There's a lovely piece (subscriber-only I fear) by James Wood in the New Republic on the limits of atheistic disrespect. It's ostensibly a review of Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, which I haven't read, but makes some more general points about what Wood calls "public atheistic critique". To this end, he also has a good deal to say about Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, a paradigm of the genre recently voted, with some justification, the most "overrated" book of the year by the discerning critics of Prospect magazine.
Wood takes it for granted that the public atheist's "disrespecting" of religion is necessary and to be welcomed, not least in an age of renascent fundamentalism. He takes it for granted, too, that the atheist has the metaphysics right - the first part of the piece is a recounting of his youthful struggles with the vicissitudes of theodicy (Wood was raised by evangelical Christians in a household "saturated in religiosity" and lost his faith at the age of fifteen) and evinces a fine contempt for the cruel sophisms of theologians like Richard Swinburne who value free will over human happiness. And yet for all that, Wood finds public atheistic critique a "rather thin genre".
In the first place, his objections are essentially aesthetic (though they're no less powerful for that). There's something wearingly "undignified", he says, about the gleeful "naughtiness" of public atheism ("there is a limit to the number of times one can be told that the Bible is a shaky text, and that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things"), though he is quick to insist that Dawkins et al are right to argue that "religion is unfairly protected by a cordon sanitaire of 'respect'". But he doesn't stop there – and nor does the public atheist:
This brand of public atheism ... has a properly hygienic function. But ... the problem is that its bright certainty about the utter silliness of religion leads very quickly away from philosophy and argument. There is a dismaying gap, in these books, between the righteous anger of the critique of the many absurdities of religious belief and the attempts to account for why people have believed this apparent nonsense for so many centuries.
Dawkins' attempt to explain away centuries of religious belief by comparing it with childish credulity, for instance, is deeply unsatisfactory. And if this kind of genetic explanation is laughably weak, Dawkins' grasp of the phenomenology of religious belief is non-existent. Here Wood turns to Wittgenstein, who insisted that there are "grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language" (this is Wood's gloss on some of the things Wittgenstein says in the notes collected as Culture and Value). Wittgenstein's claim (anticipated by Kierkegaard and, interestingly enough, Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ) is that religious language is not referential (it's not about some substantive reality) but modal – in other words, that it gives expression to a "form of life" or way of being in the world.
Of course there are obvious limits to this way of thinking about religion too, and Wood sees this quite clearly. It's certainly a good way of describing the texture of a way of life, but, says Wood, "it is hard to see how any novice, who had never believed, would be led to adopt a religious practice by Wittgenstein's language. In his world, one seems always to be born into such practices." Adherence to a certain way of life may well be an important part of being religious, but surely that adherence presupposes the truth of certain basic dogmas? But despite the fact that some of Wittgenstein's acolytes have wrongly supposed that the master's doctrines relieved them of the need to justify belief in God, Wood is right to suggest that the "jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, and explains why its explanations of the sources of religious belief are so jejune."