New Yorker essay on Atheists with Attitude

Read a New Yorker essay on Atheists with Attitude by Anthony Gottlieb where books by Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are reviewed.

Religious belief is as diverse as the number of living species in amazon, many of them, I am sure, are yet to be discovered and evolving rapidly. It is impossible for a book to contain all the diverse beliefs in its scope. Of the three books above, I have only read Dawkins book and Dawkins clearly restricts his book to monotheistic religions that have a personal god as their central dogma. Still, diverse religious beliefs is a swamp with many lurking things that writers have to tread carefully. Anthony Gottlieb asks if any of the three books have stepped on a crocodile in this swamp.

One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different.
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The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth's population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don't know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a "spirit or life force," belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest.

The author draws useful lessons from the past, especially with the philosopher Hume who went about subtly undermining religion.

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the "Dialogues" and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers' own minds. And he always offered a way out. In "The Natural History of Religion," he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God's existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the "Dialogues" he undermined proofs of God's existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.

The essay ends with a note that was music to my unbelieving ears.

Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam's--let alone as long as Christianity's? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.