Rehabilitating Faith
Atheists love to meme. I’m seeing a lot of single-image, single-phrase take downs of the many-thousand years history of faith. Underlying all of it seems to be (because this isn’t always explicit) the common complaint that religion is, as Hitchens and others have claimed, “a menace to civilization.” The contrary they offer is always science. Apparently the Enlightenment arrived just in time to save us from ravages of superstition. It’s true that people have perpetrated unspeakable horrors in the name of religion. The Crusades and the Inquisition and the Religious wars that burned through Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the genocidal expansion of Europeans into the Americas, these are familiar to all educated western people. And as for the rest of the world, we could easily go through Islam and Hinduism and create an equally astonishing catalog. It’s also true that science has given us extraordinary wonders: space exploration, MRI machines, Newton’s laws and Ei...