It added to my increasing confusion over the radical secularism that is taking over the West and America Academia in perspective. Let me just preface these comments by saying that I am would self-describe as an atheist, and that I am currently living in India on a street with a Temple, a Mosque, a Church, and families of each religion living together.

Last night I started listening to a podcast interview with Richard Dawkins about his new book the God Delusion. While I have no desire to live in a Christian Theocracy in the U.S. that is a matter of policy and politics and not of philosophy. Taking the radical secularist position that truth and knowledge can only be gained through the scientific method seems absurd given my current living situation. I happen to subscribe to a way of seeing the world that is primarily founded on testability and verifiability, but I have neither tested nor verified most of the truths that I hold.

Like Bruno Latour, I am not advocating a radical postmodernist or relativist approach to knowledge either. Gravity is not socially constructed. But lets forget philosophy for a second and just think about information diversity from a policy perspective. Dawkins rightly fears the rising power of the Christian right in the U.S. and Islamic Fundamentalism. However, advocating that all people of faith are delusional, and suggesting that humans can not hold two competing world views in their brains simultaneously is not a very affective policy for moderating theists.
Furthermore, if the issue is not philosophy, but policy, it might make a heck of a lot more sense to begin to cultivate the christian left in the U.S. as a means to accomplish goals of social suggest, environmental sustainability.

Finally, (And this is the part that most closely relates to your post) in general I like humans. It would be great if we could live another 1000 years or so at some level, even if there are just a few of us on planet earth, or maybe elsewhere in the solar system. What can I say?, I am a little nostalgic for the hairy two legged beasts who can talk. But that will only be possible if there are robust searches for solutions in the problem spaces such as sustainability, and conflict resolution. Limiting a search space to a radical secular and rationalist approach does a disservice to the many ways humans have developed to know the world. For while gravity may not be socially constructed, science and the scientific method certainly are. The world religions are not static, but constantly changing. They are one of the differences that makes a difference. A homogenous mental environment will undoubtedly have the same patterns as a homogenous physical environment.

For my money I will stop wasting my time on Dawkins, revisit Page’s new book, reread some Bateson, Deleuze, Virilio and Delanda.