Andrew Sullivan points out an online scuffle going on between agnostics, represented by Ron Rosenbaum at Slate, and atheists, represented by Julian Sanchez, currently a fellow at the Cato Institute.
As a former agnostic, I find it hard not to agree with much of what Ron Rosenbaum says. The "New Atheists," as they're called--Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and that whole loose camp--are a little too vocal, a little too certain, and a little too abrasive to be attractive. That said, Julian Sanchez is right-on in his attack on Rosenbaum's logic: the fact that empirically-minded atheists can't explain creation doesn't mean they have to throw up their hands and vocally admit defeat. Just because you can't prove that something DOESN'T exist doesn't mean you can never commit to a position about its existence with reasonable certainty.
Sometimes I wish that atheism hadn't been perverted by this Enlightenment-obsessed New Atheism. My personal trip to atheism went along substantially different lines. I remember learning the word "agnostic" from a classmate in junior high, and (having been raised outside of any religious tradition) thinking something silly along the lines of, "Oh. That's a neat word for what I am." I stayed in the "I-dunno-about-God" camp--even when I immaturely delighted, as the New Atheists do now, in skewering believers--until a couple of years ago, when a sudden realization changed my mind.
The realization was that agnosticism is a kind of cheating. Here I was, not giving a damn about the Ten Commandments, not even really bothering to look into religious issues, but still claiming that I was somehow on the fence about the existence of a God. I asked myself: "If I really believed there might be a God, would I be living the way that I am?"
The answer was obvious: No.
If you are open to the possibility of a God in the only sense that seems worth arguing about--an all-knowing, all-powerful being (or group of them) that made the universe and mankind--then your very first task should be to figure out what that God might be like, in order to understand how to live in accordance with Its (His? Her? Their?) program. The stakes are unbelievably high, and by acting as if they weren't, I had in effect made my choice. In practice, I was an atheist--but when confronted, I was making excuses that, in the presence of an actual God, weren't likely to hold up.
I wasn't about to dedicate my life to religious inquiry--you can't just whip up belief like you whip up a batch of cookies--so I "converted" to atheism. (One perk: no paperwork involved.) But my atheism is really about a lack of belief in any god, unlike the New Atheists, who are, as their critics everywhere note, fundamentalist believers, worshippers of the greatness of No God. According to these faithful atheists, No God (sometimes known, arguably incorrectly, as "Science") will step in and solve all the world's problems, if only we would all listen to the Good News.
It's the latest rebranding of humanism, which is, pretty obviously, a religion--but one that, as far as I can tell, replaces the worship of one beloved imaginary being ("God") with another ("Mankind"). Agnosticism is essentially another brand of humanism, too--it's just not sure whether it should give God a quick nod before it returns to its primary, human-centered concerns.
Outdated and dangerous ideas about "Man" and "the human" are, I think, the real problem with most current belief systems. As a result, I don't have a lot of love for either side of this New Atheist/New Agnostic coin.
