Creationism
Creationism, as discussed here, is the belief that the creation stories in Genesis are literal descriptions of creation, as opposed to a poetic form conveying an underlying message of a deeper order and will underlying the themes of chaos, reproduction and violence of the development of life as we know it.
Looking at creationism, firstly from the point of view of the Christian faith rather than scientific principles and methodology, reveals some very serious problems. First and foremost is the literalist claim - analogous to the "my opinion simply reflects reason and science" attitude of certain New Atheists - that their interpretation of the Bible is "simply what God says". This statement hides a form of idolatry, as it places an interpretation of the Bible in the place of God:
- God says that creation literally happened as described in Genesis.
- My literalist interpretation of Genesis says that creation literally happened as described in Genesis.
To claim (1) is unavoidably to claim (2), since even if you believe a literalist interpretation is true it's still an interpretation. So, very obviously in this case, creationism, and Biblical literalism (by which I mean the belief that one can take any Biblical text stating X and claim that therefore "God says X"), unavoidably assigns Divine authority not only to the Bible, but also to one's own reading of the Bible.
A further problem is the conflation of the Word of God and the Bible. Recall the description of the Word of God, N.B. within the Bible itself, at the start of John's Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
The Word obviously isn't a book. No book can be the medium through which all things are made, no book can be God, and the Bible didn't exist until well after the events of the New Testament. The Bible itself doesn't provide self-referential statements about its future form. So the apparently pious belief that the Bible is the literal Word of God arguably idolizes the Bible. One can accept that the Bible conveys a divine message without being divine itself or the form in which it conveys the message being divine, in the same way the prophets conveyed divine messages without the prophets being divine themselves. Just as prophets had human characteristics and personalities that must be disconnected from the message they conveyed, so the Bible as a book has characteristics that shouldn't be considered divine. It's our responsibility as Christians to do our best to disentagle the divine message from the specific, fallible form through which it was conveyed.
As a Christian, does the scientific perspective on the development of life and the universe matter? Consider the Greatest Commandment:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
I can't see how one can "love the Lord with all your mind" while believing lies about Him or His creation, accepting or even worse using logical fallacies, or ignoring the best available evidence about the truth. If reason - the mind - shows you that a literalist interpretation of Genesis is untrue, obedience to the Greatest Commandment demands you reject it.
Overwhelming scientific evidence contradicts a literalist interpretation of Genesis, as does orthodox theology. Failing to acknowledge that evidence doesn't reflect a "better" kind of faith in God, but just an unnecessary and potentially stubborn adherence to literalism. There is no "slippery slope" that leads from a rejection of Biblical literalist creationism to a lack of all faith in a Creator.
Finally, a comment on Intelligent Design. The problem with ID is that it fails to appreciate the powerful physical algorithms involved in evolution and self-organization. ID-ers' claims about the limits of those processes have no computational justification, simply appealing to ignorance, and every specific "flagship" example of irreducible complexity has been falsified. ID thus fails to appreciate the potential with which, from a Christian perspective, God imbues creation.
Note that the fallacy of demanding a direct-cause designer for order in biological systems is not the same as considering the more fundamental order in the universe, e.g. the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" to be metaphysical clues about, or pointers to, about a reality beyond the limits of empirical science. Or in the words of Stephen Katz (1978):
As the medievals, for example, Thomas Aquinas in his Five-Fold Way, were wrong when they argued that the existence of a "First Cause" could be proven inductively as a consequence of observing chain of causation within nature and history, because the observance of a cause in nature or history does not prove there is a cause of nature of history, so, too, modern men, who deny a cause of nature because of the randomness of natural selection, make the same error of logic, but in the reverse direction.
Atheism
Atheism, disbelief in God, is of course very broadly defined: which God or Gods are meant? What kind of belief is it that is exactly absent? Atheist worldviews are just as interpretive, and a priori just as valid, as theism: if the roles of uncertainty, subjectivity and the question of knowledge beyond the strictly empirical are understood, reasonable people can communicate with mutual respect, regardless of differences in their metaphysical beliefs. However, atheism can be distinguished from New Atheism, or
anti-theism, defined here as a set of
beliefs about theism, rather than purely the
absence of theistic beliefs. To define what I mean by anti-theism:
Anti-theism consists of the beliefs that
- theism is inherently irrational;
- theism is inherently harmful;
- science and religion are opposing forces;
- atheism is the only rational, logical and intellectually honest response to the core religious question.
Arguments against the assumptions underlying these beliefs and claims are presented in the main text. There are however also various problems more specific to an attitude that seems to be associated with New Atheism. I'll go through a number of points of concern, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether specific examples of the assertions, arguments and attitudes apply to them. A very general point is this: note that New Atheism consists of a set of beliefs about theism and religion; being beliefs, they should be tested as rigorously, knowledgeably and fairly as possible - according to the scientific principles often invoked in their support. My impression is that this is often something of a blind spot.
- New Atheism seems to pay no more than lip service to the difference between theism and Fundamentalism. For instance, creationism seems to be assumed to be representative of theism in general, despite this being demonstrably untrue. This leads to equivocation fallacies - treating all religion as the worst kind of religion.
- Confusing correlation and causation when blaming harm on theism or religion an sich, instead of seeking for more plausible underlying psychosocial causes.
- Assuming that the success of science in explaining the empirical universe somehow diminishes religion, even though science has nothing to do with whether religion can provide a different kind of value.
- Interpreting the diversity of religions as a problem for the idea of there being one God. However, many believers take it for granted that the details and imagery of different religions shouldn't be taken as absolute truths; not representations of different gods, but different ways of thinking about a transcendent God, experienced though various human and cultural filters.
- Conflating science, reason and atheism.
- Ignoring that naturalism is just as non-scientific a belief system as theism: they're both metaphysical positions that go beyond, and require more diverse kinds of reasons to believe than, anything within science.
- Using positive ad hominems such as the term "Brights".
- Using negative ad hominems such as terms like "faith heads".
- One New Atheist argument against the existence of God (which I attribute to Victor Stenger) is that the scientific view of the universe is "just as it would be" if God didn't exist. But we don't actually have the necessary comparison of a universe with a God versus a universe without a God. How do we know what a universe without a God would look like? Perhaps a universe without a God wouldn't even exist, or wouldn't contain qualia (assuming our universe has a God), or perhaps a universe with a God would be much nicer (assuming our's doesn't have a God). We don't have both cases, and we don't know which of the two we do have. All we know in terms of science is that an interventionist God isn't necessary to explain the repeatable, objective observations involved in science. Note that that's a much more limited conclusion, since it only concerns part of reality, and one specific kind of relationship with it.
Of course, none of this is to say that there are no serious problems associated with religious insitutions and beliefs. All I want to argue is that those problems don't imply that any and all invective aimed against religion or non-atheists is justified.