Don Feder on Atheism in today's USA Today

Don Feder, author of Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? has an article in today’s USA Today on atheism. Overall, the article is fairly meh, but it contains many errors of fact. Let us analyze:

(By Don Feder Mon Apr 16, 7:15 AM ET)

Oh, for the days when one could safely stroll into a bookstore without tripping over the latest atheist title. Ironically, by writing their tracts, in the long run atheists might boost belief.

Oh for the day when religious, new age, pseudoscience and generally silly books will collect thick coats of dust due to customer disinterest.

My local Barnes & Noble has the following titles on display -Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam ; The Quotable Atheist; Letter To A Christian Nation; God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist; and The God Delusion, which is a New York Times best-seller.

Actually, a few of them are NYT best-sellers.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., has become the first member of Congress to announce that he doesn't believe in God. He's probably just looking for a book deal.

I doubt it. He was targeted as part of a contest, he didn’t “just up and decide” to do it. He obliged because he is hugely popular and doesn’t fear losing his seat. Many others would if they could also do so without political fallout…

Why the sudden outpouring of atheist advocacy? Perhaps it's a way for the cultural left to assert itself in the face of the religious right. Or maybe it's meant to show that the anti-God argument can be framed more intelligently than in a Bill Maher monologue. Whatever the impetus, as a believer, I welcome the phenomenon. After all, the great enemy of belief isn't disbelief but indifference.

The former of those, combined with the general tenor of religious fundamentalism globally.

Let the godless write their books and the faithful answer them. The disillusionment with religion that dominated British intellectual circles after World War I helped to shape the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. The surviving son of atheist icon Madalyn Murray O'Hair is an evangelical Christian.

I agree that apathy is the enemy. At least making there is a benefit without conversion: the loony are forced to become more logical (not that this means they are now consistently or fully logical).

The books referenced above assert that the debate is over and that atheism has won, but atheists have been saying that for more than 200 years. Since the French Enlightenment, the death of God has been confidently proclaimed. Religion has been made obsolete by egalitarian revolution, industrialism, or science, they insisted. Yet, early in the 21st century, faith endures.

And it will continue to do so. Unlike religion, atheism has no “prophets” nor should it. It will never be obsolete so long as the cultural “package deal” that it offers has no serious competition: socialization, pre-packaged ethics, life instruction and support…

Outlasting the Soviet Union

For 70-plus years, the Soviets tried everything imaginable to kill religion: show trials, mass murder of clerics, confiscations, indoctrination and even attempts to co-opt religious symbols and ceremonies. But belief survived, while scientific socialism is now defunct.

The communists have traded one set of fantasies for another.

In China, where communism's war on God continues, the home-church movement thrives. Half a world away, America has the highest weekly church attendance in the industrialized world, notwithstanding attacks on faith from Hollywood, academia and a judiciary seemingly intent on purging religious symbols from public spaces.

But the trends are reversed now – the growth of faith in China and the former USSR now far outpaces the loss thereof here. People will not tolerate being told what to think and believe, and I, like Voltaire, would fight alongside the religious to preserve their right to 1^st Amendment protections.

In the USA - the most science-oriented society in history - Christian bookstores, radio stations and TV programming proliferate. It seems as though a hunger for the Creator is imprinted on the human heart.

The USA may be called “science-oriented”, but it sure as hell isn’t “science-literate.” Instead, the average citizen’s science competency is atrocious, and creationists fight to worsen it all time. There is a clear bifurcation between the elite status of our science and universities and the average denizen of Kansas City, MO. I would also say that the better-scoring industrialized nations (Japan, especially) on science literacy tests are much more atheistic as well:

Here are some numbers to consider, reported as the % answered correctly (2006 SE, Table 7-10):

1. The center of the Earth is very hot. (True) 78
2. All radioactivity is man-made. (False) 73
3. It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True) 62
4. Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False) 42
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True) 45
6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False) 54
7. The universe began with a huge explosion. (True) 35
8. The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True) 77
9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals. (True) 44
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around the Sun) 71

Now, compare these numbers to the 2002 SE report:

