There has been much debate in the Guardian letters pages about ‘new atheism’ and plenty of criticism of ‘new atheism’. You see, the criticism of religion is ‘shrill’ and ‘disrespectful.’ I have no idea what shrill means in this context and I was always taught that you earned respect and did not just have it visited upon you. But what is a ‘new atheist’?
I have read a lot of stuff by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late, great Christopher Hitchens and nothing that they say differs from my view of the existence of god, or rather the very likely non existence of god. And despite my having read their work, my views on religion are largely unchanged, except in one way: I now argue that I am not certain there is no god. I was always very sure there was no god because of the complete absence of any evidence that he ever existed, but I cannot prove there is no god. So whilst I am happy to describe myself as a card-carrying atheist, and I have no real doubts that there is no god, I cannot prove it 100%. Of course, I cannot prove beyond all doubt that there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden but the odds of there being fairies living behind my shed, or even in it, are as unlikely as the existence of god.
And there is nothing new about my atheism. Like most people who are not proselytised, I was able to make up my own mind and that is what worries the devout. As Richard Dawkins has said, there is no such thing as a muslim child, a christian child or a jewish child. They are the children of muslims, christians and jews, but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of children alleged to have faith pray to the same god as their parents. This is not a coincidence. I was brought up in a family that had no religion. No one went to church and no one, bar teachers at school, tried to persuade me that I should believe in a god. So by the time I was old enough to make my mind up, I was able to make a choice based on reason and evidence.
I do not care whether people get comfort from religion, or that they feel their god gives them meaning in life. I am interested in whether or not it is true. What I see is a highly unstable world where an awful lot of powerful people, many of them bad, make their decisions and life choices based upon religious superstition and its scripture, even though most of it was written many hundreds of years after the so-called events took place and at a time when there was virtually no education. Who is to say that Jesus Christ himself, if he ever existed, was not a Paul Daniels type magician, going from town to town, turning water into wine?
The devout will tell you that science cannot provide all the answers and that is true. Science provides many of the answers, but not all of them, and it always strives, with an open mind, to learn and discover more. Some things we know are true, like gravity, like evolution, but science doesn’t end there and it really is no good to be the god of the gaps, to state that because science cannot yet provide answers, then god must have done it.
It really is up to believers to prove that god does exist and not for us to prove he doesn’t, but so far the believers haven’t done a very good job. Faith, by definition, means belief without evidence. Fact, like evolution, is fact because there is sufficient evidence to prove it.
All of us are, religious or not, atheist about most gods. Some of us go one god further.
