Mises and "New Atheism"

[Taraz]

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You list an alternative, science, and then abruptly dismiss it. Why?

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First of all, your quote doesn't propose that science take the place of religion. And it's my contention that science can never take the place of religion. Religion and God serve an incredibly diverse set of needs and desires.

Most importantly, IMO, God and religion provide answers for things that science fundamentally cannot answer or at least cannot answer yet. If you've talked to any theists who deny evolution they always ask, "who created the universe if not God?" and they often say that they can't accept that something came from nothing. We are simply not advanced enough in our scientific thought to answer some of the seemingly impossible questions of life.

I think it would be much more fruitful to simply show theists where science can answer the claims of religion. Instead of asking that theists abandon God we should show them where God is unnecessary to explain things. We should attempt to massively reduce the size and scope of what God has "magical" control over. Eventually many theists would probably realize that their God is unnecessary for what they need Him for.

Basically I am advocating that we seek to educate without asking that people abandon the way they previously organized their lives. Religion provides an incredibly important social function and simply telling people to stop because it's wrong or dumb isn't going to work. We shouldn't claim that you have to be an idiot to believe in God. We should say, "oh, you don't need God to explain X . . . We actually learned that Y is explained by such and such mechanism . . . God isn't an adequate solution for problem Z because . . ." You don't have to attack religion or God as a whole, you simply have to aim smaller and strip away at it bit by bit.

So instead of doing away with God and religion at the outset, people will slowly realize that God doesn't hold any explanatory power for many things. Eventually they might decide that God is unnecessary. But we shouldn't make the mistake of suggesting that science holds all the answers because it clearly doesn't.