Dawkins and Hitchens’ arguments show that fundamentalism is alive and well, says andrew brown |
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The New Atheists are a publishing sensation. Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion has sold half a million copies in hardback in the States, according to the Wall Street Journal: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, nearly 300,000 copies. Trailing a long way behind comes the most intellectually interesting, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, at 64,000 copies. Are we seeing a resurgence of reason in a world suddenly threatened as never before by superstition?
Well, all of the books hammer home a simple world view. In this, religions are distinguished from all other belief systems by 'faith' which they define as the quality of believing things that are untrue just because you have been told them.
This is an extraordinarily popular argument, despite its self-evident absurdity - obviously, if you define faith as irrational, unwarranted |
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| Hitchens denies that Martin Luther King was a Christian |
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belief, then it is not difficult also to conclude that faith is irrational, unwarranted and evil. But these word games are the only intellectual novelty in Hitchens (left) and Dawkins, and they are carried to quite absurd lengths. Hitchens denies that Martin Luther King was a Christian; Dawkins tries to prove that Hitler was really a Roman Catholic.
You might think that an atheist, or even a sceptic, would take the position that religion is whatever religious people believe, and then try to find out what it is that religious people in fact believe, and what they mean by their words. Only Dennett seems to have made any effort in that direction, and he has sold far less than any others.
But the New Atheist books which really sell are those which mirror the abusive certainty they ascribe to all their enemies. They treat 'Religion' as their enemies treat 'Darwinism' - as something so evil and so dangerous that it must be traduced and misrepresented.
Why is this view suddenly so popular? Many Americans clearly feel oppressed by Christian pieties, and practically everyone in Europe  |
