Yesterday, Jerry Coyne spotted yet another exampleof something that I see quite a bit: accusations that prominent atheists believe that literalism is the true form of religion. Though talk of literalism is misleading, there’s also an issue of whether leading atheists have made any claims at all about the “real” form of religion. Jerry Coyne denies having made any such claims, and he seems to speak for most atheists–including myself. I take it that words can mean whatever we want them to, as long as we’re clear about it, and there are pragmatic reasons why the literal use of the word “god” will typically be a lot clearer.

Let’s start with a look at Richard Dawkins’ The God Delision: the key passage, I think is one in the very first section of the first chapter, where Dawkins quotes Steven Weinberg on the definition of ‘God,’ and then says, in his own words:

Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’.

Dawkins goes on to talk about how most people have a literal understanding of God, how metaphorical use of the term by scientists is apt to cause confusion, and how many seemingly significant attempts reconcile science and religion (particularly NOMA) end up being irrelevant to religion as most people understand it.

Sam Harris is better fodder for this accusation, since his book had a section titled “The Myth of ‘Moderation’ in Religion” which claims that “Religious moderation… has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism.” But much of the content of The End of Faith has an eminently practical bent: it was, remember, written in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, when lots of people were saying that Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with those attacks. Insofar as “religious moderates” were the ones saying this, Sam Harris was right to say that religious moderation was driven by ignorance–perhaps this is not true by necessity, but it at least happens to be true of a lot of moderate strands of religion as they exist in the real world.

In short, the key thing here is that there are *practical reasons* to focus discussions of religion on its more conservative forms without much ado, regardless of what the “real meanings” of the words involved are. If 25% of the population believed in “God,” by which those 25% meant a superpowered Martian monster trying to take over earth, it would make sense to address the fact that people believe this in a direct manner, without getting bogged down in linguistic fuss. And this would be true even though sophisticated theologians–including many theologians who Rosenau and his colleagues dismiss as literalists–felt strongly that this 25% was using the word “God” the wrong way.