My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

That would be a statement of fact. It’s likely we would have opinion a) because of it. Nevertheless, a) is an opinion. Only statements like b) can legitimately be called facts. Widespread misunderstanding of this has resulted in untold confusion and endless arguments going nowhere that accomplish little beyond spreading dissention and ill will, and New Atheists are notorious for this sort of thing. Consider the following statements;

“Now, if you think the worst possible misery for everyone isn’t bad, or maybe it has a silver lining, or maybe there’s something worse, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And what’s more, I’m pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about either.” – (Craig and Harris, 2011)

“Darwinian evolution, specifically natural selection… shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well.” – (Dawkins, 2008)

“I have argued elsewhere that the ascendancy of Christian conservatism in American politics should terrify and embarrass us. And yet, there are gradations to the evil that is done in name of God, and these gradations must be honestly observed. So let us now make sense of the impossible by acknowledging the obvious: there is a direct link between the doctrine of Islam and Muslim terrorism.” – (Harris, 2005b)

“What Darwinism does is to raise our consciousness to the power of science to explain the existence of complex things and intelligences, and creative intelligences are above all complex things, they’re statistically improbable. Darwinism raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how such entities - and the human brain is one - can come into existence from simple beginnings.” – (Dawkins, 2008)

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – (Dawkins, 2008)

“It is also worth noting that one can obtain a PhD in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of the Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this…” – (Harris, 2005)⁷

Apart from the ad hominem, cherry-picking, and straw men, what these statements all have in common is that they’re type a) statements—that is, opinions—yet all are uncritically treated as facts by the New Atheist community. Of all the New Atheists I’ve ever known or met, not one has ever in my presence made a statement of type b) in support of any belief he/she has regarding any religious topic.

At their worst such opinions can be downright reckless. For instance, take my friend’s comment that he “consider[s] all religions to be false, and can just focus on their impact to society.” This statement isn’t merely wrong, it’s incoherent. As we have seen, the study of Religion covers a vast range of belief systems rich in history, tradition and doctrinal claims covering the physical and metaphysical. The content could easily fill a public library. Relegating all of that to falsehood is like claiming that all medical specialty fields are false. Really? Which ones? Oncology? Psychiatry? Therapeutic Touch? And which parts exactly? That smoking correlates with lung cancer…? That Therapeutic Touch “energy” therapy reduces pain and anxiety…? No doubt many New Atheists would respond by pointing out that medicine is science and playing their “religion-is-mythology” card, but this begs the question. The point is that both encompass vast and diverse fields of study, the history and evolution of which include ideas ranging from insightful to demonstrated nonsense. Relegating the entire body of either to a sweeping generalization of falsehood merely demonstrates that one is illiterate in both.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said,