1. 70% of American adults do not understand the scientific process;
2. Double digit percentage gains in belief of haunted houses, ghosts, communication with the dead, and witches in the past decade;
3. U.S. depends heavily on foreign born scientists at all degree levels, as high as 45% in engineering;
4. Belief in pseudoscience is relatively widespread and growing;
5. 60% believe some people posses psychic powers or extrasensory perception (ESP);
6. 30% believe some reported objects in the sky are really space vehicles from other civilizations;
7. 30% read astrology charts at least occasionally in the newspaper;
8. 46% did not know how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun (1 year);
9. 45% thought lasers work by focusing sound waves (they focus light);
10. 49% believe antibiotics kill viruses (they kill bacteria);
11. 66% don't believe the Big Bang theory widely accepted by scientists;
12. 48% believe humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs;
13. 47% don't believe in evolution which is widely accepted by scientists;
14. 55% couldn't define DNA;
15. 78% couldn't define a molecule; (particularly sad to me, a chemist)
16. 32% believe in 'Lucky Numbers'.

So there's always plenty of superstition to fill in people's heads when knowledge and reason are absent. I don't see religion going away anytime soon, so long as general scientific illiteracy abounds and pervades.

What would a world without God look like? Well, for one, morality becomes, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult. "Thou shalt not kill" loses much of its force when reduced from commandment to a suggestion. How inspiring can it be to wake in the morning, look in the mirror, and see an accident of evolutionary history - the end product of the random collision of molecules?

This is standard tripe – our motivation to be moral is much more rational when we transfer the basis of self-interest from, “If you don’t do X, you’ll burn in hell,” to “Doing X is good for you and everyone else.” Normativity based on Divine Command Theory has been considered problematic for millennia due the Euthyphro Dilemma.

A universe that isn't God-centered becomes ego-centered. People come to see choices through the prism of self: what promotes the individual's well-being and happiness. Such a worldview does not naturally lead to benevolence or self-sacrifice.

It does by the law of symmetry in ethics and Kant’s categorical imperative. We cannot expect a society in which we may benefit from altruism without participating in altruistic behavior ourselves.

An affirmation of God can lead to the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence. In terms of morality, a denial of God leads nowhere.

I would love to a rational argument for democracy based on the theocratic policies instituted by YHWH. Basing our ethics on self-interest and rational consequentialism leads somewhere.

There are no secularist counterparts to Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce (the evangelical responsible for abolition of the British slave trade), Martin Luther King Jr., or the Christians - from France to Poland - who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

Wow. Breathlessly stupid. And completely wrong. In ancient Greece, some of the greatest thinkers to have ever lived were not theists in any Western sense. In modern times, people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet gave $30 BILLION to charity. This is ridiculous.

True, terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Terrible things have been done in the name of every noble concept, including love, charity, loyalty and kinship. Yet, the worst horrors of the modern era were perpetrated by godless political creeds. The death toll from sectarian conflict over the ages is dwarfed by ideological violence, from the Jacobinism of Revolutionary France to the charnel houses of communism and fascism.

This ground gets trodden over and over and over…Those tyrannical dictators traded religious delusion for political delusion. There is no logical connection between atheism and militant communism or anything of the sort that led to the 20^th century’s horrors. These horrors resulted from people taking away the rights of others in the name of an abstract “greater good” – both religious and political fascism has seen it this way. There was no logical correlation between atheism and these murders – only communism.

As Sam Harris and Rick Warren recently discussed,

Rick, Christianity has conducted itself in an abjectly evil manner from time to time. How do you square that with the Christian Gospel of love?
WARREN: I don't feel duty-bound to defend stuff that's done in the name of God which I don't think God approved or advocated. Have things been done wrong in the name of Christianity? Yes. Sam makes the statement in his book that religion is bad for the world, but far more people have been killed through atheists than through all the religious wars put together. Thousands died in the Inquisition; millions died under Mao, and under Stalin and Pol Pot. There is a home for atheists in the world today—it's called North Korea. I don't know any atheists who want to go there. I'd much rather live under Tony Blair, or even George Bush. The bottom line is that atheists, who accuse Christians of being intolerant, are as intolerant—

HARRIS: How am I being intolerant? I'm not advocating that we lock people up for their religious beliefs. You can get locked up in Western Europe for denying the Holocaust. I think that's a terrible way of addressing the problem. This really is one of the great canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism. The core problem for me is divisive dogmatism. There are many kinds of dogmatism. There's nationalism, there's tribalism, there's racism, there's chauvinism. And there's religion. Religion is the only sphere of discourse where dogma is actually a good word, where it is considered ennobling to believe something strongly based on faith.

