Not long ago, six Muslim immigrants to the United States, including three Albanian brothers named Duka, were charged in New Jersey with plotting to attack Fort Dix with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. A relative of the brothers, Murat Duka, lamented their turn toward religious fundamentalism, telling the New York Times: "It's fine to be a religion man. But if you get too much of the religion, you get out of your mind and do stupid things."
This struck me at the time as extremely sensible, positively Aristotelian in its endorsement of mild religiosity as a sort of golden mean between fundamentalist belief and outright atheism. Religion is fine. Just don't get carried away.
That middle ground is terrain that is becoming increasingly difficult to hold. Religious moderates have always had to deal with fundamentalists—the true believers who cleave to the strictest possible interpretation of scripture and who consider any sort of slackening or compromise as apostasy. But now the moderates are under attack from their other flank, from a clan of increasingly aggressive non-believers who lump all forms of belief under the category "dangerous." For these atheists—they include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens—religious moderates are part of the problem, because by accepting the basics of religious belief they give credibility to the same system of irrationality that sustains fundamentalism.
I entirely agree with the substance of the atheist critique, namely, that religious belief of just about any sort is intellectually lazy and that there is no more reason to believe in god or saints or angels than in ghosts, goblins or the tooth fairy. It's all infantile magical thinking as far as I'm concerned, and any rational person should be embarrassed to believe any of it.
Belief in God only ever had three intellectually useful purposes: as a justification for morality, an account of the origins of the universe, and an explanation for the organized complexity of life on Earth.
Plato took care of the morality question in his Euthyphro. In that dialogue, Socrates asks (more or less), "Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?" If the first clause in the sentence is true, then moral goodness exists independently of God. If the second is true, then what we call moral goodness is simply arbitrary, giving us no reason to worship God. In either case, belief in God can't provide a justification for morality.
As for the other purposes, the origins of the universe and the existence of life on Earth, science has taken care of both of them. The complexity of life was always the hardest nut to crack, which is why belief was still rationally respectable before Darwin came along. Ever since Darwin, religious belief has served no useful intellectual function, and yet millions of people still believe.
For lots of reasons, I suppose. Some people like the music, others enjoy the community and the chance to get out of the house once a week or so. For many people, belief is just what gets them through the night, which is probably the best explanation for the tenacity of religion. The universe is cold and life can be hard, and I can think of plenty of occasions over the years where a bit of faith might have come in handy.
Is this sort of belief dangerous? Hardly. Guys such as Harris and Hitchens worry that allowing any believers in our midst is to admit a Trojan horse inside the gates of secular liberalism, but that argument rests on a basic misunderstanding of what liberalism is. Liberalism isn't concerned with what you believe, but with how you behave. The whole point of a liberal society is that you are entitled to your own pursuit of the good life, and whether that involves climbing rocks or reading the Koran is the business of neither the state nor your neighbor, so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others to pursue their own conception of the good.
The new aggressive atheists want moderate believers to choose between liberalism and their faith. Get off the fence, they say; either you're with us or you're with the terrorists. Sound familiar?
It is hard to see how forcing all believers to choose between theocracy and liberalism, between jihad and McWorld, is even remotely helpful. Do people such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens honestly believe that it is smart to insist that even the mildest of religious types choose between their state and their religion? It is hard to imagine a gambit more certain to fuel the fires of jihad.
Again, I'm no believer. But if I had to choose between the overheated ranting of Mr. Hitchens' God is Not Great and the mannered sensibility of Murat Duka, I know whose side I'd choose. As Mr. Duka might say, it's fine to be an atheist man. But if you get too much of it, you get out of your mind and write stupid things.
Andrew Potter is co-author of The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed.
