Reply to Parsons on the New Atheism

Keith: We've discussed this quite a bit over at my place. It is one thing to criticize critics of religion for excessive rhetoric and inadequate justification for the assertions they make. I think that case can be made against Dawkins and company. It is another thing to criticize them for being unduly harsh. Here it gets tricky. One should be entitled, it seems to me to attack real intellectual fraud in as harsh of terms as is necessary. However, if one is really making an intellectual fraud charge, or if one is accusing an opponent of being culpably wrong, one assumes a much higher burden of proof. I, for example, in one post, took my friend Dick Purtill to task because he challenged Dr. Beversluis's intellectual integrity while at the same time misidentifiying the central claim of his chapter on A Grief Observed. The safest road is always civility, just because if you aren't civil you've really got to prove it. If people like Dawkins were to take the sort of tone they take but provide careful analyses of the doctrines they criticize, taking the time and effort to get things right, I would think better of him than I do now. A third problem is if these New atheists" have actually advocated doing thing that undermine the principles underlying the separation of church and state. Did Harris say, or did not say, that the death of God should be taught in the public schools. I'm sorry, but can you imagine what would hit the fan if a Christian were to say that he wanted the Resurrection of Jesus preached in the public schools? Did Dawkins describe the education of children in a particular religion in a religious faith as child abuse, or did he just think that an upbringing that made undue use of the fear of hell is child abuse. From the quotes I have seen it looks like he thinks all religious upbringing, including the education of my own daughters as Christians, is abusive. Am I being unduly sensitive if I am not too happy with Dawkins for implying that my wife and I are child abusers? Did Dennett say that we shouldn't let religious people teach falsehoods to children, such as teaching them to reject evolution? It's one thing to teach evolution in the public schools, it's another thing to tell parents that they can't tell their kids that it's all false. How would you enforce that sort of thing, without undercutting the foundations of the separation of church and state? In the "new atheist" literature they have gone beyond the sensible thing that one might say on these matters and have said things that to me undermine the underlying prinicple behind the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Maybe they didn't mean it, but then I have to say that people need to pay attention to what they are saying, and what these claims imply. Of course vigorous critique and debate is never a bad thing. If the main problem with Dawkins et al is that they aren't nice, that would be a minor problem. But I think they are open to more serious criticism than that on several fronts, including, I think, a rejection of the prinicples underlying the separation of church and state. If they don't mean these things, they should be speak more carefully in the future.