Dr Paul Allen

Only a few years ago, the aggressive “New Atheist” movement was on the march, with rhetorical brawlers like Christopher Hitchens and renowned biologists like Richard Dawkins leading the charge against religion and the last vestiges of Christian faith in the West. Religion, Hitchens famously stated, “poisons everything,” and could only be considered, at best, humanity’s “first and worst” attempt to solve existential questions. If these cobwebbed superstitions could be blasted away by the refreshing winds of reason and the Enlightenment, a fundamentally better society would rise from the ashes—or so the thinking went. But as Christianity fades further and further into our civilization’s rear-view mirror, many intelligent atheists are beginning to realize that the Enlightenment may have only achieved success because it wielded influence on Christian culture. In a truly secular society, in which men and women live their lives beneath empty heavens and expect to be recycled rather

English: Signature of Stephen Jay Gould (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) From what’s been said it seems that God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) rightly remarked,  ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.’ In fact Dawkins and other New Atheists comment rather a lot on this matter, but perhaps that’s because they speak here primarily as militant atheists rather than scientists. While scholarship has shown that the origins of ‘scientific atheism’ as a faith tradition can be traced back to the eighteenth century, the New Atheism has given it a new importance and profile through its appeal to the natural sciences in defence of its atheist outlook. In the New Atheist world-view, scie