Good article on Wired I've been meaning to blog about for a while. It's about the "New Atheists" AKA The Church of the Non-Believers.
"There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," [Richard Dawkins] said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."
Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?
Basic principles of reality and disbelief aside, he makes some interesting comments about the number of people who are privately atheistic, but publicly devout, or at least secretive about their lack of faith.
"The number of nonreligious people in the US is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million," he says. "That's more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we're in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes."
Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. "Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists," he says. "Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn't add up. Either they're stupid, or they're lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they've got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can't get elected."
When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Here is where Dawkins' analogy breaks down. Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.
After starting off with the polarizing, take-no-prisoners guys who argue that not only is religion pointless, but that people who belive in it need to be corrected and ridiculed for their foolishness, the article moves a survey of more mainstream atheists, who correctly point out that the hardcore guys are political suicide. What would a world without religion look like? How best to advance non-belief amongst the uneducated horeds? Should it be advanced, with religion often needed to control restive populations? Check out the article, it goes on for some length and is an excellent and informative read.
Labels: atheism, richard dawkins, the flying spaghetti monster
