This is largely how I feel. Anymore I feel that the militant atheist can be just as religious and dogmatic as those who actually follow religion. Their framing and understanding of religion is often a bit off-base, and reason becomes the new point of worship. There is a false notion that human-kind is making progress, and that reason is the only way to progress. And yet we've done more damage to our future since the age of Enlightenment than in any other era, which I think speaks to the fact that reason has to actually be reasonable, founded in actual wisdom and knowledge - not just how to exploit the environment to be more comfortable.
It'd be easy to criticize the secular ideologue, but in another light they're just another brand of the religious that should be accepted in the same way we do Christians. But if you're Christian, just don't expect to have a good time speaking with them.
I am happy to accept hypothetical damage to our future, if it prevents very real damage to our present.
Things are almost infinitely better for almost every living human today than they were pre-Enlightenment. And one of the ways in which things are better is that we are now able to foresee, with solid justification, the problems that will need to be handled in the future.
Without modern technology we wouldn't have anthropogenic climate change, sure. But we also wouldn't have low infant mortality, high life expectancy, and the ability to support eight billion people at a level of comfort that would have been unthinkable as recently as a few centuries ago. Henry VIII was one of the wealthiest and most powerful people of his time, and never saw a flushing toilet or used soft toilet paper.
The benefits massively outweigh the problems; And the problems are all amenable to technological solutions (if neo-Luddism doesn't block their application).
There's not a single future problem caused by technology and science that we don't already have the capability to resolve. And the notion that we are making progress is not false - indeed it's bleeding obvious, as Henry VIII would tell you if he were still around. Exploiting the resources at our disposal to become more comfortable is the whole point of human life.
I'd like to provide a proper response but it really needs a long-form essay that I just do not have the time or energy for these days. Needless to say I think there a few things to keep in mind:
- is humanity as a whole a tenable concept? Yes science has had
massive benefits, but it's also caused massive suffering, and a significant proportion of our species is still suffering and not really benefiting much from it
- much of it's benefits are stop-gap measures - yes the infant mortality rate is low, but we've also become extremely reliant on technology, possibly at the genetic level (think reliance on formula and breast-pumps). Similarly we have the means to protect people with health care, but this also kicks the can down the road to when this technology ceases to exist. We've also deskilled an enormous amount of the world's population who is no longer able to survive without reliance on complex civilization
- much of the 'benefit' doesn't actually exist - some of us have been comfortable for a short amount of time, but it's taken about one century to alter our planet's climate and deplete an enormous amount of resources
All of this isn't to say that there's anything
wrong with technology, just that
humanity doesn't
progress in any meaningful sense, and that those who have a kind of faith in reason and progress are over-simplifying what our world actually looks like and how it evolves. Many are looking at history from a small view-point - a few hundred years - not the inevitable problems that are going to arise in 500 - 1000, maybe even 10 000 years. Many are also not cognizant of the immense suffering that is still happening today.
So to tie this back to religion, when you hear an atheist talking about downplaying religion for the
good of our species there is something missing in their argument. What they're often really saying is
I want to better my condition within the context of the United States.
To me what this boils down to is that the
conclusion of scientific understanding isn't faith in reason, and the idea that we need to eradicate irrationality and make the world a paradise, it's that, as an individual, we have absolutely no control over anything and that we should just enjoy the world in it's variety and splendor before we die.