The latest salvo in the New Atheists’ attacks on religion comes in the form of the biologist Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Edward Feser finds the book’s arguments confused, contradictory, and circular, not least because of its author’s failure to define what he means by “religion”:
Coyne’s . . . method . . . is to characterize religion however he needs to in order to convict it of irrationality. Nor is “religion” the only term Coyne uses in a tendentious way. The question-begging definition is perhaps his favorite debating trick. He characterizes “faith” as “belief without—or in the face of—evidence” and repeatedly uses the term as if this is what it generally means in religious contexts. Naturally, he has no trouble showing that faith so understood is irrational. But this simply is not how faith is understood historically in Christian theology, [which is his main target]. For example, for scholastic theologians, faith is assent to something that has been revealed by God. And how do we know that God exists and really has revealed it? Those are claims for which, the theologian agrees, evidence needs to be given.
Of course, Coyne will disagree about whether the evidence really shows what theologians say it does. The point, though, is that whether we should have evidence for what we believe is not what is in dispute. Coyne acknowledges that “theologians intensely dislike” the definition of faith he proposes. So, he not only attacks a straw man but implicitly admits that that is what he is doing.
Read more on First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/02/omnibus-of-fallacies