliant flash of celestial light and the secret of the universe was revealed.

But for the rest of us, forced to ponder the complexity of our existence and the competing implausibilities of faith and unbelief, that was surely the point of the manger, the stable, the ox and the ass. That God would choose to come among us in such a way is so strange, so inexplicable, so unbelievable, it compels us to believe.

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1825,n,n
Chris Street comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

What the New Atheists Don't See

by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal

Thanks to Florian Widder for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

The British parliament's first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre* came up with a memorable line: "God doesn't exist—the bastard!"

Sartre's wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre's line implies that God's existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signi-fies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

Click here to continue:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html

Sam Harris comments: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1834,n,n

Response to Theodore Dalrymple

by Sam Harris

Reposted from:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html?sr=show

Sam Harris responds to the article "What the new atheists don't see" by Theodore Dalrymple:

First, let me confess that I have long enjoyed Theodore Dalrymple's writing. This only became an inconvenience yesterday, in fact, when I learned that Dalrymple had subjected my first book, The End of Faith, to especially malicious treatment in the pages of this magazine. I hope readers of City Journal will believe me when I say that it's not every day I discover a writer whom I admire vilifying me in print. But there was Dalrymple, denouncing me for my "sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple," for my "assumption of certainty where there is none," and for my "adolescent shrillness and intolerance." As if these weren't deficiencies enough, Dalrymple went on to declare me both a "sinister" person and the author of "quite possibly the most disgraceful" sentences ever written by "a man posing as a rationalist." Where, I wonder, will Dalrymple be when I need my next blurb?

Beyond simply hating my book, Dalrymple seems to imagine that he has exposed me for what I am: not merely a fraud, and a lazy thinker, but a genocidal maniac. On Dalrymple's reading, everyone who liked The End of Faith—my editor at Norton, the critics who favorably reviewed it, the deluded souls at the PEN America Foundation who awarded it their prize for nonfiction in 2005—must have simply skipped the chapter where I recommend that we murder millions of innocent people for thought crimes. Granted, the few sentences that Dalrymple lifted from my book with forensic care, like bloody fingerprints, seem alarming when viewed out of context. Indeed, I appreciated this liability when I wrote them. I am very happy to report, however, that no devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew—many of whom detested The End of Faith—has had the gall to excerpt these sentences and intentionally mislead readers the way Dalrymple has. His summary of my views is among the least honest I have come across, and his criticism of the "new atheist" bestsellers the least enlightening. This is more of an accomplishment, in fact, than it may appear. The race to the bottom has been fast and furious.

Needless to say, Dalrymple is not the first critic to respond to Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and me as though we were a single person with four heads. He is not the first to claim, somewhat paradoxically, that our criticism of religion goes much too far without, he is sorry to report, going so far as to say anything new. He is not the first professed "atheist" to suggest that, while he can get along just fine without an imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to delude themselves about God—nor is he the first to fail to see just how condescending and unimaginative one must be to believe such a thing about the rest of humanity. Dalymple is, however, the first in one respect: he is the first writer to claim that he could have produced every argument found in the "new atheist" books ("with the possible exception of Dennett's") by the tender age of 14. I do not doubt this for a moment—though this leaves me wondering how many blows to the head Dalrymple has suffered in the intervening years.

In lieu of answering our arguments against faith—in lieu, even, of noticing them—Dalrymple simply misses the point of our books outright. He misses it petulantly at first, but his obliviousness to matters of substance soon swells to something like exultation. He then delivers what he clearly imagines to be the killing blow, comparing our misbegotten work to a few religious meditations he deems especially profound. Perhaps it was meant as a further insult to us that he sought to convey the invidious gulf between the "new atheists" and certain "Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" by furnishing the readers of this journal with some of the most banal religious meanderings ever recorded. But I fear there is not this much method in Dalrymple's madness. The man appears simply lost. He sees neither what is worst about religion, nor what is best, with anything like clarity. It's a pity we don't have the 14-year-old Dalrymple to reckon with. Then we all might have learned something.

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1816,n,n
Chris Street comments are in bright green;

highlights in bold blockquotes (yellow).

Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

by Edmund Standing, ButterfliesAndWheels.com

Thanks to Mark Barratt for the link.

Also see this page in our 'Debate Points' section of the website:
That's not MY God or Religion you're criticising

Reposted from:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=280

This article by Edmund Standing seems to neatly dismiss the arguements of the theologicians who critise the New Atheists.

