Here we go again: another self-avowed atheist blaming fellow atheists for the state of dialog between believers and non-believers. Here’s Julian Baggini over at CiF:
Perhaps a period of New Atheist exuberance was necessary. At least it got people thinking, although I fear it has confirmed every negative stereotype about it. We now need to turn down the volume and engage in a real conversation about what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away. If we don’t, we will only have ourselves to blame if the vague platitudes of Bunting and Armstrong win the war for hearts and minds.
In other words, fundamentalist religion is obviously absurd and is doomed to extinction, but unless the New Atheists shut up and show a little respect, it will be replaced by a “woolly-minded” kind of “doctrine-lite”.
Now this seems utterly absurd. It simultaneously dismisses atheists as being unable to prevail against arguments that are “vapid and shallow”, and stipulates that atheists are responsible for setting the tone of the discourse.
Perhaps it’s just a UK thing. Maybe over in the land of my birth orthodox religion is on the point of collapsing, and like demolition experts destroying a tall building, atheists need to place a few small charges in the right place, get out of the way, and wait for a tidy implosion. But somehow I doubt that: if anything, the patterns seems to be that the “woolly-minded” are breaking apart, some becoming more fundamentalist and others joining the apatheists. This would make a nonsense of Baggini’s argument, of course.
Over here in the USA, atheists are also being told to shut up. Will Wilkinson rejects the idea:
I was recently reading somewhere about Christopher Hitchens’ debate with William Lane Craig at Biola and someone in the comments of whatever blog I was reading made the observation that there are tons of Christian schools like Biola and Wheaton and so forth full of smart kids who undergo training in arguing for the existence of God. It’s not like it’s treated as an open question at these places. The Christian schools and their Christian students know the result they need, and they practice in the most persuasive arguments that deliver that result. None of these arguments are any good, of course, as there is no God, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, and so on. But my sense is that there are about a gazillion works of theistic/Christian apologetics for every God Is Not Great. But write a God Is Not Great or a The End of Faith and you’re colored as some kind of obnoxious disrespectful lout out to set the lions on all those downtrodden Christian. Why is that? Even other atheists are encouraged to deplore the brazen “New Atheists’†alleged in-your-face lack of humility. I find this completely ridiculous.
UPDATE: PZ Myers skewers Baggini and Bunting in his inimitable way.