Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present.

Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.

1. His non-biological work, that is.

(As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true)

It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.

Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.

It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics.

It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with.

I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated.

Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.

The more the nuanced the take, the less people will be drawn to it. Hence the popularity of the Bible and the Koran etc.

The Bible has over fifty books and is perhaps one of the most nuanced works of all time, hence the wide variety of Christian denominations.

I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.

The Bible isn't nuanced because it's not even coherent. It's pretty much all over the place.

This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.

I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be.

Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality might not be complicated to read. And while all this stuff about good and evil is valuable context to understand religion, all the other slave morality babble feels pretty close to a YoutTube rant video.

The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments.

It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims.

The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone

It doesn't matter how sophisticated your argument is if it's resting on something as flimsy as "I believe in god because god says he's real".

Sounds like you aren't familiar with any of the arguments in question. This comment is dripping in ignorance.

Very few real world practitioners of these religions would recognize “religious scholars” or “academic experts” as being authoritative arbiters of their religious beliefs.

And atheists don't generally recognise Richard Dawkins as the arbiter of their beliefs either.

If someone were to attack the arguments for atheism in good faith I would hope they would fight its strongest arguments and not just tackle a hack like Dawkins. I'd like to extend the arguments for God the same courtesy.

> people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims

What is a good example?

As a Muslim, I've seen Dawkins make very basic and laughably incorrect claims about Islam. It clearly shows he has extremely shallow knowledge about what he claims to criticize. Niel DeGrasse Tyson is also guilty of the same.

Here's a short clip of Dr. Sami Ameri, a published author and expert, discussing but one of Dawkin's fallacies in his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNpvZN76zU

Ok, I just suffered through the 13 minutes of nonsens from this "expert".

One problem is that he doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Dawkins doesn't argue that, because people tend to have similar beliefs as those around them, he has disproved those beliefs. He just uses it to illustrate the close minded way some people take the supremacy of their particular religion for granted. The question "What if you are wrong?" comes with a lot of assumptions.

It's also laughable for an expert (for a number of reasons) to claim that C.S. Lewis has disproved atheism.

And the counter argument that Dawkins himself he is an atheist because he was born in the UK in the 20th century just proves Dawkins point. I think Dawkins himself would agree that the likelihood of him being atheist would have been far lower if he would have been born in Pakistan or in 17th century England.

The point he's making is that the fallacious argument can apply both ways, so it is not something that can be used to argue for either side.

This was just a short clip that has English captions. He refuted Dawkins' book in a longer series on his main channel, but I don't think it has English captions. He is an expert, no need to be dismissive.

Does it matter all that much that they get some nuances to Islam, or other religions, incorrect when the central tenant is that there is no God / spiritual being? Like arguing over the cake decorations instead of tackling the central issue of the sponge being made of chocolate or turds.

It's not just nuances, it's entire straw man fallacies. They don't understand basic Islamic tenants and claims, let alone advanced topics like Kalam, and then they attempt to argue against it, making a mockery out of themselves.

Details do matter, because they lump all religions together and attempt to argue against them as a whole, not realizing that there exist core differences among them, even if there is potentially large overlap between say Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Disregarding these facts is doing an injustice to themselves and to their audience, and spreads ignorance and malice.

While I agree that it's bad to spread misinformation that may be harmful, I'll again appeal to you that it doesn't matter a great deal to the audience of this particular book. If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.

To put it another way, if you read the book and you are religious then it probably matters to you in a way that other's just don't give a damn about. For example, I remember at uni some Christians in my class debating the holy spirit / God / Jesus and the distinction or lack thereof. But if you're not Christian then it doesn't matter, that detail has no bearing on you at all. In the same way that if you are Christian then a book discussing whether Jesus was a mythical figure and retelling of an older story or a real person, that detail is just outside your belief system, it doesn't have any bearing on you and there's no point engaging with that detail.

> If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.

And that argument is fundamentally flawed, and is the point I'm trying to make. While it may apply to other religions, it does not apply to Islam. This is where Dawkins and his ilk show their ignorance and fall flat, and falsifies their entire approach. What appears to them as (or them falsely assuming to be) underpinnings, isn't, if I can put it in another way.

I don't see the parallel to the example you gave. Once you're inside a religion, then you can discuss its details and nuances like the examples you gave. That's a completely orthogonal discussion however. Dawkins and the neo-atheist movement are arguing core basics like the existence of God, then using some fallacies that some religions commit to discredit every religion. See the problem there?

Sorry you've kind of lost me. Islam has a god and heaven as a fundamental part doesn't it? The argument is not that there's no Christian God, it's that there are no gods of any kind and the preposition of humanity to make up mythological religions for various reasons. All religions fall into this argument.

Just because Islam has God and Paradise as a fundamental aspect does not mean that you can conflate its presentation of God with the rest of the religions, which is my point. His argument is extremely brittle and laughable.

The so-called expert and Dawkings have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of truth.

For Dawkings, truth is something that can be empirically proven. Truth for Dr. Ameri seems to be a logically sound argument.

Meaningful discourse can't happen if there is no agreement over the words being used.

logically sound derived from made up premises

We know that truth extends beyond what can be empirically proven. Meaning that just because something cannot be proven empirically, does not mean that it is not true. Furthermore, truth is not limited to what can only be empirically proven. This is what the neo-atheists/scientism followers seem to always fall for, and something that even philisophers know not to be true. I believe Godel's incompleteness theorem has something to say about the matter as well. And Dr. Ameri is an expert, you can read up about his credentials. Unlike say Dawkins who was referred to as a journalist by an academic in his field.