Recently, the popular and successful books of atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens having been receiving some public criticism from religious quarters, with the most recent coming from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. According to Williams, in their discussions of Christianity, the religion critiqued by Dawkins, Hitchens and others is not a religion he recognises as his own, and these authors are arrogantly and erroneously trying to tell Christian believers 'I know what you mean' when in fact they don't, which is apparently 'annoying' him.

The basic claim from Williams and others is that these atheist writers simply haven't taken the time to properly study what it is they are writing against, and they should study some theology and address the 'real arguments'.

Given the fact that I have studied theology and attained a BA in Theology & Religious Studies with First Class Honours, I presume Williams would not claim that I have no idea what I'm talking about, yet I still concur with the conclusions of Dawkins and Hitchens.

In the following article, I shall briefly outline the basics of Christian belief, and using his own words demonstrate what Williams holds to be true.

My conclusion is that Dawkins and co have not failed miserably in their representation of the Christian faith, and that their lack of in-depth theological study in fact does nothing to harm the veracity of their arguments.

First, let's take a quick look at the basic biblical narrative:

There is an indescribably powerful and intelligent being called God who is in existence prior to the dawn of time. For whatever reason, he decides to create the universe and pays particular attention to planet Earth. Having created the universe, Earth and all the species on it (through 'creating' the Big Bang and 'guiding' evolution in the Williams style of interpretation), he decides to focus all his attention on a collection of tribal groupings in the Middle East, in particular the Israelites who are his 'chosen people' and who he obsesses over, while apparently ignoring the rest of the world's population. He lays down numerous often primitive and arbitrary moral and ceremonial laws, then gets involved in inner tribal politics and land disputes, inciting acts of brutality, war crimes, genocide, and rape along the way. Fast forward to the Middle East under Roman occupation and God decides it's time to put in an appearance. By mystical means he comes to earth in human form, being born of a virgin. He becomes incarnate as a Jewish male and wanders around what is today Israel-Palestine, imparting pithy social commentary (but never giving any systematic explanation of how such ideas might be made politically useful), engaging in faith healing (removing 'demons' from people), magic tricks (such as walking on water and raising a dead man), and ranting on and on about sin, eternal punishment for the majority of the world's population, and the impending end of the world. He gets himself crucified, in order that he can sacrifice himself to himself for our good. A few days later he walks out of his tomb and wanders round with some of his followers (noticeably not bothering to make himself known to anyone but those who already believed in him), before 'ascending' into 'Heaven', to wait for the time when he will return to raise every human who has ever lived in bodily form for judgement, then cast most of us into a pit of fire and take a select few into his 'kingdom' for eternity where they will live happily ever after.

These are the basic building blocks upon which all Christian theology is constructed.

Williams and others can protest that of course they don't really see things in such a simplistic and manifestly implausible way, but this narrative underpins the Bible, the Church creeds, liturgies, and centuries of theological speculation.

Williams claims that '[w]hen believers pick up Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we may feel as we turn the pages: "This is not it. Whatever the religion being attacked here, it's not actually what I believe in"'. Perhaps we atheists have misread people like Williams, and maybe some deep profundity has been missed. So, let's look at what Williams claims to believe and see if that is the case.

Williams states that 'it would be utterly destructive and utterly wrong to declare from the pulpit what I did not in fact believe' and that 'offering for ordination entails taking the responsibility for the faith of the church, not just little bits of it'. What is 'the faith of the church'? Does it bear any relation to the crude narrative outlined above? The Nicene Creed is for many of the largest Christian denominations a unifying statement of faith, and emerged from early church debates about the nature of Christian faith. It is read by priests and congregations alike at every Sunday Eucharist. If Williams feels he can give assent to this document, which he clearly does as he is happy to join in its recitation and, as we have seen, he believes it would be 'utterly wrong' to proclaim something he does not believe to be true, then we can take it to be an accurate reflection of his view of reality.

Here is the Nicene Creed in full:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen

Here we have the basics that one must believe in order to be a Christian. This is the 'faith of the church', which Williams believes he is 'responsible' for proclaiming and defending. We see the story of a creator God who 'speaks' through the Israelite 'prophets', who places important and accurate information about the future in the 'Scriptures' (i.e. the Old Testament), a God who 'comes down' from and 'ascends' to what can only be an actual place called 'Heaven', who is born of a virgin mother, who was crucified 'for our sake', who rose from the dead, who is to return one day from 'Heaven' in order that he can 'raise' dead bodies back to life for 'judgement', and who will take believers into an eternal 'kingdom'. It is manifestly clear that I have not chosen to misread or misrepresent the alleged facts of Christianity, and that Dawkins or anyone else can quite reasonably read this statement of faith and decide whether or not he finds it to be plausible or fanciful, plainly fictitious nonsense.

