(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

There are more concrete signs that the end of religion is nigh than the ones I gave in the previous post in this series. We have the phenomenon of churches closing all over the place. In Cleveland, the Catholic diocese closed a huge number of churches recently, angering the dwindling number of parishioners who still attended them.

Howard Bess, a retired Baptist minister, says that young people are leaving religion in droves.

In a single generation, the Christian church dropout rate has increased fivefold. The Barna Group, a leading research organization focusing on the intersection of faith and culture, says 80 percent of the young people raised in a church will be “disengaged” before they are 30.

In the past 20 years, the number of American people who say they have no religion has doubled and has now reached 15 percent. Those numbers are concentrated in the under-30 population. The polling data continues to show that a dramatic exit is taking place from American Christian churches.
Beyond those numbers, denominations across the board are acknowledging loss of membership, but it is worse than they are reporting. Many churches report numbers based on baptized constituents, yet actual Sunday morning attendance doesn’t come close to those numbers.

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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The idea that religion is in a period of inexorable decline is, unsurprisingly, not one that is shared by religious apologists. In fact, Alastair McGrath in his book The Twilight of Atheism argues the opposite, that it is atheism that is in decline. I have not read this book but Keith Parsons, a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has and in an essay that is well worth reading in full, challenges McGrath and in the process reinforces my case that it is atheism that is ascendant.

Parsons says that what is remarkable about the current debate on atheism is that it has generated enormous and widespread interest, extending far beyond the small intellectual circles that were the normal range for such controversies.

These days, says McGrath, we hear not faith’s but atheism’s withdrawing roar. Now, early in the 21st century, we are told that atheism is in decline and religion is resurgent.

How odd, in that case, to find atheist books recently heading up the bestseller lists and atheists showing up on the TV talk shows to make the case for unbelief. Is atheism becoming chic? The public response to Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, as well as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, appears to indicate a swelling interest in arguments for unbelief. A bestselling atheist book is really quite a novelty. Speaking from my own personal experience, an atheist book typically sells in the dozens, and its author will die of old age long before seeing a royalty check.

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Some of you may be wondering what has happened to my series of essays on why atheism is winning. Do not fret, it has not been forgotten! It has just been displaced as the focus of the daily essay by the more immediate and timely issues of labor and the struggles in the Middle East. It will be continued.

But until then, here is Marcus Brigstocke in a debate arguing in favor of the proposition that religion has had its day.

The response by the Christian is pathetic. No wonder the largely young audience overwhelmingly agrees with the proposition.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Keith Parsons, a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, recently caused a bit of a stir when he said that he has given up teaching the philosophy of religion to his students because all the arguments for religion, old and new, have been so effectively debunked that he simply could not even pretend to take them seriously anymore. He felt that he would be doing a disservice to his students because of his inability to present those arguments as if they made any sense, which is what good teachers try to do when teaching ideas that they personally disagree with.

For one thing, I think a number of philosophers have made the case for atheism and naturalism about as well as it can be made. Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, Nicholas Everitt, Michael Martin, Robin Le Poidevin and Richard Gale have produced works of enormous sophistication that devastate the theistic arguments in their classical and most recent formulations. Ted Drange, J.L. Schellenberg, Andrea Weisberger, and Nicholas Trakakis have presented powerful, and, in my view, unanswerable atheological arguments. Gregory Dawes has a terrific little book showing just what is wrong with theistic “explanations.” Erik Wielenberg shows very clearly that ethics does not need God. With honest humility, I really do not think that I have much to add to these extraordinary works.
…
Chiefly, though, I am motivated by a sense of ennui on the one hand and urgency on the other. A couple of years ago I was teaching a course in the philosophy of religion. We were using, among other works, C. Stephen Layman’s Letters to a Doubting Thomas: A Case for the Existence of God. In teaching class I try to present material that I find antithetical to my own views as fairly and in as unbiased a manner as possible. With the Layman book I was having a real struggle to do so. I found myself literally dreading having to go over this material in class—NOT, let me emphasize, because I was intimidated by the cogency of the arguments. On the contrary, I found the arguments so execrably awful and pointless that they bored and disgusted me (Layman is not a kook or an ignoramus; he is the author of a very useful logic textbook). I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest; I don’t think there is a Bernie Madoff in the bunch. I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it. I’ve turned the philosophy of religion courses over to a colleague. (My italics)

