Lisa Miller: "Let's move beyond faith versus reason."

Lisa Miller first popped on my radar as a possible target for some kind of hall of shame when she published her her favorable opinion of Karen Armstrong. She is a columnist for Newsweek who recently published an article on the New Atheists, "Collision," the film coming out next week and about this debate in general (disparaging the whole thing).

Let me begin by saying that I intend to see Collision and it wouldn't surprise me if I left with the same opinion of it Miller reports, though I suspect for different reasons. I've seen Hitchens debate theists (Pastor Douglas Wilson in this case) many times and his rigmarole is beginning to get tedious. I'm just tired of watching "the debate" generally. This is how it usually works when one of the New Atheists debates a religious apologist: The atheist makes logically sound arguments and the apologist makes a lot of noise masquerading as argument. Usually the theist has held their beliefs for several decades, and this prevents either from changing their mind.

This is where Miller and I begin to diverge. It has been four years of constant fighting in the annals of secular blogs, websites and in the press generally, since the publication of The End of Faith and the advent of the New Atheists. Miller says it's time for a ceasefire. While I'm tired of watching theists attempt the same points only to have them demolished over and over, I recognize the need for the debate to continue. This moniker of "the New Atheists" may be one of the problems. "New Atheism" implies that these personalities are merely reiterating the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Frederick Nietzsche and Karl Marx, perhaps only adding 21st century details. This is not true. The New Atheists are the first to place moderate religion on a continuum with extremism. They explain why faith, the willingness to believe something without or in spite of the evidence, is the problem, and that it unites these two groups in their common irrationality.

Miller has some ideas about what's really motivating the New Atheists.  

Together they've sold more than 3 million books worldwide, which suggests they may be in this for more than just our edification.

According to Harris, he was expecting his first book to "slide off the printing press and into oblivion." Hitchens has received threats to his person and family since he published God is Not Great. If you think he values the profits of the book over his daughter, I promise you're mistaken.

Pundits and journalists have used talk of the "New Atheists" to keep their criticism of religion at arm's length, without actually refuting their arguments. Instead, the internet is saturated in commentary on their style, rhetoric and anger. Dawkins, despite his rather mild disposition and criticism, is painted as an aggressive atheist who wants to deprive people of their beliefs. Miller exclaims

The atheists are, more than other interest groups, joyous cannibals and regurgitators of their own ideas. They thrive online, where like adolescent boys they rehash their rhetorical victories to their own delight, Corey.

Emphasis (and word) added. It does feel like she's addressing me though doesn't it? I'm an atheist, online, immature.... But this gets to the heart of why I do this. It is because the New Atheists' criticism has not been answered, that I regurgitate it here. If the theists they debate actually made good points, this blog wouldn't exist.

Imagine if Miller asked for a ceasefire in the debate over witchcraft. "You see how much debate has gone on surrounding witches -- where has it gotten us? What we need to do learn to live side by side with witches and warlocks and tolerate their talk of magic spells and the Evil Eye. How can we just do away with the whole enterprise? What about the comfort it brings its practitioners, or the wonderful art it has inspired -- think Shakespeare's witches from Macbeth "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble?" I'm sure you'd agree these would be profoundly inadequate responses to the New Chemist criticisms of alchemy.

I suggest that apologists like Miller brace themselves. This conversation is far from over. To the contrary, it is just beginning. This is not about atheism. Atheism is too small. Philosophically, atheism means almost nothing. It is simply the failure to be convinced of a specific, rather well subscribed belief. Reason is much greater than atheism. And there really is a war underway between reason and faith. It is true human beings can be scientists, for example, and still believe something on faith. But this only evidences the extent to which the human mind can be misused partitioned into realms of different standards of evidence. To be reasonable is to have good cause for belief in a proposition, faith is the commitment to a proposition without good cause. Reason and faith are incompatible; neither can function insofar as the other is tolerated. This criticism demands that people have good reasons for everything they believe. To ask any less is to ask for, and get, nothing.