There is currently going on an historically unusual and organized effort to supplant science with religion. This is mostly occurring in the USA ( creationism/ID). The reaction from atheists has gotten to be somewhat vigorous and understandably so, I think.
It can be argued intelligently that fundamentalist religious views are counter to the best interests of human life on the planet (think fundamentalist Islam) and therefore any theistic view is can be held as suspect of negative effects.
I respect both theists and atheists if their views are compatible with science. If their views are anti science then I am afraid that the science must win out, in my not so humble opinion. Sometimes that means that fundamentalist theists ought to be confronted and if possible they should be intellectually neutralized.
So, some atheists rise to the challenge of what they perceive (rightly or not) to be serious challenges to rational thought.
Yet not very long ago “science” included theories of racial superiority and the necessity of sterilizing the disabled, basing educational systems on phrenology and removing glands from people who broke society’s rules. What a generation considers science changes.
Creationists run a gamut, far from constituting a bloc or movement, and a large majority of them have no intent to replace science with religion; they have done their homework to the best of their ability and found that there is reason to think one branch of science currently has things mistaken. Since that has happened often before, it really isn’t irrational to suspect it could be happening again. Not to think science and rational thinking themselves are worth nothing, but to think we could be in yet another period of faulty popular opinion in just one or perhaps two specific disciplines.
There are no more or fewer people denying the need for rationality than at any time. The few who do so are as likely to be atheists as anything else from what I have seen, which is a lot.
Intelligent design is not irrational or unscientific. It’s not even rare among the top biologists and cosmologists today. Young-earth creationism is, but the people who believe Y-E-C would be the ones who still believe in phrenology if they weren’t religious. ID just means there is an intelligence behind the existence and complexity of our universe. Whether or not someone is religious is unconnected to whether or not that person is logical – except after an undeniable or near-undeniable paranormal experience, when the hard-line materialist is the one ignoring evidence and/or resisting the process of drawing conclusions that follow from the facts. At such times, the atheist is the one who is irrational.
The species of irrationality that occurs most often among atheist die-hards is a combination of foregone conclusions, straw-man arguments, denial, arguments from authority and arguments from intimidation, in my experience.
To lump all who believe something lock, stock and barrel together as fundamentalists regardless of what it is they believe and what causes them to do so makes no sense. Fundamentalism is actually the belief that the Pentateuch is the most literal part of the Bible and the res tis more symbolic if anything. That is a modern, 19th-Century, minority interpretation of Scripture in a specific Christian tradition. It happened because the way some educators were educated then had little in common with the way the ancient Jewish and early Christian theologians were educated. Fundamentalism was actually a misguided attempt to use modern methods to understand ancient thinking and observation, rather than a return to a pre-rational way of thinking. It doesn’t apply to other religions. Suicide bombers have no more in common with fundamentalists than anyone else has. To call them Fundamentalists is simply to apply a misnomer.
