Is common ground between atheism and belief possible? [View All]

[rug]

Julian Baggini
guardian.co.uk
Friday 25 November 2011 12.21 EST

"I'm sorry Julian, you seem to be working hard to establish a middle ground that nobody wants to occupy." I'm finding it hard to disagree with this comment by DiscoveredJoys on last week's post about what reasonable religious belief could look like today. But since the main purpose of posting my articles of 21st-century faith was to find out just how many could support them, the project is not worthless if we find out the answer is hardly anyone at all.

To recap, there's a lot of complaint that "new atheist" criticisms of the supernatural aspects of religion miss the point. If that's true, then it should be possible both to set the atheists straight and establish the credibility of religion by clearly stating what faith without silly, primitive beliefs looks like. This I call "reasonable faith", and although several commentators here have protested that I'm arrogantly laying down the law on what is or is not reasonable in these matters, all I can say is that I can only call it as it I see it, and I do not think that anything counts as reasonable just as long as some people believe it is.

The articles aim to set out what is required for reasonable faith in the most general, minimal terms possible. Then, by seeing how many people can agree with them, we can ascertain whether or not there is real and widespread support for a form of religion that avoids the new atheism's harshest charges. Preliminary feedback is not encouraging. Before posting the articles I approached a few commentators for their opinions.

Top of the list was Karen Armstrong, since she has been the most prominent advocate of seeing religion as mythos not logos: roughly speaking, as about values and practices, not beliefs about what exists or has happened on earth or beyond. So not surprisingly she agreed with the first article, which asserts that creeds or factual assertions are at most secondary and often irrelevant to religion. She also agreed, with some reservations about the wording, with the second, that religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, and the third, that religions are not crypto- or proto-sciences.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/25/atheism-belief-articles-faith?newsfeed=true