The Limits of Experience

A recent LA Times opinion piece is a sane and reasonable call for moderation on the part of Richard Dawkins and his “New Atheist” followers in their crusade to eliminate religion from public life. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum point out something I used to consider a given: that religion and science are not mutually exclusive.

They also note that the belligerent atheistic approach, in which religious people are mocked and scorned, is unlikely to sway the faithful from their convictions.

As much as I admire Richard Dawkins, I couldn’t agree more that he often jumps the shark. Like it or not, lack of belief in a god is an extremely new kind of mindset in human history, and it’s to be expected that most of us remain unconvinced of our various imaginary friends’ imaginariness. I know many highly intelligent people who believe. I don’t know how they are able to believe. I do know how I managed to cling to belief for the first thirty or so years of my life, and I suspect a few of my acquaintances might be similarly situated. But ultimately, it’s not for me to speculate on what is in other people’s minds.

I don’t know just when it was decided that one could be either a believer in science or a believer in religion but not both. I accepted the truth of evolutionary theory at least 15 years before I ceased believing in a god. In Christianity, only the strictest fundamentalists — those for whom the Bible is literal truth — should, in fact, find their faith irreconcilable to any acceptance of science. Anyone else is free to view the Bible as allegory and interpret Genesis as a kind of symbolic shorthand account of what actually happened. Even the Catholic Church — having learned its lesson after enduring centuries of ridicule for its persecution of Galileo — acknowledges evolution as compatible with its theology.

For most people, the journey from belief to atheism is a gradual progression through transition periods. It’s slow and far from inexorable. Without a doubt, my acceptance of the theory of evolution was one of my first steps down that road, and I believe this has been the case for a great many Christian apostates like me.

By denying the very existence of any sort of middle ground between belief in the supernatural and complete acceptance of scientific reality, the New Atheists are manufacturing an unnecessary philosophical polarization that guarantees them fewer converts. Worse, they are laying an obstacle in the paths of untold thousands of intelligent believers who, but for what they view as a nasty and churlish attack on their faith, might well think their way around to reality in the fullness of time.

Bluntly: Their hearts are in the right place, but the New Atheists sometimes do more harm than good. After all, good intentions sometimes really do pave the road to . . . you know where.