Yesterday Mrs Phil bought me a copy of the latest New Scientist magazine, “The God Issue”, because it looked interesting. I’ve had a chance to read through it now – or at least the relevant articles – and I thought I’d post up a quick review.
Know Your Enemy
The introduction, ‘Know your enemy’, starts off promisingly:
Children are born primed to see god at work all around them and don’t need to be indoctrinated to believe in him.
This is interesting information. But we’ll come onto that a bit later on.
This is not an apologia for god. Religious claims still wither under rational scrutiny and deserve no special place in public life … [But] religion is deeply etched in human nature and cannot be dismissed as a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity.
Ah. Religious claims still ‘wither under rational scrutiny’? That’s a bold claim to make given that many scientists are, in fact, Christian – see, for example, Wikipedia’s list of Christian thinkers in science. Alienating some of your readership is not a smart move in any magazine, and in this particular case it seems like unnecessary sniping. Also, one logical conclusion of children naturally predisposed to believe in ‘god’ is that there is a possibility that ‘god’ might exist – a possibility which seems to escape every writer throughout the magazine.
Still, it is good to see that atheists are coming round to the idea that religion is not a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity: hopefully this will signal the beginning of the end for the Dawkins school of atheism, which seems to hold that every religious person is hopelessly deluded.