I have found that, in practically every instance, the scientists who declare their disbelief in God have no idea what serious religious people mean by the word “God.”

I think it's precisely the other way around. Apologists, particularly when making this complaint against scientists who allegedly misunderstand who God is, tend to define "God" in a way that has almost no connection to what believers conceive of him as. For example, you define God as "the condition for the possibility of the universe as such, the non-contingent ground of contingency." If I asked any believer what they thought this phrase was referring to without showing them beforehand that it is your definition of "God", they would have no idea. In fact, I think many believers would say that this definition is just incoherent nonsense that doesn't mean anything at all. If you want to define "God" in such a weird way, I can't do anything to stop you, but I can tell you that your definition is not what the word "God" means to anyone else, so to claim that atheist scientists are just misunderstanding the term is the exact opposite of the truth.
I will also point out that this is not even what you mean by "God". When you, or anyone else, talks about God, you're not just talking about something but rather someone. Yet, under your definition, there is nothing that says that God is personal. There is nothing that even points toward that. Your definition also doesn't say anything about the qualities commonly attributed to God, like omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc. All of the arguments I see for God start by defining "God" in an extremely vague and abstract way that has almost nothing to do with what the English word "God" actually means, aside from maybe sharing one characteristic with the Abrahamic God, and end by concluding that this version of "God" exists. But these are always arguments put forth by religious apologists and philosophers to prove that God, in the sense that the word is commonly used in, exists. This is a clear example of a motte-and-bailey tactic.

Almost without exception, they think of God as some supreme worldly nature, an item within the universe for which they have found no “evidence,” a gap within the ordinary nexus of causal relations, etc.

You seem to be confusing the dismissal of claims about God due to a lack of evidence with a conception of God as a worldly being of whom there should be worldly evidence. That is not why people dismiss God as having no evidence at all. The dismissal of claims about God due to a lack of evidence is just a result of basic epistemic principles - you need to have some adequate reason for believing something in order for the belief to be justified.

Many academic philosophers, trained in highly specialized corners of the field, actually have little acquaintance with the fine points of philosophy of religion and often prove ham-handed when dealing with the issue of God. We hear, time and again, the breezy claim that the traditional arguments for God’s existence have been “demolished” or “refuted,” but when these supposed refutations are brought forward, they prove, I have found, remarkably weak, often little more than the batting down of a straw-man.

This is a circular argument. It only makes sense to use philosophers' claims that traditional arguments for God have been refuted as evidence that those philosophers don't understand philosophy of religion if you are starting with the assumption that the traditional arguments for God are sound, but that assumption is exactly what is in dispute. I find that arguments for God almost always rely either on bad philosophy or a misunderstanding of philosophical concepts. That means that, for me, the fact that someone believes all the traditional arguments for God would be evidence pointing in the opposite direction - showing that they haven't thought about the arguments very hard or learned about the problems with them. But it would be ridiculous for me to use that as an argument that religious philosophers lack the sophistication to understand why their arguments are bad, and that their positions should therefore do nothing to give people pause - it would clearly be circular for me to do so.

But more to it, the percentage of atheists in the professional philosophical caste has at least as much to do with academic politics as it does with the formulation of convincing arguments. If one wants to transform a department of philosophy from largely theist to largely atheist, all one has to do is to make sure that the chairman of the department and even a small coterie of the professoriat are atheist. In rather short order, that critical mass will control hiring, firing, and the granting of tenure within the department. Once atheists have come to dominate the department, only atheist faculty will be hired and students with theistic interests will be sharply discouraged from writing dissertations defending the religious point of view. In time, very few doctorates supporting theism will be produced, and a new generation, shaped by thoroughly atheist assumptions, will come of age.

Are you claiming that this is what has actually happened? What is the simpler explanation - that new evidence, the progression of philosophical debates, and societal developments have caused more and more philosophers to become atheists, or that atheists infiltrated the highest levels of the philosophy departments of every university so that the could encourage the next generation to become atheists. It is especially astonishing that such a takeover could happen if theism really is on better philosophical footing than atheism and already dominated the philosophy departments before the takeover, which, if this logic is to be believed, would mean that atheism was highly discouraged and not believed by very many. This idea is really just a conspiracy theory, and it is just as ill-conceived and incoherent as the idea that NASA is covering up a faked Moon landing.

Does anyone really think that this happened because lots of clever new arguments were discovered?

