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Writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens tend to equate religion with fundamentalism. A more nuanced examination of religious belief can be found in modern fiction

In the last 10 years or so, have the rise of American evangelicalism and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, encouraged, together with developments in physics and in the theories of evolution and cosmogony, a particular style of aggressive, often strident atheist critique. Books like Richard Dawkins 's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens 's God Is Not Great have sold in the millions. Apart from the unlikely success of these books, it also has the spread of atheist and secularist sites and blogs, some of them intellectually respectable, is another rather dogmatic and limited (ie, pretty horrible) was. The events of the 11 September 2001 were the obvious spur. In The End of Faith , The American writer Sam Harris argues that as long as America remains flooded in Christian thought, it will never defeat militant Islamism, since you can not backward religious system prevail over another backward religious system. Atheism would be the key to unlock this uneasy stalemate. Scientists such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have wider projects, perhaps - for them, the removal of our religious blinders will result in a correct appreciation of the natural world, and to describe the science 's ability, and to decode.

We know that many people hold religious beliefs, which are also suggestions - get up and pray creeds on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, they can tell you who will be punished in hell, and how, they believe that Allah is one God , and so on. The prayer itself is a statement: it suggests that God exists, and can be transmitted. Instead of simply declared all religious faith as non-propositional, which is obviously wrong, it would be interesting to know what you are than the practice of propositional beliefs. We know that people believe all sorts of things as sets. But how do they know them? In this area, the New Atheism has nothing to say very interesting, except to wish away all of those beliefs.

But the people 's beliefs are often fluctuating and changing - it's why people lose their faith or convert to faith in God. If you always ask people what they think as they think, spend and why they believe that the sentences they have dedicated themselves in the church or temple or mosque, you will find that there is nothing easy about propositional beliefs. Recently I spent some time with both Christian believers, both ordained a priest. One is an academic theologian and university chaplain, the other a religious affairs journalist. The academic theologian was walking with me, in a university town, and began a sentence, "I think". And then he caught himself and added:. "I don 't know what I think at the moment" A few weeks later I met the religious affairs journalist, who was a pastor for several years. In the course of our conversation, he claimed: ". It is impossible to be a serious Christian and believe in Heaven and Hell '\ When I was growing up in a strong and conventionally religious parents' house, was surprised and said that if you could stop the belief in heaven is also a belief in God, he said, violently: "It 's exactly the opposite is not the belief in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian faith \." Trapped in childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian faith from the great temptation and threat of heaven and hell separated.

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It lives parasitically from its opponents. Just as evangelical Christianity through biblical literalism and an uncomplicated faith is marked by a "personal God", the New Atheism seems often engaged in combat only with the written literalism, but the only way to fight with rivals such literalism literalism . The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be strikingly similar facilities. This God is to fight the God's worth to the God we grew up as children (and soon developed from below, or ceased to believe in) has created this God created the world, controls our destiny, is sitting somewhere in heaven loves us, sometimes punishes us, and is prepared to intervene in order to perform miracles. He promises goodies in heaven for the pious and fear for the damned. As militant atheism interprets religious beliefs, again on the Protestant or Islamic model, such as blind - a blind leap of faith that the believer is thrown into an infinite stupidity - can thus no understanding or even interest, why or how people believe that the religious narratives are extended follow them, and how these narratives are often invaded by doubt, reverse, break and banality.

It is a telling moment in The God Delusion Dawkins, why countless generations of people speculated believed in God. How could the belief in an illusion for so long? Dawkins suggests that we developed a hadd, a "hyperactive agent detection device": \. "We hyperactive detect agents where there are none, and that makes us suspect malice or goodness, where, in fact, nature is only Indifferent "His example \ for this elementary error comes from the sequence of Fawlty Towers in which John Cleese 's car has broken down. Cleese gets out and hits the car starts. This is an example of the hadd, and by extension, \ of mankind's faith in God. Well, you really believe that the offer of a minute Fawlty Towers is an appropriate analogy for thousands of years of religious belief? It's not about whether you believe in God or not. You may find this an infidel and a little weak. Marx said that the study of religion was the most difficult project of an intellectual, was. If I told you that the history of warfare, we say, could "says" by some of the recent discovery of a particular receptor in the brain that Agincourt and Austerlitz, Antietam and the Ardennes were essentially the same thing, because by generated a universal deceit, what would I ask about the nature of warfare, politics, statecraft, to the enormous mass mobilizations that Tolstoy said as "the swarm-like life of mankind" characterized?

A good place to study, that "swarm-like life", and to see religious faith seriously and represent serious consideration, is the modern novel - by, say, Flaubert and Melville in the 1850s to say today. Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Camus - and in our own time, José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee - have all sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief shows, many of them have struggled with the departure of God. Because they are writers, they want to see on both sides of a theological argument, and so they can \ cheap 't afford to do what militant atheism is not what is merely caricature of every form of belief, it doesn' t. They offer stories of faith, and novelistic narratives, that the real ambiguity, contradiction, intermittency, even the absurdity and irrationality of our spiritual life comedy. In a beautiful passage in Moby-Dick , Melville says that the sea constantly moves and stands like a human conscience. That could be said of our spiritual life, too.

