As a recent subscriber to Wired, I was pleased to learn that the subscription was well-worth the price when I read Gary Wolf‚s compelling article „The Church of the Non-Believers. Mr. Wolf‚s work smartly and covertly evidences his attunement to another battle that rages beneath the surface of the academic debates on the value of religion: modern science vs. philosophy. He writes that for defenders of the faith the problem is that atheists have „implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. However, this is a much more serious problem than he admits. Science has been running the table in the articulation of the real and the values that extend from it for at least a century, and few laypersons understand that so many of the dehumanizing aspects of modern existence are effects of the dominance of scientific logic. Any phenomenon that cannot be quantifiably and empirically „verified is thought to be tantamount to illusion; in this way scientists create the totalizing and torturous binary evidenced in the article ˆ the natural vs. the „supernatural.
As much as Mr. Wolf talks about rhetoric in the essay, I was disappointed that he forgot about that field as an academic discipline when he was searching for one that could offer substantive challenges to the claims of the „new atheists (exactly what is „new about their atheism was never adequately explained). Let me offer just two of many such arguments:
Many scholars outside the natural sciences agree that it is language that structures human experience. The hard line explains that discourse is in fact constitutive of the real (i.e. concepts that function as if they were real certainly are real, since the real is only that which has potential real-world effects). On this model we see that there are huge bodies of discourse that take God as their object, and thus God has real effects (e.g. people pray, or give to charity, or start a war in his name). Therefore, we do have „evidence that God is „real.
All of the thinkers upon which Mr. Wolf focuses could be said to commit the very first and fatal error of Western philosophy (an error upon which the natural sciences habitually rely): the conflation of spatiotemporal presence with being. Once we move past the archaic notion that something only exists if we can observe its occupation of a quantifiable space and time, the realm of the real becomes much more inclusive, and, frankly, much more interesting. How inane: because we can‚t see a God he doesn‚t exist?! God is only dead if we want (and believe) him to be, and I hope that before we agree to abandon him we think very hard about the coldness of a world that only admits ideas that gain the (historically fickle) approval of scientists. Yours in Christ,
Adam EllwangerPhD Candidate in RhetoricColumbia, SC
