I hereby declare the official editorial policy of Salon to involve atheist-bashing, especially in the form of  the “I-am-better-than-everyone” stance so effectively portrayed in this famous xkcd cartoon on atheists:

And if a picture’s worth a thousand words, than the picture above is worth the 1,666 (!) words of Andrew O’Hehir’s new piece in Salon, “America: stupidly stuck between religion and science.” O’Hehir’s piece says absolutely nothing new, but simply reiterates the idea that fundamentalism is dumb, but not all religion is fundamentalism, that the New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris attack religion as if it were fundamentalism, and therefore they’re dumb too. Have you heard that one lately? O’Hehir’s looking for some kind of middle ground between science and religion, but, bizarrely, admits in the end that it doesn’t seem to exist. I wonder why that is?

Here, in words, is the supercilious first paragraph of O’Hehir’s piece, which could serve as a caption for the cartoon above:

Karl Marx’s famous maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, can apply just as well to the history of ideas as to the political sphere. Consider the teapot-tempest over religion and science that has mysteriously broken out in 2014, and has proven so irresistible to the media. We already had this debate, which occupied a great deal of the intellectual life of Western civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was a whole lot less stupid the first time around. Of course, no one on any side of the argument understands its philosophical and theological history, and the very idea of “Western civilization” is in considerable disrepute on the left and right alike. So we get the sinister cartoon version, in which religious faith and scientific rationalism are reduced to ideological caricatures of themselves, and in which we are revealed to believe in neither one.

Yes, we have had this debate, and it has continued, though I don’t think it was more active in the 18th and 19th centuries than it is now. And no, it’s not more stupid this time around, because we know a lot more about science, and we’ve seen how science has made even more hash of religious claims.  And note how O’Hehir implies that he, but nobody else engaged in these arguments, understands their philosophical and theological history. Such hauteur! In fact, many of the New Atheist arguments against religion are either the old and supposedly “less stupid” ones (viz. those of Russell or Hume), or newer responses to the defensive but unconvincing lucubrations of Sophisticated Theologians.™ You want stupid? Pick your side: Karen Armstrong or Steven Weinberg.

O’Hehir does indeed go after “young earth creationism” and its spinoffs, but then says that these worldviews are “a tiny fringe” movement in Christianity, implying that most decent Christians are of the liberal Eagleton stripe. He fails to note that 46% of Americans—hardly a tiny fringe minority—are indeed young-earth creationists when it comes to human evolution; that about 70% of us believe in Satan, angels, and Hell; and that 30% of Americans see the Bible as the direct word of God, while another 49% see it as “inspired by the word of God.”  O’Hehir clearly doesn’t get out enough, but at least he notes some of the dangers of melding Christianity and politics. Yet even those he hedges in a strange way:

This creationist boomlet goes hand in glove with the larger political strategy of Christian fundamentalism, which is somewhere between diabolically clever and flat-out desperate. Faced with a long sunset as a significant but declining subculture, the Christian right has embraced postmodernism and identity politics, at least in the sense that it suddenly wants to depict itself as a persecuted cultural minority entitled to special rights and privileges. These largely boil down, of course, to the right to resist scientific evidence on everything from evolution to climate change to vaccination, along with the right to be gratuitously cruel to LGBT people. One might well argue that this has less to do with the eternal dictates of the Almighty than with anti-government paranoia and old-fashioned bigotry. But it’s noteworthy that even in its dumbest and most debased form, religion still finds a way to attack liberal orthodoxy at its weak point.

He’s right about the “persecuted minority” canard, but I fail to see why gay rights, vaccination, and climate-change avowal are either “liberal orthodoxy” (they happen to be things that are either true or moral) or “weak points,” but never mind.  Certainly creationism and persecution of gays are strongly based on religion, and, of course, bigotry is not something that is separate from religion. Religion is certainly one of the main sources of bigotry.

After he gets religion out of the way, O’Hehir goes after his real target: atheists. And here he gets just about everything wrong:

Things can’t possibly be as bad on the scientific and rationalist side of the ledger, but they’re still confused and confusing. [Neil deGrasse] Tyson has made diplomatic comments about science and religion not necessarily being enemies, a halfway true statement that was never likely to satisfy anybody. (Meanwhile, “Cosmos” thoroughly botched the fascinating and ambiguous story of Giordano Bruno, a cosmological pioneer and heretical theologian burned by the Inquisition.) 

I didn’t see this show, but my impression, and that of others, was that the Bruno example was not used to show a conflict between religion and science per se, but a conflict between faith and rationality: how blind faith impeded and persecuted free thinking. O’Hehir argues that Tyson’s aim was to show that, à la Gould, religion and science occupy separate magisteria, but I don’t recall any viewers mentioning such a claim appearing in “Cosmos”.