Part of the weakness of the current theological warfare that it provided a stable, lifelong faith - every page curdled his rival (but oddly symmetrical) creeds. Also in today's politics is the worst crime you can commit to apparently change his mind. But the people 's beliefs are often not stable range, and. We are all flip-Floppers. Our "Ideas" can be thought of as more awareness Woolf, a flicker of different and even picks up impressions and beliefs. What if you were a strong Christian believer, and you woke up one night, terrified by the sudden awareness that God does not exist? Hours passed in this unillusioned crisis, and then blessed sleep finally comes back. The next day you wake up and the terrible doubt - a thing of the night - disappeared mysteriously. You continue, "believing in God". But what does this mean that faith now? If it was not explained by the doubt in the night to void, it now contains the memory of the inversion, as the case might smell a bad area?

An essay or work of polemic finds it hard to describe the texture of such fluctuation, whereas the novelist understands that to tell a story is to novelise an idea, to dramatise it. There is no need to make a tidy solution of belief; to the novelist, a messy error might be much more interesting. The Brothers Karamazov provides a famous example from the 19th Century - a novel in which the author, a hard-believing Christians who argued against his own convictions so strong that many readers of Ivan Karamazov 's varied atheism (as Dostoevsky feared might happen). For a contemporary example, there is recent work by Coetzee, who has explored the contradictory and irrational manner in which people hold ideas and suggestions. In Shame , Elizabeth Costello And Diary of a Bad Year , Essentially religious feelings (like Atonement, shame, mortification) rub alongside seemingly rational and propositional beliefs (for example, Elizabeth Costello 's belief that eating animals is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust). This blend of the sentimental and intellectual ensures an unstable compound, and Coetzee wants to dramatize, I think, how ideas not only kept, but actually lived - that is how they often lived irrational. If a college president Elizabeth Costello asks whether her vegetarianism comes from their moral convictions, it deviates seemingly rational argument, and the answers, religiously, that it 'comes from the desire of my soul \ save ".

Polemicist want to pursue intellectual contradictions, writers, to explore them. In the wonderful work of the 19th Atheist century Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), we find a writer to do the same dance as contradictory Dostoevsky, but vice versa. Jacobsen was an ardent atheist and an early translator of Darwin. Where Dostoevsky argues against his own Christian faith, seems to Jacobsen, to argue against his own atheism. The hero of Jacobsen 's great novel Niels Lyhne is a staunch atheist, but he is far greater glory of God 's presence, than he ever give to God' s supposed non-existence. At a crucial moment near the end of the book, as is his young son dies in his arms, Niels breaks down and prays to God, as he says the blunder of his proud atheism, as prayer is moronic. How many atheists seem not to Niels stop calling on a God whose existence he is not on credit. Niels is always in a relationship with God even if he does not explain the belief in God, brilliantly staged Jacobsen 's novel, like Niels seems only able to banish God, not kill him off.

Contemporary theological and atheist polemic tends to believe that we all just choose our beliefs - and thus may decide to have no opinion. That may be true of privileged intellectuals, but there are certainly many millions who don 't feel the freedom to choose to have faith or unbelief, but they choose their faith. Woolf seems to understand this in To the Lighthouse

There is an amusing clip on YouTube, in which Dawkins confronts Rowan Williams. Dawkins asks the archbishop of Canterbury if he really believes in miracles such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, happenings in which the laws of physics and biology are suspended. Well, not literally, says Williams. But, says Dawkins, pouncing, surely Williams believes that these are not just metaphors? No, says the archbishop, they are not just metaphors, they are openings in history, "spaces" when history opens up to its own depths, and something like what we call a "miracle" might occur. Dawkins rightly says that this sounds very nice but is surely nothing more than poetic language. Williams rather shamefacedly agrees. The scene is amusing because both men are so obviously arguing past each other, and are so obviously arguing about language and the role of metaphor. Dawkins comes off as the victor, because he has the easier task, and holds the literalist high ground: either the resurrection happened or it didn't; either these words mean something or they do not. Williams seems awkwardly trapped between a need to turn his words into metaphor and a desire to retain some element of literal content.

Both men could find themselves in Moby-Dick. For in that novel, Melville explores precisely the question that hovers over the Dawkins-Williams exchange. Can God be literally described, or are we condemned to hurl millions of metaphoric approximations at him, in an attempt to describe him? After all, in Melville's novel, the white whale is symbolic of both the devil and of God, and the writer tries very hard to describe the nature and mass and temperament of that indescribable whale: Melville uses scores of different metaphors to capture the essence of the beast, and fails. It cannot be captured in words. Only when the beast is killed will it be captured. Melville's novel is a kind of ironic counterpart to Aquinas's belief that God can only be described by what he is not. Melville, who fluctuated violently between belief and unbelief, seems to have been terrified by the idea that if God cannot be reached by metaphor, then God is only a metaphor.

Dawkins is dead, metaphors, and tried, by containing the literal occurrence in the actual words to explain the virgin birth and the resurrection to be void. And Williams stressed that such literalism shot on goal, and instead have recourse to the metaphor of the "event" a "room" in the opening story, an indefinable wonder aberration. One feels sympathy for both sides - and perhaps also a plague on both their houses - as Dawkins seems bullishly literal and Williams as quietly evasive. Contra Dawkins, God should be something metaphorical space allows, but contra Williams, God 's presence in the world, God' s intervention, should certainly not just metaphorically. God is not just a metaphor.

Of course, Melville is no evidence of a solution for the Williams-Dawkins 'argument (not least because it couldn' t be), as a writer, his task is, as Chekhov once put it, just put "the right questions to ". Which is no small thing.

This article is adapted from a recent Weidenfeld lecture in St. Anne 's College, Oxford.