I pointed several days ago toward a piece in New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan, noting that he had badly conflated philosophy and religion and seemed to have a poor understanding of how ignorant a lot of the Evangelical Right who comprise the Republican base actually are.
I live in a town that is the home of a Southern Baptist Seminary, and can hardly go outdoors without tripping over some yahoo that genuinely believes everything went wrong when a talking snake tricked a gullible woman into stealing a bad piece of fruit, and that evolution is the make-believe of liberal, Baby Jesus-hating scientists.
What do you know? Albert the Pious devoted a lot of friendly attention to the piece, and today New York Times columnist David Brooks commented favorably on the piece.
Sullivan, Mohler, and Brooks all make the identical mistake: Because they are themselves religious people, they misinterpret the skepticism of scientists and engineers as just another religion, albeit attenuated; they seem unable to imagine an intellectual framework that does not assume some amount of magic, as though scientists and engineers nod toward a different and decidedly peculiar magic.
No. Jerry Coyne put it nicely:
Most atheists simply reject the notion of God because there is no evidence for one. Many of us, including the scientifically minded, reject God in the way we reject the Loch Ness Monster: there could have been evidence for both creatures, but none has shown up. There is evidence that could surface that would convince many of us—I am one, Carl Sagan was another—that a divine being existed. But we haven’t seen any such evidence. In contrast, for many believers there is no evidence that would dispel their notion of God. If evolution, the Holocaust, and the persistence of evil and physical disasters didn’t do it, then nothing will. [emphases in original]
I don’t posit an incorporeal being outside time and space to explain what I don’t understand; I say that I don’t understand, and let it sit or investigate further, and that is the case with every skeptic I know of.
Toward the end of the Progressive Era, when the Pious first began to understand that thought was evolving in a direction that cut them out, the American philosopher John Dewey delivered two lecture series’ that were subsequently re-published as A Common Faith and The Quest for Certainty. The first is available in either print or ebook, and the second is available in only print. Both are worth a read, for Dewey clearly understood that religion would inevitably become a reactionary and destructive force in public life, and tried to suggest antidotes.
Navigating the death of religion — especially the Abrahamic theisms — is the greatest task before humanity, because that death seethes below a lot of global and domestic turmoil, and because that death is spurred by a paradigm shift that much of humanity is simply not competent to make; witness the difficulty of even educated men like Sullivan, Mohler, and Brooks.