IGNORING GOD AND TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY:

Campaigns Like These Make It Hard to Find a Reason to Believe (Eduardo Porter, 12/14/07, New York Times)

As I watched Mitt Romney tie himself into a constitutional knot as he argued that religion should provide a guide for public policy but not be used to choose a president, it made me suspect that all the candidates in the race — Republican and Democratic — must believe that I lack some essential virtue.

I’m an atheist. When people trot out the well-worn John Adams quote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” I can’t help feeling squeezed out of the polity. [...]

Atheists have solid reasons not to believe. We don’t need a divine being to explain the natural world, and don’t know why we should trust claims about humankind’s divine origins because they are in religious texts. Give “2001: A Space Odyssey” a thousand years and who knows what might happen.

Yet believing for tactical reasons has a long intellectual pedigree.

It is a variation of Pascal’s wager — one of the most famous arguments in the philosophy of religion. Articulated by the 17th-century French philosopher and gambler Blaise Pascal, it posits that rational people should believe in God even if it is impossible to prove whether He exists, simply because it is a better bet. [...]

For the record, Pascal was a Christian. He offered up his wager to persuade nonbelievers to believe. In France, it apparently didn’t work. Only 17 percent of the French agree with John Adams’s assertion that belief in God is necessary to make proper moral choices, according to a recent poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Fifty-seven percent of Americans do.

The American press badly needs some adapted version of Godwin's Law in which anybody who rests his argument on the moral authority of the French automatically loses.