5 A question of proof: science
Science is the great success story of human intellectual exploration. It’s widely regarded as the most secure and reliable form of human knowledge, and has gained this enviable reputation by the modesty of its ambition. Scientists know that they don’t have to comment on everything – just what can be shown to be true by rigorous and testable investigation.
The nature of science
Science seeks only to describe the forms and processes of the world; it declines to make observations on issues of meaning and value. And it’s right to do so, for the cultural and intellectual authority of science depends critically upon its absolute neutrality in ethical, political and religious debates. This point was made long ago when Darwin’s great supporter Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) famously declared that science ‘commits suicide when it adopts a creed’.1 Huxley was right. If science is hijacked by fundamentalists, whether religious or anti-religious, its intellectual integrity is subverted and its cultural authority compromised.
In a sense the natural sciences are the one remaining aspect of the Enlightenment project that has stood the test of time. The experimental method is universally valid and blind to the culture, race, religion or gender of its researchers.2 But while science may use rational methods of investigation, most notably the careful accumulation of evidence through observation and experiment, it does from time to time witness developments that are deeply counterintuitive and seem completely irrational (quantum theory providing many choice examples). Yet the question a scientist will ask is not: ‘Is this reasonable?’ but ‘What are the reasons for thinking this is true?’
There’s an important point here about the limits of human rationality. The fact that the strangeness of the physical universe is not something we could possibly have predicted makes it clear that rationality is a matter of discovery rather than foresight. Science has learned to conform its thinking to the distinct and idiosyncratic nature of the universe rather than lay down in advance what form this ought to take.
The approach to the philosophy of science currently dominant suggests that scientific advance takes place by identifying the ‘best explanation’ of a set of observations.3 A classic example illustrates this point well. In his Principia Mathematica (1687), Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) argued that the most satisfactory way of making sense of the motions of the moon and planets on the one hand, and of bodies falling to earth (such as his famous apple) on the other, was to propose the existence of something called ‘gravity’ – an invisible force of attraction.4 He was deeply suspicious of the idea, but it appeared to be the best explanation of observations of the world.
In other cases of scientific advance the jury is still out. For example, two quite different approaches to quantum theory – the so-called Copenhagen school and the alternative developed by David Bohm – are equally elegant and, in theory at least, scientists haven’t been able to decide which is right.5 Similarly, in the recent debate about whether we need to think about a single universe or a ‘multiverse’, the evidence is ambivalent and a case can be made for either view.6
Furthermore science is a never-ending quest for the best understanding of things. The way things seem today will not be the way they’re seen a century from now. (A hundred years ago scientists thought that the universe had existed for ever; that belief has now been replaced with the radically different notion that the universe came into being in a primordial fireball known as the Big Bang.7) The philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once shrewdly observed that scientists believed many things to be true but knew that some of those would eventually be shown to be wrong. The problem was that they didn’t know which.
Today most scientists believe that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is the best explanation of what we see in the world around us. But as Richard Dawkins rightly points out, Darwinism may eventually turn out to be wrong: ‘we must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light which will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition’.8 We need to be clear that a sensible recognition of the provisionality of scientific theories is not the same as resigning ourselves to a kind of relativism, each generation arbitrarily choosing what it wants to believe. Theoretical judgements are driven by evidence, and evidence accumulates over time, gradually leading to what the historian Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shifts’ – radical changes in the way we see things.
This point is not controversial in the philosophy of science, but my experience of debating the topic suggests that many ordinary people, especially within the New Atheism, have a rather simplistic take on science, believing that ‘science proves things’. Let’s explore this further.
Does science ‘prove’ its theories?
New Atheist websites tend to give the impression that scientific theories are based only on evidence. Religion on the other hand, they posit, runs away from evidence. Richard Dawkins’ argument that atheism is rational and scientific, while religion is irrational and superstitious, is clearly being picked up here. But just how reliable is it?
Dawkins often argues that there’s no need for faith in science, in that the evidence for a correct conviction compels us to accept its truth. He first set out his views on this matter in The Selfish Gene in 1976 and has not changed his mind since.
