The most positive, optimistic development I know of is the way many young people are coming out in defense of atheism—and the ones who do are often wonderfully eloquent. I’ve mentioned my daughter’s testimonial before; now Brent Rasmussen finds another young lady’s essay that will make you feel good about the future.

Unfortunately, in the comments to that post you’ll also discover why many of us find evangelical Christianity contemptible. There are more discussions of the subject where the loathsome Christians are out in force — something that also happened with Skatje’s post — and I really don’t know how the less verminous Christians can stand to share a label with these creatures.

Somebody gets it.

Now what are we to think of a scientist who seems competent inside the laboratory, but who, outside the laboratory, believes in a spirit world?  We ask why, and the scientist says something along the lines of:  "Well, no one really knows, and I admit that I don’t have any evidence – it’s a religious belief, it can’t be disproven one way or another by observation."  I cannot but conclude that this person literally doesn’t know why you have to look at things.  They may have been taught a certain ritual of experimentation, but they don’t understand the reason for it – that to map a territory, you have to look at it – that to gain information about the environment, you have to undergo a causal process whereby you interact with the environment and end up correlated to it.  This applies just as much to a double-blind experimental design that gathers information about the efficacy of a new medical device, as it does to your eyes gathering information about your shoelaces.

Maybe our spiritual scientist says:  "But it’s not a matter for experiment.  The spirits spoke to me in my heart."  Well, if we really suppose that spirits are speaking in any fashion whatsoever, that is a causal interaction and it counts as an observation.  Probability theory still applies.  If you propose that some personal experience of "spirit voices" is evidence for actual spirits, you must propose that there is a favorable likelihood ratio for spirits causing "spirit voices", as compared to other explanations for "spirit voices", which is sufficient to overcome the prior improbability of a complex belief with many parts.  Failing to realize that "the spirits spoke to me in my heart" is an instance of "causal interaction", is analogous to a physics student not realizing that a "medium with an index" means a material such as water.

It’s like asking someone if they understand science, and they can recite a string of facts at you … but they haven’t absorbed the concept.

John Horgan criticizes Francis Collins for his defeatism in thinking that human beings will always be evil to one another:

Christians castigate atheists such as Richard Dawkins for propagating a dark, nihilistic view of human existence. But Dawkins is Pollyanna compared to Christians like Collins, who has so little faith in human reason and decency that he thinks we’ll kill each other until the end of time.

I’m not quite as optimistic as Dawkins—I don’t think that the disappearance of religion would necessarily or rapidly lead to an improvement in the human condition. I do think it is an essential start to the process, however; reason is the tool by which we will build a better future, and we must clear the interfering clutter of superstition to make a beginning of it.