Reasonable Dissent

Re: Atheist Fundamentalism

This comes from an editorial page from a Texas news station, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised. But the sentiments here are not as uncommon as they should be. Rod Dreher writes a collumn entitled, Against Atheist Fundamentalism.

First things first, I’m willing to criticize some atheists he mentions in his post, the Texas Church of Freethought. Now, I don’t claim to know very much about this group, but my first impression is that they are trying to do some ok things in exactly the wrong way. From their home page:

We are a rational approach to religion, offering atheists, agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers all the social, emotional and inspirational benefits of traditional faith-based churches, but without appealing to tradition or superstition.

Guys, atheism is not a religion (which I’m sure they know), and calling yourselves a “Church” is going to hurt your cause more than help it. The article’s writer even says “Texas is so religious even the atheists go to church.” I don’t necessarily think that what they’re doing is that bad, but they open up atheism to so much trouble by calling it a church. Atheism is not about faith.

But let’s get back to the real issue, misrepresenting atheists. Let me pick a gem from his article, and we can all see what boils my blood here. Yes, people apparently still think like this:

Unfortunately, militant atheism in power has repeated all the crimes of religious regimes and, absent ethical restraints, made them vastly worse. Though their ideologies despised Christianity, both the communists and the Nazis justified their own monstrosities as “scientific.”

Oh no. Please, no. We need to squash this one once and for all, but it just will not happen. The Hitler Historical Museum quotes a speech he made on April 12, 1922 saying:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

We need to stop equating Nazism with atheism. It’s a false analogy, and I suspect it began because there’s such a stigma against nazism that mentioning it in the same sentence, even if shown to be false, casts a shadow that is hard to step out of.

Mr. Dreher would like us to accept that religion and science don’t have to be mutually exclusive and, indeed, can each learn from the other. I don’t whole heartedly disagree with that statement, just the second half. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they do not share any common ground. I know that it’s difficult when the “sphere” of science seems to overstep the line in the sand that religion has made, but we have to understand that science itself is impartial. It’s not trying to step on the toes of what religion claims to know; it just goes where the evidence leads. And if new evidence arises, science takes it in stride. Science can’t learn from religion, not because, as Dreher quotes a speaker, “scientists [have] nothing to learn from religious people, who by definition believed absurd things”. The reason is that the things they believe are not in the same realm. Science builds on itself; each new piece of information must be incorporated and reviewed, tested and retested, peer reviewed and scrutinized. There are few assumptions that science relies on, and the fewer the better. Asking science to just take a little religious wisdom doesn’t make sense, because religious beliefs aren’t purely rational. Notice I didn’t say absurd, stupid, mindless, etc. They are just based on different premises: religious belief is never built from the ground up on rationalism.

Equating science and religion to us taking a cue from the Eskimos about using all parts of the animals we kill is just silly. Science isn’t saying “don’t use all parts of the animal”. Science is saying “the reason that we should use all parts doesn’t seem to be because they gave themselves to us for nourishment.” It’s explaining our world the best that we know how currently. Religion can take it personally if it would like, but don’t drag science down too. It’s just too impartial to play the blame game.

Oh, and Rod: Don’t for a second act like kids “sitting around the campfire, learning from grown-ups that the world is disenchanted after all” is in on any comparable level with kids going to evangelical bible camps, being broken down with criticism, encouraged into trances and “speaking in tongues”, and taught to laugh at science. A camp where kids are told that they can examine the world for themselves is far from a bad thing.

Tags: atheism, General, logical fallacies, science