From a recent Newsweek column, via Jerry Coyne:
But this version of the conversation [the version represented by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens--ed.] has gone on too long. We have allowed three people to frame it; its terms—submitting God to rational proofs and watching God fail—are theirs.
But this approach to discussing religion far pre-dates Harris. It’s found in much of the usual list of great religious thinkers: Augustine, Anslem, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Clarke, Berkley, Kant, Paley, and many others, up through Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig in our own day. The historical ignorance required to attribute this approach to discussing religion to a few recent atheist writers is breathtaking. Beyond that, of course, trying to define this issue and ask what can be made on both sides is how normal people who care about the truth discuss things.
This is a part of the whole ‘new atheist’ meme which seems to have sprouted up.
It seems the theists are determined to portray atheism as merely a fad or a fashion that has no historical roots and no future.
The only thing that’s ‘new’ about today’s atheists is the fact that for a brief time in the history of the world one can say out loud that they do not believe in *any* gods without being killed immediately for saying such a thing.
This opportunity might not last forever, either.
I agree that the statement is ignorant, even a dodge of the issues (instead of admitting God can’t be proven, it’s easier to complain about framing).
But there is an interesting historical correlate behind the quote, whether the author intends it or not. Some philosophers, such as Linda Zagzebski in her historical introduction to Phil religion, put the blame on Descartes for setting up the false framework of classical foundationalism, which is the context in which the need to “prove” the existence of God arises. It seems that although we’ve largely abandoned epistemic foundationalism, we haven’t abandoned the leftover requirements on theists.
That’s a tidy historical narrative, but it can’t possibly be right–plenty of the religious thinkers I listed above were not (and in the case of Swinburne and Craig, are not) classical foundationalists. The practice of providing arguments for your positions on intellectual questions is very old, at least as old as Plato, and I suspect it’s a human universal. The general habit of arguing for beliefs suggests most people believe something like “there are a lot of things you shouldn’t believe without having reasons for doing so,” a position much weaker than classical foundationalism, but which makes sense of the need many people see to present arguments for and against the existence of God.