[Faith] is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn’t matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.9
Though this seems clear and persuasive, it’s actually an unsustainable view of the relation of evidence and belief in the natural sciences simply because it fails to make the critical distinction between the ‘total absence of supporting evidence’ and the ‘absence of totally supporting evidence’.
For example, consider the current debate within cosmology over whether the Big Bang gave rise to a single universe or a series of universes (the so-called multiverse).10 I have many distinguished scientific colleagues who support the former approach, and equally distinguished scientific colleagues who support the latter. Both are real options for thinking and informed scientists, who make their decisions on the basis of their judgements of how best to interpret the evidence and who believe – but cannot prove – that their interpretation is correct. This process rather inconveniently doesn’t fit at all with Dawkins’ bold declaration that ‘if there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway’. Dawkins himself clearly believes in the multiverse theory, but the evidence for it just isn’t good enough to compel him – or anyone else – to accept it. Science just isn’t like that.11
In its rigorous sense, ‘proof’ applies only to logic and mathematics. We can prove that 2 + 2 = 4, just as we can prove that ‘thewhole is greater than the part’. Nevertheless it’s important to avoid confusing ‘provability’ with ‘truth’. As we noted earlier, the great mathematician Kurt Gödel famously proved that however many rules of inference we formulate, there’ll still be some valid inferencesthat are not covered by them. In other words there are some statements that are true that we may not be able to show to be true.12 The philosophical implications of this are considerable.13
In science, as we make a series of observations we’re forced to address the questions: ‘What must be true if we are to explain what is observed?’ ‘What “big picture” of reality offers the best fit?’ The American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) used the term ‘abduction’ to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as ‘inference to the best explanation’.
A classic example of this can be found in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), now widely seen as a landmark in scientific history. New Atheist websites often assert that Darwin proved his theories, contrasting this unfavourably with the ‘blind faith’ of religion. Darwin himself knew otherwise. He believed that his theory of ‘natural selection’ provided the most elegant and persuasive explanation of biological life forms – but he knew he couldn’t prove it.14 The problems were obvious.
To begin with, there was no ‘smoking gun’ – no knock-down, unambiguous evidence that would conclusively and incontrovertibly compel people to accept his theory. Everything that was known about the natural world could be accommodated by rival theories, such as transformism.15 Furthermore there were serious scientific objections and difficulties to his theory that made it unacceptable to many scientists of his day.16 The most significant of these was probably the problem of genetic dilution.17 Darwin lacked a viable theory of genetics to explain how inherited characteristics were transmitted to subsequent generations.
Yet despite some formidable difficulties, Darwin believed that his theory was right and would one day be shown to be so. How, he asked, could a theory be wrong when it made so much sense of what he observed? Yes, there were loose ends everywhere and a large number of problems. But his core idea seemed to him to be correct – even though it couldn’t be proved.
. . . a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.18
So does science prove its theories? There are certainly some things that science (as opposed to logic and mathematics) can prove and has proved – that the chemical formula for water is H2O, for example, or that the average distance of the moon from the earth is about 384,500 km. But these are basically facts about our world. The big scientific questions concern notions about the origins of the universe, the nature of force and matter and perhaps the biggest question of all: is there a Grand Unified Theory that can explain everything? We can give to these questions good answers that we believe can be justified from the best evidence at our disposal. But we can’t give a final answer because we know that what scientists believe today may not be what scientists believe in the future. No wonder standard scientific textbooks rightly emphasize that ‘science rests on faith’.19
Most people don’t have a problem with this. Faith is just part of human life and plays an important role in science as it does everywhere else. However, the New Atheism tends to have an aversion to the word, believing that ‘faith’ denotes some kind of intellectual perversity reserved for deluded religious fools. Faith, we’re told, is invariably blind faith. Quite clearly it’s not: belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world. As the philosopher Julia Kristeva observed: ‘Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say “I believe,” I mean “I hold as true.”’20
In the end, science is about giving us reasons for believing that certain things are true, while at the same time insisting that we realize that future generations may rightly want to challenge these beliefs. That’s why science is so successful: it’s willing to change its mind in response to new evidence. But what about things that lie beyond the scientific method?
