Atheisms

James Wood is one of the most public of our public atheists, but he has several bones to pick with other members of the brotherhood in a TNR review of Sam Harris’s latest book (TNR, December 18). He complains, for instance, against Dawkins’s use of Russell’s “celestial teapot” argument (ie, we can’t prove there isn’t a teapot orbiting the sun; but that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable, rational opinion), emphasizing that “content matters here.” There’s a difference between the unprovability of God and the unprovability of a teapot because of who God is (or, as Wood would have it, is purported to be).

He also finds an embarrassing gap between the “hygienic” work of “disrespecting religion” and atheists’ efforts to explain how so many could be deluded so thoroughly for so long. Wood would rather that atheists not attempt to explain religious belief at all than to pull out “flimsy” explanations “from their anthropological kit bag.”