O’Hehir then takes off the gloves and uses New Atheism as a punching bag, but again gets a lot of it wrong:

Creationists and other Biblical fundamentalists, needless to say, are having none of it: For them, the empirical realm is always and everywhere subservient to the revealed word of God. Meanwhile “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with their pop-culture sock puppet Bill Maher, espouse a similar view from the other direction. Their ahistorical or anti-historical depiction of religion is every bit as stupid as Ken Ham’s. Since there is nothing outside the empirical realm and no questions that can resist rational inquiry, the so-called domain of religion does not even exist. These debased modern-day atheists conflate all religion with its most stereotypical, superstitious and oppressive dogmas – a mistake that Nietzsche, the archangel of atheism, would never have made – and refuse to acknowledge that human life possesses a sensuous, symbolic and communal aspect that religion has channeled and accessed in a way no other social practice ever has. Strangely, their jeremiads urging the sheeple to wake from their God-haunted torpor haven’t won many converts.

First, nobody claims that “the so-called domain of religion” doesn’t exist, if that’s conceived as religious practices. If O’Hehir means that there is no evidence for any of the empirical claims of faith, then yes, we have no evidence of that sort. And that is completely independent of history or even the human longing for spirituality. After all, Sam Harris’s next book is on spirituality without religion.

O’Hehir thinks that somehow, because these human longings exist, they give credibility to religion. Well, they do, but only religion as a social or philosophical organization—not as a purveyor of truth. Further, who among us has “refused to acknowledge” that humans do long for symbolism, sensuality, and communality, something that religion tries to channel (along with its other less palatable aims)? Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell was in fact an attempt to show why, given the human character, religion has gained purchase. Finally, O’Hehir is simply wrong to say that the efforts of New Atheists “haven’t won many converts.” Has he ever looked at Dawkins’s “Converts Corner” site? That site has 120 pages of letters from people whom Dawkins has helped “convert” to unbelief. In contrast, I know of not one secularist who has become religious because he or she was turned off by the “militant atheism” of people like Dawkins. O’Hehir is a journalist who simply hasn’t done his homework, one who spout soothing platitudes without checking his facts.

What O’Hehir is missing is simply this: despite religion’s catering to some human needs, New Atheism opposes it on three grounds. First, its truth claims are false, and lead people to abandon rationality in other areas of inquiry. Second, that abandonment of rationality, and adherence to dogma, has pernicious effects on today’s world (O’Hehir himself cites America’s religious right, which even he admits has a malignant affect on society, but fails to mention Islam). Third, we can have the good things of religion—the communality, the sensuality, and yes, the spirituality—without the false, corrosive, and divisive claims of faith. After all, Scandinavia, France, and Germany do. And they’re doing fine.

And have a look at this deepity:

While [Ken] Ham’s beliefs are avowedly irrational and Dawkins claims to represent absolute rationality, both come off as passionate extremists within the cool, denatured, post-ideological space of the mass media — where in any case there is no obvious difference between those things.

“Cool, denatured, post-ideological space of the mass media”? What does that mean? (“Denatured”?) And does O’Hehir really see no difference between Ham’s crazed religiosity and arguments about the Flood and the Ark, and Dawkins’s refusal to accept these things because there’s no evidence for them? Yes, there is passion on both sides, but only one side has the evidence. Somehow “evidence” seems to have gotten lost in O’Hehir’s tirade.

I won’t reprise the rest of O’Hehir’s self-satisfied but unconvincing argument, except to reproduce his last paragraph, which I find thoroughly confusing:

Eagleton claims that our “post-theological, post-metaphysical, post-ideological [and] even post-historical era” is reacting with intense anxiety to the rise of a renewed fundamentalism, and the news flash that God isn’t dead after all. But he’s writing from the context of Britain, one of the world’s most thoroughly secularized societies. The American dilemma lies in the fact that we’re not post-anything. The Enlightenment never entirely took hold on this continent, as Thomas Jefferson accurately predicted, and the faithlessness or supermarket spirituality of consumer culture coexists uneasily with intense religious feeling and intense mythological nationalism. If Americans keep fighting the old philosophical battle between faith and reason over and over again, in increasingly silly forms, that reflects an unresolved spiritual contradiction at the core of our national identity. We long to be a shining city on a hill but cannot build it; we long for a mystical synthesis of science and religion but cannot find it.

On the one hand, O’Hehir bemoans the continuing conflict between Enlightenment values and religion. That’s a very real conflict, not a “silly” one.  And while it may be more intense in America than in, say, northern Europe, this conflict is not at “the core of our national identity”. Rather, it’s simply a holdover from the bad old days, combined with the adverse social conditions in America that has kept religion from waning as it has in much of Europe.

The reason the debate goes on is not because it’s been taken over by those “silly” New Atheists who don’t have the proper historical and theological grounding, but because there is a fundamental incompatibility between seeing the world through faith and through the spectacles of reason.

I, for one, do not long for a mystical synthesis of science and religion. Given religion’s methods for finding “truth,” which don’t find truth because each religion has settled on a different version of reality, and can’t find truth because faith accepts things without evidence, no synthesis is possible. That’s why we can’t find one. It’s beyond me why O’Hehir cannot see this simple fact. But perhaps he’s blinded by his animus towards atheism, and by his protruding chest, which, like that of a courting prairie chicken,  has become so puffed up by his preening and strutting that it has occluded his vision.

If anything is “silly” in all this, it’s O’Hehir’s futile effort to straddle the fence between science and religion. His article comes off as saying nothing beyond “both sides are stupid,” and he offers neither a synthesis nor a cogent analysis of the problem.

h/t: Marcel