The limits of science
The natural sciences are empirical in their approach – in other words they rely on the application of observation and experiment in investigating the world. Yet empiricism refuses, as a matter of principle, to speculate about any realities beyond the observable world. Bas van Fraassen, a leading philosopher of science, makes this point clearly.
To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena, and to recognize no objective modality in nature. To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable . . . it must invoke throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable.21
This emphasis on what’s ‘actual and observable’ gives the sciences their distinct identity. It also defines their limits.
In arguments with zealous New Atheist foot soldiers – most of whom, I say with some regret, seem to know astonishingly little about the history and philosophy of science – I regularly find that one of the easiest ways to make them furious is to tell them that science can’t answer some of life’s great questions. I’m accused of all sorts of things when I do this, usually of peddling ‘typical religious obscurantism’ or spouting ‘anti-scientific nonsense’. As the writings of Richard Dawkins carry the status of Holy Writ for many of these very earnest people, I take pleasure in pointing out how Dawkins himself correctly emphasizes the moral limits of science: ‘science has no methods for deciding what is ethical’.22 This does, I have to say, throw them into some confusion. They often don’t know very much about Richard Dawkins either.
The clumsy word ‘scientism’ – often glossed as ‘scientific imperialism’23 – is now used to refer to the view that science can solve all our problems, explain human nature or tell us what’s morally good.24 It claims that all that’s known or can be known is capable of verification or falsification using the scientific method. Anything that cannot be verified or falsified in this manner is to be regarded as at best mere private opinion or belief and at worst delusion or fantasy. Very few natural scientists embrace scientific imperialism, to my knowledge. It appears to appeal to a handful of philosophers on the one hand and a much larger cohort of adherents of popular ‘scientific atheism’ on the other.
Two areas of thought that clearly lie beyond the legitimate scope of the natural sciences are the non-empirical notions of value and meaning. These cannot be read off the world or measured as if they were constants of nature. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam rightly notes, while there’s such a thing as ‘correctness in ethics’, it’s important not to model our ethical thinking ‘on the ways in which we get things right in physics’.25 It’s been known since the eighteenth century that there are formidable intellectual obstacles in the way of anyone wanting to argue that science can generate moral values, most notably the impossibility of arguing from observed facts to moral values.
The New Atheist celebrity Sam Harris has tried to argue otherwise in his most recent book, The Moral Landscape.26 Moral values are about promoting human wellbeing. Since science tells about what promotes wellbeing, it can determine moral values. There’s no need for God or religion. Science can tell us what’s right. So what of the massive problems that philosophers know are associated with this kind of approach?27 Harris deals with these by kicking them into the long grass, hoping that nobody who knows anything about the debate will notice his failure to engage with these problems.28 In the interests of reaching a ‘wider audience’, Harris avoids precisely the serious philosophical discussion that his position demands. The outcome is a lightweight and seriously deficient view of the foundations of morality.
My atheist colleagues had hoped that Harris would stop ranting against religion and do some serious positive thinking instead. The New Atheism, in their view, desperately needed to show that it could do something other than rage against faith. Sadly it looks as though Harris just can’t break the habit. A whole chapter is needlessly given over to anti-religious polemic when it should have been used to deal with precisely the objections to his own position that Harris so badly needed to engage. The New Atheism is great at anti-religious rhetoric, but it’s yet to show that it can put forward a positive and defensible alternative to faith-based values.
Religion engages with questions that lie beyond the scope of the scientific method – such as the existence of God, the meaning of life and the nature of values. These are all open to rational debate; it’s very doubtful whether they’re open to scientific analysis in that they’re not empirical notions. I find myself in broad agreement with the conclusions of Sir Peter Medawar (1915–97), who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on immunology. Medawar draws a distinction between ‘transcendent’ questions, which he thought were best left to religion and metaphysics, and questions about the organization and structure of the material universe. Medawar insists that it’s ‘very likely’ that there are limits to science, given ‘the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer’.29 Medawar makes it explicitly clear that he has in mind questions such as: ‘What are we all here for?’ ‘What’s the point of living?’ These are real questions and we’re right to seek answers to them. But science – if applied legitimately – isn’t going to help. We need to look elsewhere.
