One of the hallmarks of New Atheism is its repeated demand for the faithful to pony up evidence for their beliefs. Since they don’t have any, even the “sophisticated” believers are starting to openly reject the need for such evidence, which makes them look pretty dumb. The proper stance is pithily summarized by Christopher Hitchens: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Two articles just appeared that clearly show this “evidence-is-overrated” stand.

1. I’ve just received an advance copy of Richard’s new book, The Magic of Reality (it’s released in the U.S. October 4) and am looking forward to reading it (it’s meaty!). It’s being sold as a children’s book but is really, I think, for joint reading by parent and child, or if by children alone, by those who are at least 12. At any rate, this book is the launching pad for a conversation (moderated by Susanna Rustin) between Dawkins and Catholic writer Christine Odone at the “Comment is Free” section of the Guardian.

In a piece called “So you believe in hell?“, Susanna Rustin asks the questions and Dawkins and Odone thrash out the issues of whether and how children should be taught religion. (I didn’t previously know much about Odone, but articles like this and this convince me that she’s the British Ann Coulter.) In the piece, Odone, a Catholic, asserts her belief in transubstantiation and in reward and punishment in the afterlife. She also claims that faith isn’t dogmatic, asserting this:

You musn’t think that religion is stuck in its inquisitorial phase; religion is capable of evolution and many people of faith are filled with doubts.

But there are only two things that make religion “evolve”: scientific advances that show religious dogma to be nonsense, and advances in secular morality that force religion to play catch-up, as it has done with gay rights and gender equality. And as for those “doubts,” well many people of faith are not filled with doubts, because if Catholics were so doubtful, for example, the Church wouldn’t enforce its odious dogmas about homosexuality, contraception, divorce, and sexual behavior on its adherents.

The exchange of note is this, when they’re discussing religious assertions as metaphors:

RD: But how do you decide which bits to doubt and which bits to accept? As scientists, we do it by evidence. CO: You can’t boil everything down to evidence!

Well, not everything, perhaps, but certainly assertions about the afterlife and whether a cracker and wine become body and blood. How can you teach that stuff to kids if there’s no stinking evidence?

2. Andrew Brown has a very confused piece at the Guardian called “Creationism explained” (an obvious riff on Pascal Boyer’s book, Religion Explained) about how the purpose of life or the universe can’t be explained by science. But of course, as one of the world’s leading faitheists, Brown claims that purpose and meaning can be detected by religious rumination, and that this is absolutely compatible with science:

But the mainstream, orthodox, Christian position is not in fact Paleyite. It doesn’t claim that the purpose of life can be discovered or shown by scientific enquiry; only that this purpose, discovered or known by revelation, is perfectly compatible with the results of science. This is also a position which can be described as “creationist”, but I would never do so, because that muddles an enormously useful and important distinction. The orthodox Christian view cannot be refuted scientifically. It is therefore irrelevant to science classes, unlike the first sort of “creationism” which is actively hostile to science teaching.

Discovered or known by revelation? Can religious revelation really discover or know anything that is true? And are such “discoveries”, such as they are, always incompatible with science? After all, if one decides by revelation that God’s purpose is to answer supplications and prayers, then that’s something that can be tested (and has been refuted) by science. There are certain empirical consequences one expects in universes supposedly constructed for some purposes, and those consequences can be tested. Nothing that is true, except for one’s subjective feelings, can be discovered or known by revelation. One always needs stinking evidence.

Brown’s last sentences, though, takes the cake for incomprehensibility:

(My own point of view is that the question of whether the universe has a purpose is not only one we can’t answer, but one we can’t even properly frame. How on earth could we emerge from a game whose rules were comprehensible to us?)

If you can’t even frame the idea of a purpose, does religion make any sense at all? And what the deuce does he mean by the last sentence?