Nope, not convinced. Yes, the drive to believe the supernatural may be strong in many people, especially the uneducated, but the 'we' Bo uses in claiming that humans can't avoid thinking in a supernatural way is too all-encompassing. Dawkins doesn't think that way, neither did Hume, neither do I and neither do millions of others. I don't even believe Bo does. And even if all these people DID believe, it would still be foolishness.
Sam Harris's argument was always that religion might very well be good for us - Hitchens claimed it wasn't - but if religion isn't 'literally' true then it isn't true full stop. In which case we should treat the stories as we do all other stories, myths and legends, all of which may well illustrate deep truths or show us moral characters worth emulating but so what?
By the way, I remember almost 20 years ago when I followed the New Atheists - I'm one of the few who haven't turned on Dawkins, now claiming his arguments were simplistic and sophomoric - and even in those days he admitted to being a cultural Christian, enjoying the carols, the music inspired by religion, and the ancient village churches. This is not a new admission or backsliding on his part.
I agree that 'we' is too broad a generalization (convenient shorthand!), though the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that religious (i.e., supernatural) cognition is 'natural' in a way that scientific thinking is not (see Robert MaCauley’s book).
In his essays and Letters to a Christian Nation, Harris blames religion for all kinds of evils, including the degradation of public discourse. Certainly, Harris, Dawkins, and others in the 'New Atheist' movement believed that eradicating the superstitions of traditional religions would be beneficial.
Fair about Dawkin and cultural Christianity. I do think New Atheism has aged poorly, and I was never a fan. But we might just disagree about the viability of religion as poetry?
Also many fair points. Yes, Harris et al do think we would be much better off without religion. What I meant to say was that Harris's view is that religion could have any number of wonderful attributes and it still wouldn't make it true, which is hardly a trivial detail, at least not to those who bother about such gauche things as the truth, though I know some very sophisticated people like to smirk and wiggle two fingers at either side of their daft heads whenever they say the word 'truth'.
As for New Atheism aging poorly, I have never understood the difference between New Atheism and plain old atheism. All the beliefs are the same, it is just that the former is more confrontational, presumably because it arose at a moment when we all thought religion was on its last legs and suddenly people were being beheaded and planes were being flown into buildings. In light of this, I found the complaints that the New Atheists were strident and impolite a bit pathetic. Yes, their real target should have been Islam but there is a fine line between bravery and signing your own death warrant and I too would keep my views to myself if I were standing in Mecca or Bradford High Street. That apart, attacking all religions at once kills several birds with one stone and allows you to evade the accusation of 'punching down' at oppressed minorities.
It seems to me that you either view religion like a meal, which is either good or bad but never true or false, or whether you think it belongs in the true/false category like fiction/non-fiction. I view it as the latter but some sophisticated people - now that their beliefs have become either incredible or just plain wrong - have decided their best bet is to shift it into the 'meal' category (what Bo would call the 'poetry' category). I view this as a sneaky shifting of the goalposts.
But all that aside, the only appeal religion has is precisely the unbelievable stuff. Take away the miracles, heaven and hell, life after death, resurrection, water into wine, the night-flights on flying horses etc. and what are you left with? A dull set of rules and beliefs on a par, attraction-wise, with the AA Motoring Handbook.
The "unbelievable stuff," in my view, make for wonderful poetry. Many thinkers—from the Romantic poets and German Idealists to Harold Bloom—have drawn inspiration from religion without accepting its doctrines literally. I do agree, however, that many people *are* drawn to the unbelievable stuff and will continue to be.
The primary error in considerations like this one is that people implicitly assume that they and we are separate from the Divine, when a moment's serious reflection shows that this is not so. Our responsibility is to Realize our true Nature and Condition. No belief necessary.
"Humans were not specially created by God, nor did they eat from a forbidden fruit, nor were they punished for violating God’s decree. Because this is absurd, defending a literalist interpretation of Genesis and original sin would be not only foolhardy but also self-defeating. It would alienate those who accept the current scientific consensus on human evolution."