The New Atheism sees science as some kind of one-way intellectual superhighway to atheism. It’s not. Science can be made to resonate with atheism just as it can be made to resonate with Christian belief. It may certainly challenge some religious approaches that claim to offer a ‘scientific’ view of things. But in itself and of itself science is theistically neutral – unless it abandons the scientific method and strays into the more speculative world of metaphysics.
Warfare: science as the enemy of religion
From what’s been said it seems that God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) rightly remarked, ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.’30 In fact Dawkins and other New Atheists comment rather a lot on this matter, but perhaps that’s because they speak here primarily as militant atheists rather than scientists.
While scholarship has shown that the origins of ‘scientific atheism’ as a faith tradition can be traced back to the eighteenth century,31 the New Atheism has given it a new importance and profile through its appeal to the natural sciences in defence of its atheist outlook. In the New Atheist world-view, as we’ve seen, science is about what can be proved to be true whereas religion is about running away from the facts and seeking consolation in outdated, discredited and immoral Bronze Age myths.
For example, Christopher Hitchens regularly asserts that people believed the earth was flat because of religious dogma. It’s a puzzling assertion as historical scholarship long ago showed that virtually every Christian scholar of the Middle Ages acknowledged the sphericity of the earth.32 Some of them were even able to calculate its approximate circumference. The urban myth that religion demanded a flat earth is now known to have developed in the late nineteenth century, and it’s really time to give it up!
It’s not unreasonable to argue that the New Atheism does more than simply reflect the cultural stereotype of the ‘warfare’ of science and religion; it actually depends upon it for its plausibility. The origins of this idea – often referred to as the ‘conflict thesis’ in scholarly works – lies in the massive social shifts that took place in Victorian England. In the early part of the nineteenth century most English scientists were ordained clergy of the Church of England who saw no tension between their faith and the scientific method. With the passing of time it became increasingly important for scientists to assert their independence of the Church – or any other institution. This led to a significant shift in the dynamics of cultural power as scientists began to wrest cultural and professional authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values.33
The perception that science and religion were at war with each other was not, as some New Atheist writers seem to think, the result of the Darwinian debates. It actually arose later in the nineteenth century through highly polemical popular works such as John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896). Through shrewd manipulation of the historical evidence these passionate books portrayed noble, honest, objective and heroic scientists as victims, struggling to defend the truth against odious, manipulative and repressive Catholic clergy.
These two works, today remembered as much for their ideological stridency as their historical inaccuracy, had a deep impact on atheist thinking. Bertrand Russell, for example, draws uncritically on both sources in his History of Western Philosophy. Despite (or perhaps on account of?) their lightweight and superficial reading of history, they established the popular stereotype of the warfare of science and religion that persists to this day, largely through uncritical repetition in the media.
The ‘warfare’ model underlay the appeal to science as a core component of the Soviet Union’s attempt to impose its official atheism on an unwilling and unpersuaded public. In my study I have a photograph of the library of the Timiriazev Scientific Research Institute for the Study and Propaganda of the Scientific Foundations of Dialectical Materialism,34 taken around the year 1931. This institute, originally dedicated to biological research, became part of the spearhead of the Soviet Union’s attempt to eliminate religion by an appeal to science. On the library wall a massive banner reads: ‘The front line of the battle against religion!’
