Atheist Play Nice

Transcript Atheist Play Nice

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, we just read an article – an op-ed editorial piece – in USA Today. The title is “Atheist Play Well With Others.” [1] Adjuring theist encouraging atheists to get along in the sandbox of life. Now this article was written by a believer in God who thinks that there is no problem with Christian faith and with science. He takes our atheist friends – the so-called New Atheists – to task over what he perceives as not playing nice in this whole debate. What do you get from this article?

Dr. Craig: This is a very interesting on-going debate that represents a kind of new wrinkle in the New Atheist movement. In the past New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and others have turned their wrath primarily upon Christian conservatives – creationists, proponents of intelligent design, and so forth – and vilified them and demonized them as fundamentalists and idiots. But now what has happened is they have begun to go after the so-called moderates or as they are sometimes called “accommodationists.” These would be people who reject intelligent design, creationism, and really natural theology to a large degree, but who are nevertheless theists. I’m thinking here of people like Francisco Ayala or Ken Miller or Francis Collins. People that are with the Templeton Foundation Group who promote the dialogue between science and religion but are very anti-intelligent design and anti-creationist. These folks have attempted to be very diplomatic and very friendly toward science and incorporating it into a kind of synoptic Christian worldview that includes science as a dialogue partner. But these New Atheists don’t want anything to do with it. They regard these accommodationists as equally imbecilic and therefore have been attacking them because they say that if you are really a rigorous scientist there is no reason to believe in God, there is no reason to posit these spiritual realities and therefore these accommodationists and so-called moderates are really irrational and are just as bad as the conservative believers.

Kevin Harris: The New Atheists are saying, “You accommodationists – you all are trying to have your cake and eat it, too. You can’t have it both ways. You either have to hold to what your Holy Book says or you are going to hold to what science says. They don’t say the same thing [according to the New Atheist] therefore pick and choose. Why are you being so fuzzy and compromising.”

Dr. Craig: That is exactly right. You pick one or the other. When you try to have it both ways like that you are holding to some sort of incoherent worldview.

Kevin Harris: By the way, Bill, the New Atheists have grown bored with Young Earth Creationists and barely even give them a nod anymore. As this article says, and as you say, at one time all the guns were trained on Young Earth Creationists. Now they are just seen as so out of it that they are not worth being on the radar.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. In this recent article that I read, one of the authors had said that battle has already been won. It was over with the Dover case. In Pennsylvania, it is done, it is ended. So now they are going after these moderates which I find really funny in a way because the moderates, I think, always fancied themselves allies of these folks in one sense, opposing the ID people and the creationists. Now the New Atheists have really turned on these moderates to challenge their religious beliefs. Now, I don’t think by any means that debate is over on intelligent design, for example, or the fine-tuning of the universe as an argument for God. You don’t end philosophical debate by a court case! To think that the Dover decision ends the philosophical debate is just enormously naïve.

Kevin Harris: Especially when you look at some of the things the judge said. I’m like pulling what’s left of my hair out.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, it’s just crazy. So that I think is just posturing on the part of the New Atheists. I think, as you say, it represents a kind of triumphalism where they are bored with this and they want to move on now to attacking the moderates. But the response of people like Karl Giberson in the editorial in USA Today I found rather odd. [2] Because rather than coming back with a robust defense of theism and saying that it is not incoherent to hold to theism and to a modern scientific view of the world, instead what Giberson does is say, “You atheists are being nasty.” He accuses them of being un-American. This is his response:

Now, I would think that if science does give us the truth about some issue and these religious views don’t comport with it, well then you ought to give them up. It doesn’t matter whether they are un-American. I thought this was a bizarre way of defending the truth of a position by saying that it’s un-American to challenge it.

Kevin Harris: It goes into the new tolerance, and that is you hold all beliefs as somehow equal. Let’s all play nice because we all have our opinion and let’s not upset the apple cart of people’s opinions. Let’s let them hold their little pet opinions and pat them on the head and just accommodate them. It was very patronizing.

Dr. Craig: What is silly about that is the New Atheists presumably aren’t trying to say that these moderates can’t express their opinion or trying to infringe their rights, their civil liberties. They are just saying their view is irrational and the response to that is not to say “Well, gee, that is really un-American for you to say that.” The defense is, “This view is not irrational. There are good reasons to believe it. And here they are.” But Giberson doesn’t do that. Instead, he takes this route that you describe of saying that this is really mean-spirited and nasty. That has absolutely no bearing upon the truth of the New Atheist critique or upon the truth of theism.

Kevin Harris: Atheists from British Columbia responded to this article to which we are referring. He says it is not necessary to play nice in the sandbox of public debate. He says in past debates over slavery, for example, it was important to make the scientific claim that blacks are not biologically inferior to whites. That is how one of the ways that science overcame slavery. So slavery advocates had to be confronted with the fact that their views “didn’t comport with science.” I think that is a pretty good analogy where science can actually show that a particular view is wrong.

Dr. Craig: And what’s funny about this is that these moderates and accommodationists have been relentless in their critiques of Young Earth Creationism by saying that these religious views are disqualified by modern science. It is exactly analogous. They have used science in a critique of religion. Ayala does this with intelligent design, as you know from the debate that I had with him in Bloomington last fall. [3] He attempts to use evolutionary theory as a way of discrediting certain theological viewpoints. And yet now when the New Atheists turn upon the moderates and try to disqualify their view, Giberson says they have “to learn how to play in the sandbox.” I think that is a trivializing illustration; as though what we are doing is playing like children in a sandbox and they need to learn to play nice. I don’t see any reason to think the New Atheists need to learn to play nice. They can be as vociferous as they want. But what they need to do is offer good arguments for their position and good arguments then call forth good arguments in response, not accusations of being mean-spirited or not playing nice.

