The title of this post is the title of a snazzy one-act (one joke?) play that I am too uninspired to write.
Though more commonly known as That Guy Who’s Married to That Girl Who Used to Be Married to Your Favorite Incarnation of Dr. Who, English scientist Richard Dawkins is also one of the more articulate and outspoken public faces of the New (sic) Atheism. While not likely to be remembered as an innovator on that front, Mr. Dawkins has a knack for maintaining composure in the face of the most exasperating questions, and his sense of wonder regarding the beauty of our universe is a contagious awe that makes him the most accessible among the latest batch of religious fundamentalism’s critics.
Some of his pithiest remarks, immortalized in Facebook profiles and countless blogs, reveal his limitations (calling pantheism “sexed-up atheism” is akin to calling biochemistry “sexed-up alchemy”) but no one mistakes him for a philosopher or sociologist. It is unfortunate in a way that the current de facto voice of atheism has to be a scientist. Working from that discipline enables a critique of only the most superstitious theological models. Horses don’t come much deader than that, though in the fallout from this (now obsolete) conversation, thinkers who remain in the religious spehere will happily find themselves in more sophisticated company.
To the project of developing a Christian position that was tenable for the 20th Century, it could be said that no one has contributed more than Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. (My friend Michael Stohrer told me this is a suggestion that would "make Nietzsche’s moustache quiver with rage".) In the same way, the popular atheists of this moment, by funneling essentially old-hat arguments into shiny new best-sellers, have brought the purging fire skepticism to a large audience, and the spiritual ideas that survive will be the ones worth saving. For that, believers should be grateful.
Rather than an heir to Bertrand Russell and Antony Flew, Dawkins is a charismatic provocateur whose civil and unwavering rhetoric could potentially contribute to getting participants in the popular conversation onto the same page so we can take the conversation farther.
Tomorrow’s Dawkins will have to be more sophisticated, someone who, like his audience, will accept the conclusions of hard science as a given but is willing to dive into abstract, even subjective concepts beyond myopic materialism. In any conversation, the no-saying position must be meaningfully occupied, (lest we fall into a sheepish consensus) and this position requires three-dimensional thinkers able to adapt, thinkers who are unbeholden to predecessors. The 21st Century’s religious conversation must move past simplistic science/religion binaries as well as the common inability to understand or distinguish between the diverse positions that exist within one tradition.
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