This from a debate with Shmuley Boteach:
We’re all atheists,” Hitchens argued in his dry British timbre. “We no longer believe we need to tear the beating heart out of a virgin to make the sun rise. We no longer believe in the sun god Ra or in Zeus, and we now must go one step further.”
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Other members of the Dawkins Gang as I call them, including Richard Dawkins himself, see here, often employ this piece of silliness. The idea is that since we are all atheists about some god or goddess, we should be atheists about all gods. A howling non sequitur, of course. Consider this parallel 'argument':
We are all anti-scientific about some scientific claim or other in the sense that all of us deny some scientific claim or other and with justification. Thus I deny, and I hope you do as well, Dalton's assertion that water is HO and the pre-Michaelson and Morley contention that light requires for its propagation a medium, the so-called luminiferous ether. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. But presumably no one will think that one ought to be anti-scientific about every scientific claim.
No one thinks that because many once well-established scientific assertions have been abandoned as false that all scientific assertions ought to be abandoned as false or will be. No one takes the Hitchens-Dawkins 'further step' when it comes to scientific claims. Why should it be any different in matters of religion?
"Because religion is buncombe from start to finish!"
But of course this response simply begs the question against the theist. Anyone who just assumes that the crudest forms of polytheism and the most refined forms of monotheism are on a par simply disqualifies himself from being taken seriously in a discussion like this. Was Democritean atomism the last word in atomic theory? What people like Daniel Dennett, another key Dawkins Gang member, cannot get through their heads is that religion might be subject to development and refinement just as science is. Such people cannot understand development of the God concept as anything different from deformation. They think, quite stupidly, that the crudest anthropomorphic conceptions are those with which religion must remain saddled. But they would never say something similar with respect to science. Why the double standard? See Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.
One is no doubt free to adopt a scientistic metaphysics -- which, nota bene, science does not and cannot justify -- but then one ought to admit that one thereby (i) adopts a metaphysical stance not entailed by science proper, and (ii) begs the question against theists.
The chapter on Science and Religion in A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is relevant here. He sees that "religious thought develops into an increasing accuracy of expression, disengaged from adventitious imagery [and that] the interaction between religion and science is one great factor in promoting this development." (p. 170)
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Take care,
Steve
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