WARREN: You don't feel atheists are dogmatic?

HARRIS: No, I don't.

WARREN: I'm sorry, I disagree with you. You're quite dogmatic.

HARRIS: OK, well, I'm happy to have you point out my dogmas, but first let me deal with Stalin. The killing fields and the gulag were not the product of people being too reluctant to believe things on insufficient evidence. They were not the product of people requiring too much evidence and too much argument in favor of their beliefs. We have people flying planes in our buildings because they have theological grievances against the West. I'm noticing Christians doing terrible things explicitly for religious reasons—for instance, not fund-ing [embryonic] stem-cell research. The motive is always paramount for me. No society in human history has ever suffered because it has become too reasonable.

At least Don cedes some of this:

This is not to say that atheism leads naturally to guillotines and gulags, but, just as "love your fellow man as yourself" can be corrupted, so too can liberty, equality and fraternity.

They can indeed, and this corruption is, if anything, exacerbated and accelerated by the hybridization of government and religion. Fascism throughout history shows a trademark mixture of the two, and the forms of communism that were practiced were a form of religion.

Signs throughout history

There is no irrefutable evidence for God's existence or non-existence. But, if you look closely, his footprints can be discerned in the sands of time.

Jews introduced the world to monotheism. They also were the first people to perceive history as linear- an unfolding story moving toward a conclusion. Is it a coincidence that this tiny, originally nomadic people generated the ideas that shaped the Western world, including equality, human rights and a responsibility to our fellow man? Jews are the only people to maintain their identity during two millennia of exile, and then return to their homeland and re-establish their nation.

Wow. This first sentence is breathlessly stupid. Monotheism was practiced in ancient Egypt and via Zoroastrianism long before Israel existed.

As for the fate of the Jews, I think it should be remembered that had the Roman Empire not instituted Christianity, and instead had paganism remained superlative, we wouldn’t have the same world today. Second, the influences of Israel’s neighbors upon her are almost always ignored and trivialized. She survived because she posed no threat to the greater empires which gave her everything she had: trade and knowledge. And it should be realized that Judaism is one of the few ancient religions whose national and religious identities were one, and enforced by death penalty (see Phineas). No other religions were so egocentric and insulated from “contamination”.

Mark Twain wrote: "The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up, held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. … All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?" Had Twain been a believer, he might have answered his own question.

This really depends on your interpretation. Consider that Egypt is still alive in the blood of inhabitants of many nations. Ditto with the others. The same is not true of Judaism at all, whose isolationism has made it statistically insignificant in terms of population impact and global distribution. I don’t see the ”magic” here. But Don sees God's "chosen" -- God is a little bit of a bigot.

America's survival and rise to global pre-eminence are equally improbable. Challenging the greatest empire of the 18th century, America should never have won its independence or should have self-destructed during the Civil War.

Ah, the standard “America was chosen by God,” the mantra of the Religious Right. Funny, isn’t it, how every country has this same view of its divine Providence? If those two wars were “blessed by God,” then God is quite a dick for choosing them over, say, peaceful means.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the genius of our infant republic lay not in its farms and workshops but in its churches whose "pulpits flame with righteousness."

This is false. He said many things in his Democracy in America (1835), but not this. Only by the mouths of stupid Religious Right sycophants do these sorts get repeated, always without specific citation, of course, and many others cherry-picked out of context from various Founding Fathers. Many others are lies made up by Barton and his ilk. In addition, Tocqueville said some other things that completely run contrary to the RR agenda, and thus they never quote them.

For instance,

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835))

And also,

“They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835))

I don’t even find it remarkable anymore that the supposed “scholars” and ”intellectuals” of the RR, like Feder, make such gross blunders of fact. They may even lie knowingly. Whatever accomplishes their goal.

Atheists are free to disbelieve and to try to propagate their disbelief in books and other intellectual forums. But saying the debate is over doesn't make it so. A bit of humility might make their case more convincing. Then again, humility is itself a religious concept.

Why, thanks for your permission in that first sentence. I agree the debate is not over regarding general arguments for a god’s existence, and that it ought not be. But insofar as creationism and YHWH go, those ideas are intellectually bankrupt, and no degree of false humility obscures a falsehood.
*update: See KoS also, I can't find anything else yet*
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