{"id":3455,"date":"2017-11-06T08:31:16","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T05:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3455"},"modified":"2017-11-06T08:31:16","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T05:31:16","slug":"god-is-not-great-the-atheist-assault-on-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3455\/god-is-not-great-the-atheist-assault-on-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"God Is Not Great: The Atheist Assault On Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“Boldness was not formerly a characteristic of atheists as such. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.” <\/em>\u2014Edmund Burke<\/p>\n

A<\/strong>LARMED BY THE RISING POWER <\/strong>of religion around the world, atheists in the West today have grown more outspoken and militant. What we are witnessing in America is atheist backlash. The atheists thought they were winning, but now they realize that, far from dying quietly, religion is on the global upswing. So the atheists are striking back, using all the resources they can command. This is not a religious war but a war over religion, and it has been declared by leading Western atheists who have commenced hostilities.<\/p>\n

Statistics seem to suggest that in America the number of atheists is growing. The Pluralism Project at Harvard reports that people with no religious affiliation now number nearly forty million. That’s almost 15 percent of the population, up from less than 10 percent in 1990, and so a virtual doubling of the atheist ranks in a single decade. Science writer John Horgan boasts that “there are more of us heathens out there than you might guess.” It’s unclear from the data if there are more atheists, or simply more people who are open about their atheism.<\/p>\n

Atheists come in different varieties, making up their own sectarian camps. There are secularists, nonbelievers, non-theists, apatheists, anti-theists, agnostics, skeptics, free thinkers, and humanists. Fine distinctions separate some of these groups. While agnostics say they don’t know whether God exists, apatheists say they don’t care. Some of these groups are not technically atheist because an atheist is one who declares God does not exist. But even so they are de facto atheists, because their ignorance and indifference amounts to a practical rejection of God’s role in the world. In this book I use the term atheist in its broad sense to refer to those who deny God and live as if He did not exist.<\/p>\n

The distinguishing element of modern atheism is its intellectual militancy and moral self-confidence. We have seen a spate of atheist books in recent years, like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, <\/em>Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, <\/em>Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis, <\/em>and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. <\/em>Other writers, like E. 0. Wilson, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker, have also weighed in with anti- religious and anti-Christian tracts. In Europe, the Wall Street Journal <\/em>reports, philosopher Michel Onfray has rallied the unbelievers with his bestselling Atheist Manifesto, <\/em>which posits a “final battle” against the forces of Christianity.<\/p>\n

Never before have we seen what we are seeing now, which is what Dawkins terms a widespread assertion of “atheist pride.” Prominent atheists are staging a huge “coming out” party. Two of them, American philosopher Daniel Dennett and British biologist Richard Dawkins, published articles calling on fellow unbelievers to give up the term “atheist,” as the term, they suggested, has such negative connotations. Their alternative? Dennett and Dawkins want to be called “brights.” Yes, “brights,” as in “I am a bright.\u201d Dawkins defines a bright as one who espouses “a worldview that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.” According to Dennett, “We brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny\u2014or God.” Dennett’s implication is clear: brights are the smart people who don’t fall for silly superstitions.
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\nBrights and other nonbelievers are not impressed with the growth of religious belief around the world. When I published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle <\/em>detailing this growth, I received lots of indignant letters. One theme stood out: the stupidity or irrationality of believers. “The reason that religious tribes are growing around the world is that it is much easier to believe in the unproven than to think and to ask questions.\u201d “Most of the world is impoverished, uneducated, and plagued by war and disease. So I take little solace that so many of the besieged believe in fairy tales in order to make their lives a little easier.\u201d “It’s amazing that anyone with an ounce of sense can believe in gods, spooks, and leprechauns. No wonder the world is such a mess with so many irrational people in it.\u201d “The world is already overcrowded. So thank heaven we atheists are keeping our number down. The poor, religious people in other countries seem to be breeding like mice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, there is a bit of arrogance here, but in the view of the atheists and the brights, it is justified. Long considered a marginal and reticent minority, atheists are now lashing out at religion with enormous gusto. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg writes, “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.” Sam Harris in The End of Faith <\/em>condemns what he terms “the lunatic influence of religious belief.” Christopher Hitchens writes, All religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first place.” Dawkins adds, “The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”<\/p>\n

What gives the atheists such confidence? The answer, in a word, is science. Many atheists believe that modern science\u2014the best known way to accumulate knowledge, the proven technique for giving us airplanes and computers and drugs that kill bacteria\u2014has vindicated the nonbeliever’s position. And it seems that a majority of scientists in the United States are atheists. Only 40 percent\u2014a sizable minority, but a minority nevertheless\u2014believe in a personal God. And among members of the elite National Academy of Sciences, only 7 percent of scientists can be counted among the ranks of the believers.” These figures have remained generally consistent over several decades, with the proportion of atheists rising slightly.<\/p>\n