You have lost me, Bo. Of course many will be alienated who disbelieve the Bible is God's word. This is the great divide that we will see on the Day of Judgment.
Jesus said, “if you believe in God you believe also in me” I think the reverse is true . Some people like Atheist Christopher Hitchens, think that the very existence of Jesus is in doubt. But as Einstein, otherwise a sceptic, remarked,
“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." Einstein was then asked if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus, to which he replied, "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.”
Yes, it is the story of Jesus which inspires faith. And this is not otherwise blind. It is also based on the reliability of the Gospels. Immense scholarship has been devoted to the question of the reliability of these ancient documents. Their veracity has emerged unscathed in every important particular. The story of Jesus, his Teaching, Death and Resurrection, is better attested than anything else in ancient history except the career of Alexander the Great.
I doubt we will agree on this, but the scholarly consensus does not hold that the veracity of the Gospels has remained unscathed in every important particular. Nor do I think many critical scholars have held that view since the Enlightenment, particularly since Reimarus. Some scholars even question whether a historical Jesus existed at all. I remain agnostic, but to me, the Jesus of literature holds greater significance than the historical Jesus, whoever he may have been.
My understanding is there is strong -- though not irrefutable --. evidence there was some historical dude Jesus. The problem is understanding exactly what one means by the claim that "Jesus existed".
Jesus was a common name in Judea at the time so is it enough that the Romans crucified some dude named Jesus at one point in time? That doesn't seem right. We wouldn't agree Napoleon existed just because there was once a pig farmer in Belgium called Napoleon -- that just doesn't have enough of the features we think of Napoleon having to count.
Indeed one ultimately gets into some heavy philosophy about what it takes for a name to refer. On kripke's causal theory one might argue that it was enough if there was a preacher called Fred in Judea who causally started the Jesus stories even if absolutely none of the stories is accurate. On Russell's definite description view you need to make enough of the claims about Jesus true for the term to refer.
If you listen to clips of Hitchens I think that is what he is charitably understood to be saying -- sure maybe some guy was causally responsible for starting Christianity but we have no reason to think he did most of the things in the gospels and at that point it feels a bit misleading to call him Jesus. I wish he had been a bit more clear on this point but at the same time the people insisting he was ignorant don't seem to call Catholics ignorant for believing in all sorts of shit (jesus's rebirth) which we have much much stronger reason to doubt. Probably better (as this discussion has been) to just avoid the slurs entirely.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the resurrection (or anything else about Jesus) is well attested. You have no eyewitness testimony from anyone even claiming to have met Jesus. You have no first-hand accounts of him where you even know who the author was. You have nothing provably written within 40 years of the supposed events. (For comparison we have four first-hand eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Hastings, all written within months of the event.)
'The story of Jesus, his Teaching, Death and Resurrection, is better attested than anything else in ancient history except the career of Alexander the Great.'
Wouldn't you say you are rather overstating your case? The resurrection of Jesus is better attested than, say, the Roman invasion of Britain? When you say 'well attested', do you mean that it is written in the Bible? Isn't that a circular argument?
I'm by no means sure of this, but I don't think Jesus is mentioned anywhere outside the Bible, which is kind of odd for someone who was allegedly such a thorn in the sides of the Romans, a people who kept records of pretty much everything.
“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." Einstein was then asked if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus, to which he replied, "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.”
I question the veracity of these quotes, but if true, it only proves that no one is perfect...not even Einstein.
Einstein was far from perfect. For many years, he refused to accept quantum mechanics because it offended his sense of how the universe should work. He was also a socialist.
Personally I really dig this piece. I think however that by questioning what is for some people, the unquestionable's veracity, surely there will be discontents. I think any religious epic is beautiful and a key to understanding life and how to live it. You can find the same truths inside many texts and belief systems.