This is a decent book and the reviews highlight a few examples of what you’re looking for:

https://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/...

In addition to the book linked to by the other poster, a lot of the work of David Bentley Hart addresses the fallacies of materialist arguments:

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...

I haven't read this one, but seems on point: https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolutio...

To be clear, Hart's own religious views seem pretty eclectic, and he is much less dogmatically Christian than blurbs and marketing of his books suggest.

My experience with religion in the public sphere is that ~all of the religious arguments that are actually advanced in that sphere have nothing to do with ones made by religious scholars.

Attacking a strawman is perfectly appropriate in this case, because the strawman is what actually drives policy.

I've always been curious about serious scholarship of religion.

I've wondered whether it is possible to be both, say, a Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).

I imagine that scholars can have serious disagreements over the meaning of the Bible or even its provenance without necessarily leaving the religion.

> Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).

Yes, this happens.

> not believing that Christ existed physically

The vast majority of historians, including atheist ones, think that someone answering to that general description _did_ exist, though they obviously don't think he was the son of God.

> not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good

Substitute 'God' for 'Christ', and yeah, that's common. Many people are also purely _culturally_ religious; they don't believe in a god (or at least not the one their religion mandates), and do not accept many of the teachings or beliefs of their religion, but do _identify_ as being a member of a religion. In Ireland, say, 70% of people identified as Catholic on the most recent census (in the 90s this was closer to 90%; younger people _are_ less likely to engage in this practice and the child abuse scandals also caused many older people to break away), but in polling the majority of Irish Catholics do not believe in, well, Catholic stuff (a personal god, hell, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, etc), or accept the Church's moral worldview (see outcomes of referendums on abortion, equal marriage etc).

I'm an atheist but wouldn't mind seeing a religion based on Jesus' teachings flourish. I think most people are dumb and need something/someone to encourage them to act rationally and civilly. Not me, of course; I try my best and don't need further encouragement. Current Christianity isn't sufficient; one can easily see how un-Jesus-like many Christians are.

> people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims

No true religious people in scotland?

But I guess most people are not really interested in religous studies. The useful thing to understand is that thought rooted in religon can be discarded out of hand.

Agnostic isn't a consistent belief position though: if you claim you don't know if a higher power exists, the question is which one and how is the impact of this different to being an atheist.

So that bucket collecting random other beliefs isn't too surprising.

Agnostic is just a pussy version of atheist.

Nope, any scientist should be agnostic ;). Since the existence of a god can not be proven nor disproven. Do I have an elephant in my living room? Chances are incredibly low, but can you prove it?

While you are technically correct about the logic, there is no scientific reason to even consider the existence of any higher power.

Please remember that polls are often inaccurate. Internet polls are especially inaccurate.

YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...

_Good quality_ internet polls these days are fairly comparable in accuracy to high quality traditional polling. This isn't the CEO of Yougov posting a twitter poll; there's a process.

I don't think the poll supports the idea of spiritual morphing. The 30% of agnostics is not much different from the population average of 27% and less than catholics at 31%, while atheists believe in astrology less (10%) than any of the other groups.

If abandoning religious beliefs of yesteryear really just morphed them into others like astrology, those new beliefs should be much more common among people who've abandoned the old.

I think a better explanation of the data is that some people have strong opinions on spirituality, ranging from dismissing it all to holding up some particular scripture as the single source of truth, which then informs their stance on astrology, while others just go with whatever, so they're distributed across denominations at roughly the base rate and believe in astrology at roughly the base rate.

Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons.

I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.

I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions.

The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun.

Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)

From Wikipedia:

> Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird

Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family.

Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.

I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context.

"So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."

That’s because mammals aren’t reptiles:

Mammals are from Synapsids[0] and dinosaurs (and modern reptiles) are from Sauropsida[1] — with the commonality being that amphibians split off first [2]. We can draw disjoint clades, which we cannot do for birds and dinosaurs. Beyond that, you’re just talking about tetrapods in general [3]. Reptiliomorpha has multiple names, precisely due to this — eg, pan-amniota.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropsida

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod

> Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated.

It's not. The definition of astrology is literally the study of how bodies in space affect life on earth.

And if you don't believe in astrology, how exactly do you explain tides?

This is silly. Astronomy and physics perfectly explain the tides. Just because there's another belief system that also claims to explain the influence of celestial bodies on the earth, doesn't mean I need to believe in it to explain the tides.

Astrology is a subset of astronomy, since astronomy is the study of things in space. But the part of astronomy that deals with how things in space affect life on earth is astrology. It's literally the definition. You can't just attribute a bunch of random bad things to astrology and then change the definition to make it fit your preconceptions. Literally just type "astrology definition" into Google.

If birds are dinosaurs, aren't some dinosaurs birds? So we can claim that birds existed 200 million years ago.

Your logic is flawed, it is true that birds are dinosaurs, and it is also true that some dinosaurs are birds (literally birds). But it is not true that birds existed 200 millions years ago. The oldest known bird fossils are around 160 million years old.

Why? If birds are dinosaurs then some dinosaurs are birds. So the ancestors of those dinosaurs are also birds and we can go further and further until the first living thing which was also a bird. So its descendants were also birds. So every living thing is a bird.

If humans are vertebrates, then some vertebrates are human. It is wholly possible (and indeed true) that a specific subset of vertebrates (those that existed 200 million years ago) and another subset (humans) are disjoint.

It seems like these people should be required to read Douglas Adams. Though they'd likely miss the point.