Do You Prefer Hard-Core or Soft-Core?

A few hours after posting yesterday's blog entry, I read the following from Richard John Neuhaus in the May 2008 issue of First Things. It addresses the issue of "intellectually respectable" atheism versus the fuzzy logic of the so-called "new atheists."

Marx, Freud, and, above all, Nietzsche are atheists for whom one can have a measure of intellectual respect. They, says John F. Haught in his book God and the New Atheism, understood that when God and religion are eliminated life does not go on as usual. Haught calls them the hard-core atheists. It’s quite a different matter with the new crop of soft-core atheists. Haught writes: “Dawkins declares that the biblical God is a monster, Harris that God is evil, Hitchens that God is not great. But without some fixed sense of rightness how can one distinguish what is monstrous, evil or ‘not great’ from its opposite? In order to make such value judgments one must assume, as the hard-core atheists are honest enough to acknowledge, that there exists somewhere, in some mode of being, a realm of rightness that does not owe its existence completely to human invention, Darwinian selection or social construction. And if we allow the hard-core atheists into our discussion, we can draw this conclusion: If absolute values exist, then God exists. But if God does not exist, then neither do absolute values, and one should not issue moral judgments as though they do. Belief in God or the practice of religion is not necessary in order for people to be highly moral beings. We can agree with soft-core atheists on this point. But the real question, which comes not from me but from the hard-core atheists, is: Can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?”

I had my own web conversation with some atheists regarding this topic about a year ago, as you may remember from an earlier post.

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Why The Constitution Prohibits The Teaching of Darwinism in Public Schools

An interesting excerpt from today's First Things blog:

The physicist Steve Barr tells the story of a lecture Daniel Dennett gave last year at the University of Delaware, in which he claimed that Darwin had shredded the credibility of religion and was, indeed, the very “destroyer” of God.

In the question session, a philosophy professor named Jeff Jordan suggested to Dennett: “If Darwinism is inherently atheistic, as you say, then obviously it can’t be taught in public schools.” “And why is that?” inquired Dennett, incredulous.

“Because,” said Jordan, “the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution guarantees government neutrality between religion and irreligion.”

Dennett, looking as if he’d been sucker-punched, leaned back against the wall and said, after a few moments of silence, “clever.” After another silence, he came up with a reply: He had not meant to say that evolution logically entails atheism, merely that it undercuts religion.

Barr notes that Jordan’s question reveals how the self-appointed defenders of the scientific method are trying to have it both ways. Don’t allow religious philosophy to intrude into biology classrooms and texts, they say, for that is to soil the sacred precincts of science, which must be reserved for hypotheses that can be rigorously tested and confronted with data. The next minute they are going around claiming that anti-religious philosophy is part and parcel of the scientific viewpoint.

There’s a kind of old-fashioned animus in it all, an Enlightenment claim of a sort of—oh, I don’t know—enlightenedness about our escape from the dark ages of religion....

But there are other pieces of the puzzle that are worth noticing. The tides of book publishing shouldn’t be discounted. The flood of atheism books over past two years followed the flood of theocracy books over the previous two years—and for much the same cause: Because publishers are sheep, they follow in droves, and they want their new books to be like their previously successful books. If Sam Harris’ End of Faith had not made the bestseller list, Christopher Hitchens would not have written his atheism book now, however atheistical he happens to be.

Still, there are reasons Sam Harris started the flood. The attacks of September 11 fit in here somewhere: the sudden unavoidable awareness of Jihadism and radical Islam put a weapon in the hands of opponents of religion. Here are crazies announcing they want to kill us in the name of God, and thus—by the logical fallacy known as illicit conversion—everyone who believes in God must be a murderous lunatic. Here are neo-fascists who are creating theocratic states across the Middle East; and, by that same illicit conversion, America’s evangelicals and Catholics—and Orthodox Jews, for that matter—must want to build Gilead in Harvard Yard.