Monday, March 01, 2004

Fashionable Atheism?

Interesting post by Schizmatic at Gene Expression. The post is titled “Decoupling Atheism from Intellectual Progress." A couple of quotes from the post.

"I submit that unbelief has very little to do with scientific/intellectual progress and a great deal to do with fashion. The traditional arguments against a good God’s existence did not suddenly become stronger with the Enlightenment; such arguments did, though, become more fashionable. “Reason” did not suddenly come into existence in the late eighteenth century (Will Durant to the contrary), and any medieval student whose undergraduate education began with the Posterior Analytics would take a great deal of offense if he were told such."

and

"Why, though, am I bringing all of this up? To make a bold new argument for the truth of the Christian faith? No.2 Rather, my point is that I often see it confidently asserted that a decline in religious faith is a necessary component of religious progress and that the march of this progress will eventually lead to a godless world. I think that, in light of the fact that unbelief is usually more a product of fashion than anything else, we ought not to look forward to a world in which the “God problem” seen in different parts of the world suddenly resolves itself. Indeed, the religious revival underway in a certain monotheistic religion and the fact that folks with a scientific and engineering background are often drawn to the most fundamentalist interpretation of this religion would both seem to indicate that we are in for a religious world for a long time to come."

Posted by John Venlet on 03/01 at 08:22 AM
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