"My objection to Douthat is not that he is sincerely religious or that he believes literally, but that he attempts to persuade other intellectuals of the literal truth of many traditional religious doctrines. This is a mistake—one that is doomed to failure. Many educated intellectuals reject religious teachings as outdated and refuted by scientific progress. Bad arguments about fine-tuning, the mystery of consciousness, or the existence of miracles will not persuade them; they will instead trigger a cognitive gag-reflex, causing the mind to recoil. This, in turn, will breed hostility toward religion and fuel militant atheism or anti-institutional supernaturalism."
Is the "cognitive gag-reflex" of "educated intellectuals" a marker of healthy maturity or of stunted growth? When I was a child, I would choke on the tiniest aspirin and had to have chewable, saccharine-flavored medicines. As an adult, I can swallow horse pills with ease, attending to the effects they have on the quality of my life as my body metabolizes them.
The movement of intellectuals like Dawkins toward an embrace of cultural Christianity highlights the question of to whom the responsibility for adapting to the manifestation of religion in society belongs. Can the poetic God that you prefer be advocated for directly from the pulpit without vitiating the potency of the myths that bind a community together? Perhaps the poetic stance is better situated within esoteric corners of the broad and deep spiritual tradition. Perhaps it is better for those that find themselves repelled by what they take to be naive or infantile appeals to magical dogmas to view them as invitations to explore other possibilities within their faith rather than dismiss and abandon it outright.
You find that you cannot believe as you imagine Augustine or Aquinas or even Douthat believes, yet you also recognize that they are hardly rubes. What to do then? See if you can discern, within what they reveal of their views, the vitality of honest and earnest engagement with difficult doctrines that make up the discipline of one of the few domains that remains in direct contact with both the irreducible mysteries of life and the undeniable realities of shared humanity.
"The traditional God of the theologians has failed, but the God of the poets is still viable."
I like that subtitle. For me, I define God as the fairest and most possible thing, given everything we know (with the emphasis on that last clause, which is what makes the challenge so hard).
For by that standard if there is any justice in the world (in the sense that we all get what we deserve in the end) it is quite invisible.
But then one could say the same about the true state of the world, for the simple reason that all emotions are invisible, they being what in the end we care about most.
Thus, for example, it is possible that pleasure and pain in all their myriad physical and emotional manifestations are not separate and independent phenomena, as is widely presumed, but rather are correlative phenomena, like the two sides of a coin, and that a symmetry necessarily exists between them such that they just balance out over the lifetime of every sentient creature—in which we should probably include in every sentient creature's lifetime what it may possibly feel like to die. It cannot be assumed that we go out like a match, that the disintegration of the nervous system is not itself a felt thing of conceivably enormous strength and significance.
What I am getting at is that while anthropomorphic descriptions of God along with the metaphorical language of the Bible more generally are not to be taken literally (except by fundamentalists and atheists), something that is morally equivalent to the Hebraic conception of God might be plausibly embedded in nature itself.
By way of analogy think of a spring, the stretching of which is experienced as pain, the release of which is experienced as pleasure. This might hold not only within the chemical brain of every sentient creature (including us humans of course) but for nature as a whole in accordance with the minimum total potential energy principle, which is very well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_total_potential_energy_principle
These are abstract and purely subjective metaphysical speculations to be sure--they are hardly poetical!-- and as such they must remain forever beyond science. But the same might be said of the nature and origins of pain and pleasure themselves, which are equally subjective and therefore unscientific.
Then too there is Simon Weil's idea that God's absence in the world is the proof of his presence. I take this to mean that if we knew for a certainty that God exists (that we all get what we deserve in the end) everyone would behave and life would be a bore.
Let me conclude with a challenge to readers' imaginations: what do you think is the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know?
"The fervor of New Atheism has faded, its trust in science and reason having failed to eradicate superstition."
Yes, ignorance, which at some point becomes stupidity, is alive and well. But there is no reason to give up on enlightenment.
"Perhaps religion was never the scourge its critics claimed. Perhaps man possesses a religious instinct—or instincts—that cannot be eliminated, only distorted."
