Weigel: "Way Beyond the New Atheist Nonsense"
A reader brought this to our attention. With all the notice given to the ‘New Atheists’, (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and their elaborate casuistry against God and religion, this rebuttal by George Weigel ( "Way Beyond the New Atheist Nonsense" ) is a cogent response worth reading. George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. writing in First Things , demolishes an idea central to post-modern thinking that religion and science are contradictory and incompatible. Weigel states: "Given the intellectual flimsiness of their work, it’s best to look for cultural causes to explain the popularity of the 'New Atheists.' And surely one factor is the now-canonical notion in Western high culture that biblical religion is incompatible with modern natural science—an idea rooted in the notion that the 'scientific method' is the only way to get at the truth." The so-