ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the thoughts and arguments of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the fifth “horseman,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In general, they argue that science is worth defending because modifications of technologies are the salvation of our planet. This is really a defense of the “technological fix,” the idea that technology holds the secret to solving all of our problems, technical or social. This takes science in the direction of scientism, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the scientific cogito and the theological cogito are incommensurable. One does not expect theists to be actively engaged in collective, generationally linked, intersubjectively tested research on the hypotheses that Jesus is the son of god and the resurrection was an actual event in history. If we understand religion sociologically as the systematization of the moral order of a social group – its norms of good and bad and right and wrong – then atheism is a religion. Good science, however, is not faith based; it is evidence based; the kernal of truth in this statement tends to get exaggerated in New Atheist rhetoric.