A key allegation is that because the 'new atheists' haven't studied theology in any depth they cannot really know what they are talking about. Perhaps something important has been missed. Perhaps the Creed needs some theological reflection in order that its 'true meaning' can be discerned. Take Jesus' supposed resurrection, for example. Surely if Dawkins read theology he would understand that this should not be seen as a literal historical event entailing a dead body getting up and walking out of its tomb? Yet this is clearly not the case if one reads Williams' own words. Reacting to the suggestion of ultra-liberal American bishop John Shelby Spong that Williams surely doesn't really believe in walking corpses, Williams states that such a suggestion makes him 'quite cross', because:

I am genuinely a lot more conservative than he would like me to be. Take the Resurrection. I think he has said that of course I know what all the reputable scholars think on the subject and therefore when I talk about the risen body I must mean something other than the empty tomb. But I don't. I don't know how to persuade him but I really don't.

So, Williams does believe in walking corpses. But what about all this stuff about Jesus being God incarnate? Maybe if Dawkins and co read theology they would find that a more creative, poetic, and less literal interpretation is proposed by the likes of Williams. Again, it would seem not:

Some of the fundamental patterns of Christian teaching - the creation of the world from nothing, the utter involvement of God and Jesus Christ and the Spirit - they are to me the grammar of anything we might say. I'm not impressed when anyone says we ought to be creative about those; they are what create us, they are the realities that make it possible for us to be the human beings God wants us to be. I can't imagine wanting to be creative in respect to them any more than I could with the air I breathe.

One is led to ask again how exactly Dawkins and others have supposedly set up a straw man caricature of Christian faith, how Williams can feel that '[w]hatever the religion being attacked here, it's not actually what I believe in', given his clear assent to the notions outlined in the Creed.

At this point I should briefly concede that in order for certain aspects of the Creed to be fully understood, at least a cursory reading of Patristic theology is a necessary undertaking. Some of the phrases do have a very technical meaning, and were arrived at through an often heated process of debate. Three examples that particularly stand out are the following concepts: 'eternally begotten of the Father', 'of one Being with the Father', and 'who proceeds from the Father and the Son'. However, the core message of Christianity is not dependant on such theological obscurantism and pedantry. These phrases are derived from later reflection on what I have termed the building blocks of Christian faith. It is not necessary to understand the theological musings of early church thinkers in order to discount the underlying message of a virgin birth, demons and angels, miracles, a divine blood sacrifice, walking corpses, and heaven and hell as nonsense. Here we see a clear example of the very nature of theology, and why its study is genuinely unnecessary for Christian faith to be rejected. In principle, one should be able to judge the alleged truths of Christianity based on the biblical narratives alone, for all later theological reflection is grounded in the assumption that these narratives are an accurate reflection of world history and ultimate reality. Take out these narratives and the whole theological edifice comes tumbling down.

In theology, one will find centuries of attempts by intelligent men and women to make their manifestly irrational beliefs appear logical and coherent, but it's all based on the same few key beliefs.

The essence of theology is neatly summed up in a well known definition given by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109): fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). In fact, as a theological student, this was the first definition of theology that I was taught.

The notion of 'faith seeking understanding' demonstrates clearly how intellectually vacuous theology is

, and how low its credibility should be as an academic pursuit (in the sense of actively engaging in its production, as opposed to its purely academic study as part of the history of ideas).

Theology turns the scientific method which we have followed since the Enlightenment upon its head.

Where scientific research may start with a reasonable proposition based on prior evidence (a hypothesis) and then examine further data to see if this proposition is factually accurate, or may simply lead to the discovery of data which no-one had previously predicted, theology starts with the acceptance of ideas that have no factual basis or for which the evidence is appallingly weak and proudly proclaims acceptance of these ideas on the basis of 'faith' as a virtue, and then goes on to attempt to make these a priori beliefs appear intelligible and rational.

In other words, the 'results' of theology have been arrived at before study to confirm them has taken place. The theologian does not approach the basic tenets of Christian faith as possible truths to be tested for logical consistency; he or she instead begins with the conclusion that a series of internally incoherent, pre-scientific, and fantastic 'beliefs' derived from 'faith' are true, and then attempts to dress these beliefs up in the clothes of intellectual credibility.

Theology is not in this sense a proper academic pursuit, but is instead the attempt to mask superstition in a fog of pseudo-intellectual verbiage. Williams is good at this.

