Divine Intervention or Coincidence?

My mom sent me this article from the OC Register today after our friendly back and forth. I would have linked directly to it, but there were a lot of ads on the page. So, here it is:

Paul Campos: Some atheists like to lord it over you
By PAUL C. CAMPOS
Syndicated columnist, University of Colorado law professor


In my younger and more vulnerable years I once got into a debate with a fundamentalist Christian about the morality of capital punishment. Her view was that the Bible sanctioned the death penalty, and as far as she was concerned that was the end of the matter.

What struck me most about her attitude toward the subject was her contempt for anyone who might see the question differently.

Recently I've gotten into several debates with some equally zealous atheists, and the sensation has been quite similar.

It's a typical irony of life that fundamentalist atheism should have so much in common with what it most despises. It's even more typical that its adherents are generally blind to these parallels.

Needless to say, just as most religious people aren't fundamentalists, the same holds true for atheists. Those who are, however – what we might think of as the Taliban of atheism – often have a prominence well beyond their sheer numbers.

Like their religious counterparts, fundamentalist atheists tend to combine considerable arrogance with a level of intellectual naivete that can be charming in precocious children, but is merely annoying in adults.

This arrogance is illustrated by their attitude toward questions that less self-confident souls might consider to be somewhat problematic – such as, the ultimate nature of reality – but that fundamentalists consider no more mysterious than the design of a bottle opener.

Indeed, one of the curiosities of fundamentalist atheists is their touching faith in the power of the human brain, which, despite being nothing more than a random evolutionary development in an omnivorous bipedal primate, has turned out to be sufficiently powerful (at least in their case) to discern the fundamental structure of the universe.

People of a less-robust faith might consider that a rather astounding coincidence.

The intellectual naivete of the fundamentalist atheist is reflected in the sorts of arguments he puts forth when he dismisses religious beliefs as not merely mistaken, but nothing more than childish superstitions that can't be taken seriously by any enlightened adult.

Consider, for example, the argument that something called "science" (a mysterious word that such people tend to invoke with a reverence their religious brethren reserve for the word "God") is based on a dispassionate examination of the "evidence" – and what mysteries lurk within that word! – while, by contrast, religious belief depends on something wholly different, called "faith."

This argument won't impress anyone who knows something about the history, philosophy, or sociology of science and religion, and who isn't already fanatically committed to believing it.

Again, like his religious counterpart, the fundamentalist atheist tends to avoid this difficulty by remaining ignorant of the thing he despises. His faith in atheism is maintained by building a straw-man version of religious belief, and knocking it over repeatedly, to the applause of like-minded believers.

The alternative to fundamentalism involves embracing the idea that the world is a deeply complex and mysterious place, which human beings have in all likelihood barely begun to understand. The non-fundamentalist atheist recognizes that many religious beliefs are just as rationally defensible as his atheism, and that, indeed, he might well hold those beliefs if his genes or his upbringing or his education had made him a slightly different (but equally rational) person.

The worst aspect of fundamentalism is the contempt it breeds for everyone who doesn't share the faith. The fundamentalist is forced by the tenets of his belief system to assume that the human race consists almost exclusively of deluded fools, who through a combination of stupidity and cowardice have failed to see the light, but that for some mysterious reason these almost universal disabilities don't apply to him.

As a prominent contemporary theologian has put it: Isn't that special?