If there is a Thor, betcha he supports nationalizing the banks

(The Thor's Helmet Nebula, NGC 2359)

Via Ry, Matt Taibbi delivers a hilarious takedown of those tasked with intellectually defending religion against atheist attacks.

But Taibbi is given an easy target here. Fops like Terry Eagleton are inept at defending religion mainly because they handicap themselves from the get-go. Eagleton and company assume that at the end of the day, not only must religion be defended, but Christianity must be proven to be the best religion, and the Christian God the One True God. That is a tall order; of course Eagleton and co. can't deliver.

An easier intellectual task for these modern-day Jesuits would be to attack atheism right back. I haven't read the atheistic manifestos by Richard Dawkins (name spelled backwards: "Snikwad") and Christopher Hitchens, but I have read the online excerpts. The basic idea: we cannot see God, therefore God does not exist.

That to me seems silly. We also cannot see extraterrestrial aliens; does this mean that we should assume that they, too, do not exist? In fact, the two are one and the same; if God did not originate on Earth, then he is an extraterrestrial too. Do atheists really expect us to believe that human intelligence is as good as it gets? That among the vast, unbounded sweep of the cosmos, there can possibly exist no intelligence that would be so complex and vast that we'd call it a "god"?

I'll remain agnostic on the existence of Yahweh, but are atheists really willing to bet me that there's no Thor?

The other argument often made by atheists is that human religion, as we know it, is bad for society. I'll accept that this might be the case, but it seems far from proven. We can argue back and forth all day whether religion increases morality (my answer: possibly sometimes). But as a consumer good, religion is clearly a thing that a lot of people like and want. Like a washing machine. You don't see a lot of people publishing tortured intellectual defenses of washing machines.

The burden of proof is therefore on the atheist, not the theist; to show that religion is bad; they must show that this good creates negative externalities that outweigh its value to its consumers.

So this should be the latter-day Jesuits' response to Hitchens and Snikwad: Prove to me that there is no god of any kind, anywhere. Prove to me that religion is bad for society.

But that's not enough for Eagleton and co. They don't just want to slap down atheism; they want to show that their own religion is A) correct, and/or B) good for people. (A) is an infinitely harder task, since demonstrating that Jesus (or Allah, Yahweh, etc.) exists is just as impossible as proving Thor doesn't. And (B) is a lost cause too, since it's pretty impossible to argue that the existing form of a consumer good is the apex. Just as we can be fairly certain that we'll someday invent a better washing machine, we an make a reasonable guess that someday we'll find a religion that people like better than Christianity, Islam, and the rest of the current crop.

So the atheists come off sounding much smarter and more reasonable than their opponents. But atheists had better stick to poking fun at the bumbling defenders of traditional religion, because if they ever tangle with the real masters of logic - the agnostics - they're going to get their pudgy British butts handed to them. At the moment, of course, agnostics have good reason to ally with atheists - Christianists are threatening to cut off our research funding (and Islamists are threatening to cut off more than that). But don't expect us to agree that "there is no God". We've got better unanswerable questions to ponder.