Atheists and evidence

I don't wish to extend this too much, but Mick has rejoined to my response to his criticism of my post on A.C. Grayling. Phew. Most of Mick's latest post is aimed at situating his criticism, and as I don't think what he says in doing that really damages any of the points I argued against him, I'm content to leave the discussion at that. I want only to comment on his final paragraph:

For what it's worth, on the subject of religion as a force for good, while I'd agree that any serious discussion would need to deal with that, I suspect (without any evidence - how could you get evidence?) that those who claim religion as a motivating factor in their good deeds would generally speaking be good people anyway. As Steven Weinberg said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion".

As I argued a few days ago, the 'generally speaking... good people anyway' claim is open to two different construals. One of these - that, in a non-religious world or much less religious one, such people would still act well because other beliefs would fulfil the same function of encouraging good as religious teaching sometimes does - is irrelevant to the matter in dispute. What could be the case in a different kind of world won't tell you what the balance between the good and bad influences of religious belief has actually been up to now. The alternative way of construing the same claim is as meaning that people who give religion as a motive for doing good don't really know their own minds and motives (their explanations are like Marxian ideological superstructures in the crudest versions of Marxism), and something else is the real cause of their actions. Apart from the fact that you can perform exactly the same kind of operation with respect to the motivating power of non-religious beliefs, secular, humanist, whatever, so that this is a kind of arbitrary dealing, what is most extraordinary about it is that it proceeds by discounting the overt evidence on the basis, as Mick concedes, of no evidence at all. Ironic, surely, on behalf of the case against religious belief, so often faulted by us atheists for being unresponsive to evidence.