Ross Douthat, on the urgent need of the militant atheist Jerry Coyne to insist that any Christian who does not take Genesis literally is a bad Christian who doesn’t understand his own religion:

The other possibility is that Genesis was never intended to be read as a literal blow-by-blow history of the human race’s first few months, and that its account of how sin entered the world partakes of allegorical and symbolic elements — like many other stories in the Bible, from the Book of Job to the Book of Revelation — to make a  theological and moral point.

One can take the latter view and still argue that evolution by natural selection creates challenges for the way Christian theology (though less so Jewish theology, I think) traditionally interprets the Genesis story. (I’ve aired versions of this argument myself: Here, here and here, for instance.) But that’s very different from arguing that either the Genesis story or evolutionary biology has to be a “palpable lie,” and implying anyone who accepts Darwinian evolution has to dismiss the first book of the Old Testament as the ancient equivalent of the Hitler Diaries. This is the view of many fundamentalists, of course. But it’s extremely telling that an atheist like Coyne insists on it as well.

John Gray (an agnostic, btw):

The urgency with which [the New Atheists] produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terorrism: the tide of secularization has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religious as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the nineteenth century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

More:

Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. … The attempt to eradicate religion … only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the die of faith ebbas away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

I remember having an argument once with a fundamentalist Christian who was trying to talk me out of my Catholicism. I told him that he had gotten some doctrine or another all wrong, that the Catholic Church did not teach what he claimed it taught. He told me I was wrong. I realized then that this man wasn’t interested in learning anything that might change his mind about this cartoon idea of Catholicism he carried in his head. It was an odd thing. I didn’t expect the man to come around to my way of thinking, but I was simply trying to tell him that he’d arrived at his conclusion based on objectively false premises. But he was far too wedded to his Christian fundamentalism to let anything like the facts change his opinion.

So it is with Jerry Coyne and his sort, these Apophatic Atheists, who derive their negative anti-theology from what they’re not (e.g., Christian fundamentalists), and insist that the rest of the world has to fit into their narrow, rigid, Manichean categories … or else we’re all living in false consciousness. And to think these are the kind of people who supposedly have such high regard for empiricism…