While struggling to write a review of this pretty dreadful book by Alister McGrath on the "rise and fall of disbelief", I came across a post at Socialism in An Age of Waiting about the fallacy that atheists and materialists lack a sense of wonder or awe. The bloggers there write:
a sense of wonder grounded in awareness of the material bases of human lives can go deeper and do more good than a sense of wonder diverted to things unseen, unproved and unattainable.Indeed. That's a necessary corrective to McGrath, who taxes atheism (and therewith all forms of secular humanism) with being an "imaginatively impoverished and emotionally deficient" creed. SIAW mention Richard Dawkins in this connection, making due allowance for what they accurately describe as "his strikingly irrational and somewhat embarrassing anti-Dubya rants" (I've blogged about these before). Dawkins has an interesting little piece, entitled 'The Sacred and the Scientist', in an excellent collection edited by Ben Rogers, Is Nothing Sacred? Dawkins says:
Poetic imagination is one of the manifestations of human nature. As scientists, and biological scientists, it's up to us to explain that, and I expect that one day we shall. And when we do explain it, it will in no way demean it. But nor should we confuse it with something supernatural.