The thought that humanity is destined to have a debilitating belief in the supernatural is discouraging.
"Perhaps religion is inevitable. If not Christianity or Islam, then fascism, communism, or some other perverted cult of personality."
The second sentence suggests that religion is a 'perverted cult of personality'.
"Many religious claims do seem absurd to men and women shaped by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment."
That is an understatement, for sure.
"And because his mistaken strategy still seduces some religious intellectuals who dream of defending the dogmas of religion with the tools of science, it warrants critical attention."
"The enlightenment" is a social and political project, not a coherent epistemological position. Any man of sense and historical perspective understands this.
Really unimpressed. Douthat doesn’t make the best arguments but this was little better an any new atheist drivel. Didn’t even steelman theism talking about the intentionality of the mind because impossible given materialism or divine simplicity which are theism 101. Not to mention Humes miracles argument totally begs the question and is unconvincing given we have documented scientific miracles like the Shroud of Turin, OLOG Tilma, Fatima, Eucharistic miracles etc
The Shroud of Turin was radiocarbon-dated between 1260 and 1390 CE. Also, the image could be created using natural techniques known during that time period.
Disappointing. Science vis a vis theology has moved on considerably, and the view that no god would ‘allow’ suffering reveals a caricature of god little better than the ‘sky daddy’ atheist trope. Both the for and against arguments in this article are stale and extremely out of date. Suggest reading Ian Gilchrist, and Frederico Faggin just for starters.
Nope, not convinced. Yes, the drive to believe the supernatural may be strong in many people, especially the uneducated, but the 'we' Bo uses in claiming that humans can't avoid thinking in a supernatural way is too all-encompassing. Dawkins doesn't think that way, neither did Hume, neither do I and neither do millions of others. I don't even believe Bo does. And even if all these people DID believe, it would still be foolishness.
Sam Harris's argument was always that religion might very well be good for us - Hitchens claimed it wasn't - but if religion isn't 'literally' true then it isn't true full stop. In which case we should treat the stories as we do all other stories, myths and legends, all of which may well illustrate deep truths or show us moral characters worth emulating but so what?
By the way, I remember almost 20 years ago when I followed the New Atheists - I'm one of the few who haven't turned on Dawkins, now claiming his arguments were simplistic and sophomoric - and even in those days he admitted to being a cultural Christian, enjoying the carols, the music inspired by religion, and the ancient village churches. This is not a new admission or backsliding on his part.
Many fair points.
I agree that 'we' is too broad a generalization (convenient shorthand!), though the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that religious (i.e., supernatural) cognition is 'natural' in a way that scientific thinking is not (see Robert MaCauley’s book).
In his essays and Letters to a Christian Nation, Harris blames religion for all kinds of evils, including the degradation of public discourse. Certainly, Harris, Dawkins, and others in the 'New Atheist' movement believed that eradicating the superstitions of traditional religions would be beneficial.
Fair about Dawkin and cultural Christianity. I do think New Atheism has aged poorly, and I was never a fan. But we might just disagree about the viability of religion as poetry?
Bo
Also many fair points. Yes, Harris et al do think we would be much better off without religion. What I meant to say was that Harris's view is that religion could have any number of wonderful attributes and it still wouldn't make it true, which is hardly a trivial detail, at least not to those who bother about such gauche things as the truth, though I know some very sophisticated people like to smirk and wiggle two fingers at either side of their daft heads whenever they say the word 'truth'.
As for New Atheism aging poorly, I have never understood the difference between New Atheism and plain old atheism. All the beliefs are the same, it is just that the former is more confrontational, presumably because it arose at a moment when we all thought religion was on its last legs and suddenly people were being beheaded and planes were being flown into buildings. In light of this, I found the complaints that the New Atheists were strident and impolite a bit pathetic. Yes, their real target should have been Islam but there is a fine line between bravery and signing your own death warrant and I too would keep my views to myself if I were standing in Mecca or Bradford High Street. That apart, attacking all religions at once kills several birds with one stone and allows you to evade the accusation of 'punching down' at oppressed minorities.