In the end Stalin’s approach just didn’t work. Belief in God was still rampant in the Soviet Union when he died in 1953, forcing the Communist Party to begin an aggressive programme of indoctrination the following year, decreeing that ‘the teaching of school subjects (history, literature, natural sciences, physics, chemistry, etc.) should be saturated with atheism’.35 Soviet school textbooks repeatedly asserted the malevolence of religion through breezy slogans such as ‘Religion is a fanatical and perverse reflection of the world’ or ‘Religion has become the means of the spiritual enslavement of the masses.’ Yet all that this socially manipulative programme of using science as a weapon against religion achieved was to lay the foundations for the massive rebirth of belief in God after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
For the record, historians of science are generally agreed to have shown during the 1970s that the ‘conflict thesis’ was historically untenable.36 The myths on which it depended so critically – especially in popular atheist propaganda – have been comprehensively dismantled,37 and in recent decades popular culture has become increasingly willing to engage with the more messy complexities of history and culture instead of reducing them to mindless slogans and stereotypes. Everyone knows that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are shorthand terms for enormously complex and diverse beliefs, practices and communities. Crass generalizations are intrinsically dangerous here.
Earlier I noted how the New Atheism disregards the huge body of scholarly literature concerning the nature and impact of religion. Sadly the same is true of the history and philosophy of science. Why can’t the New Atheism take this literature seriously? To its critics it’s at least a century out of date with its reading.
Yes there are tensions – often serious – between some religious thinkers and some scientists. There always have been and always will be. But we’re also seeing synergies, resonances and the possibility of dialogue and mutual enrichment – perhaps more so today than ever before. The New Atheism is angered and exasperated by the growing number of scientists interested in metaphysical and religious questions, frequently portraying such people in rather hysterical terms as collaborating with the enemy .38 But that’s only how it looks if you’re psychologically fixated on the historically obsolete ‘warfare’ model. It’s time to move on and leave these discredited certainties of the past behind.
And there are signs that this is happening. In 2008 Richard Dawkins retired as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His militant atheism had made this position controversial, linking the affirmation of science with the ridicule of religion. He was succeeded by the distinguished mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Journalists flocked to interview him, chiefly interested in one question: would he follow in Dawkins’ footsteps, and make this chair a personal pulpit for atheism? Du Sautoy’s answer was crisp and convincing. Though he was an atheist himself, he would ‘absolutely not’ be indulging in anti-religious polemic. His job was to promote science, and he looked forward to doing that with enthusiasm.39
These comments provoked anger from some on the Dawkins website.40 What kind of scientist was this? Why had he not given Dawkins the honour due to him? If du Sautoy was a real scientist he’d be rubbishing religion! What a ridiculous choice for this chair! ‘If he’s going to promote the public understanding of science he has to confront the daily challenges of religion to rationality.’ Just as well Dawkins was still around to tell the truth about science, since this newcomer was clearly not up to the job. Yet du Sautoy’s approach represents an important step back to normality. Maybe there’s hope that civilized conversation will at last take the place of confrontation and ridicule in this important field.
The twentieth century: the seismic shift
The relation of science and faith changed decisively in the later twentieth century. Although New Atheist propagandists regularly declare that scientific advance and progress has eroded the case for belief in God, the facts are otherwise.
The first decades of the twentieth century were dominated by a scientific belief in the eternity of the universe. It had always existed. Religious language about ‘creation’ was seen as mythological nonsense, incompatible with cutting-edge scientific knowledge.
This belief played an important role in the great 1948 debate between two leading British philosophers – the atheist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and the Christian Frederick Coplestone (1907–90) – that’s widely regarded as a classic exploration of the issues.41 Russell thought this scientific consensus was more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God question once and for all. The universe is just there and there’s no good reason to think about what brought it into being.
But things have changed since 1948. During the 1960s it became increasingly clear that the universe had an origin – the Big Bang.42 Though this idea was met with fierce resistance by some atheist scientists of the day, such as the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who was worried that it sounded ‘religious’, happily this prejudice was overwhelmed by the evidence in its favour. And it’s an undeniable fact that the new understanding of the origins of the universe resonates strongly with the Christian doctrine of creation.
A replay of the Russell–Coplestone debate was staged in 1998 to mark its fiftieth anniversary. It featured two leading philosophers, the Christian William Lane Craig and the (then) atheist Anthony Flew.43 Craig, the philosopher who many now regard as the natural successor to Coplestone, developed the following line of argument:
Major premise: whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Minor premise: the universe began to exist.
