Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Page 13

picture. The “New Atheism” wants to take us back to the rationalism and
sanity of the Enlightenment.
So what is “new” about the “New Atheism?” An innocent reader
might assume that this movement had discovered new scientific evidence
or new philosophical arguments that demonstrated that God was the
arbitrary and meaningless construction of the human mind. Yet it soon
become clear that there are no new arguments here. The old, familiar and
somewhat tired arguments of the past are recycled and rehashed. What is
new is the aggressiveness of the rhetoric, which often seems to degenerate
into bullying and hectoring. It serves a convenient purpose, by papering
over the obvious evidential gaps and argumentative lapses that are so
characteristic of this movement. But it does little to encourage anyone
to take atheism with intellectual seriousness. The philosophical roots of
Dawkins’ atheism, for example, are easily exposed as shallow, uniformed,
and severely vulnerable.6
In this lecture, I want to look more closely at this core claim that religion
is evil. Such is its cultural power that it tends to be assumed, rather than
demonstrated, by those who advocate it. This, I think, tells us rather more
about contemporary cultural prejudices and biases than about religion
itself. In fact, it turns out to be an article of faith, a belief which can only
be sustained by highly selective use of evidence and what comes close to
manipulation of history for the purposes of advancing an aggressively atheist
agenda. I shall focus particularly on Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion,
as it is widely seen as the most influential and intellectually sophisticated
of the recent writings from the New Atheist schóol.
When I was an atheist myself, things seemed admirably clear. I grew
up in Northern Ireland, infamous back in the late 1960s for its religious
tensions and violence. It seemed obvious to me that if there were no religion,
there would be no religious violence. I bought into the now outdated
Enlightenment view, which I find charmingly yet not a little uncritically
echoed in the manifestoes of “New Atheism”, that humanity was innocent
and disinclined to violence until religion came along. Get rid of religion,
6 For an excellent philosophical critique of Dawkins, see Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly
Is a God: Doubting Dawkins. Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008.
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