A reader writes:
While I agree that Dawkins and Hitchens, and the rest of the New Atheist movement, are probably evangelical at least in the sense of being obsessed with getting people to abandon their old, wrong ways, I think that Aslan has widely missed the mark by positing that religious hypotheses must be given the same weight as any other hypothesis. He says, "The point is that, like any researcher or critic, like any scientist, I'm open to possibilities," but this is misleading, because the possibilities he's apparently open to are unfalsifiable and untestable. His examples, particularly string theory, are a fairly dead giveaway that he's not discussing this fairly.
String theory is a theoretical branch of physics that exists mostly in mathematical models, designed to reconcile two things that we know already to be true (relativity and quantum mechanics). It's an explanation of the gaps in our knowledge, and it may be incomplete. No one is asserting for certain that there are, what, eleven dimensions? They're asserting that if there are, we can explain apparent discrepancies between these two known facts. String theory is an admission of exactly what Aslan is seeking – that our best scientists working with the most advanced technology in the world cannot prove everything.
It is, however, an attempt to prove what they do not yet know, which is much further than the Universal Spirit hypothesis, which accepts ignorance by placing certain items arbitrarily beyond the purview of human knowledge, with no apparent backing other than the fact that the claims made by this hypothesis are outside human knowledge. Is my claim that the universe was created as a giant sauce pan by the Flying Spaghetti Monster any more credible simply because I have designated the true nature of the FSM as "beyond your knowledge"? No. It sounds like a con to say that you simply cannot and will never understand that which I am requiring you to accept as possible.
This Universal Spirit hypothesis, on the other hand, not only requires some very complicated assumptions, but it only exists to explain a single phenomenon that is not apparently countered by other, incongruous phenomena. Some less complicated assumptions yield more sensible answers: that humans respond to certain stimuli in a generally predictable fashion, and one of the more reliable forms of stimuli-response pairing is religious. Heck, we know that humans started out in relatively small groups in Africa. Perhaps religions simply followed a relatively similar evolutionary path in different regions because of the foundations set in our common heritage. The point is that these are all far more sensible, far more testable, far more likely than the existence of a timeless, undetectable, impossibly old and powerful alien intellect that subsists beyond the veil of the material world and guides human evolution to worship it.
In any event, we do agree on one thing: the "God probably isn't real" posters aren't terribly persuasive or helpful. I much preferred the "Good Without God" campaign I saw on many of the MBTA's trains and buses here in Boston last year. I can be hard growing up in a largely theistic society and finding yourself unable to believe as everyone else does. It's also good to confront religious people with atheism in their homes and neighborhoods and workplaces, in the same way it was good to confront them with homosexuality in these personal contexts. A surprising number of people, upon discovering my atheism, have told me that they didn't think I could be an atheist because I was so nice and sensible and not a teenager anymore.
Demonstrating that atheists are a wide variety of people, not just the church-burning black-metal-listening malcontents people seem to think of us as is a much better thing than yelling at them about their beliefs. Nobody likes being approached by Jehovah's Witnesses, but apparently the New Atheists think that the proper way to counter everything from cucumber-sandwich Anglicans to snake-handling born-agains is by informing them, absent any argument or evidence, that they're wrong.
The Dish 