Excellent points. Thanks
It seems to me that you either view religion like a meal, which is either good or bad but never true or false, or whether you think it belongs in the true/false category like fiction/non-fiction. I view it as the latter but some sophisticated people - now that their beliefs have become either incredible or just plain wrong - have decided their best bet is to shift it into the 'meal' category (what Bo would call the 'poetry' category). I view this as a sneaky shifting of the goalposts.
But all that aside, the only appeal religion has is precisely the unbelievable stuff. Take away the miracles, heaven and hell, life after death, resurrection, water into wine, the night-flights on flying horses etc. and what are you left with? A dull set of rules and beliefs on a par, attraction-wise, with the AA Motoring Handbook.
The "unbelievable stuff," in my view, make for wonderful poetry. Many thinkers—from the Romantic poets and German Idealists to Harold Bloom—have drawn inspiration from religion without accepting its doctrines literally. I do agree, however, that many people *are* drawn to the unbelievable stuff and will continue to be.
Bo
The primary error in considerations like this one is that people implicitly assume that they and we are separate from the Divine, when a moment's serious reflection shows that this is not so. Our responsibility is to Realize our true Nature and Condition. No belief necessary.
"Humans were not specially created by God, nor did they eat from a forbidden fruit, nor were they punished for violating God’s decree. Because this is absurd, defending a literalist interpretation of Genesis and original sin would be not only foolhardy but also self-defeating. It would alienate those who accept the current scientific consensus on human evolution."
You have lost me, Bo. Of course many will be alienated who disbelieve the Bible is God's word. This is the great divide that we will see on the Day of Judgment.
I suppose, in the spirit of science, I can only say that we shall see.
Bo
Jesus said, “if you believe in God you believe also in me” I think the reverse is true . Some people like Atheist Christopher Hitchens, think that the very existence of Jesus is in doubt. But as Einstein, otherwise a sceptic, remarked,
“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." Einstein was then asked if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus, to which he replied, "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.”
Yes, it is the story of Jesus which inspires faith. And this is not otherwise blind. It is also based on the reliability of the Gospels. Immense scholarship has been devoted to the question of the reliability of these ancient documents. Their veracity has emerged unscathed in every important particular. The story of Jesus, his Teaching, Death and Resurrection, is better attested than anything else in ancient history except the career of Alexander the Great.
I doubt we will agree on this, but the scholarly consensus does not hold that the veracity of the Gospels has remained unscathed in every important particular. Nor do I think many critical scholars have held that view since the Enlightenment, particularly since Reimarus. Some scholars even question whether a historical Jesus existed at all. I remain agnostic, but to me, the Jesus of literature holds greater significance than the historical Jesus, whoever he may have been.
Bo
My understanding is there is strong -- though not irrefutable --. evidence there was some historical dude Jesus. The problem is understanding exactly what one means by the claim that "Jesus existed".
Jesus was a common name in Judea at the time so is it enough that the Romans crucified some dude named Jesus at one point in time? That doesn't seem right. We wouldn't agree Napoleon existed just because there was once a pig farmer in Belgium called Napoleon -- that just doesn't have enough of the features we think of Napoleon having to count.
Indeed one ultimately gets into some heavy philosophy about what it takes for a name to refer. On kripke's causal theory one might argue that it was enough if there was a preacher called Fred in Judea who causally started the Jesus stories even if absolutely none of the stories is accurate. On Russell's definite description view you need to make enough of the claims about Jesus true for the term to refer.