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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Although the Archbishop of Canterbury says he opposes new atheists for our ‘less tolerant attitude towards religion’, what I think is driving his concern is the fear that the new atheist message is reaching the ordinary flock. After all, atheists are currently in the minority. We have no power over anyone except the power of persuasion. If we are as intolerant or arrogant or rude as our critics claim, we are only hurting ourselves by such alienating behaviors and religious institutions should be pleased. Their concern about the new atheist message only makes sense if they are worried that our message is getting through to large numbers of people. The news report about the Archbishop’s call says that “The Church is keen to address the rise of new atheism, which has grown over recent years with the publication of bestselling books arguing against religion.” (My italics)
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous posts, I said that it is the firm knowledge that almost everything in religious texts like the Bible and the Koran are fiction that will destroy religion. But right now that knowledge largely exists amongst a small group of theologians and philosophers of religion and does not percolate out to influence ordinary religious believers who do not read their works. The clergy who deal on a daily basis with ordinary believers have some awareness of this knowledge but also realize that to disseminate it to their flock would cause an uproar and destroy their careers and so they keep it to themselves or discreetly share it with a very few of their colleagues and parishioners. As a result of this, beliefs that religious texts are mostly true have remained largely unscathed.

It is the new atheists who have upset the status quo. The new atheists are well aware of the power of this knowledge in undermining religion and have been using it in their attacks on religion, repeatedly pointing out that there is no evidence to supports its strong claims and that the religious texts are largely fictional and contradicted by science.

Doubts about the plausibility of god are not new. Many philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks argued persuasively that the idea of god made no sense and created all manner of logical contradictions. What those philosophers did not have were the insights provided by modern science. The rapid advancement of science that began with physics in the 16th century and joined in the late nineteenth century by dramatic advances in biology and geology resulted in deepening our understanding that the world works perfectly well without the need for divine intervention at any stage. The archeological findings in the late twentieth century that have shed light on human history have been combined with these other scientific findings to discredit the factual claims of religion.

The decisive new development is that we now know that not only is god unnecessary as an explanatory concept for anything, but that the Bible itself is false in almost all its historical details and that its main characters are fictional. What is new about the new atheism is that it is the new atheists who are taking this knowledge out of academia and intellectual circles and broadcasting it to ordinary people, to the believers in the churches and mosques and temples, using popular books, newspaper articles, radio, TV, films, the internet, in short any and all forms of accessible media.

I think that the new atheists are on the right track in thinking that the best way of fighting religious extremism is by attacking it at its foundations, the literal truth of religious texts, and taking that message directly to the general public. But it is undoubtedly true that this will result in moderate religion suffering irreparable collateral damage because they too depend, even if to a lesser extent, on believing in the truth of those texts. Even if I were sympathetic to the accommodationist idea of preserving moderate religion, I frankly do not see any way out of this.

As long as doubts about the existence of god and the truth of the Bible stayed within elite circles, it did not cause serious damage. I think that it is clear that the leadership of mainstream religions is well aware of the danger that this knowledge presents if it became widely known. This is why there has been such a strong reaction to the new atheists amongst the religious hierarchy. They cannot, of course, argue that the new atheists are wrong on the facts because they realize we are right. They want to avoid at all costs a debate on the historical truth of the religious texts because that would only give more publicity the fact that is false. Instead they attempt diversionary tactics.

One such tactic is to attack the ‘tone’ taken by new atheists and argue that we are not ‘tolerant’. For example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom one could label as a religious moderate, has called upon his clergy to fight back against the new atheist message.

Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.

A report endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that the Church faces a battle to prevent faith being seen as “a social problem” and says the next five years are set to be a period of “exceptional challenge”.

Pope Ratzinger has also decided to come out swinging against what he calls “atheist extremism”, an undefined quantity. What would he consider non-extreme atheism, I wonder? His top aide Cardinal Walter Kasper also stoked fears about the danger of the atheist message taking hold amongst the general population.

I am actually heartened by the responses of Williams and Ratzinger. It shows that the new atheists are having a major impact on the minds of ordinary believers.

