I couldn’t agree more: New Atheism, as championed by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, is more exasperating than cathartic or even intellectual. (I was disappointed in Harris’s The End of Faith; I’ve read better, more convincing books on the perils of religion.) Given the last five years, it’s understandable: President Bush’s evangelism, as well as the focus on radical Islam, virtually guarantees that there will be a few pissed-off secularists who are tired of religion’s hypocrisy and bigotry. But the problem, as I see it, is that New Atheists aren’t saying anything new—they’re just out to piss you off. They’re doing a good job of it, sure, but they’re irritating the wrong people.

“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is [Peter Holden's] The Book of British Birds,” Mr. Eagleton wrote, “and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” That was only the first sentence.

James Wood’s review of Letter to a Christian Nation in the December 18, 2006, issue of The New Republic began, “I have not believed in God since I was fifteen.” Mr. Wood, a formidable writer who keeps picking the scab of religion in his criticism and fiction, confessed that his “inner atheist” appreciated the “hygienic function” of Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s ridiculing of religion and enjoyed “the ‘naughtiness’ of this disrespect, even if a little of it goes a long way.”

But, he continued, “there is a limit to how many times one can stub one’s toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor” or be told that “Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things.”

H. Allen Orr is an evolutionary biologist who once called Mr. Dawkins a “professional atheist.” But now, Mr. Orr wrote in the January 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, “I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude that he’s actually more of an amateur.”

Ouch.

And maybe not coincidentally, the New York Times Magazine carries an interesting, lengthy (eleven pages!) piece on the biology of the religious impulse.

[Scott] Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s, when he was at Cambridge University studying the nature of religious belief. He had received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of religion everywhere he looked—at archaeological digs in Israel, among the Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the eighties. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists—not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

[...]

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God—evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?