Conclusion: therefore the universe has a cause.
Note that, unusually, the minor premise, which would have been comprehensively rejected in 1948, is now accepted by virtually every scientist as of possibly even greater importance than the major. Flew experienced considerable difficulty at this point and was unable to deploy the strategies used by earlier generations of atheist apologists with any plausibility. For several years before his death in 2010, Flew explicitly affirmed his belief in a God. He had moved away from his earlier atheism, taking up a position I would characterize as a form of deism.44
This fundamental shift in the scientific consensus has changed the tone of the debate about God. Also important is the growing realization that the universe came into being ‘fine-tuned’ for life.45 The fundamental constants of nature seem to be fixed at certain values that make our existence possible. Fred Hoyle was one of the first to appreciate this phenomenon and its obvious theistic interpretation. It is, he wrote, as if ‘a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature’.46
Fine-tuning proves nothing but it is deeply suggestive. It resonates strongly with the Christian way of thinking.47 The cosmology of the early twenty-first century is much more sympathetic to Christian belief than that of a century ago.
Science and reason: some concluding thoughts
So where do these reflections on reason and science leave us? Both have much to say, yet we can still ask good and meaningful questions that neither reason nor science can answer. And we’re right to look elsewhere when they fail to provide adequate responses. If it is to remain true to the criteria by which it demands that others should be judged, the New Atheism must restrict itself to the domain of the rationally and scientifically verified and verifiable. The New Atheism’s search for liberation from what it terms ‘superstition’ seems to have ended up confining humanity within a self-made and self-imposed cage.
But is this domain existentially and morally habitable? It may have been thought so back in the eighteenth century. Yet as Sir Isaiah Berlin noted, the dominant mood in Western culture from the late nineteenth century onwards has been ‘the rejection of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit’.48 To limit oneself to what reason and science can prove is merely to skim the surface of reality and fail to discover the hidden depths beneath. The rise of fantasy writings – such as fairy tales in the Victorian era49 and their later development in J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis – is an important reflection of this loss of confidence in the existential adequacy of scientific rationalism.
In late 2007 Richard Dawkins and the Oxford mathematician John Lennox met in Alabama50 for an interesting and widely discussed debate in which most of the questions arising from the New Atheism were explored, especially those relating to science and faith. The Christian online community had no doubts about the outcome: Lennox won.
Many in the New Atheist virtual community also reluctantly drew that same conclusion. They were disturbed by Lennox’s argumentative prowess and clearly in shock that the core ideas of the New Atheism had been so successfully challenged on rational and scientific grounds. But more significantly, some began to realize that reason and science might actually point towards God rather than towards atheism. What New Atheist foot soldiers had regarded as reliable allies might turn out to be traitors. The following deeply frustrated comment, posted on Richard Dawkins’ website, is representative of the tone of that reaction:
Why is everyone surprised that these debates all end the same way. Why, why would we expect something better from the religionists? I’m beginning to believe the best we can do is to just shout at them, ‘You’re stupid, you’re idiots, you’re morons!!’ It is probably as effective as using reason and logic. Reason and logic are anathema to these people. I’m going to yell at them.51
This blogger was clearly shocked that reason and science not only failed to persuade Lennox but seemed to point towards theism. So what could be done? Best just to yell at Lennox and others and tell them they’re morons. Shout them down if you can’t win the argument. And that, in the view of many critical observers, is precisely the form that much New Atheist polemic now takes. Sadly many contributors to New Atheist websites seem to think that loud and rude insults trump evidence-based argument. I’m not sure whether that tells us something about the intellectual weakness of the New Atheism or about the state of contemporary Western culture.
There are clear signs of a dawning realization of this point within the New Atheist community. While their cheerleaders urge them to trust reason and science, insisting that they offer an incorrigible and irrefutable foundation for atheism, freethinkers within the movement are coming to realize that their beliefs are simplistic – where they once thought they were plain simple.