A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 1: Simple Mistakes

For all of the press, accolades, and book sales Richard Dawkins and the New Atheist Movement gets, it is one of the least respected intellectual movements amongst modern scholars. These scholars I speak of range from fellow atheists to deeply religious people who have come together to agree that there exist massive holes at the foundations of the New Atheist movement’s arguments.
The first to stand up to guys like Dawkins was Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton, England's foremost literary critic. He wrote this about Dawkins' The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, October 2006:

"Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either…We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it."

The large issue scholars seem to have with the New Atheist movement is two-fold: Dawkins and others believe that you can either have faith or you can have reason - that because you have faith, you are therefore unreasonable. The two cannot live together. Secondly, many New Atheists see the answers to all of life’s questions residing under the scientific disciplines, namely the physical and biological sciences. The majority of today’s most respected scholars find those two claims dangerous.

The same month of that same year Eagleton published his article, Atheist professor of Philosophy at NYU, Thomas Nagel, wrote a review of Dawkins' book in The New Republic. In it, he denounced the idea that all of our answers to life can be found in the physical, because the question of life itself is a metaphysical question of our own consciousness. He writes:

"The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical - that is, behavioral or neurophysiological - terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed - that conscious experience, through, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts."

Next: Who's still making this mistake and who's not buying it.