Via Chris Mooney, a tidy example of one of the more annoying kinds of rhetoric that flies in public debates: “Forrest argues that new atheists should respect the personal nature of faith, and nurture a sense of humility by recognising that scientific evidence does not rule out existence of the divine.” The trick is to declare one’s own side of the debate to be the side of moral virtue (“humility,” whatever) independently of whether that side’s view is true or can produce reasoned analysis in its defense. It’s a tactic of distraction–of “shut up, that’s why.” And it’s pretty dumb.
I think there’s at least one sense in which this criticism could be valuable – if some kind of epistemic humility is taken to be relevant in the context of, say, a virtue approach to epistemology. Perhaps epistemic humility is a virtue we ought to cultivate, and one we need to cultivate in order to better evaluate religious belief.
Incidentally I think religious believers violate principles of epistemic humility constantly – both in the details and extent of their religious beliefs, and in their generalizations about rival belief systems.