If you listen to clips of Hitchens I think that is what he is charitably understood to be saying -- sure maybe some guy was causally responsible for starting Christianity but we have no reason to think he did most of the things in the gospels and at that point it feels a bit misleading to call him Jesus. I wish he had been a bit more clear on this point but at the same time the people insisting he was ignorant don't seem to call Catholics ignorant for believing in all sorts of shit (jesus's rebirth) which we have much much stronger reason to doubt. Probably better (as this discussion has been) to just avoid the slurs entirely.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the resurrection (or anything else about Jesus) is well attested. You have no eyewitness testimony from anyone even claiming to have met Jesus. You have no first-hand accounts of him where you even know who the author was. You have nothing provably written within 40 years of the supposed events. (For comparison we have four first-hand eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Hastings, all written within months of the event.)
'The story of Jesus, his Teaching, Death and Resurrection, is better attested than anything else in ancient history except the career of Alexander the Great.'
Wouldn't you say you are rather overstating your case? The resurrection of Jesus is better attested than, say, the Roman invasion of Britain? When you say 'well attested', do you mean that it is written in the Bible? Isn't that a circular argument?
I'm by no means sure of this, but I don't think Jesus is mentioned anywhere outside the Bible, which is kind of odd for someone who was allegedly such a thorn in the sides of the Romans, a people who kept records of pretty much everything.
“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." Einstein was then asked if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus, to which he replied, "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.”
I question the veracity of these quotes, but if true, it only proves that no one is perfect...not even Einstein.
Einstein was far from perfect. For many years, he refused to accept quantum mechanics because it offended his sense of how the universe should work. He was also a socialist.
Personally I really dig this piece. I think however that by questioning what is for some people, the unquestionable's veracity, surely there will be discontents. I think any religious epic is beautiful and a key to understanding life and how to live it. You can find the same truths inside many texts and belief systems.
"My objection to Douthat is not that he is sincerely religious or that he believes literally, but that he attempts to persuade other intellectuals of the literal truth of many traditional religious doctrines. This is a mistake—one that is doomed to failure. Many educated intellectuals reject religious teachings as outdated and refuted by scientific progress. Bad arguments about fine-tuning, the mystery of consciousness, or the existence of miracles will not persuade them; they will instead trigger a cognitive gag-reflex, causing the mind to recoil. This, in turn, will breed hostility toward religion and fuel militant atheism or anti-institutional supernaturalism."
Is the "cognitive gag-reflex" of "educated intellectuals" a marker of healthy maturity or of stunted growth? When I was a child, I would choke on the tiniest aspirin and had to have chewable, saccharine-flavored medicines. As an adult, I can swallow horse pills with ease, attending to the effects they have on the quality of my life as my body metabolizes them.
The movement of intellectuals like Dawkins toward an embrace of cultural Christianity highlights the question of to whom the responsibility for adapting to the manifestation of religion in society belongs. Can the poetic God that you prefer be advocated for directly from the pulpit without vitiating the potency of the myths that bind a community together? Perhaps the poetic stance is better situated within esoteric corners of the broad and deep spiritual tradition. Perhaps it is better for those that find themselves repelled by what they take to be naive or infantile appeals to magical dogmas to view them as invitations to explore other possibilities within their faith rather than dismiss and abandon it outright.
You find that you cannot believe as you imagine Augustine or Aquinas or even Douthat believes, yet you also recognize that they are hardly rubes. What to do then? See if you can discern, within what they reveal of their views, the vitality of honest and earnest engagement with difficult doctrines that make up the discipline of one of the few domains that remains in direct contact with both the irreducible mysteries of life and the undeniable realities of shared humanity.
"The traditional God of the theologians has failed, but the God of the poets is still viable."
I like that subtitle. For me, I define God as the fairest and most possible thing, given everything we know (with the emphasis on that last clause, which is what makes the challenge so hard).
For by that standard if there is any justice in the world (in the sense that we all get what we deserve in the end) it is quite invisible.
But then one could say the same about the true state of the world, for the simple reason that all emotions are invisible, they being what in the end we care about most.
