Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (39 page)

Reconciling Science and Religion (Or Not) Again: Gould’s NOMA

Looking back at the century as it drew to a close, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noticed that the Catholic Church had been gradually and tentatively extending an olive branch to science. In 1950, Pope Pius XII called evolution “a legitimate matter of inquiry” on which “Catholics are free to form their own opinions.” When John Paul II went even further in 1996, calling evolution “more than a hypothesis,” and citing “significant argument[s] in favor of the theory,” Gould thought it was high time to reach for that branch. And he did so in 1997, proposing a new way of looking at the relationship of science and religion.

Science and religion are concerned with different things, he said, and as long as they stay out of each other’s areas of concern, there’s no need for conflict. This general idea wasn’t actually new. Pope Leo XIII made a similar proposal in 1893. But new or old, Gould’s proposal reopened the important discussion about whether or how science and religion can live together.

Each of the two has “a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority,” Gould said. Science deals with observable fact, and religion deals with morality and meaning. The two domains don’t overlap, he said, so there shouldn’t be a problem. Many people have agreed with him, including many fellow atheists and agnostics who are eager to move beyond the culture war.

But others, including prominent scientists and philosophers, have pointed to serious problems with the idea. It’s hard to find a religion anywhere that doesn’t make claims of fact, from miracles to the effectiveness of prayer to whether a giant flood ever covered the Earth. And several sciences, including neuroscience and psychology, have recently made enormous contributions to understanding what morality is and how it operates. There’s even been scientific progress in defining morality by improving people’s understanding of what increases or decreases suffering. So the domains do overlap, they say, enormously and inevitably.

Even though many of these critics are just as eager to form a better relationship between science and religion, this idea just doesn’t work for them. Either way, there was no better time to begin asking these questions than the cusp of the 21st century.

Chapter 9

Voicing a New Atheism, and a New Humanism, for the 21st Century

In This Chapter

Reacting to September 11, 2001

Meeting the “Four Horsemen”

Making the existence of atheists better known

Broadening humanism

Growing up: The movement matures

T
he beginning of the 21st century saw the birth of a more confrontational brand of atheism, one that challenges the ill effects of religion without apology. At the vanguard of this movement-within-a-movement are four prominent writers who’ve boosted atheism into the center of the cultural conversation.

The new century has also seen a broadening of the freethought movement, including a gentler, more cooperative and humanistic strain of atheism. It may get less media attention, but even the blogger PZ Myers — as confrontational an atheist as you’re going to find — calls humanistic atheism “the heart of an atheist movement that will endure and grow. Ignore it,” he adds, “and we can expect atheism to fade away.”

This chapter explores atheism in a new era of fast growth and rising public awareness.

Tracing the Birth of the 21st-Century Atheist Movement

Social movements are often born in a single, defining moment. You can trace the birth of the 21st century atheist movement to a single moment — the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Though atheists and humanists had been around for centuries, challenging religious ideas and working for their own place at the cultural table, the horror and clarity of that moment — especially the clear part played by religion — was the last straw and a call to action for countless nonreligious people.

Adopting President Bush’s frequent praising of “faith-based initiatives” in American communities, many atheists pointed out that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were also a “faith-based initiative” — and that religion could no longer get a free pass from criticism and challenge.

Other movements have been jumpstarted in similar ways. Black Americans had been working for equal rights for almost a century after emancipation when Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the white section of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That clear injustice struck a chord. It was the last straw, and a full-blown social movement for civil rights was born.

Gays and lesbians had been working for social acceptance and equal rights long before the raid at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village, but that single event proved to be the last straw, a tipping point that created a powerful social movement for gay rights.

Feeling “Deep Grief and Fierce Anger”: The Four Horsemen

Ask an atheist what he or she was feeling on September 11, and you’ll typically get two answers:

That terrible mix of fear, anguish, uncertainty, and grief that everyone else was feeling

Anger and determination to speak out and challenge religion more than ever before

Add a feeling of slack-jawed exasperation when it seemed like everyone else, from the president to my Aunt Diane, was responding to an act of religious insanity by
dropping to their knees in prayer.
Politicians started lacing their speeches with calls for God’s protection, and some prominent evangelists even blamed atheists in part for the attack, calling it God’s revenge for “secularizing America.” The president spoke of the need for a “crusade” against those who had committed the crime, alluding to Matthew 12:30 (“He who is not with me is against me”) as he called for allies in a war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack.

It was surreal. And among its many other effects, this painful time gave birth to the modern freethought movement.

Being a direct, unapologetic public atheist in a hyper-religious time and place is difficult, but several prominent voices rose to the challenge. Among them were four authors whose bestselling books criticizing religion came out on each other’s heels, all within a few years of the attacks and each other. Their books became rallying points for “The New Atheism,” and those authors — biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, journalist Christopher Hitchens, and neuroscientist Sam Harris — became known, with ironic tongue in cheek, as “The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.”

The first of these books, Harris’s
The End of Faith,
wasn’t published until three years after September 11, 2001. But plenty else had been written and said in those three years, including an astonishing, clear-headed essay written by Dawkins in the raw and frantic days immediately following the attack.

The following sections describe some key aspects of the atheist response to this horrifying moment.

Sounding the alarm: Richard Dawkins on “the elephant in the room”

On September 15, 2001, less than 96 hours after the attacks of September 11, a compelling essay by Richard Dawkins appeared in the
Guardian
newspaper in the United Kingdom. Commentators and politicians at the time were doing what they’ve done for centuries — saying that a religiously inspired tragedy, in this case the 9/11 attacks, wasn’t really about religion at all. It was about politics, or culture clash, or something else . . .
anything
but religion.

“They hate us for our freedom,” President Bush said, not worrying whether that actually made any sense. Countless religious progressives claimed the attacks had been inspired by religious extremism, attempting to place a firewall between that extremism and religion in general.

The purpose of Dawkins’s remarkable essay was to make the case that religion was an “elephant in the room” that everybody was too polite to talk about, and that religion wasn’t just incidentally involved but had played an essential, indispensable part in the tragedy — that the tragedy literally
couldn’t have happened without it.

He starts by imagining someone coming up with the idea of crashing airplanes into buildings to strike terror into a hated nation. The reason itself may not have been religious in origin — it could just as easily have been political. Ah, but how to do it? You would need some sort of guidance system to keep the planes on course until they hit the buildings.

He considers a few options, including a pigeon trained to peck at a target in exchange for food pellets — something that was actually tested in World War II. But getting the pigeon and the necessary targeting equipment on the plane would be too difficult. To pull off such an attack, you really need . . . a human being. But involving a human presents a problem. He couldn’t be trusted to stay on target because he’d know that to do so would mean his own end as well.

Then Dawkins’s imaginary terrorist event planner hits on an idea: What if some young men could be convinced that death isn’t the end after all? Better still, what if they can be made to believe that a heroic death (like the murder of several thousand infidels) would be followed by a trip straight to a paradise with 72 virgins to call his own?

Suddenly you have your guidance system. Whatever the origin of the desire to wreak havoc, religion provided the means to focus it, to amplify it, and to make it a reality.

Dawkins assured his readers that he wasn’t making light of the tragedy. On the contrary, he said he was motivated by a “deep grief and fierce anger” — and this grief and anger heralded a whole new day for his approach to religion. “My last vestige of ‘hands off religion’ respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11
,
2001,” he said, “followed by the ‘National Day of Prayer,’ when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands,
united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.”