I think it’s mainly as a response to the rapid growth of Evangelicalism that the Dawkinesque style of (let’s say) “militant” atheism has gained ground over the last couple of years. I am talking about people like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, who no longer try to hide their contempt for the more religious among us – they simply let rip, in essence calling anyone who follows a religion a deluded fool, and usually a dangerous one too.

In saying this, I am not overlooking the rise of fundamentalist Islam as a factor in generating atherist militancy. There’s no doubt that, as fundamentalist Islam has lately taken a major place in world events, it has brought home just how hard to tell the difference between a Christian fundamentalist and a Jewish or Muslim one. But even so, it’s the Christian wing of fundamentalism that, I think, exercises minds like Dawkins’s and Harris’s the most. Their contempt, if I can put it this way, is mainly reserved for the fundamentalists who should know better: those who are lucky enough to live in a country where a more secular alternative is right there in the mainstream, and where science and history are readily accessible.

Before I go any further: I am not saying that the Dawkinses and Harrises and Hitchenses of the world are wrong. I agree with most of what they say: like Dawkins, I think that filling a young head with religious nonsense is a form of child abuse, just as filling the same head with other kinds of misleading nonsense such as racial ideology would be. I agree with Sam Harris that most of what passes for religion is simply the canonised distillation of ancient ignorance. And I agree with Hitchens that the Ten Commandments are notably odd for their lack of prohibition on rape, cruelty to children, genocide, or slavery. And of course they aren’t alone;  I was prompted to start this post by other posts such as this one from Thomas Huber and this one from DesertOrchid.

Those guys, all of them, are right to find religion ridiculous.

But I’m not a militant atheist myself. I don't go for calling people deluded or criticising them for hypocrisy. I have been – in my teens and twenties, I rarely hesitated to call a Christian an idiot, even though it didn’t always make me a lot of friends to do so, and if I’d met more Muslims I probably would have called them idiots too. I saw it as a matter of principle - how can you bite your tongue when you know someone's wrong about something? But to be honest,  looking back I sometimes feel that whether or not I was right, I was still a bit wrong.

So I am not usually a militant atheist any more, and here is why: I actually want to reduce the damage religion wreaks on the world, in whatever small way I can. For me, changing the world usually means writing or talking. I am not saying I have a lot of influence through these avenues, only that they are all I’ve got. And since all the writing and all the talking I can manage in my lifetime is certainly not going to culminate in world-wide atheism (and I’ve got a lot of other stuff to attend to as well!), I look at it one of those things where you have to pick your battles.

Picking my battles, I don’t really worry about the does-God-exist stuff. I can’t deny that, in my opinion, people who believe in God are a bit silly, but they aren’t necessarily doing any harm. The dangerous ones are the ones who believe a particular text to be the actual word of God. They’re the ones who believe that a book (or a Pope) is infallible, that the will of God is knowable by us or by our leaders, or that God takes sides in our geopolitical struggles. If I tried to illustrate that exhaustively, I’d be here all night, typing out story after story, so instead I will just ask you to look up any random excess of religion in the news (and there are many of them from suicide bombings to elections), and note that in each and every case, the perpetrators thought they were doing what God wanted them to do.

There’s a second reason for leaving the does-God-exist question out of it, too. It’s to do with evidence. In one sense, absolutely nothing can be proven – you could just be a brain floating in a vat imagining everything including me, and we’d never be able to prove otherwise. But at the common-sense, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt level, there are all kinds of things we can prove with concrete, observable evidence. I am talking about the level of evidence that lets us say, “Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas”, or “Elizabeth I reigned over England from 1558 to 1603.” We could be wrong about those things, but if so then we are not very far wrong, or if we are very far wrong, then there has been a conspiracy to fool us that is too vast to contemplate.