Thus, for example, it is possible that pleasure and pain in all their myriad physical and emotional manifestations are not separate and independent phenomena, as is widely presumed, but rather are correlative phenomena, like the two sides of a coin, and that a symmetry necessarily exists between them such that they just balance out over the lifetime of every sentient creature—in which we should probably include in every sentient creature's lifetime what it may possibly feel like to die. It cannot be assumed that we go out like a match, that the disintegration of the nervous system is not itself a felt thing of conceivably enormous strength and significance.
What I am getting at is that while anthropomorphic descriptions of God along with the metaphorical language of the Bible more generally are not to be taken literally (except by fundamentalists and atheists), something that is morally equivalent to the Hebraic conception of God might be plausibly embedded in nature itself.
By way of analogy think of a spring, the stretching of which is experienced as pain, the release of which is experienced as pleasure. This might hold not only within the chemical brain of every sentient creature (including us humans of course) but for nature as a whole in accordance with the minimum total potential energy principle, which is very well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_total_potential_energy_principle
These are abstract and purely subjective metaphysical speculations to be sure--they are hardly poetical!-- and as such they must remain forever beyond science. But the same might be said of the nature and origins of pain and pleasure themselves, which are equally subjective and therefore unscientific.
Then too there is Simon Weil's idea that God's absence in the world is the proof of his presence. I take this to mean that if we knew for a certainty that God exists (that we all get what we deserve in the end) everyone would behave and life would be a bore.
Let me conclude with a challenge to readers' imaginations: what do you think is the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know?
"The fervor of New Atheism has faded, its trust in science and reason having failed to eradicate superstition."
Yes, ignorance, which at some point becomes stupidity, is alive and well. But there is no reason to give up on enlightenment.
"Perhaps religion was never the scourge its critics claimed. Perhaps man possesses a religious instinct—or instincts—that cannot be eliminated, only distorted."
The thought that humanity is destined to have a debilitating belief in the supernatural is discouraging.
"Perhaps religion is inevitable. If not Christianity or Islam, then fascism, communism, or some other perverted cult of personality."
The second sentence suggests that religion is a 'perverted cult of personality'.
"Many religious claims do seem absurd to men and women shaped by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment."
That is an understatement, for sure.
"And because his mistaken strategy still seduces some religious intellectuals who dream of defending the dogmas of religion with the tools of science, it warrants critical attention."
That is a pipe dream.
I remain an ardent agnostic atheist.
"It is impossible for us to believe as Augustine or Aquinas did."
Who is this "us" you speak of?
"Who is this "us" you speak of?"
Most likely enlightened people.
Many of us remain proudly unenlightened.
"Many of us remain proudly unenlightened."
I don't see that as a point of pride, but as you wish.
"The enlightenment" is a social and political project, not a coherent epistemological position. Any man of sense and historical perspective understands this.
""The enlightenment" is a social and political project, not a coherent epistemological position."
I said nothing about the Enlightenment. I said, 'enlightened people'.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt by attributing the adjective to an object. Absent that, it's just empty verbiage. "Smart people are smart."
Who is this "us" you speak of?
Really unimpressed. Douthat doesn’t make the best arguments but this was little better an any new atheist drivel. Didn’t even steelman theism talking about the intentionality of the mind because impossible given materialism or divine simplicity which are theism 101. Not to mention Humes miracles argument totally begs the question and is unconvincing given we have documented scientific miracles like the Shroud of Turin, OLOG Tilma, Fatima, Eucharistic miracles etc
The Shroud of Turin was radiocarbon-dated between 1260 and 1390 CE. Also, the image could be created using natural techniques known during that time period.
No, you do not have “documented scientific miracles” regarding the eucharist or the Turin shroud, or indeed anything.
You can claim that if you want but it’s simply not consistent with the facts
Which facts amount to “documented scientific miracles”?
Disappointing. Science vis a vis theology has moved on considerably, and the view that no god would ‘allow’ suffering reveals a caricature of god little better than the ‘sky daddy’ atheist trope. Both the for and against arguments in this article are stale and extremely out of date. Suggest reading Ian Gilchrist, and Frederico Faggin just for starters.