There's a New Atheism?

So, this month's cover story in Wired is "The New Atheism," which presents profiles of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and a few others. Here is my favorite excerpt, from Dawkins, responding to the point that his absolutism makes life harder for the "sensible" folks arguing that belief in evolution doesn't naturally or inevitably lead to atheism:

"My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side."

I agree with this. The real battle is between naturalism and supernaturalism. I've pretty much had it with quasi-neo-deist explanations of evolution. Either natural processes explain, or can explain, the observable universe, or they can't. I'm on the "can" side.

I also like the author's (Gary Wolf) comment that many of the people he knows call themselves agnostic, but "they don't harbor much suspicion that God is real." I also like Dawkins's point, which I've been making for years, that no one is agnostic about the existence of Apollo, or Thor, or the Thunderbird. If you have to suspend judgment on the existence of the Christian God, why not on all the gods that have ever been believed in?

So, here's a cheer for the old atheism.