Next: The battle for hearts and minds.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post, I looked at some of the theoretical arguments made by accommodationists for not criticizing religion and discussed why I did not think them very credible.

The other arguments that accommodationists make are practical ones. Belief in a god, we are told, serves some positive ends, such as inculcating moral values or causing people to refrain from bad actions for fear of divine retribution, and eliminating it would result in antisocial behavior by some. The counter to this argument is that there is no evidence that religious people are more moral than non-religious people or that lack of religious beliefs drive people to evil actions.
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For some time now I have had this feeling that the struggle between atheism and religion is over and atheism has won. I believe a tipping point has been reached in which religion has begun an inexorable slide towards oblivion. Not total oblivion, of course. There will always be pockets of people who feel the need for belief in some supernatural being. But sooner rather than later, perhaps within two generations, religious people will not be the majority that they have been up to now but will consist of small scattered sects like the Amish, viewed with amused indulgence for their devotion to maintaining a bygone lifestyle. This will seem counter-intuitive when viewed with the public religiosity we see all around us, especially in the US and the next series of posts will flesh out why I think this is the case.

Readers of this blog are aware of the current debate between so-called new (or unapologetic) atheists (some of whom refer to themselves jokingly as ‘gnu atheists’) and accommodationists. The former group (of which I am a member) feels that belief in gods and the supernatural are unsupported by evidence and that at a fundamental level religion is incompatible with science and should be treated in much the same way that we treat other myths and superstitions like unicorns and fairies and Santa Claus, beliefs that we might indulge in children but which no self-respecting adult would admit to. The new atheists think that one of the reasons that beliefs in gods survive is because religion has created a protective cocoon around it and made it a social taboo for people to point out that it has no credibility.

These views have ruffled the feathers of some and there has been some pushback. We are told that we must respect the sincerely held beliefs of religious people and not offend them by asking awkward questions as to why religious people believe what they do or pointing out all the logical and evidentiary contradictions. It is never made clear why we should give religion this special privilege that is not extended to other sincerely held beliefs concerning politics or history or human behavior. In every area of knowledge other than religion, shining the bright light of reason and science on it is seen as desirable, a way of separating truth from falsehood and the credible from the absurd.

Accommodationists, on the other hand, consist of people (some of whom are self-proclaimed atheists) who think that science and religion are either compatible or that if we do not think so, we still should not violate the taboo of pointing out the incompatibilities. The compatibility argument, when probed, eventually comes down to saying that there are areas of knowledge that science does not and cannot investigate and thus god can act in that sphere and hence religion has dominion over that area of knowledge. Of course, the claim that some area is outside the reach of science is an old one that has been refuted repeatedly as formerly inexplicable phenomena have been subsequently shown to be explainable by science. There is no reason to think that the currently alleged designated areas of inexplicability (the origin of the universe and of life) are any more immune to scientific encroachment than the behavior of the solar system and the diversity of life, former candidates for inexplicability subsequently explained by Newtonian mechanics and Darwinian natural selection.

An alternative form of this accommodationist argument is that issues such as morality and ethics and some vaguely defined spirituality are intangibles that do not have the material basis that is amenable to scientific investigation and that we must look to religion as the source of such values. One counter to this is that it is not at all clear that such things do not have a material basis. After all, all thoughts and behavior are governed by decisions of the brain which does have a material basis. In fact, there is a huge field of evolutionary biology and psychology directed towards understanding just how our behaviors evolved.

The other counter is that it is not self-evident why, even if we concede for the sake of argument that science cannot investigate these claims, these areas of knowledge should be ceded to religion. Why should only religion be credentialed to say what is and is not moral and ethical behavior? Why not psychology or sociology or anthropology or literature? Why should we infer our moral values from the Bible (to choose one source of religious values) instead of the works of William Shakespeare or Leo Tolstoy or Rabindranath Tagore or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Confucius? The only reason to do so is if we think the Bible (or the Koran or equivalent other religious text) has been shown to be true. The fact that it has not been shown to be true and in fact is riddled with claims that we know to be flat-out false means that there is no reason to give it preferred status. Religion has not earned the right to claim default status of truth for those areas of knowledge that are supposedly outside the realm of science.

Next: Other arguments for religion’s durability