Julian pointed out in a comment on Wassup with the new atheism? that a lot of people think that atheists are dogmatic anti-religionists, and that if we now have good reason to believe that this is the impression being created, we should think about altering our tune.

There is something to that, there’s no denying it. It is quite possible that vocal atheists are alienating huge numbers of people who would otherwise be secularists and/or liberal believers, with potentially harmful results. This is of course the drum that Matthew Nisbet never tires of beating, though he does it very aggressively and also very manipulatively (as in repeatedly claiming that Paul Kurtz is not a vocal atheist but a politely bashful … Read the rest

There are a couple of other things that bother me about Julian’s ‘new atheism’ article.

One is that he says his opinions ‘are not so much about these books as the general tone and direction the new atheism they represent has adopted. This is not a function of what exactly these books say, but of how they are perceived, and the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews’ but then he doesn’t provide a very clear account of how the ‘four horsemen’ are perceived and the kind of comments they make. He discusses ‘the new atheism’ without ever really pinning down for the reader what he takes that to be – so we’re left … Read the rest

Julian wrote a piece arguing that the ‘new atheist movement’ is destructive. It got linked at Dawkins’s site where commenters greeted it with intemperate hostility – until Russell Blackford posted a comment informing them that Julian isn’t actually as wicked as all that, which calmed things down a little. Julian later commented too, pointing out with some justice that the intemperate hostility rather bore out his point.

I want to take issue with some things Julian said, however – though I will of course do so in a very reasonable and measured way.

He starts off by saying, with deliberate impudence, that he has an opinion about the four chief Newatheists, despite the fact that he has not read … Read the rest