Hawkishness and the “New Atheists”
Robert Wright is doing some blogging to promote his great new book The Evolution of God and offers this thought on the oddly right-wing foreign policy views of the so-called “new atheists”:
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
Actually, the chances were pretty good. When it comes to foreign policy, a right-wing bias afflicts not just Hitchens’s world view, but the whole ideology of “new atheism,” especially as seen in the work of Hitchens allies Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
Wright’s ensuring discussion of this bores into the details of Western ideas about Muslim grievances and makes good points. I think another way of thinking about it is that Dawkins has basically tried to reformulate atheism in the evangelizing and illiberal mode of illiberal evangelizing religion. Thus, much as right-wing Christians and right-wing Muslims can simultaneously loathe each other and have structurally similar views, so, too, can “new atheists” join the party. Elsewhere you have a liberal ethic adhered to by people who identify with different spiritual traditions and also by what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it.
200 Responses to “Hawkishness and the “New Atheists””
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July 14th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Some of the “new atheists” are also strongly attracted to a type of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology that has, for various reasons, attraction to people on the economic/political “right”. You see this in Dawkins and Dennett, for example, going back to their disputes with the “Marxist” views of Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin. Exactly how the ideas mix together is a complicated matter and one, I think, not fully shaped by the logic of the ideas on their own. But this association goes back long before this particular version of it.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Dammit this makes me mad. Seems there has been a shift in recent years towards professional athiests thinking it’s not enough to be an athiest and explain why, you have to be a dick towards everyone else as well. Not “I don’t believe in God” but “YOU’RE WRONG!! GOD DOESN’T EXIST AND EVERYONE WHO THINKS HE DOES IS AN IMMORAL IDIOT!” Then they use that logic to justify the Iraq war or whatever. At that point you’re coming pretty close to Pat Robertson televangelist territory, condemning Muslims and preaching religious wars, and I’d rather watch the televangelists. At least faith healing and speaking in tongues and so forth is fun to watch.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Atheists say religion has been a major source of conflict in the middle east? Those idiots!
Wait right wing nut jobs think Muslims are this source of all evil. Hmm… Islam is a religion. Therefore atheists are really right wing nut jobs!
July 14th, 2009 at 9:28 am
and what about people (like me) who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity but have no desire to go to battle over it? that’s most of the atheists i know.
this whole new atheists/”normal” atheists dichotomy is your own construction. there is nothing new about atheists who openly argue for their views. bertram russell published “why i am not a christian” decades ago. what is new is that atheism as a concept is more socially acceptable so outspoken atheists are no longer marginalized and made invisible as they have for most of human history.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:33 am
I really don’t see how this is “hawkish.” Dawkins even opposed the war in Iraq from fairly early on, I believe. It’s oversimplistic to say that religion is the sole explanation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I don’t think it pushes any particular policy recommendation. Arguably it could cause violence indirectly as Wright says at the end, but that seems like a weak argument.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:34 am
As an atheist with a ’self-conscious atheist identity’ who sometimes finds himself wanting to ‘go to battle over it’, I don’t think that binds me to hawkishness. The branch of atheism that I am drawn to, which many others are as well, is most influenced by humanism. This basically means I believe in using as little violence as possible and giving preference soft power. And yet I can’t help but love a pointless argument with a Christian apologist. So I really don’t think this distinction you’re making holds up, where foreign policy progressive atheists are usually the more passive and acquiescent ones, while outspoken atheists are more hawkish.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I thought the loudest infidel was Richard Dawkins, who is on the left. In fact, most of the new atheists I’ve seen tend to be dovish on foreign policy (anti-Iraq, pro-Palestine, etc.)
Hitchens is just a loud-mouthed special case.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:40 am
could it also just be the simpler explanation, that hitchens is a belligerent loudmouth who likes to get into drunken brawls?
and that any extrapolation from there–even with another data point for sam harris–is a pointless violation of occam’s razor?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I agree that Hitchens is a disgrace.
Sam Harris, I know nothing about.
I’ve read a few of Dawkins’ books, and consider him a first-rate intellect, scientist, and science popularizer. So, I’d like to hear some evidence that on foreign policy he is an intolerant right-winger, or Iraq war supporter.
All I got from the link is that he stated the Israeli Palestinian conflict would not have happened in the absence of religion. That seems pretty uncontroversial, if a bit banal, to me: I too find it hard to imagine a Zionist movement leading to the founding of the state of Israel if the Jewish religion didn’t exist.
