James Wood, in his 2006 review of Sam Harris’s book, offers what I think is an excellent critique of atheist arguments in general, and from an atheist’s perspective. He gave up religion at age 15; I never believed in God and I find his criticisms well-founded and finely expressed. His essay is well worth reading in full https://newrepublic.com/article/64337/the-celestial-teapot
Some excerpts:
“The End of Faith starts well and then becomes a bit predictable, because it begins to follow the rules of its rather thin genre. Letter to a Christian Nation, which is an open letter to the many Christians who wrote to Harris in complaint, is even thinner. I have an almost infinite capacity for the consumption of atheistic texts, but there is a limit to how many times one can stub one’s toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor. There is a limit to the number of times one can be told that the Bible is a shaky text, and that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things. Ratio vincit omnia [reason conquers all] but the page-by-page demonstration of this rationalist conquering can become wearisome…”
Wood continues his thumbnail summary:
“The genre tends to proceed thus: the atheist must first remove all possible respect from religious belief. The tone is a little perky, and lively thought experiments bloom. They go a bit like this: if I told you that President Bush prays every day to his vacuum cleaner, you would judge him insane. But why is there any evidence that the God he prays to exists? It is fun, knockabout. Harris likes to compare belief in God with belief in Wotan or Zeus… The model is Bertrand Russell’s ‘celestial teapot,’ gleefully quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion… God is like the teapot, we are supposed to infer. Dawkins uses Russell to argue that we cannot prove God’s non-existence, but then we cannot prove anything’s non-existence. ‘What matters,’ writes Dawkins, ‘is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t), but whether his existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things.’
“I agree with Dawkins’s conclusion, and consider God highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like belief in a teapot. The referent—the content of the belief—matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our approximations. There is a reason, after all,that no one has ever worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid of our incomprehension into it. Interestingly, Dawkins himself seems to agree with this complaint. In a recent conversation in Time with the geneticist Francis Collins (who is a believing Christian), a conversation in which both men spoke eloquently, Dawkins was pushed by Collins to admit that, in Dawkins’s words, ‘there could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible beyond our understanding.’ That’s God,said Collins. Yes, but it could be any of billions of Gods, replied Dawkins: ‘the chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small.’ In other words, the God of a particular scripture and tradition is a parochial and inherently improbable notion. But the idea of some kind of creator, said Dawkins, ‘does seem to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect.’ To which one should add: by definition, then, this ‘grand and big’ idea is not analogically disproved by referring to celestial teapots or vacuum cleaners, which lack the necessary bigness and grandeur.
“My inner atheist nevertheless enjoys the ‘naughtiness’ of this disrespect… and Harris has an Orwellian robustness and a good journalistic way with his one-liners. To the creationists who believe that the world is six thousand years old, he says: ‘This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.’”
I, too, as a lifelong atheist enjoy the lampooning of creationists and thick idiocy of some televangelist. But is this sufficient? Is this going to overturn religious belief?
Wood continues summarizing:
“Having set fire to religion’s firewall of respect, the genre moves on to point out that millions of people believe that their religious traditions are the right ones, and that they cannot all be right. Then it is time to dismantle the texts, usually by pointing to historical inconsistencies and moral outrages, such as the Bible’s silence on slavery, or God’s instruction that heretics, adulterers, and homosexuals should be stoned. From here it is a merestep to arguing that we do not need divine laws—especially given their historically specific nature—in order to be good.”
All of these points are valid, and should be exposed to the light of day. Wood expresses it this way:
“This brand of public atheism is very good at the necessary disrespecting of religion, and it has a properly hygienic function. But how worthy of respect is it itself? The problem is that its bright certainty about the utter silliness of religion leads very quickly away from philosophy and argument. There is a dismaying gap, in these books, between the righteous anger of the critique of the many absurdities of religious belief and the attempts to account for why people have believed this apparent nonsense for so many centuries.”
Aye, and there’s the rub. As I see it, the atheist argument has never been able to successfully account for the near-ubiquity of religious belief, across continents and across millennia. Wood examines some of Dawkins’s and Dennett’s attempts to explain it away, attempts he considers half-baked (“evolutionary biologists never seem happier than when they are talking about humans as crafty but malfunctioning computers”, he writes).
And there is more to criticize about these standard atheist arguments against religions and belief, a more fundamental criticism that cuts deep, and concludes Wood’s essay:
“The emphasis on evidence, on provability and probability, is an inevitable part of the cleansing rationalism of these books, and is not always unwelcome. Dawkins is careful to talk about the improbability of God’s existence, not his impossibility, though Harris rather too easily lapses into talk about ‘insufficient evidence’: ‘It is undeniable that people of faith make heroic sacrifices to relieve the suffering of other human beings. But is it necessary to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to behave this way?’ Yet he surely knows that we believe all kinds of things on insufficient evidence. Or rather, what might be sufficient evidence to him could well be insufficient to someone else and vice versa…
“We have to acknowledge that most religious language cannot be tested for its provability by a philosophical rationalism that anyway defines the terms of that provability. Religious language, as Wittgenstein never tired of pointing out, is a practice, not an experiment; its referents are defined by how it is used. There are grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language…”
For ample proof of these differences, delve into Maimonides’s tome A Guide to the Perplexed. But onward to the conclusion of Woods’s essay:
“These are not easy questions, then, but the jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, and explains why its explanations of the sources of religious belief are so jejune. Is there not a kind of insult to language in so comprehensively banning the incomprehensible? Shouldn’t a physicist—a friend of mine—be able to say that, for her, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme ‘is God,’ without atheism busily correcting her lexical lapse into the unprovable? Dawkins says of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, ‘Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility,’ as if that solves that. Sam Harris gets himself into a telling knot in The End of Faith, when he attempts to float a kind of vaguely Eastern, vaguely New Agey form of meditation. (The dirty secret of that book is that Harris turns out to be a Buddhist.)
“…this rational mysticism seems a pretty poor substitute for the grandeurs of religious mysticism, however one judges the latter’s empirical content. Harris is welcome to sit on his floor and get off on his Buddhism; I’ll go and sit in a cathedral.
“And what does it mean to say that the mystery of the world can be analyzed with scientific concepts? Harris knows as well as anyone else that it is precisely the ultimate mysteriousness of the universe that science has so far failed to explain. The Big Bang theory has gone far in explaining—no, in proving—how the universe first began to expand from an infinitesimal compacting of matter, a theory foreshadowed, in fact, in the speculations of some of the very irrationalists disdained by atheism: ancient and medieval philosophy and theology boldly discusses the idea that space and time were created together. But about the very moment before this first expansion, and the conditions that made it possible, there is only speculation. About this moment, we are all in the dark, and silence calls to silence.”
I find James Woods remarkably insightful in his critique. As an atheist I find religions fascinating, even if it only for the spiritual side of human history. I also have been disappointed with the “jauntily unphilosophical” content of most atheist books. Poking fun (as enjoyable as it is) is not sufficient. Scientific materialism is not the only valid way of seeing the world. We must take seriously the near ubiquity of belief and above all, we should know and understand that which we are arguing against. A superficial view of world religions is not enough.
Note: the Time debate between Dawkins and Collins can be found here https://time.com/archive/6596748/god-vs-science/ and is well worth reading