Any person or scientist who claims to pursue truth has to take notice of the astounding research available. Evolution will be seen as the shamanism of age.
September 14, 2011
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I’m an atheist, and have been for most of my conscious adult life, but I’ve always been very, very, very interested in faith. I see it as quite a specific thing and not necessarily solely reducible to belief. I’ve always been very interested in it as a sociological phenomenon, and as an aesthetic phenomenon…
I have extremely little sympathy for the au courant style of crude atheism associated with people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I suppose it’s based on several things. Above all my antipathy is based on the fact that it seems to be extremely bad sociology. It’s also bad and ignorant theology. I’m not interested in theology in and of itself, although their views on theology are very ignorant, but it’s mostly their bad sociology. It’s all predicated on this notion that religious faith is founded on an intellectual error, and that to me is just staggeringly wrongheaded. No matter what else you think about faith, that is not what it is. So to criticize it on those grounds is wildly missing the point.
Now obviously religions do make truth claims, and those truth claims can be evaluated, so it’s not totally divorced from the issue of rationality. But the idea that that is what it’s essentially reducible to, and therefore you can criticize it on those grounds, just strikes me as a willfully naïve or stupid way of understanding the way that faith and religion intersect with everyday life, with perceived reality and political reality and so on.
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(via ladandyzette)
