“that amount to little more than mocking religious people. Richard Dawkins, a famous biologist and atheist, is an honorary officer of a group that sells Bible Warning Labels to raise funds so it can file lawsuits… With people like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as two of the most well-known atheists in the Western world, it is easy to conclude that atheists have a serious disdain for all religious people (the majority of the world) rather than a mere difference in belief, think they are serious intellectuals and smarter than “childish” religious people because they reject a power higher than themselves, and spend an enormous amount of time researching, writing, and degrading a God they do not believe in. Looking in from the outside, it seems atheists are working overtime to justify their personal beliefs to a highly skeptical audience. This is not the best public relations campaign… Organized atheism only exists to promote a single belief. Religious organizations promote a single belief and an important worldview including the duty to help the poor and persecuted even if they do not share our religious belief or happen to be atheists themselves.” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/).

What Dawkins, Hitchens and the New Atheist movement do is a serious disservice to science, which cannot be co-opted to serve an ideology. But under their lead, science has been denigrated into scientism, which is the failed philosophy of logical positivism, resurrected to bolster Darwinian materialism as a kind of proof of atheism.

Scientism, however, negates science, which as properly defined by actual scientists, such as those in the university of Indiana (http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/unt.s.is.html), is “a process by which we try to understand how the natural world works and how it came to be that way… there is no certainty in science, only degrees of probability (likelihood), and potential for change. Scientific understanding can always be challenged, and even changed, with new ways of observing, and with different interpretations. The same is true of scientific facts. New tools and techniques have resulted in new observations, sometimes forcing revision of what had been taken as fact in the past. Therefore, unlike mathematics, and contrary to popular perception, in science nothing is ever proven (in the sense of finality or certainty that the word suggests).” Science has limitations.

Scientism denigrates legitimate science because it denies and negates those facts. It doesn’t allow for scientific understanding to be challenged, but turns what is currently interpreted by some (e.g., the hypothesis of macro-evolution) into unquestionable dogma; it takes the “scientific method” and turns it into a magical determiner of facts; it also misunderstands how the scientific method actually works, and how fallable it can be, based as it is on human observation and interpretation.

This false-version of science has been trumpeted by its purveyors as the new authority in matters of Truth, a replacement for the ignorant religious views and institutions of old. And yet it operates the same way in that it has gatekeepers and spokespersons who dominate the discussion and silence those who would question the status quo (and this is something that can be backed up with numerous quotes from scientists in various fields who’ve witnessed this firsthand). Then as now, people don’t question authority figures, and accept blindly what the authority tells them is true.

It’s still fundamentalism only in a modern guise, and it’s just as pernicious as religious fundamentalism. And the fact that what Dawkins and Hitchens is preaching IS a philosophy “could” qualify it as a kind of alternate religion (when that word is used in its broadest sense as a way of looking at life and the world around us).

Well, that turned out longer than I intended! Anyway, it’s an interesting subject (when its kept from degenerating into an argument, which unfortunately, happens too often in public and online debate).