Faith in office and an atheist's manifesto

Sullivan with two timely posts:

Oliver Kamm, an atheist, differs from Dawkins on the topic of secularism in politics:

The cause of secularism is politically vital. But there is no political case for atheism. (I do believe, as a pragmatic point, that society would be better off if there were more atheists around; but I also believe that society would be better off if moderate religion, accommodating itself to secular government and education, supplanted religious absolutism. A consistent secularist would be indifferent between these possibilities.) Dawkins, by contrast, maintains (p. 44): "American atheists far outnumber religious Jews, yet the Jewish lobby is notoriously one of the most formidably influential in Washington. What might American atheists achieve if they organised themselves properly?"

Leave aside the tendentious first sentence of that statement. (American Jewry is not "formidably influential" in forming public policy, even with regard to US policy in the Middle East; it genuinely isn't.) The second strikes me as a thoroughly bad idea. I do not wish to see, and will not sign up to, an organised interest group of atheists, because atheism is a private belief, of no civic significance. So is religious belief. The task of defending state neutrality between those positions is what we, and the President of the French Fifth Republic, should defend.

Steven Weinberg returns to the old debate about religion and science. One choice paragraph:

The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of odds and ends about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation.

We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. As Richard Feynman has said, "The theory that it's all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."

For myself, that inadequacy and sense that man is not special are what lead me to reject most religious notions years ago.

But I very much appreciate Kamm's point about consistent secularism being indifferent to moderate religion, and cannot stress this enough. Absolutists and Dominionists like Alan Keyes are those that I take grave exception to.