If someone believes that God doesn’t exist, and has good logical arguments for their case, then what’s the problem with that? They should keep quiet because stating those arguments isn’t the best strategy in “the war on terror”? Who cares?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Perhaps too, the atheists who also feel it is best to be confrontational on religion have a large overlap with atheists who feel it is best to be confrontational on foreign policy.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Well put. The atheist activists and religious activists have this in common: they don’t make a distinction between intellectual atheists and agnostics and people who are simply non-believers or non-religious.
Activist atheists can be as much of a pain to have around as fundamentalists. The casual atheists, casual agnostics, and the non-religious make up a sizable percentage of the population. They overlap with the culturally religious: people who will even give you the name of a religious sect if you ask them but seldom involve themselves in active religious practice.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
This is exactly right -and it isn’t just Hitchens. There is some stuff in Sam Harris that sure sounds like an out and out call for an atheist jihad against all the benighted Muslim fundamentalists. I’m glad somebody else finally noticed…
July 14th, 2009 at 9:45 am
There is a quite a bit of unfair lumping together going on here. As others ahve pointed out, Hitchens stands pretty much alone in his warmongering. And the so-called new atheism has a lot more to do with ‘coming out of the closet’ than its does with picking fights. Sure Dawkins and Harris and so on are loud and evangelical, but there is an appetite in the atheist public for leadership and loud evangelists tend to fill that roll in any movement.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Midland: “Nonbeliever” and “atheist” are synonyms. If you’re not religious, then you’re a-theist. The only difference is that atheist has somewhat sharper connotations.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:49 am
“Activist atheists can be as much of a pain to have around as fundamentalists.”
Right. Similarly, environmental activists, human rights activists, urban planning activists, education activists, etc, can all be a pain in the ass. Why can’t they just leave me aloooonnnne????
July 14th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I think that you know fuck-all about Dawkins and haven’t read a word the man has written. Which is something you have in common with about 99% of the fools who attack strawman versions of him.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Netbrian, Sam Harris is virulently anti-Muslim, to the point that his case in The End of Faith against religion in general is considerably undermined by his unrelenting insistence that there is something uniquely evil about Islam in particular.
I don’t remember Dawkins being nearly so inflammatory, but if these two figures plus Hitchens are the three ambassadors of new atheism then it is understandable that the movement is seen as bigoted against Muslims.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:02 am
And the so-called new atheism has a lot more to do with ‘coming out of the closet’ than its does with picking fights
Exactly. Are they Stalinists? No? Then this is no different than “militant” gays or blacks or what have you. Or, at least, they strongly deserve the benefit of the doubt by supposed progressives like Matt.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:05 am
I think I see the logic here. Hitchens and Harris are “virulently anti-Muslim” rightwingers. They are also prominent atheists. Dawkins is also a prominent atheist. Therefore, he must be a “virulently anti-Muslim” rightwinger.
If the three most prominent “new atheists” (a term I think is ahistorical, as other commentators have pointed out) are “virulently anti-Muslim” rightwingers, then it must be “evangelical atheism” that is to blame.
Huh?
How about some actual evidence about Dawkins before smearing him?
July 14th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Sample size problem by the Author. 1 Right-Wing Atheist doesn’t make a statistic.
Come over and join us here.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/wrong_from_the_title_on.php
And damn those Atheists for actually speaking out loud their thoughts and beliefs, can’t they be quiet like all the other religious people in the world who never beat people over the head with their wisdom, nor force their particular ideology on school books over reality.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Oh, Kid Bitzer @ #8 got it right, would have saved the author a lot of time to realize the obvious truth.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Actually, Mr. Wright is seriously in error. Most of the so-called new atheists are on the left side of the political spectrum (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Larry Moran, Jerry Coyne,PZ Myers, Jason Rosenhouse etc.). Critiques of Wrights’ article can be found at
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2009/07/robert_wright_bashes_the_new_a.php
July 14th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I usually like Yglesias but this strikes me as completely wrongheaded and evidence-free, to say the least. Most atheists that *I* know, like me, don’t badger people about religion, and aren’t warmongers by any stretch. I do like what Dawkins writes, but that is in part because of things like the Discovery Museum not far from me with Fred Flintstone riding on a dinosaur. As a scientist I greatly dislike belief systems which, as Dawkins says, are self-inoculating- the challenge is to believe even in the face of contrary or at least lack of evidence. This seems to me a bad mental habit, one this country has suffered from particularly over the Bush II years, and it also seems to me that religion far too often provides good training for this kind of ‘thinking from the gut’, as Colbert would say.
I’ll stack Dawkins up against Pat Robertson et al. any day.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Netbrian, Sam Harris is virulently anti-Muslim, to the point that his case in The End of Faith against religion in general is considerably undermined by his unrelenting insistence that there is something uniquely evil about Islam in particular.
