He does seem a bit taken aback by the militancy of the Internet variety, if rightly unimpressed by what passes for their arguments:
So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion — it is an inferior way of knowing — is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion’s content — it’s cotton-candy fluff — is the product of incredible ignorance.
It’s interesting to see how Fish correctly hammers the oft-heard but moronic “evidence” argument, albeit in a less straightforward manner than he could have. Most of these “evidence” arguments border on dishonesty, when they do not leap across the line with all the enthusiasm of a Kampuchean atheist smashing skulls with shovels, in that they completely depend on redefining the word “evidence” in a manner that is not recognized by any dictionary on the planet. It’s also interesting to see Fish hit the epistemological angle, which one seldom sees outside of evangelical Christian theologians and traditionally minded philosophers. Of course, it will avail him little, since if militant atheists were epistemologically competent, they wouldn’t be militant atheists in the first place. While mathematicians are capable of understanding postulates, the average science fetishist merely stares blankly when confronted with the fact that his deified method involves fundamental assumptions.
It’s true that science works. But then, there’s no shortage of empirical and scientific evidence that religion works too, and in some cases, even better. This is particularly true if one considers their comparative ability to provide predictive models of human behavior.
The most amusing comment was this one, which so perfectly demonstrates the social autism of the average atheist: “If religion is all about doubt and questioning, then I might be more religious than most born-again Christians. For some reason, though, born-again Christians don’t seem to enjoy me doubting and questioning their faith.”
Interestingly enough, I have found that for some reason atheist science fetishists don’t seem to enjoy me doubting and questioning THEIR faith either. For, as Sam Harris has shown, it is atheists who tend to assert their beliefs far more rigidly and dogmatically than Christians. One wonders if atheists would be similarly inclined to answer this particular question the same way if it concerned anything but God – note that the key term which clearly highlights the atheist tendency towards mindless dogmatism is the word “suggest”. The only rationally correct answer is “agree”, which can be easily understood by substituting anything from “cancer” to “bull market” for “God”; regardless, contrary to the New Atheist propaganda, the scientific evidence shows that it is Christians who are the more open-minded.
