What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel.Christian writer Dan Hart wonders if New Atheism might just be a passing fad.
If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.(Article is a bit long)
What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.
For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors.An erudite hatchet job is still a hatchet job.
The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.He talks like a curmudgeon, yes (that's sort of an Orthodox thing, really) but he's more fair-minded than he may seem at first. And he's arguably right. Not to invoke the name of the great divider, but there are plenty of atheists here who are unhappy with Dawkins and his ilk for the same reasons Hart lists.
Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. ... [dismissive summaries, such as "The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera"] ... So it goes. In the end the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing—as, frankly, do all the books in this new genreMaybe he missed the title of the book: "Why We are atheists", not "Why you should be an atheist". It's not a book of arguments; it's a book of conversion stories. It's designed to illuminate why people actually chose atheism, not a philosophical treatise for epistemology postdocs.
The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike.I don't know man it kinda seems like he is trash-talking contemporary atheism as a whole. He also mentions the naivete of paganism which no one will return to (except, I guess, modern pagans, but whatevs)
There is nothing in the least majestic, poignant, or "exuvial" about American religion, and not only because it possessed very little by way of mediating structures to begin with. If the vestigial Christianity of the old world presents one with the pathetic spectacle of shape without energy, the quite robust Christianity of the new world often presents one with the disturbing spectacle of energy without shape. It is not particularly original to observe that, in the dissolution of Christendom, Europe retained the body while America inherited the spirit, but one sometimes wonders whether for "spirit" it would not be better to say "poltergeist." It is true that the majority of observant Christians and Jews in the United States are fairly conventional in their practices and observances, and the "mainstream" denominations are nothing if not reserved. But, at its most unrestrained and disembodied, the American religious imagination drifts with astonishing ease towards the fantastical and mantic, the messianic and hermetic. We are occasionally given shocking reminders of this--when a communitarian separatist sect in Guyana or a cult of comet-gazing castrati commits mass suicide, or when an encampment of deviant Adventists is incinerated by an inept Attorney General--but these are merely acute manifestations of a chronic condition. The special genius of American religion (if that is what it is) is an inchoate, irrepressibly fissiparous force, a peregrine spirit of beginnings and endings (always re-founding the church and preparing for Armageddon), without any middle in which to come to rest.That's from the interesting, if spotty, essay "Religion in America: Ancient and Modern." (Yeesh, that last sentence there – fissiparous? I swear, half the reason I'm drawn to this guy is because he talks like he's been sitting around reading way too much Hegel.)
Doesn't that make it even worse? Sounds like it functions as an atheist Foxe's Book of Martyrs or those interminable spiritual autobiographies that were never quite worth it after Bunyan's Grace Abounding.Worse in what sense?
But I still believe that it's possible to have a thoroughgoing and rational atheism, an atheism that knows what it's about and yet is open-eyed to other perspectives.But why would any atheist want that? The whole point of atheism is that you don't have to think about religion. You get to think about something else instead. And, given the finite nature of life, why waste time? Perhaps a theist who thinks he'll live forever it might seem more reasonable.
Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse.Wait... is he - criticising someone else's writing style?
Good article, and I'm glad to see someone finally address Hitchens, but this is treading ground Hart's already covered in other articles - as well as his book, which was great. I've also noticed that Hart's prose has gotten a bit less purple with practice, and that's a good thing. Can't wait to see what his next project is."Gotten a bit less purple"? Verily, the implication of that sentence makes my blood run cold, as cold as the deepest circle of Dante's Hell.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.Hart wants atheists to justify ourselves to him, and it would never occur to him that the same burden lies upon his shoulders. Where is his refutation of Hinduism? Where is his refutation of Jainism? Of the Native American religions?
He [Hitchins] speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present.Certainly the original European Hospitals (in the modern sense of Hostels) and the spin-off Infirmaries were established by religious orders, but that is because religious orders were the only organized groups in Medieval Europe that had the power and money to assist the poor. Furthermore, I've always questioned the idea that 100% of those in religious orders were true believers in God; there must have been some who joined because religious orders were simply alternative life style choices as well as some (mostly women) who were forced into joining. Wanting to assist the poor is not confined to true believers and had Medieval Europe been atheist rather than Catholic, perhaps a secular group may have invented the idea of Hospitals.
