My task was to rebut your interpretation of the debate. I understand the impetus toward interpreting the new atheists in the way you have. However, it is not justified by either the evidence (what the new atheists say) or argumentative necessity. The former, I trust, needs no comment from me to establish; the arguments themselves must be attended to. I do not think you will find anyone explicitly endorses the “everyone’s a literalist” opinion. For the latter, in order to avoid having to sincerely post that all religious persons are literalists in order to establish that they must bear the burden of collective responsibility, the new atheists need an account that allows for collective accountability for crimes committed under softer conditions: by individuals and by communities which does not presuppose literalism among its followers.

My overly complex formulations was a tentative guess at what conditions we can reasonably hold a collective accountable for those two things.

I certainly don’t set out to paint with an overly wide brush. You point out, I think rightly, that not all religions (or religious communities, or whatever) violate either (a) or (b). That would be a case where I would agree that no collective accountability can be established… unless, of course, a good argument can be / has been made by the new atheists as to why I ought to. But notice the dynamic of the argument: you set a high bar for collective accountability, and I set it lower, and that suffices for the point of that post.

But if may respond to your newest comment. I am not sure what a “method of (true? correct?) understanding” is. Whether we agree or not would depend on what we expect the correctness in “true understanding” to mean, and in what contexts. I suppose that I don’t doubt that the human will cannot be understood without faith and lack thereof, for example, but this is a fairly limited context.

Thanks for your comments. David Sloan Wilson is primarily a well known evolutionary biologist who has written extensively on group selection and other aspects of levels of selection in evolutionary biology. I find your observation that he regards atheism as a “stealth religion” is incidentally, an observation I have arrived at independently after realizing how zealously fanatical some militant atheists – especially those who participate in online blogs like this one – are.

I’m not sure that complicated statement can boil down to the idea that religion and science are incompatible. But beyond that, there are still many religions who only employ traditional writings as ideas for people to consider, not as truths that have to be accepted no matter what. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, to name a few, all treat the writings of their founders with great respect; but for these traditions, the proof is in the value of the experiences that follow from serious exploration of the propositions.

There are also many religions that have emerged in the past century that put primary burden of proof on the individual to come to an understanding of the truth through testing of ideas in personal experience. To mention one example, Unitarian Universalism includes science as one of the sources of wisdom a person should consider in the quest for understanding of our place in the cosmos; and there are no scriptures or doctrines or dogmas of Unitarian Universalism for people to interpret literally or metaphorically.

Religion is a very complex phenomenon. All religions attempt to come to an understanding of the truth of our place in the universe. They employ many methods of reaching that understanding, and some of those methods are essentially, epistemologically, the same as science. It is wrong to ignore these religions and religious methods of understanding. As science developed, many religious people embraced it on the belief that understanding the physical universe can only increase our understanding of God and our place in the grand scheme of things, and the important moral issues we must face. Such people continue to exist and embrace science today.

I am aware that fundamentalists are not all extreme literalists, but the basic idea of any fundamentalism, that one set of writings alone is the “Word of God,” is treating a mythological idea, that God talks to us like a person, as if it were literally true. Calling a scripture the Word of God ought to at most suggest these writings are very important. This is a fallacy that ultimately leads to many false beliefs, among them the conceit that God would only find one group of people important enough to receive his wisdom.

My point is that not all religious groups invoke a scripture as a divinely inspired and ultimately infallible source of information. Buddhists, for example, have a huge canon of scripture but it is read for what it can offer about how to experience enlightenment. They don’t ask anyone to believe something just because Buddha said so. They insist enlightenment must be experienced directly, not unlike scientists who insist ideas be tested with experiments. Unitarian Universalists respect all sources of knowledge and wisdom, including science. But they don’t insist people believe anything based on faith or because someone somewhere said so. I could multiply these examples many times.

This is why religion is not categorically opposed to science, because there are plenty of religions that insist people decide things for themselves based on their own experience, aided but not determined by traditional ideas. The militant atheists never recognize these respresentatives of religion. They say things like, “Science is based on reason while religion is based on faith.”

But that’s just not true. Many religions don’t invoke faith at all. And science requires faith that all events in the universe conform to universal laws which are the same at all places and times. No matter how many experiments one does, one can never prove that the laws of the universe are universal.

Have you read David Sloan Wilson’s writing on the science and religion debate? It’s a refreshing and interesting argument coming from one of the more prominent evolutionary psychologists around.

You’ll have to navigate the terrible Huffington Post website, but his series of posts entitled Atheism as a Stealth Religion are great. He’s also written about the evolutionary origins or religion at book length.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/#blogger_bio