Damon Linker Owns the New Atheists

Damon Linker, a contributor to the New Republic, is, to my mind, one of the more insightful writers on religion and irreligion writing in the United States today. In a recent interview with The Economist, Linker offers what I can only describe as an utterly devastating critique of the New Atheists:

[T]he so-called new atheists present a special case, which is why I devote one of the six chapters in my book to criticising such writers as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Mr Harris has denounced religious toleration, one of the founding ideals of liberal politics. Mr Dawkins, meanwhile, calls religious education a form of child abuse, which seems to imply that devout parents should be thrown in jail and their children placed in protective custody by the state. Such views are profoundly illiberal and have far more in common with the intolerant, ideological atheism of the French Revolutionary Terror and Marxist dialectical materialism than the humanistic scepticism of Socrates, Voltaire, or Camus.

The members of the second, more humanistic tradition of atheism understood and accepted that although an individual may settle the question of God to his personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all human beings will settle it in the same way. They recognised that differences in life experience, psychological makeup, social class, intelligence, the capacity for introspection, and temperament will tend to preclude unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Humanistic atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists, including our bestselling new atheists, do not.

I fear that far from shoring up the secular political tradition, the arguments of the new atheists are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite and mutually antagonistic forms of illiberalism—as well as one in which traditionalist believers feel vindicated in their suspicion that a liberal society is fundamentally hostile to their convictions. The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. In place of absolute faithlessness, we need intelligent faith and open-minded doubt.

This is quite a take down, and it is all the more so for its conciseness and understatement. As an agnostic, a believer in interfaith dialogue, and a longtime Camus admirer, I can only stand in awe and say amen. I especially like the second paragraph and so reproduce it again:

The members of the second, more humanistic tradition of atheism understood and accepted that although an individual may settle the question of God to his personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all human beings will settle it in the same way. They recognised that differences in life experience, psychological makeup, social class, intelligence, the capacity for introspection, and temperament will tend to preclude unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Humanistic atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists, including our bestselling new atheists, do not.