Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin’s angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound “as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear”.
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. [emphasis added]
I think the debate between believers and non-believers is pointless if it becomes about who is right or wrong or rather who is more evil than the other. The real issue is what ought to be the place of religion and the reason why atheists are necessary is because they show that secularism is a value that is essential is a democratic and modern society. I resent religion the most when they feel the need to evangelize and to become pervasive. What is worrisome is that the fact that Dawkins and Hitchens have encountered such strong resistance. In my opinion, this resistance shows that the most important for believers isn’t truth, but the necessity to be right absolutely and to crush dissent as if they were sure that they were right, they would be bothered by people professing loudly that they weren’t.
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