We already know what he believes about God, Jesus, and so on from his own words and from his assent to church doctrine, but then when speaking publicly he attempts to muddy the waters with vapid rhetoric such as the following from his recent lecture:

The religious believer says that moral integrity, self-introspection, honesty and trust are styles of living that connect with the character of an eternal and free agency, the agency most religions call God. Agree or disagree, but I would say to critics, at least grasp what is being talked about. Often the atheist seems to be talking about something else.

No, Dr Williams, the atheist is not 'talking about something else', but the very beliefs you proclaim to be true.

Dressing up Christian ideas about God in language such as 'an eternal and free agency' is nothing but the creation of a smokescreen of meaningless jargon in an attempt to make superstition appear sophisticated.

It seems highly likely from the words of Williams that he himself has not bothered to read the writings he claims to be criticising.

It seems amazing that he can blandly relate Christian belief to 'moral integrity, self-introspection, honesty and trust', without engaging with Dawkins' sharp critiques of the notion of religiously and biblically derived morality in The God Delusion.

What we seem to be seeing is the replaying of a centuries old argument so weak that even a school child should be able to unpick it - the notion that belief in God is integrally linked to ethical standards, with its implication that atheists are somehow unable to be moral because they don't believe in a divine watchman who will one day bring judgement upon us.

Have Dawkins, Hitchens, and numerous other atheist thinkers grossly misrepresented Christianity? Can Christian believers justifiably claim that the religion they find written of by such thinkers is something other than the one they at least pay lip service to? No, and no, again.

Must Dawkins and others undertake an arduous trawling through centuries of theological waffle in order to reject religious belief? Absolutely not.

The claims of Williams and others like him are nothing more than knee-jerk reactions against rationalism. They complain that their faith is being misunderstood when it seems that they themselves are the ones who are misrepresenting what they actually believe.

How the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who by his own admission believes in all the core teachings of the Christian faith, can claim that atheist critiques avoid the so-called 'real arguments' is beyond me. The fact is, there are no 'real arguments'.

Theology is at bottom a matter of faith, not genuine intellectual argument. Theologians can continue to write endless books and articles using dense and 'learned' tones, but there really is no need for atheists to read them as they all boil down to the same ultimate beliefs, beliefs that atheists, quite rightly in my view, reject on the basis that they do not have intellectual or moral credibility.

Edmund Standing holds a BA in Theology & Religious Studies and an MA in Critical & Cultural Theory

The New Athiesm: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen

reposted from: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=928
via NSS Newsline October 5th

The New Athiesm: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen

By Mitchell Cohen

Fall 2007

There has been fierce debate over the past several decades about the role of religion in American politics. From the late 1970s and on, religious conservatives played an increasingly vociferous public role and were important in pushing the country to the right--much to the chagrin of both secular and religious liberals.

Now there seems to be a shift in mood. A number of prominent authors and scientists have published books in the past year that advocate a "New Atheism."

The books, which include Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great, have sparked considerable public controversy across the political spectrum. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen weighs in on the phenomenon in a recent interview with the left-wing Berlin weekly Jungleworld.

Cohen is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His article on the current state of French politics ("France: Red Rose, Blue Grip") appears in the Dissent's Fall 2007 issue.

Question: Atheism seems to sell in the United States. There are “New Atheist” best sellers. At the same time, “New Atheists” claim to be repressed by widespread American religious sensibilities. Why is atheism having such resonance?

Mitchell Cohen: Best sellers have contexts. The context today is a reaction against politicized and intolerant religious fundamentalists who have acted aggressively to impose their views of the world on American politics and public life for several decades. A strong intellectual challenge to them has been long overdue.

At the same time, I think we should avoid talking about “best-sellers” and about the relation between religion and politics in the U.S. in a simplistic way. Two decades ago Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was a best seller even though it is pretty incomprehensible if you lack familiarity with Heidegger, Deconstructionism and Leo Strauss. The context? Thousands probably purchased this conservative tome because they heard about the “culture wars” and that universities were full of professors teaching subversive ideas. But another book, the Bible, also sold pretty well back then (and now) and I suspect is read more than Bloom.

The U.S. is, and has always has been, a country in which religions thrived, partly due to traditions of tolerance and an acceptance of pluralism fostered by the separation of religion and state.

It goes back to the earliest phases of American history. This doesn’t mean there hasn’t been prejudice (for example, against Catholics in the nineteenth century). And racial prejudice and persecution constitute a whole other, vicious matter, the greatest disgrace of American history. Nonetheless,

the U.S. was the first country whose constitution barred state support for a national church, and that has had a long-term impact.