But what is it about science that supports atheism? For one, science seems to work better than religion. “We can pray over the cholera victim,” Carl Sagan writes, “or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours.” In such cases, Sagan points out, even Christians are likely to supplement their prayers with medicine. Another reason, according to Steven Pinker, is that “the modern sciences of cosmology, geology, biology, and archaeology have made it impossible for a scientifically literate person to believe that the biblical story of creation actually took place.” While science relies on the principle that “nothing is more sacred than the facts,” Sam Harris charges that “theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed it is ignorance with wings.”<\/p>\n

In making their case, the atheists often appeal to the revolutionary influence of Charles Darwin. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, <\/em>Dawkins writes that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” He points out that the universe and its creatures show irrefutable evidence of design. Before Darwin, there was no plausible explanation for that design other than to posit a designer. So atheists had no way to account for life’s diversity and complexity. Many\u2014including skeptic David Hume\u2014were forced to concede that each creature was fitted with the equipment needed for its survival by some sort of higher being.
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\nThe great achievement of Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, Dawkins and others say, is that it shows how creatures that appear to be designed have in fact evolved according to the pressures of chance and survival. Atheists now have an alternative explanation for why fish have gills, why birds have wings, and why human beings have brains and arms and lungs. Indeed, in the atheist view, evolution refutes the biblical account of human creation, exposing it as a crude and primitive myth. Carl Sagan remarks that “as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do…. Whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God…. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.’ This is none other than the God of the Gaps, who is forced by science into ever greater irrelevance. Dawkins argues that contrary to the claims of religion, we humans “are survival machines\u2014robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”<\/p>\n

In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, <\/em>Dennett contends that Darwin’s theories are a kind of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview” about the nature of man and the universe. Specifically, Dennett and others interpret Darwinism to mean that all life can be understood entirely in natural and material terms. Man is nothing more than matter in motion. The soul? A product of fantasy. The afterlife? A myth. Human purpose? An illusion.<\/p>\n

Leading biologists spell out some of the implications. As Darwin has shown how life is “the result of a natural process,” Francisco Ayala writes, we are “without any need to resort to a Creator.”” In an essay on evolution and its implications, William Provine writes, “Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society…. We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us.”<\/p>\n

Many scientific atheists portray man as simply a carbon-based machine, a purely material object whose belief in immaterial things is a kind of epiphenomenon or illusion. Biologist Francis Crick, who helped to discover the structure of DNA, writes that all biology is reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Life is the product of the same mechanical operations as the inanimate matter in nature. Consciousness is “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Biologist E. 0. Wilson writes that the hidden operations of our mental activity give us “the illusion of free will.”<\/p>\n

For centuries, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out, religion has taught men to believe in an immortal soul that inhabits our bodies, a kind of “ghost in the machine.” But modern science has, in Pinker’s view, destroyed that belief. “The mind is the physiological activity of the brain” and “the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes” and those have been “shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes.\u201d Therefore the mind is nothing more than “an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events:’ When the brain decays through aging or disease, the mind disappears. As for the soul? Pinker ringingly declares that “the ghost in the machine has been exorcised.”<\/p>\n

This scientific atheism has its roots in the Enlightenment. Leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, were anti-clerical and anti-religious rather than atheist. Denis Diderot and Baron d’Holbach did, however, introduce a full-fledged atheism to the educated population of Europe. These thinkers viewed science as a privileged form of knowledge based on reason and criticism and testing, and viewed religious doctrine as a form of ignorance rooted in myth, coercion, and fear. As Voltaire put it, “There are no sects in geometry.” That’s because there are methods of verification that enable all scientifically minded people to agree on the facts.
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\nModern doctrines of materialism and naturalism, which hold that matter is the only reality and that there are no supernatural influences in nature, have their foundation in the atheistic wing of the Enlightenment. Modern atheists have employed these ideas to formulate their influential theories. Marx, for instance, portrayed religion as the “opiate of the masses,” a drug that dulls the mind, preventing it from comprehending the scientific forces acting upon history. Freud, in his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, <\/em>termed belief in God a comforting illusion invented by human beings to avoid facing the reality of death. When Richard Dawkins states in The God Delusion <\/em>that he holds his beliefs “not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence.\u201d he is placing himself squarely in this tradition of the skeptical Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

The Enlightenment critique of religion was not merely an intellectual critique but also a moral critique. This is the case with the atheism of today, which involves a moral denunciation of God’s role in the world as well as a condemnation of the evil influence of religion throughout history. Christopher Hitchens writes glibly of the “moral superiority of atheism.” The leading figure of this type of atheism was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution as true, but he detested Darwinism for what he took to be its exaltation of a certain brutish type that survived in nature through raw force. Nietzsche’s atheism is of a very different pedigree than Dawkins’s. Nietzsche would have taken Dawkins’s breed of Darwinism as the mark of a particularly low and unimaginative human type, widely found in England. Nietzsche too was interested in survival of the fittest, but to him this meant the cultural survival of great and noble and artistically imaginative forms of humanity. Nietzsche termed his superior type of human being the ubermensch, <\/em>or “overman.”<\/p>\n

