Rejection of deities: agnosticism & atheism

A/theism describes your belief state.

An atheist does not believe in God.
A theist believes in God.

A/gnosticism describes your knowledge state.

An agnostic would not claim to know what they believe for sure.
A gnostic would claim to know what they believe for sure.

A Gnostic atheist is called: Strong atheism: atheists (do not believe in God) who do claim to know for sure (Gnosticism) that there is no God. This is a rare position, it’s difficult to be absolutely sure of anything – let alone a negative. Being sure that something does not exist seems to require that you know everything – that you know that at no time or place in reality did a thing ever exist. Especially since God is beyond the physical world – it’s difficult to rule it out since our knowledge does not reach that far.

An agnostic atheist is called: Weak atheism: atheists (do not believe in God) who would not claim to know for sure (agnosticism) that there is no God. Dawkins says, if 7 is being absolutely sure there is no God, he’s at a 6. Most atheists are weak atheists. They claim simply that we lack sufficient justification for belief in God and therefore should not believe in God.

Russell’s teapot illustrates weak atheism: Russell asked you to imagine the idea that there is a teapot flying around Saturn. We have no evidence for this, but also none against it. We can’t prove nor disprove this claim. So what should we believe? Russell says we should not believe in this teapot even though there is no evidence on either side – because the only justifiable reason to believe in something is if there is a reason to believe in it.

It’s not like there being no evidence/proof on either side means it’s just up to us what we want to believe – in such cases, not believing is the logical reaction.

New Atheism & its criticisms of religion

Secularism is the view that religion and government should be separate. Religion should be a matter of private belief.

Militant atheism or anti-theism: the view that religion is harmful even as a private belief and thus society would be better off without it. People should be legally free to believe it in their private lives, but there should be social and cultural pressure against holding religious beliefs.

Militant atheism, sometimes called anti-theism, goes further than standard secularism by claiming that we should completely get rid of religion, even from private life, because it is harmful even as a private belief.

“I’d like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people’s lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.” – Dawkins

Non-thinking

Freud suggested that if there were an 11^th commandment, it would be “thou shalt not question”.

“When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.” – Freud.

Dawkins argues that religion bad for society because encourages irrational thinking. It encourages people to take things on faith instead of reason and evidence.

Dawkins points to the story of the doubting Thomas, Jesus’ disciple who didn’t believe he had risen until being shown the evidence of his wounds from the crucifixion. Jesus implied that his other disciples was better than Thomas because their faith was so strong that they didn’t need evidence. This encourages an unscientific mindset.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” – Dawkins.

Infantile worldview

Freud argues that belief in religion is caused by the psychological fear of a chaotic, unpredictable world and a fear of adult life and its responsibilities. During childhood, order is represented by the father. So, religious people find comfort by projecting an order-providing eternal father – God – onto reality. “Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfilment” without which some would be in danger of mental harm due to being “unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life”.

“religion may be altogether disregarded … It’s doctrines carry with it the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race”. – Freud.

Dawkins argues that an irrational mind will just believe whatever it wants rather than search for the truth. Dawkins is influenced by Freud, agreeing that religion is the result of childish wishful thinking regarding death.

“Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps especially in children, a tendency to believe what you’re told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there is no evidence.” – Dawkins.

Dawkins is also critical of what he describes as the infantile way that religion provides meaning and purpose to people, rather than enabling them to create it for themselves:

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” – Dawkins.

Dawkins compares religion to fairy stories that children learn like the tooth fairy. It’s an unscientific childish attempt to explain reality.

impedes scientific progress

Science vs religion as a source of truth & scientific progress

Religion once had total power and authority over culture, life and truth itself. This led to an uneasy relationship with science, especially during the enlightenment period when science really began to emerge as a source of truth. The source of the tension was twofold. Science had its own method for discovering truths which was independent of religious authority. Secondly, science began to make discoveries which contradicted religious beliefs. This motivated religious leaders to try and impede scientific progress.

The idea that the earth was the centre of the universe was important to Christians as it fit with their belief that humans are a special part of creation made in God’s image for a unique purpose. Galileo discovered that actually the earth orbits the Sun. The Church imprisoned Galileo and forced him to state publicly that he was wrong.

“In questions of science, the authority of thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual” – Galileo.

Darwin’s theory of evolution contradicted the Christian view that were directly created by God and are not like other animals due to being made in the ‘image of God’. Evolution showed that in fact we evolved gradually over millions of years and that actually there was no clear line when human beings emerged and the ancestor species that we evolved from ended.

Scientific understanding of the universe works without the need for God. Laplace wrote a book on the workings of the universe, claiming to have ‘no need’ of the hypothesis that there is a God. More recently, Stephen Hawking made the same claim.

Dawkins argues that science has shown religion to be pointless as a means of discovering truth. Not only is religion pointless, it actively stands in the way of scientific progress. It teaches people to be satisfied with God as an explanation rather than search for the true scientific explanation. It is against important areas of research like stem cell research. It convinces people to not believe in evolution.

Religious responses to New Atheism

rejection by religious groups of New Atheist claims regarding incompatibility of science and religion

Response to Dawkins: McGrath, Collins & Polkinghorne: only fundamentalist literalists have unreasonable unscientific faith

Karl Rahner: Evolution is simply how God designed us, so it’s still true that God designed and created us. In 1950, Pope Pius XII declared that there is no inconsistency between evolution and Christian belief.

McGrath points out that even back in medieval Christianity there was an appreciation that the Bible involved not just literal language but also allegorical and analogical language as well as parables for moral teaching.