I rarely quote George Washington, but it seems to me that he had the right idea when he wrote, in a letter to the Jews of Rhode Island in 1790, that American citizens ought all to “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” that one should not speak solely of “toleration…as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed” basic rights. The government, he went on, ought to give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and to require only that those who “live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no God.

It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Generally speaking, freedom of conscience and the absence of persecution helped to facilitate the pursuit of religious beliefs in non-threatening ways.

There have been religious revival movements throughout all of American history, often at times or in the aftermath of big changes. Their legacies are mixed, to say the least. Sometimes they furthered a message of democratic populism; often they promoted nativism and ignorance. My point is that the politics of religion in the U.S. is multidimensional. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the name of white Christianity. It represented American history at its ugliest. But the civil rights movement, which was perhaps our most glorious and important moral moment, was significantly religious in its leadership and mobilized out of black churches. And, of course, its greatest leader was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

But

since the late 1970s there have been great pressures to weaken the constitutional separation of religion and state, and intolerance has come with these efforts.

These developments correspond to the rising influence of the religious right. President George Bush’s invocations of the deity are not a new phenomenon (read speeches of American presidents throughout the last two and a half centuries), although many politicians have also done so just for the political advantage. Most people think Bush’s religiosity is sincere and I see no reason to doubt that–-just the consequences of politicized religion. Well, I do more than just doubt the consequences.

No one took Nixon’s religiosity too seriously. It was Jimmy Carter, a conservative Democrat who began to re-inject religious sanctimony in more recent times. But it worked to Reagan’s advantage and the Republicans successfully mobilized right-wingers and many Evangelicals into their ranks (American evangelicals are in fact diverse). Reagan gave them an honored place under his political tent in the 1980s. This required many public gestures to them on his part and lots of moral support. The neoconservatives also played a role. Back in the mid-1990s I heard one of their leading figures, Midge Decter, declare that the major problem of intolerance in America was “liberal” intolerance of fundamentalists.

Politically, a new situation arose under the current Bush administration partly because Republicans controlled all three branches of government after the elections of 2000 (and until this past year). Recall the absurd situation when a Republican dominated Congress was called back into session, prodded by the religious right, to debate whether or not life support systems should be maintained on a brain-dead woman in Florida. I think a good many people were appalled at this. Rightly so and not least since these same Republicans usually insisted on “keeping big government out of our lives.” A key aspect of American political change in recent decades was the growth of mobilized right-wing religious activism within the Republican Party along with a decline of unions which were key mobilizing forces within the Democratic Party. A dramatic reversal of that development would be salutary.

So there has been, generally speaking, a strong injection of religiosity into the American public sphere, especially but not just under the Bush administration.

It has chipped away at what Thomas Jefferson once called the wall of separation between religion and state.

There have been struggles over education in some states because of religious activists who want “creation science” taught rather than Darwin.

Polls show an unusual number of Americans actually believe in some ideas like that, although I have yet to hear anyone in the Bush administration suggest that “Biblical science” —say, the principles of physics implied by Joshua’s successful command of the sun to stand still in the Bible—should be the basis of a missile defense system.

(And I will admit that the Bush administration itself raises interesting questions about the idea of evolution). An additional important and worrisome dimension that needs to be noted is the impact of Bush’s appointments to the Supreme Court, which has become very conservative. The status of abortion rights, long a target of religious conservatives, is in question.

As I said,

the “New Atheism” responds to this religious mobilization and its baneful effects on politics, culture and political life. Recall the fundamentalist preachers who declared on television two days after 9/11 that those terrible attacks were really God’s punishment of the U.S. for its sinners.

The late Reverend Jerry Falwell, a stalwart of the “conservative revolution” from the Reagan era and on (and a frequent guest on TV talk shows), declared that Americans “probably got what we deserved.” He added that “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians…the ACLU, the People for the American Way” were responsible because “all of them have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You made this happen.’”

Reverend Pat Robertson, another political holy man, concurred. Robertson and Falwell hemmed and hawed when they were attacked for these remarks and it is safe to say that most Americans, including the overwhelming majority of religious Americans, were undoubtedly disgusted by them. It's hard to imagine Bin Laden disagreeing with Robertson and Falwell on this. And, I am sad to say, the mental structure that produces such statements has a lot in common with a part of the extreme left, those who insist that no matter what happens in the world, the U.S. is somehow, “in the final analysis,” liable and everyone else its victim—and so 9/11 was really the fault of the U.S. Just remove a word like ‘pagan’ from Falwell’s statement and replace it with ‘imperialists.’

