In defence of “fundamental” atheists
Dan Gardner has an excellent piece in The Ottawa Citizen arguing why it is unfair to “equate those who question God with the worst kind of zealots.”
It is quite common to equate the “new atheists” to religious fundamentalists:
[…] As one English university dean said in the Guardian, Richard Dawkins is “just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs in the Tube.”
Less Olympian thinkers have portrayed strident atheists as hacking away at the bonds of morality, which must inevitably lead to various forms of depravity ranging from the sexual to the genocidal.
Don’t you know Stalin was an atheist? That’s the way it goes.
This, according to Gardner, “frames the debate in a pleasingly symmetrical way”: with “the insane religious fanatics who fly jets into skyscrapers” on one side and ”fanatical atheists” on the other.
However, this characterization falls apart at closer scrutiny:
But just what is the core of Dawkins’ radical message?
Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.
That’s it. That’s the whole, crazy, fanatical package.
When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don’t, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon.
And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic on par with faith-saturated madmen who sacrifice children to an invisible spirit.
The whole article is worth reading; I was finding it difficult to choose excerpts from it to quote in this post. Especially if you are a theist who agrees with the “fanatical atheist” characterization, you would do well to read Gardner’s piece to understand the position of “new atheists.”
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