Thank you. I'm Kevin Harris. There's a recent book from atheist philosopher Tim Crane. It's called

The Meaning of Belief, Religion from an Atheist point of view, from Harvard University Press.

And Keith Parsons, who's also an atheist philosopher,

and you've debated him a couple of times Bill,

he says that this is quoting an important new book, and this is what Keith writes he says that this new book

argues that the impasse between religious believers and atheists is due to

atheist misunderstanding of the nature of religious belief.

Crane himself an atheist primarily addresses the new atheist like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher

Hitchins. Parsons continues, according to Crane, atheist regard religion, which

in our cultural context means theistic religion, as a kind of defective

cosmology, a spurious, proto-scientific hypothesis about the origin of the universe via the supernatural acts of a divine agent. These atheist writers then see the persistence of religious people in advocating such a non or anti-scientific thesis

as evidence that believers are superstitious, primitive, and irrational.

Parsons continues. If indeed religion were a sort of crack-pot cosmology,

then belief in God would be like belief in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster or ancient astronauts, and the condescending smirk of atheists would be justified.

Crane argues that religious belief is not any kind of hypothesis or

or prototyp scientific claim.

He says that religious belief consists of two elements,

what he calls the religious impulse is the

impulse is the drive to recognize the existence of a transcendent order

that is both factual and normative. God is posited as real, that's factual, and

his will specifies how things should be normative. is the desire to belong to a community that historically defines itself through shared

beliefs and practices and which understands the world in terms of those beliefs and practices. Right, so these are the two elements that he would identify as part of religious belief.

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