Kevin Harris: So do we as followers of Christ, people of faith, do we need to play nice? Aren’t we taught to play nice in the sandbox?

Dr. Craig: Yes. I think that is where Giberson should have directed his critique. We, as Christians, I think do need to play nice because we are called upon as Christians to emulate the example of Jesus and to speak the truth in love. Paul says speak the truth in love. Therefore, we need to be charitable and generous and civil in our public discourse. We need to set a higher standard for ourselves than for the New Atheists. They can behave however they want but when we respond to them we need to show ourselves to be men and women of goodwill, charity, and love in dealing with an opponent.

Kevin Harris: And intellectual integrity.

Dr. Craig: Yes, of course.

Kevin Harris: The podcast that we just did – go back and listen to our last podcast – we addressed that. How it is terribly freeing to be able to go after arguments with all the vigor that you can muster, but we are going after arguments not necessarily people. [4]

Dr. Craig: Right. Once you distinguish between criticizing an argument and criticizing the proponent of the argument, then you can see how irrelevant it is about whether or not a person is being nice or being American because the critique is being directed properly at the argument. It will be that that is the focus of our attention. So if the New Atheist is mean-spirited or not playing nice, that is irrelevant. What we want to look at would be his argument and respond to it accordingly, respond to the argument.

Kevin Harris: Many in the New Atheist movement who are some of the chief writers, I think they try to show some civility.

Dr. Craig: Really? Who are you thinking of? [laughter]

Kevin Harris: Danial Dennett is very complimentary of your work. He even complemented you after a talk that he heard you do tremendously. Some of them – Dawkins – can be pretty nasty.

Dr. Craig: Even Dennett. You know there was this infamous recent encounter between Dennett and Alvin Plantinga at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association where Dennett did not handle himself well at all. Plantinga presented his evolutionary argument against naturalism and Dennett’s response was not a response to the issues at all. Instead, all he did was get up and denigrate religious belief and how irrational it is and utterly failed to engage with Plantinga on the argument. So even in that case there was a failure to engage on the level of argument, I think, with the views of one’s opponent.

Kevin Harris: Maybe I need to take that back then. [laughter] I am thinking mainly of a movie that came out in theaters and is now on cable called Religulous with the comedian Bill Maher. It is a combination of the word religious and ridiculous. It is very much a mean-spirited attack. It has got some funny moments. I finally watched it. It makes Christians and other people of faith just look moronic and silly. It pokes fun. We do have some mean-spiritedness that is out there.

Dr. Craig: Right. And yet their position isn’t false because it is mean-spirited. That is the point. The attack is bad because it has no intellectual substance. It is only ad hominem, ridicule, and sarcasm. It is the lack of substance that makes it a poor argument.

Kevin Harris: Bill, do you realize that some of the New Atheists, some of these writers, and even this movie are doing to us what Pascal did to the unbelievers of his day? They are trying to shake us up. They are trying to say we can discuss these and maybe your views are ridiculous. They are trying to shake us up in a lot of ways. I do see that. They are saying for too long it has been taboo to discuss religion or to criticize religion. Sam Harris says enough of that; we better start criticizing it.

Dr. Craig: Sure. And in that sense, I guess I would agree with him. I certainly think religious views are fair game because religious views are really philosophical positions about a certain worldview and they must be scrutinized. That’s what we are called upon to do as philosophers.

Kevin Harris: Truth dares to be questioned. Test all things; hold fast to that which is true. In fairness to some of the Young Earth Creationists who are mentioned in this article, they did respond. Answers in Genesis did respond and said oh, no, no, no, we are not a cult. Gallup polls in recent years continue to show that almost half of Americans think that the earth was only created in the last ten thousands years. I don’t know where they get those stats. Also that the numbers of Young Earth proponents are growing, not shrinking. So they tend to defend themselves here.

Dr. Craig: I think one of the points that the Young Earthers rightly make would be that people like Giberson and these other so-called moderates or accommodationists are just as mean-spirited and nasty when it comes to their criticisms of Young Earth Creationists as the New Atheists are now of the moderates and accommodationists. Some of the things that these moderates say about Young Earthers or even about intelligent design are just vicious and very emotionally laden. So there is a certain hypocrisy here that the moderates think it is alright to vilify the Young Earthers and the fundamentalists but when they’re criticized in a mean-spirited way then they all of a sudden say this is un-American to do this. [5]

Kevin Harris: I see that this article, and also some of the writers and vocal people that this article mentions, have very conveniently put intelligent design and Young Earth Creationism in the same category.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: They are really not.

Dr. Craig: No, though that is the moderate or accommodationist view of things – that these two are really not dissimilar, when in fact anybody who really knows anything about these views knows how dissimilar they are.

Kevin Harris: You mentioned that yourself. You said the ID movement is very rigorous and that has not been put to rest especially by one court trial. It gets down to number one, these are very interesting times in which we live. It comes back to what Reasonable Faith is doing and what you are doing to bring clarity to these issues. We want to do our best with God’s grace to be an example of how to be civil and yet how to be intellectually rigorous and honest. And how to show charity. There are people who hold to different views of creation and we need to strive to make sure that that is coherent biblically and scientifically. So we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Dr. Craig: Right. We are called to a higher standard than these New Atheists are. So we should not follow their model of comportment in the way we do public discourse. We need to follow the example of Christ in the way in which we deal with opponents and unbelievers. But we need to have the same sort of intellectual rigor and substance that they would think their own views possess. [6]