I do believe in the accomplishments of postmodernism (which I have defended on a number of occasions where they have not been much defended: in the press). I will certainly get to these matters when my narrative reaches the 20th century, but it is also true that I am set upon, in this project, honoring various “enlightenments.” I won’t, in the end, leave them unquestioned, but I am not about to leave them unrecognized.

Some of the debate on this paper — to which you have made a significant contribution — aspires to be about the sway of what is probably best called postmodernism. I wrote the paper, delivered it and posted it with that debate very much in mind. I find myself, however clumsily, wanting to suggest that it is possible to drift too far into cultural relativism and what might be called “religious relativism” (in which I include the attack on “scientism”). I, in turn, probably can benefit from some reminders of the limitations of the Enlightenment approach, to which my book project lends itself.

My thoughts, on much of the above, have been very much influenced by Jacques Derrida. The essay by him I quote here has, in fact, been the most interesting and, in my view, the most important text I have read in my research for this book. I don’t believe I have misrepresented his position in this section (not that I pretend to encapsulate it) . I once had occasion to ask Derrida if he was an atheist. I understand that his answer to that question is anything but a simple “yes.”

Second, I have to thank you for the opportunity you have given me to think these things out and spout off as I have. Much as I know you will brush off most of my comments and have the last word, still the idea that I have written on the coattails of you book, may it sell a million copies, is pleasant and more stimulating than kibitzing on someone’s merely personal blog. I hope The Future of the Book project flourishes.

With respect to Derrida’s essay you ought at least to give the full title, which is “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (1996 in French, in English 1998 in “Religion”, ed. by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo). With characteristically impish perversity, Derrida capitalizes on the kneejerk assumption that faith and knowledge are opposites. You fell for it. Rather than finding an opposition between faith and knowledge, Derrida discusses the kinds of religion which seek to know, or experience God directly, versus those which believe that certain behaviors are pleasing to an essentially unknowable God. The distinction is made by Kant Derrida’s text here is Kant’s 1796 essay “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone” where the distinction originates. Kant’s titular wording has been variously rendered (pure reason, mere reason, reason merely) indicative of his doubt as to whether reason was necessarily an absolute such as could replace the God concept. Derrida doubts whether ‘religion’ in the singular has any meaning at all, or whether we must at least talk of ‘religions’. He questions whether religion is in fact having a resurgence or has or can ever fade.

You also annoyed me by somewhere in your blog recently brushing off the issue of reevaluating the Enlightenment, as though that were some kind of highbrow nonsense which could only distract from the simple truth of atheism whose history you are writing. But really, having dragged in Derrida (not to mention Heidegger) with Kant behind him you can hardly disinvite the evil stepmother postmodernism from the party. And postmodernism is nothing if not the reevaluation of the Enlightenment. Atheism may be cool, but at this point hasn’t postmodernism become necessary? You may want to end-run the issue by showing that disbelief predates the Enlightenment, but so what? As Derrida discusses, disbelief is always in some sense concomitant with belief. It is only with the Enlightenment that disbelief becomes programmatic – and it is the essence of postmodernism (in the terminology of Lyotard) to reject the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, particularly the one that says that humanity, shackled by religion and superstition, will be liberated by rational knowledge and Cartesian science.

Science killed more people in the last century than religion did in the entire history of the planet. For every one that science saves, science kills a hundred. But the ones saved praise science endlessly, while the ones who perish are silent.

After all I will often say, in the absence of a clock, “I believe it’s time for lunch.”

I don’t think this observation is merely casuistical. In some times and places–and not primarily in the cases of societies with something like atheism in the mix–only *this* use of the word “belief” is operative. In a society of believers, in fact, the word “Belief” might itself be configured as a kind of emptiness. A shaman after all doesn’t “believe” the animals and plants he sees around him to be the outward expressions of spiritts–rather he *knows* this to be true; it’s the foundation of “knowledge” for him, the basis not only of thought but of cognition, for that matter of perception.

This kind of word-trouble has been posited as one of the chief obstacles to atheism; I think of Owen Barfield in this regard. For atheism seems itself a creature of belief.

In fact, belief and doubt are not opposites either. Doubt is not disbelief, it is a questioning and an uncertainty. Doubt is a part of religious experience. The existence of doubt in no way supports atheism. It may lead to atheism but it is not atheism. Atheists don’t doubt the existence of God, they deny it. They may at one time have doubted it, before they were atheists, or they may have never doubted it beccause theey never believed it.

These are very simple terms. You should use them clearly — your observations are foggy. A subject is hardly elucidated when it is mentioned that Derrida, of all people, finds a complex alternation therein. Usually to invoke Derrida is to assert that the issue has been demonstrated to be insoluble.