Collins agrees, arguing that literalism is inconsistent with scientific knowledge. He points out that Augustine encouraged us to realise that Genesis is ultimately beyond our understanding.

“[Genesis] was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.” – Collins.

Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.” – Collins

Polkinghorne also rejects literalism and the type of creationism that is opposed to evolution and therefore opposed to science

“I am certainly not a creationist in that curious North American sense, which implies interpreting Genesis 1 in a flat-footed literal way and supposing that evolution is wrong.” – Polkinghorne.

Polkinghorne argues that this approach is not only scientifically wrong but also theologically. It fails to appreciate that the Bible contains many different genres of which literal fact stating is only one.

“Reading Genesis 1 as if it were a divinely dictated scientific text, intended to save us the trouble of actually doing science, is to make a similar kind of error.” – Polkinghorne

Increase in fundamentalist religious activity relating to morality and community

New atheism has challenged traditional religion and its place in society. This has created a backlash effect where some religious people have become more conservative and even fundamentalist in order to hang onto the traditional values that new atheism is trying to undermine.

For example, traditionally, homosexuality, abortion, stem cell research and gender equality were all bad according to Christianity – and new atheism claims that religion is bad for being against such things. So now we have the rise of a backlash and move towards conservatism on these issues. E.g. the striking down of the roe v wade supreme court decision allowing states to criminalise aborition.

Increase in religious apologists (defending religion) in media

Much of the battle between new atheism and religion takes place culturally and this often includes the media. There has been a rise in popularity of religious apologists – defenders of religion – appearing on the media to debate and defend religion. E.g. W L Craig, McGrath, Rowan Williams the previous archbishop of canterbury. Throughout history the archbishop of canterbury would not have engaged in debates with famous atheists – but Williams did debate Dawkins because of this increasing need for religion to defend itself against the new atheist attack.

The success of religious responses to atheistic arguments

Atheistic argument 1: religion is and promotes non-thinking

Dawkins argues that religion bad for society because encourages irrational thinking. It encourages people to take things on faith instead of reason and evidence.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” – Dawkins.

Religious response: McGrath’s response: religious belief is rational. To defend the rationality of religious belief, McGrath points to Aquinas’ 5 ways, explaining that they were meant to show the “inner consistency of belief in God”, not provide foundational evidence for God.

Faith in God thus offers a better ‘empirical fit’ with the world than the alternative that order is the result of mere chance.

Aquinas never speaks of his ways as being ‘proofs’ of God’s existence. McGrath says that “Dawkins misunderstands an a posteriori demonstration of the coherence of faith and observation to be an a priori proof of faith”.

McGrath’s response: religious belief is rational. To defend the rationality of religious belief, McGrath points to Aquinas’ 5 ways, explaining that they were meant to show the “inner consistency of belief in God”.

McGrath points out that Aquinas never speaks of his ways as being ‘proofs’ of God’s existence. Dawkins doesn’t understand that a posteriori arguments are only meant to show that there are logical reasons to believe in God. They are not meant to be absolute a priori proofs of faith.

McGrath’s point is that Aquinas’ 5 ways may not prove the truth of God, but they do show that a logical rational argument for God’s existence can be made and believed in. Belief in God can therefore be rational. You might think that Aquinas’ argument is incorrect, but you can’t think they aren’t arguments. So, belief in God can involve rational argument and thus can be rational.

Evaluation of religious response: Response to McGrath: just because something is internally consistent and reasonable, that doesn’t justify belief in it. To justify belief, especially to the degree religious people do such that they base the meaning and purpose of their lives on it, arguably requires evidence that supports the belief.

Furthermore, consider Dawkins’ point about the multiple religions that exist – by McGrath’s standard it is ‘reasonable’ to believe in any of them – but they can’t all be true and there’s no ‘reasonable’ way to choose any particular one of them. So, religious belief is not reasonable or rational. It is non-thinking.

Atheistic argument 2: religion is an infantile worldview

Dawkins is also critical of what he describes as the infantile way that religion provides meaning and purpose to people, rather than enabling them to create it for themselves:

Dawkins compares religion to fairy stories that children learn like the tooth fairy. It’s an unscientific childish attempt to explain reality.

Religious response: McGrath responds that many reasonable people have converted to religion long after childhood, such as himself and the philosopher Antony Flew. So, religion cannot just be an irrational belief caused by indoctrination of children. The analogy with Santa Claus or the tooth fairy is flawed since there are no adults who believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.

Evaluation of religious response: Dawkins and Freud’s argument is therefore unsuccessful. Dawkins and Freud could be right that there are some infantile reasons that some people believe in God, but it is an overgeneralisation to think that is true of all religious believers.

Furthermore, Dawkins ignores other obvious and important motivations for religious belief such as the need for moral and spiritual guidance/direction. These are not childish motivations.

Atheist argument 3: religion is unscientific and impedes scientific progress

New atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens and Greyling argue that the Church impeded scientific progress regarding evolution and locked up Galileo. Today they still try and prevent stem cell research.

Religious response: McGrath, Polkinghorne & Collins: it’s only fundamentalists who are non-thinking and unscientific. Collins supports stem cell research. You can’t blame all religion and aim to get rid of all religion (as New atheists do) just because of the ‘lunatic fringe’.

Evaluation of religious response: Dawkins and Harris respond that although it’s true that fundamentalists are the main problem, moderate believers contribute to the problem of fundamentalism by demanding that faith be respected. The problem is that fundamentalists also have faith and moderates make faith difficult to criticise when they demand that it be respected. This makes fundamentalism difficult to criticise too.