The reassertion of religion is usually, although not always, a conservatizing tool. Fortunately, there has now been a political shift against the right in the U.S. It is not a radical move left. Still,

after years in retreat, secular intellectuals are reasserting themselves. This is very much to the good. Part of it is due to Iraq. Many Americans are wondering and worrying a lot these days. Bush’s ratings are very low and this is a president identified strongly with religiosity and who used messianic motifs—vigorously—to justify a war that has gone very wrong.

But again it is a multifaceted situation.

I suspect that many more people have seen Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ than have thought about Oxford professor Richard Dawkins’s argument against “intelligent design” as proof of the existence of a god.

Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion has been a best seller in the U.S. and he was on the cover of Time. Journalist Christopher Hitchens’s book God is not Great has provoked considerable irritation and controversy. Perhaps the angry reactions against authors like these (the two are actually British in origins) and the rush by some to dismiss them indicate a certain success on their part in forcing people to think afresh about the efforts to privilege religion in public life. Fresh thinking is a positive thing. Still, I would urge some caution when speaking of “New Atheists” as if they were a school. There are differences among them. I would also point out that religious liberals are not free of sanctimony.

Question: Is the debate on “the New Atheism” important for leftwing intellectuals in the U.S.?

M.C: I think this debate raises some poignant challenges to the left both in the U.S. and around the world. (The new religious aggressiveness is not just an American phenomenon). The left everywhere ought to be identified with both tolerance (this has not always been so) and with critical intelligence—the latter often means challenging religious precepts, ambitions and institutionalized power. The hard thing is to balance the tolerance and the criticism, to insist on pluralism but not to allow religion to privilege itself in the public realm. The left should always want people to think for themselves, but this cannot mean “you must be secular like me” since it also should not mean “you must be religious like me.”

Religion is a fairly broad category and leftists need to make distinctions among different types of religious behavior and religious commitments just as they would insist that “there are leftists and there are leftists.” After all, there are “leftists” who want a freer, more egalitarian world and there are Stalinists (or people who are still trapped within Stalinist mental structures, even if only implicitly). And there are religious leftists and liberals who are allies and comrades of secular leftists. While I am thoroughly secular, I know many religious people who are fine, thoughtful people—and I know many secularists who have been able to justify in left-wing language either mass murder, terror or religious fanaticism. These things are “objectively” anti-imperialist, you know, especially when they come from the Mideast. I have heard people—Americans and Europeans—throw fits about Bush’s religiosity all while they always “understand” Hezbollah or Hamas.

Here we come to another side to this story. Responses by liberals and the left to religious aggressiveness have sometimes been timid and sometimes self-deceptive. The left has always had a problem with the modern liberal state for social and economic reasons. But that liberal state did not come about simply because of “the rise of the bourgeoisie,” as an old, reductionist mantra had it. It also arose, especially in Europe, because of religious civil wars that finally exhausted murderous, God-crazed combatants; a political space and order, a domain of adjudication, was needed above organized holy warriors.

Of course, I am oversimplifying processes that took different paths in different countries over considerable time and didn’t all turn out the same way. Still, we cannot say often enough today that the modern liberal state was an act against civil wars created by societies dominated by religion; it is only as the domination of the public realm by religion ends that open, liberal, and social democratic (or socialist, if you prefer) societies become possible. When religious movements are triumphalist, when they believe that they can assert themselves inexorably in the public realm, liberal and social democratic values are jeopardized. (Those of us who identify with the left want liberal states to be social-democratized—but that is another matter and one that is very complicated and multidimensional in our globalizing era.)

In my view, a secular state needs a humanist basis. Yes, that means that I think secular humanist culture should be privileged in liberal democracy (or in what I would prefer, social democracy) but not religion.

The reason is that it can encompass religious lives, whereas religious culture cannot do the same for secularism and atheism. Humanism, with its Renaissance origins (among thinkers who were mostly religious in some way), fostered pluralism by legitimizing multiple authorities, leading people to evaluate for themselves, to see varied points of view, not just to accept a last word from one authority

Some of these arguments and formulations were presented before in a different context in Mitchell Cohen, “Auto-Emancipation and Anti-Semitism (Homage to Bernard-Lazare),” Jewish Social Studies, Fall 2003.

. These are prerequisites of citizenship in a free, pluralistic society – a society that assumes its members are grown-ups and can make choices about different options in life—secular, religious, or some mix—and then also can legitimately change their minds.

