The Danger of Soft Atheism

A very instructive exchange between Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, and Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, just appeared in the pages of the New York Times. Kitcher describes himself as a proponent of "soft atheism," which is to say an atheism distinct from the polemical variety espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Unlike his harsher colleagues, Kitcher is willing to admit that religion can play an ethically useful role in a predominantly secular society.

I won't delve into this feature of Kitcher's thought, for I have explored the Kantian reduction of religion to ethics elsewhere, but I would like to draw attention to one particular move made in this interview, since it shows with remarkable clarity one of the fundamental misunderstandings of religion common among atheists.