and their apologists (the self-proclaimed 'moderates', or to use more apt terms, the 'accommodationists', or the 'faitheists'). Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against the purveyors of superstition, supernaturalism, ignorance. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. It was in response to the highly organized and well-financed campaign by the religious right that led champions of rational thinking such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell(February, 2006) had been published. In fact, in early 2006 only Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (2004), and Daniel C.

This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge.Īt the time, three and a half years ago, no one was using the phrase 'the new atheists'. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools.

It was in April 2006 that President George W. 'What is this stuff, you ask one another,' says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, 'and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?' 'Now that you're famous, even I might have to take you seriously. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him 'the atheist with a soul.' When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. The book had brought Cass an indecent amount of attention. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer.įirst had come the book, which he had entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and to Sigmund Freud's The Future of An Illusion. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.īut now things had happened - fundamental and fundamentalist things - and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through.

What is the point of existence