“I agree with many of their criticisms of religion,” Melvin Konner writes about the New Atheists— Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens —“. . . but I don’t like their attacks on other people’s faith. I don’t think faith will fade away, nor do I think it should.” Rather than dismiss or ridicule religious faith, Dr. Konner, an anthropologist and medical doctor, wants to understand it as a fact of human existence. In “Believers: Faith in Human Nature,” he contends that religion is “an evolved, biologically grounded, psychologically intimate, socially strong set of inclinations and ideas that are not universal but are so widespread and deeply ingrained that, in my view, faith will never go away.”
The idea that religion is on the verge of disappearing is an old one. French radicals predicted its demise in the 18th century, as did Karl Marx in the 19th, H.G. Wells and other Fabians in the 20th, and the New Atheists in the 21st. The supposition that religious belief is a holdover from the superstitions of yesterday, destined to expire in the near future, has motivated radicals the world over to carry out horrific acts of violence on religious adherents of all kinds, out of the conviction that it didn’t matter anyway since such people would have no part in the inevitably secular future. Today the same idea, or something close to it, licenses American media outlets to treat fervent religious beliefs as symptoms of madness. If Dr. Konner can persuade today’s radicals to understand religion as a fixed component of life on earth, more power to him.
