i should have known better than to click this looking for a substantive argument against dawkins.

besides mentioning him briefly, and completely mischaracterizing his views, this article says nothing about dawkins at all.

it's just a troll for ad revenue.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/05/richard_dawkins_is_so_wrong_it_hurts_what_the_science_vs_religion_debate_ignores/

but i'm waiting for an iso to build on an ancient pc, so i'm going to bite.

the crux of modern atheism is simply the elimination of religion from policy discussions. this absolutely requires a tactic of pushing for cultural change. however, it doesn't call for the active repression of religion. if the culture were to change, as it must to remove it from influence, the question of repression becomes a sort of canard - or at least it does from a liberal perspective, as i can assure you is the perspective of both dawkins and hitchens (i am not familiar with the other guy).

that requires a public discourse on some level, because religion is embedded in the cultural makeup of most existing societies. that is to say that it is not possible to minimize the policy effects of religion without challenging it publicly, because that is what the debate is. far from being intolerant, that is actually what is called democracy.

religious people like to try and use this sort of trump card of personal belief, but it is bluntly incoherent to claim that public policy is beyond criticism because it is personal. this doesn't make the least bit of sense, and atheists are not going to allow this trump card any time soon so the religious really just might as well drop it.

in a sort of abstract sense, religion has the option of avoiding this discourse by removing itself from the public arena. yet, this is neither something that could be accomplished by any centralized religious authority nor something that religion could ultimately even survive, as it is, by nature, a deeply cultural thing. religion cannot disentangle itself from politics - or at least not without the cultural change that atheists are pushing for.

so, it's a position that is incoherent because it's rooted within a contradiction. religious people want to argue that a cultural, collectivist phenomenon is beyond criticism because it is a personal belief. that circular logic cannot be squared.

but, it exposes a weakness in their position. instead of providing arguments, they pull out this trump card - they are beyond question.

this is of course anathema to any sort of critical thinking, be it scientific or not. so, it gets under the skin of people that use evidence and logic for their epistemological basis.

that's not to say that i think that science and religion are in absolute conflict. i don't. and neither does dawkins or did hitchens. rather, i think that science has the ability to reformulate most religious questions and provide naturalistic explanations for them, and that religious people should not push back against this. further, religion has the potential to continue to provide these questions, even if they're often worded badly.

what cannot be justified is when religion rejects science because it contradicts it. that is something that should be called out from the highest places with the loudest speakers and used as an example as to why faith-based reasoning is fallacious.

...and it's not because it's personal. it's because it's not personal. it's because it's public.

consider the evolution of morality, as one example. until recently, morality was the scope of the religious. i've even heard the argument - and made it a few times myself - that religion maintains a place in the world because of it's ability to teach morals. maybe there's no evidence god exists, but that doesn't mean that we shalt kill.

recently, though, we've been able to understand morality as something that develops with complex societies. we now have a naturalistic explanation using natural selection (and modified ideas for group evolution) that allows us to understand why we make these rules. with this greater understanding of morality, the religious model is becoming obsolete.

this has public policy ramifications. a society that understands morality as a naturalistic development where the altruistic are more likely to pass on their genes will not construct the same laws or have the same social order as one that thinks that rules have been enacted by god. and, perhaps we have come to an arbitrary difference that is defined by political preference, but that is all the more reason that it is a public debate to determine the kind of society we want to live in.

so, these pleas ought to fall on deaf ears.

also, islamic thinking in the middle ages was directly descended from greek thinking. i believe it was empodkles that came up with the four elements, not that persian dude. and i think it was anaximander that came up with the first crude theory of evolution, although it was borrowed from the babylonians (who thought we evolved from fish).

it's also beyond ridiculous to suggest that the western intellectual tradition did not merge science and philosophy. from aristotle through to newton, we see a confluence rather than a division.

yet, what one *can* see in the west is that philosophy has moved beyond god as unnecessary, because it has reasoned it's way past it. god has famously been declared dead.

it's unfortunate that so much of the rest of the world has yet to receive the memo.