But pluralism, radicalized, can also create a sense that nothing unites or even links people; that linkage is essential for citizens in a democratic society. I think that this problem of fragmentation can be offset by an amended version of what John Rawls, the American philosopher, called “public reason.” Democratic debate must finally address “citizens as citizens.” I think citizens must be able to express arguments on the basis of their own particularities—whether political, cultural, religious—but there must be a point at which they translate their deliberations and claims into a common political language. (Rawls thought to separate public reason and secular reason, but I would demur on that).

It seems to me that aggressive efforts at some form of religious domination of the public realm in the U.S. and elsewhere undermine the possibilities of common political language. Let me make this stronger.

If I express my secular humanist ideas publicly, if I try to persuade fellow citizens of them, I must be open to criticism—fierce criticism, down to the basics, up to the dots on the i’s of my ideas, every word and sentiment. I can survive those criticisms. I may even change my ideas. After all, the different bases of my ideas may be wrong, in whole or part.

This is an approach to Humanism that I call Scientific Humanism.

But what happens when religious-political claims are open to the same challenge? If a Muslim friend, on the basis of his profound religious convictions, makes an argument for a law that is to govern me, shall I challenge his belief in Muhammad’s prophetic role? Anyone who knows some history knows it is likely to lead to religious wars.

The alternative is to ask him (or her) to secularize the principles of argument.

But left-wing illiberalism has also been a catastrophe—both in economic and cultural matters—and it betrays what has always been best in left-wing thinking. I say this as a person of the left. We shouldn’t forget that parts of the left have acted just like religious fanatics.

Think of Leninists (and, of course, Stalinists) with an infallible doctrine (“the science of society”), organized like a church, purging now and then, persecuting non-believers (whether social democratic or Christian or whatever). I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the mind-set of left-wing sects who believe that the whole world would be set aright if everyone could just grasp properly the entirety of their theories, just put them exactly in place, and the statement in early July by the Pope that Orthodox and Protestant Christianity are not “true” forms of Christianity. Years ago I wrote a book on Lucien Goldmann, the remarkable Romanian-French Marxist humanist who advocated a liberal – rather than an orthodox -- socialism back in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing also that the left should be heir to the best ideas of liberalism like tolerance, respect for the individual and equality before the law. His chef d’oeuvre, a book entitled The Hidden God, examined the world-views of Pascal and Racine in the context of religious, economic and political change. When I read his description of the sects within Jansenism, the Augustinian movement in seventeenth century France, I remember being struck by the comparison with Bolshevik sects of the 1920s (but also some left-wing groupuscules—Maoist, Trotskyist, etc.—that I came across in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s).

Left-wing illiberalism is not just a matter of some left-over believers of old style Marxist orthodoxies. It also animates important segments of the post-modern left. A prime example of this is Antonio Negri who tells us (together with Michael Hardt, his co-author of Empire) that there is a liberating global “multitude” whose “body” can “configure itself as a telos.” This quasi-religious language—please, save us from it!—is really a post-modern reinvention of tiers-mondisme, a failed left-wing doctrine that provided illusions but not much help for the difficult, painful problems of the Third World. It is no wonder that Negri describes Khomeini’s victory in Iran as “the first postmodernist revolution.” Negri’s works have been best sellers on US campuses. Notably, this has been after some two decades in which right-wing religiosity inserted itself so forcefully into the American scene—and at a time when secular, liberal, and social democratic intellectuals were relatively weak (actually, they still are). Negri also needs to be demystified. The American left needs stronger unions that are appropriate to today’s social and economic life—not imaginary multitudes substituting for older Marxist notions of the working class. The same goes globally.

If someone tells you that Islamic extremists are part of a “liberating” multitude because they are against imperialism, remind them that some folks in an earlier generation of leftists were quite able to be anti-imperialist and also to be against the Stalin-Hitler pact. They didn’t need hundreds of pages of theoretical delirium to figure it out. And remember that there were leftists whose theoretical hallucinations led them to imagine that the Second World War was little more than a reprise of conflicts among imperialists. I say that despite the fact that I think it is a mistake to make today’s Islamic extremists simply a function of totalitarianism, as if they are the same sort of phenomenon as Hitler or Stalin. They certainly are totalitarian in many ways, but I question the use of “totalitarianism” as a master-category. It’s too easy.

Nonetheless, I am struck at how parts of the extreme left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The objects excused are different but the patterns of apologetics are sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once called ‘the left that doesn’t learn.’ But there are others—liberals and conservatives—who haven’t learned either, or who suffer memory lapse when it comes to all the persecutions and religious wars in the fabric of Western history and seem to forget the historical importance of the domestication of religion within a liberal democratic framework. There has been excessive indulgence of aggressive political religiosity, whether it is the self-righteous Christian right in the U.S., belligerent political Islamism in the Mideast and beyond, or the fanatical religious nationalism of the Israeli settler movements.