To this standard of proof, we really can prove that Darwin was essentially right about evolution; we humans didn’t live at the same time as dinosaurs, and we are indeed descendents of primates quite different to ourselves. We can prove that the Bible, along with all those other books, was written by men, and indeed by men who knew almost nothing about almost everything. We can prove, to this real-world standard, that whoever wrote the story of Noah’s Ark knew less about biology or the scale of earthly life than a five-year-old who has just come home from a day at the zoo.

In all of science, evolution is one of the most beautiful theories to lay out for somebody. It is a pity it’s become so controversial, because it is the archetypal case study for how scientific discovery happens. It is so simple, yet so far-reaching and world-changing. If anyone wants to know, I explain it as really just two basic ideas: firstly, that when living organisms have offspring, those offspring are slightly different from the parents. And secondly, that some members of each generation will have more offspring than others. Most people would agree that both of those things make obvious sense, and then all you have to do is put them in an environment where some changes are more advantageous than others, and away you go. That doesn’t get you all the way through the theory of evolution, but it is a good start, and there are real-world examples that demonstrate this process within a human timeframe. In other words (and with a bit more work than I’ve just done), we can prove that evolution, and not Genesis, explains our origins.

Unlike evolution, the question of whether God exists is not provable, even to that common-sense, court-of-law standard. We can offer alternative explanations for why believing in God seems so innate, and why it is so easy to see the hand of God in everything. Thus, we are prone to anthropomorphising things – not just animals and so on, but the universe itself, and perceive a human-like “purpose” in everything that happens. I once woke up in a darkened bedroom and saw a human figure crouched in my room! A few moments later, I realised it was the vacuum cleaner, with a few bits of clothing hanging on the handle from unfinished housecleaning the night before. Thinking we are seeing people in this way, when we are actually only seeing objects is a common event for most of us – that is just one example of the many times it’s happened to me. I believe this tendency is an evolutionary adaptation, a survival mechanism: as humans, our intelligence is disproportionately huge not because we needed to figure out how to use tools, but because we are so extraordinarily social. For as long as we have been around, we have (on the one hand) been most endangered by our fellow humans, and (on the other hand) depended for our survival on those same fellow humans more than on any other resource. So of course when something happens we attribute human purposes to it! We had better err on the side of thinking the vacuum cleaner is a menacing human attacker, rather than think the human attacker is a vacuum cleaner!

So we anthropomorphise. We think of fate as a person, God as a person, and think that the universe around us has human motivations. It’s innate in our make-up to think this way, and I think that is why we tend to believe in God.

But that is not proof that God doesn’t exist. It’s the best I can do, but it’s not really that much if someone really wants to believe God’s out there.
In the same way, we have a bounty of evidence for evolution, but we don’t have anywhere near as much evidence as to how life began. We have a lot of conjecture and nothing concrete. So when somebody says, “wait, all this evolution stuff has to go back to somewhere... what did the first life evolve from?”, the only real answer is that we don’t know. One way or another, I think it was chance. But we can’t prove that in the same way that we can prove what happened after life began - it evolved into us!

So I don’t get into those ones any more: I’m not a militant atheist. Heck, I don’t even start conversations on these topics, and I am certainly glad to get through an evening without them coming up. Maybe if I met more fundamentalists I would be more active about it, but as things are, these are just the sorts of things I’ll talk about if evolution or the Bible come up in a conversation. Nor do I have any idea whether I’ve “converted” anyone away from a belief in creationism. The only thing I am really saying is that going straight for the there-is-no-God jugular doesn’t seem to achieve much, so I focus on the provable – the life around us is a product of evolution, the Bible is no more God’s Word than a Spiderman comic is, and therefore it is our individual and personal responsibility to decide what’s right and wrong, and we certainly shouldn't be thinking that God cares how we dress or whether we eat shellfish. I think if we could all agree on that, religion wouldn't do much damage any more. There would still be some religious beliefs floating around that I found absurd, but hey... absurd's okay, provided it's harmless as well.

Sorry for the long post... just a few random thoughts, in between the "real" writing. :)