Nietzsche hated religion, and most of all he hated Christianity. For him, Christianity represented hostility to life, a seething hatred of existence dressed up as faith in another life. Nietzsche also viewed Christianity as a foe of nature, depriving the greater man of his instinctive and rightful desire to subdue and crush the inferior man. In Nietzsche’s view Christianity invented morality as a device to keep the strong men of the world in check and to con them into sharing the fruits of their genius with lesser men. Christianity, in short, was a “slave morality” designed for losers, which for Nietzsche explained its immense popularity. Nietzsche’s aristocratic atheism has few open advocates today, but many themes from his polemic against Christianity remain influential.<\/p>\n

One such theme is that the God of Christianity is an autocrat. Nietzsche’s objection was not to His tyranny, but to the fact that He represented the wrong kind of tyranny. Nietzsche condemned the Christian God for humbling the great and exalting the lowly. Modern atheists like Christopher Hitchens also castigate the Christian God for his “desert morality:’ Slavery and patriarchy are usually mentioned in the indictment, but the real objection is to the moral severity of Christian ethics, which imposes strict commandments and forecasts hell for those who fail to abide by them. Hitchens charges that “the religious impulse lies close to the authoritarian, if not the totalitarian personality,” and he especially faults religion for “sexual repression.” In this line of thinking, God is condemned in the name of freedom, especially the moral freedom for human beings to evaluate for themselves what is right and what is wrong.
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\nA second major theme of atheist discourse is the historical crimes of religion. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars, and the witch trials all feature prominently in this moral indictment. “In the so-called ages of faith,” Bertrand Russell writes in Why I Am Not a Christian, <\/em>“there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.” In recent years, with the rise of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, atheists commonly invoke bin Laden and his murderous co-conspirators to show that religion in general is a motivating force for violence and oppression. Columnist Wendy Kaminer described the September 11 attacks as a “faith-based initiative.\u201d The War on Terror is commonly portrayed as a clash of competing extremisms, with Christian extremists on the one side and Muslim extremists on the other. Sam Harris frets that “we are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature.”<\/p>\n

For atheists, the solution is to weaken the power of religion worldwide and to drive religion from the public sphere so that it can no longer influence public policy. A secular world, in this view, would be a safer and more peaceful world. Philosopher Richard Rorty proclaimed religious belief “politically dangerous” and declared atheism the only practical basis for a “pluralistic, democratic society.” These ideas resonate quite broadly in Western culture today.<\/p>\n

One may think that atheism\u2014based as it is on a rejection or negation of God\u2014would be devoid of a philosophy or worldview of its own. Historically it would be virtually impossible to outline anything resembling an atheist doctrine. Today, however, there are common themes that taken together amount to a kind of atheist ideology. We hear hints of this ideology when Dawkins writes of “the feeling of awed wonder that science can give us” as “one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.” There is almost a religious sensibility here, but it is framed in secular terms. Consider Carl Sagan’s self-proclaimed manifesto, “Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.” This is a statement not of fact but of ethics, a dedication to manly honesty over wishful fantasy, an affirmation of what one ought to believe and on what basis. Strange though it may seem, the best way to understand this ideology is to consult the most villainous character in the Christian story.<\/p>\n

The Christian villain, Satan, has now become the atheist hero. Consider Milton’s Paradise Lost. <\/em>There Satan is portrayed as a lonely, intrepid figure, deprived of cosmic hope, abandoned to his own wits, navigating his way through the heavens, pitting himself against the unknown, refusing to accept the tyrannical sovereignty of God, rebelling against divine decree, and determined to build out of his own resources a rival empire devoted to happiness in the here and now “What though the field be lost, all is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield.” This is the independence to which contemporary atheists aspire. As Rorty put it, “It is a matter of forgetting about eternity.” E. 0. Wilson writes, “We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little.”<\/p>\n

Modern atheists view themselves as brave pioneers, facing the truths of man’s lowly origins and the fact of death with heroic acceptance. They profess to be guided not by blind faith but by the bright (though not infallible) flame of reason. They derive their morality not from external commandments but from an inwardly generated calculus of costs and benefits. Setting aside hopes for eternity, they are dedicated to the welfare of mankind. Science is their watchword, and its practical achievements are the only “miracles” they are willing to countenance. It is an impressive vision, and in the rest of this book I will examine it carefully to see how much sense it makes of our world and whether it can enrich our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “Boldness was not formerly a characteristic of atheists as such. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.” \u2014Edmund Burke ALARMED BY THE RISING POWER of religion around the world, atheists in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7315,1722,7284,7316,7317,7259,7318,7319,7320,7321,7322,7323,7324,7325],"class_list":["post-3455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-agnostics","tag-atheists","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-edmund-burke","tag-free-thinkers","tag-humanists","tag-john-horgan","tag-non-theists","tag-pluralism-project","tag-religion-around-the-world","tag-religious-affiliation","tag-religious-war","tag-secularists","tag-skeptics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}