Question: What do you think about the neglect by most of the New Atheists of efforts by Jewish, Christian, and other religious philosophies to address important questions of political theory?

M.C.: John Dewey, the American pragmatist (a liberal with very different methods from those of Rawls) was right when he said “metaphysics has had its day and if the truths Hegel saw cannot be stated as direct practical truths, they are not true.” I’d make pretty much the same point about the use of religious philosophies in contemporary political debate. If Jewish, Christian, and other religious philosophies develop good ideas about politics and ethics—certainly they have at times—those ideas ought to be translatable today into secular terms and argued.

Catholicism has a long, distinguished tradition of discussing “Just War” and there are many powerful ideas in it, but their persuasiveness in contemporary democratic debate cannot rest on views of the Trinity. Jewish philosophers have many valuable things to say about social justice, but their persuasiveness cannot depend on whether or not Moses received Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Islam has eminent traditions of legal thought, but their values for a democratic society today cannot rest on the belief that Muhammad was a prophet. They must be presented in terms that are debatable by a non-Muslim.

Question: Do you think that belief in naturalism and/or evolutionism on the part of the New Atheists is just a replacement for belief in god?

M.C.: No. The question presumes that scientific research is the epistemological equivalent of religious belief. The starting point of any scientist is that he or she can be proven wrong.

Question: Isn't the pro-Darwin propaganda of the New Atheists really a step back? Doesn’t it lose sight of the fact that a critique of the idea of the survival of the fittest is also a critique of a brutal society?

M.C.: No to the first question. Not necessarily to the second. There is a phenomenon called “Social Darwinism” and it has a long, unpleasant history. If I recall correctly, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.’ Darwin’s mind may have been influenced by what he saw before him in the brutal world of nineteenth century capitalism, especially in Britain—whose thinking is not shaped by the world they live in? —but that isn’t an argument for or against his contentions in The Origin of Species, let alone the basis for judgments about how he makes them or the evidence amassed by contemporary evolutionary biologists. Darwin’s work—and theirs—is not ‘propaganda.’ Its main purpose is not a moral critique or embrace of the idea of “survival of the fittest,” but an attempt to explain evolutionary processes in nature. We are part of nature so we are part of those processes. One can try to draw different types of moral or political conclusions from evolution, but that has been the source of philosophical debate for a very long time. In contemporary public debates, the chief objection to Darwin comes from people who must somehow, in someway prove Biblical veracity. No matter how much evidence is amassed they will twist and turn until they arrive where they want to be. I think issues of ‘moral evolution’ must be approached in very complicated and spectacle ways. Any intelligent person must grant that the twentieth century raises pretty tough questions about anything we’d call ‘humanity’s moral evolution’ – but no less about ‘intelligent design,’ let alone a morally informed intelligent design.

A fellow named Marx wanted to dedicate volume two of a treatise entitled Capital to Darwin. One of the great problems of Marxism—actually, less so in Marx himself than in the thinking of many of his followers—was the easy, wobbly assimilation of ‘science’ into a teleological social and historical theory. It is much more useful, perhaps, to remember the distinction between necessity and freedom and leave the teleology out. Old fashioned Marxists used to imagine philosophically that freedom would evolve naturally, out of historical necessity, and virtually everyone knows now how naïve and simplistic that was. It also implied that you didn’t really have to do anything to become free—an anomalous notion. But just as politics doesn’t simply follow economic development, so politics, economics and history don’t simply correspond to or follow natural developments.

The left has had some pretty bad moments when it comes to the idea of science. Remember how Stalin wanted to abolish genetics because it conflicted with his ‘scientific’ theory? This was no prelude to human liberation, but it certainly reminds me of “Creation science.” No matter what the evidence, you twist and turn until you prove your original point or aim—or insight or belief—right.

In any event, if we ask if Darwin’s work justifies a ruthless market society or the ruthless application of “market principles”, it seems to me that the answer is: of course not. The fact that genetic inheritance makes some people more and some people less prone to certain diseases doesn’t justify abandoning scientific research into their cures – or even just their treatments (I am a social democrat). We are born into pre-existing political, social, and economic worlds, and while there was no decision by humanity to descend “from some pre-existing form,” to borrow Darwin’s words, that should hardly prevent us from making sure that every citizen is as fit as possible, that is, have good health insurance.