The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.posted by jokeefe at 9:01 AM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
Jahveh ehad, cried Moses: "Hear O Israel, Being is our God, Being is One" (Deut. 6:4).posted by No Robots at 9:32 AM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]
Yet this quotation provides precisely the historically monstrous example of how Israel hears and how the truth is straightway transformed into superstition in Israel's ears. For this magnificent saying is at once a hymn of exultation and a wrathful protest against idol worship of any kind; but despite this protest, it now signifies—in the conception of Israel, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Israel—the well-enough known, imbecilically wrong translation: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our god is the only God!" (Brunner, Spinoza gegen Kant, page 43). Moses said that thou shalt not make unto thee any image of this Jahveh, no imagination of it, i.e., it is that which cannot be thought as things are thought, as if it had the same sort of being as things—I am that I am (Ex. 3:14)! Jahveh, Being, is the term for the wholly abstract spiritual; it has no relation to the relative world. By Jahveh, the wholly great is meant. It means the same thing as Spinoza does in his great—his absolutely great expression, Ens constans infinitis attributis (Absolute Being with infinite attributes.) And Jahveh Tsebaot, Jahveh of infinite powers, is nothing but the mystical expression of the same thing as is expressed philosophically by Ens constans infinitis attributis.--Our Christ / Constantin Brunner, p. 157-8.
the First Cause argument, work[s] by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
Richard Dawkins addressing the cosmological argument in 2007
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.It's fine for him to say that atheists don't address the strongest arguments for religion. But to say that and then trot out an argument that's been addressed time and time again, strikes me as just insulting.
Bertrand Russell addressing the first cause argument in 1927, by quoting John Stuart Mill who addressed it in the 1850's.
religion: we need to fund a ballot measure to prevent the recognition of gay marriage. we need to put creationism into science education. we need to put prayer back into schools. we need to go out there and win souls for jesus. as president, i don' t think atheists should be citizens.i and the atheists i know tend to have respect for the personal practice of spirituality, even admiration at times. it's the point where the spooky tentacles of one's personal holy spirit start to reach out and touch us, unbidden and unwelcome, and ever more insistent, that it becomes a problem. in this respect, dawkins and those guys are like the ghostbusters or that little lady in poltergeist.
atheism: why are the ten commandments hanging in a public courtroom?
religion: OMG you're attacking my personal spirituality! you have no right! when will this persecution stop!?! *gnashing of teeth* *rending of garments*
me:I'm not taking it there, that's where the article is taking it. The article essentially accuses the "new atheists" of not addressing any but the most trivial arguments for Christianity while ignoring the serious theological arguments. But none of these serious theological arguments are ever actually given.There do not exist any non-lame arguments for the truth of Christianity.Come on, now. Do you really want to take the conversation ths direction?
I do wonder what atheists such as Dawkins believe regarding how matter came to be....as silly as Dawkins might find me for believing in God I do have to say I wonder why a belief that there was no first cause shouldn't be seen as equally or more ridiculous (do any of you know if this has actually been addressed by the atheist camp?)Have you ever seen anything begin to exist? And I don't mean simply rearranging already existing stuff, as would be the case for making a house, baking a cake, growing a plant or animal from seed or fertilized egg, or creating matter from energy as in a fusion reaction.
I do wonder what atheists such as Dawkins believe regarding how matter came to be....as silly as Dawkins might find me for believing in God I do have to say I wonder why a belief that there was no first cause shouldn't be seen as equally or more ridiculous (do any of you know if this has actually been addressed by the atheist camp?)
The New Atheism refers to a 21st century movement in atheism. The term, which first appeared in the November 2006 edition of Wired magazine, is applied, sometimes pejoratively, to a series of six best-selling books by five authors that appeared in the period 2004–2008. These authors are Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. They and other supporters of the New Atheism movement are hard-line critics of religion. They state that atheism, backed by recent scientific advancement, has reached the point where it is time to take a far less accommodating attitude toward religion, superstition, and religion-based fanaticism than had been extended by moderate atheists, secularists, and some secular scientists.To elaborate a bit, in The God Delusion, Dawkins makes the case that there's a social taboo against criticizing any religious claim, even when that claim makes assertions about the empirical world. E.g., if someone made a (non-religious) claim that the earth is only 1 day old, you probably wouldn't feel too bad about countering that claim. But you might hesitate a bit more before countering a creationist's assertion that the earth is 6,000 years old -- simply because it's a tenant of the creation's religious faith, and to call out the claim as false would be considered rude or hurtful.
And as we look even closer, more than you think are on "your side"... Granny Smith never used her faith to say someone was "wrong"; but it did help her deal with people younger than her dying of cancers.
Martin Luther King jr. just wanted to control and dominate.
posted by klangklangston at 9:04 AM on May 18
Okay, you get one.
And you can have Ghandi, too.
posted by empath at 9:05 AM on May 18
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