Stanley Fish articulates why this is a reasonable position to take, far more reasonable than to adjudicate that "reason" as a Hitchens asserts is somehow superior to "faith."
A mind without chains – a better word would be “constraints” – would be free and open in a way that made motivated (as opposed to random) movement impossible. Thought itself — the consideration of problems with a view to arriving at their solutions — requires chains, requires stipulated definitions, requires limits it did not choose but which enable and structure its operations. MB asks, “Why is it not possible to reason simply as a gratuitous exercise.” Why, in other words, is it not possible to reason without anything in mind? Just try it; you can’t even imagine what it would be like.
If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. The theological formulation of this insight is well known: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11). Once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.
The issue is that the continuing set of materialist/positivist assertions made by fellows like Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. assumes a particular understanding of reason that assumes a particular formulation of evidence that substantiates given claims. Of course, this chain of reasoning is itself based on an assumption of superiority in the face of what seems absurd. That is, religion is by default absurd contrary not to a specific kind of evidence or lack thereof, but to an assumed notion of reason made before any evidence is conjured.
The question is how by the same reasoning based on objectivity, evidence, etc. that leads to the assertion that belief in God is absurd/delusional does one prove that the chosen reasoning strategy some claim is absolutely correct? Note that this boils down not just to a matter of being correct. Claims have been made that it is not only epistemologically but ethically superior, even to the point that religion is inherently abusive. A major problem is that is automatically assumes that God cannot exist because the testimonies of observers must be false since they cannot produce evidence beyond their own experience. But if religious testimony is false because it is based on something not available for a specific kind of scientific observation, why should we attend to any experience as evidence of something?
If we are fair to consent to this claim and eliminate human experience as evidence for claims about reality, then what are we left with? Nothing. Human experience shapes the order of the world and relies on assumptions in order to make sense of things. This is as true for a scientist who delights in solving a problem by relating different objects given to the human senses, as it is true someone whose understanding of human suffering through a religious lens offers comfort in the face of the absurd. Experience which is always rooted in untestable assumptions governs knowledge, reasoning strategies, and what a given observer believes to be reliable and trustworthy. While I will not exactly characterize this as "faith", it is most certainly not empirical in the sense that Dawkins favors the notion of the empirical.
Is it rational, then, to arbitrarily discount human experience as evidence that God might exist and to rely on the conclusion that the billions of people who have believed in God throughout human history were all delusional? When pressed this line of thinking boils down to the claim that the mental health community has given religion a "free pass" and has therefore misunderstood their own clinical diagnosis of delusional behavior since belief in religion is not automatically diagnosed as "delusion." It is like a flat earth "theorist" says that the overwhelming majority opinion of the physics community of scholars has gravity wrong. If one indubitable set of assumptions drives knowledge, it leads to absurd absurd conclusions through absurd reasoning strategies. In short, theologians, religion scholars, philosophers, social scientists, behavioral health practitioners, the medical community, etc. have all got religion wrong – only atheists truly understand what religion really is. This sounds an awful lot like a person who does not believe that evolution is real lecturing Richard Dawkins on how viruses mutate. Evidence is not the problem. The fundamental problem rests in the assertion that evidence must meet specific hypothetical criteria in order to make something rational.
These claims made by the various atheist assertions are not new. One can look to the history of higher education in the late 19th Century and find all of the same assertions by secularist activists who, as Christian Smith argues, were de-legitimating the authority of religion primarily to increase their social capital as agnostics and atheists in a religious world. When these layers of activism were pulled away, the short-sighted reasoning of positivism was quite effectively dismantled by philosophers of science in the early to mid 20th century. Yet it is back again. I submit it is not because these thinkers are somehow superior or more rational than theologians, it is because they are staking a claim to their own social relevance in an act of protest, as any minority group is wont to do, and frankly should have the freedom to do. Yet the jeremiad of objective superiority is ultimately unhelpful and misleading if not completely wrong.
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