Re: [asa] Dawkins and PZ Myers and their 'attitude'

At 09:34 AM 4/7/2007, George Murphy wrote:

>Having said that, there is no reason to pretend that Dawkins (or
>anyone else) knows what he's talking about in areas in which he
>doesn't. You may know of the theologian Gordon Kaufman, now an
>emeritus prof at Harvard. I think he can be fairly characterized as
>ultra-liberal theologically - as the title of his recent book Jesus
>and Creativity indicates, he now doesn't want to talk about "God"
>but about "Creativity." In some pre-conference conversation a few
>months ago he mentioned a public lecture that Dawkins had given at
>Harvard which Kaufman described "the dumbest talk about religion
>that I've ever heard." (I'm quoting from memory but that's pretty close.)

@ Speaking of "ultra-liberals", normally I wouldn't reference
anything by E.J. Dionne -(since I consider the significance of his
scribbling to be along the same lines as Plantinga considers Dawkins'
philosophical ramblings - see Jack's post today) - but today's
offering is almost half-way emotionally stable. :)

~ Janice

Washington Post Published: April 07, 2007
The problem with the neo-atheists - E.J. Dionne Jr.
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1105397.html

They see faith in God as a danger to society. But they seem as
dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn.

WASHINGTON - This weekend, many of the world's estimated 2 billion
Christians will remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ.

While some Christians harbor doubts about Christ's actual physical
resurrection, hundreds of millions believe devoutly that Jesus died
and rose, thereby redeeming a fallen world from sin.

Are these people a threat to reason and even freedom?

It's a question that arises from a new vogue for what you might call
neo-atheism. The new atheists -- the best known are writers Sam
Harris and Richard Dawkins -- insist, as Harris puts it, that
"certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance
in this one." They think a belief in salvation through faith in God,
no matter the religious tradition, is dangerous to an open society.

The neo-atheists, like their predecessors a century ago, are given to
a sometimes charming ferociousness in polemics against those they see
as too weak-minded to give up faith in God.

What makes them new is the moment in history in which they are
rejoining the old arguments: an era of religiously motivated Islamic
suicide bombers. They also protest against the apparent power of
traditionalist and fundamentalist versions of Christianity.

As a general proposition, I welcome the challenge of the
neo-atheists. The most serious believers, understanding that they
need to ask themselves searching questions, have always engaged in
dialogue with atheists. The Catholic writer Michael Novak's book
"Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does
one know that one's belief is truly in God," he asks, "not merely in
some habitual emotion or pattern of response?"

The problem with the neo-atheists is that they seem as dogmatic as
the dogmatists they condemn. They are especially frustrated with
religious "moderates" who don't fit their stereotypes.

In his bracing polemic, "The End of Faith," Harris is candid in
asserting that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a
terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved
once each one of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of
others." Harris goes on: "I hope to show that the very ideal of
religious tolerance -- born of the notion that every human being
should be free to believe whatever he wants about God -- is one of
the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. We have been slow
to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's
inhumanity to man."

Argument about faith should not hang on whether religion is socially
"useful" or instead promotes "inhumanity." But since the idea that
religion is primarily destructive lies at the heart of the
neo-atheist argument, its critics have rightly insisted on detailing
the sublime acts of humanity and generosity that religion has
promoted through the centuries.

It's true that religious Christians were among those who persecuted
Jews. It is also true that religious Christians were among those who
rescued Jews from these most-un-Christian acts. And it is a sad fact
that secular forms of dogmatism have been at least as murderous as
the religious kind.

But what's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely
question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. As
Novak argued in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism in the March
19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul
of Judaism and Christianity for millennia." (These questions get a
fair reading in another powerful commentary on neo-atheism by James
Wood, himself an atheist, in the Dec. 18 New Republic.)

"Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is
about moral realism, and moral humility." Of course Christians in
practice often fail to live up to this elevated definition of their
creed. But atheists are capable of their own forms of arrogance.
Indeed, if arrogance were the only criterion, the contest could well
come out a tie.

[Exposing his own moral arrogance, Dionne writes:] As for me,
Christianity is more a call to rebellion than an insistence on narrow
conformity, more a challenge than a set of certainties.

In "The Last Week," their book about Christ's final days on Earth,
Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, the distinguished liberal
scriptural scholars, write: "He attracted a following and took his
movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged
the authorities with public acts and public debates. All this was his
passion, what he was passionate about: God and the Kingdom of God,
God and God's passion for justice. Jesus' passion got him killed."

That's why I celebrate Easter and why, despite many questions of my
own, I can't join the neo-atheists.

E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sat Apr 7 12:15:58 2007