To Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s critique of Lawrence Krauss’s New Yorker article “All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists,” I would add that Krauss conflates theism, which he doesn’t define, with religion, which he also doesn’t define. Remember, many people who practice a religion do not profess belief in any god of any description. Zen Buddhists are the prime example. And many people who say they do believe in God, whatever they mean by “God,” are “spiritual but not religious.”
“There is no such thing as ‘religion,’” Gobry argues. The term is vague. It has come to mean almost anything.
In Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), the Supreme Court ruled that Maryland could not require a public official who was an atheist to declare “belief in the existence of God.” Maryland had on its books a religious test that, Justice Hugo Black argued, unconstitutionally violated the official’s “freedom of belief and religion” — not freedom from belief and religion. Freedom of. Atheism, in other words, is religious.
Black noted that “among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.” If all those plus Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Scientology, and the bespoke belief systems and improvised personal rituals of countless isolated individuals are “religion,” what is their common denominator? Paul J. Griffiths, a theology professor at Duke, has observed that
Americans have a lot to say about religion. Listening to these discussions, though, rapidly suggests the conclusion that hardly anyone has any idea what they are talking about — or, perhaps more accurately, that there are so many different ideas in play about what religion is that conversations in which the term figures significantly make the difficulties in communication at the Tower of Babel seem minor and easily dealt with.
Secularists have no compelling definition of “religion” and therefore no compelling answer to the complaint that their values constitute a religion that they seek to impose on others. David French has touched on this problem.