No one with even a passing familiarity with modern philosophy can deny that huge amounts of progress occurred during the 20th century and that tons of extremely influential arguments were formulated during this time. It is also undeniable that new arguments do cause immense changes to the intellectual landscape. Think of how Quine's arguments against the once-dominant philosophy of logical positivism eventually led to its downfall, such that it is now the first example people point to of a completely dead philosophy.

Another serious problem with trumpeting the current statistics on the beliefs of philosophers is that such a move is based on the assumption that, in regard to philosophy, newer is better. One could make that argument in regard to the sciences, which do seem to progress in a steadily upward direction: no one studies the scientific theories of Ptolemy or Descartes today, except out of historical interest.

Newer is better. Modern philosophers have access to a larger tradition than historical philosophers because that tradition has been around longer now than it had been back then. Their views are informed by the the arguments of previous philosophers as well as all of the counter-arguments that have been put forward. The modern state of philosophy is the result of more deliberation overall than any past state. It is hard to deny that, just as people learn more and become wiser over time, so too do societies and intellectual traditions, since, just as experience and thought contribute to people becoming wiser over time, the intellectual contributions of various philosophers cause philosophy, as a whole, to collect more wisdom. In addition, philosophy and science are not completely separate domains. Scientific knowledge often informs philosophical debates. Therefore, it is inconsistent to hold that science progresses upward while philosophy does not.

But philosophy is a horse of a different color, more akin to poetry.

Not at all. Philosophy is much more like science than poetry. In fact, the two are so similar that science originated as a branch of philosophy, and the foundations of science are still a branch of philosophy. Both fields exist to answer questions about reality. They are both fields of knowledge, as opposed to poetry, which is a field of art. Philosophy deals with objective truth - poetry deals with feelings and personal meaning. Philosophy and poetry could not be more dissimilar, and confusing the two is what leads to a lot of bad philosophy - people often believe in philosophical claims because they sound profound and poetic, rather than because of good arguments. Expressing a claim in poetic language, however, doesn't make it any more likely to be true.

Does anyone think that the philosophical views of, say, Michel Foucault are necessarily better than those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, just because Foucault is more contemporary?

No one is claiming that all modern philosophers are better than all past philosophers.

I for one think that philosophy, so marked today by nihilism and postmodern relativism, is passing through a particularly corrupt period.

This is a caricature of modern philosophy. Nihilism doesn't seem very popular to me (and you provided no evidence that it is popular among philosophers), and postmodernism is only popular among continental philosophers (who made up only a small percentage of those surveyed).

Why should we think, therefore, that the denizens of philosophy department lounges today are necessarily more correct than Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion

You don't even need to think that modern philosophers are better than these philosophers to think that philosophy, as a whole, is better off now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Also, these philosophers had many atheist contemporaries who were just as, if not more, notable. You mentioned A.N. Whitehead, but what about the atheist Bertrand Russell with whom he co-wrote Principia Mathematica? Russell was one of the greatest philosophers of his day and possibly the greatest logician of all time. You mentioned Wittgenstein (whose actual position on God's existence is debatable, given that he was an atheist for part of his life and often make remarks seemingly expressing skepticism), but his good friend and fellow philosopher Frank Ramsey didn't seem to acknowledge a God. How about G. E. Moore? W. V. O. Quine? I think you get the point - giving a few examples of good philosophers who were theists doesn't mean that most philosophers at the time were.

Exactly. Another church could claim condescension if it's the one true church. Whether this claim is valid depends on whether which labels/names are true.

For one group to claim intellectual superiority over everyone else- Is that believable? No.
And then to say they are changing the meaning!?

I personally think the use of "brights" is petty and silly. Do you think it's a good term?

Edit: added words, changed words and some meaning

Can you imagine an organization that calls itself the "one true church"?

“Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” the document said. The other communities “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles.

Hi Cat,

The well-known Athiest Christopher Hitchens, like Bishop Barron, also similarly objected:

My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.

It seems like Dennett's response is that he is changing the meaning of the word "bright". He intended to "successfully hijack" the term.

Can you imagine if a group says we are the "intellectually superiors", but we are hijacking the term to not imply that you are stupid.

I am.

I agree with you--it is not a question of specialization. There are many, many ways to come to a belief in God, depending on the way one perceives the world and decides things. It is not simply a question of who is a "bright"!

Second, if Philosophy of Religion is what Wikipedia says it is, it is reasonable to suppose that it draws a high percentage of students who are open to, practicing, and/or exploring some sort of religious belief.

I HAVE "just asked" — early and often — so when, if ever, can I soundly deduce that I have received, and that I have _correctly_ received and _correctly_ understood what I've received?