I don’t remember Dawkins being nearly so inflammatory, but if these two figures plus Hitchens are the three ambassadors of new atheism then it is understandable that the movement is seen as bigoted against Muslims.
I’ll give you Harris (I only read “A Letter to a Christian Nation”, where my impression was he didn’t think Islam was so uniquely bad), but I don’t see why anyone would think of Dawkins as uniquely bigoted towards Muslims. I’ve never seen anything to make me believe he sees them as uniquely harmful, and he spends far more of his time on Christianity.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I usually like Yglesias but this strikes me as completely wrongheaded and evidence-free, to say the least.
I agree. Religion is rightwing, which is why all of the hardcore Christians are Republicans. (See True Blood’s Army of the Sun.) Every now and then you’ll get a goody-two shoes Ned Flanders type but usually they’re the exception.
Robert Wright is trying to appeal to the Ned Flanders types in his typical boring manner, whereas Yglesias doesn’t want to offend them.
I just disagree with characterizing Hitchens’s views as rightwing. He’s anti-genocide and anti-dictator, unlike the so-called “anti-war” “left” apparently, who have become callous “realists” and regard the US and the West as bullies, full stop, end of story, and are still living with Rumsfeld in a Cold War world.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:52 am
I think another way of thinking about it is that Dawkins has basically tried to reformulate atheism in the evangelizing and illiberal mode of illiberal evangelizing religion.
That’s “another way of thinking about it” in the same sort of way that creationism is another way of thinking about biology.
It appears that Dawkins hasn’t personally responded to this particular hit piece, so I hope he’ll forgive my attempts to characterize his views. Dawkins has not suggested that theists will, or even should, burn in hell. He doesn’t believe in hell and if he did he wouldn’t want to send anybody there (AFAIK – he might make exceptions for mass murderers or child molesters or some other exceptionally horrible crimes). He’s not advocating that theists should be burned at the stake or sent to gas chambers or even unfairly taxed at higher rates. Historically aware readers will no doubt recognize that I am not making these examples up – “illiberal religion” is a very high bar to live up to and Dawkins neither is, nor wants to be, anywhere near it.
Dawkins, of course, isn’t the pope of atheism – there isn’t one. But the fact that he’s not the same as Hitchens and Harris on this point suggests that they may not be representative, as indeed I believe they aren’t. (You could try taking polls of atheists or something. Or better yet, _Wright_ could try that before making sweeping generalizations based on a few blowhards. Evidence-based journalism is an old idea, but it might be worth trying again.)
Atheists, “new” or otherwise, aren’t a religion and don’t try to enforce doctrine on each other. Dawkins really does not belong in the same ideological space as Hitchens and Harris on political questions in general, even though all three don’t believe in any gods. (Weirdly enough, atheists tend to not actually define their life by what they don’t believe in. It’s theists who define them that way.)
P.S. Self-described “godless liberal” blogger P.Z. Myers also rejected Wright’s thesis along pretty much the same lines I’ve described above.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:01 am
why does it not surprise me that you’ve bought into this silly, totally incoherent ‘theory’ that people like myself are somehow ‘represented’ by Christopher Hitchens because I don’t believe in a diety?
and what the hell is this ‘new atheists’ crap? seriously, this is an entirely manufactured term designed to discredit vocal atheists such as Dawkins so that confused people will think they are the same as evangelical Christians. too bad such lazy logic even makes it past the skeptics sometimes.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Chris above me at #26 is exactly right.
Seriously, this post takes credibility away from Matt Yglesias in the same way that George Will’s writing about climate change takes credibility away from the Post. it is just flat-out false. utterly bogus.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:09 am
In case anyone needed further proof of what a humongous neocon shithead Sam Harris is, here’s “The End of Liberalism”:
On the specific point of Dawkins and the Israel-Palestine conflict, you should read Wright’s argument. First, it’s quite obvious that the conflict is about land and money, like most all conflicts in the world. Second, mistaking the causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the best ways of avoiding its solutions – the issue is that Israel must withdraw from the occupation, and talking about religious issues as if they’re central helps to obfuscate that basic fact.
On the general point, there is a whole complex of ideas around the New Atheism – ev-psych, the superiority of western philosophies and economies, the focus on internal belief as a movier of history rather than social and cultural dynamics – which are closely associated with 19th century imperialism. That many of the New Atheists, like the neoconservatives, have taken up the foreign policies of classical imperialism, isn’t particularly surprising. The belief that Western cultures (and you’ll note the new atheism never articulates itself as Buddhist atheism, it’s always the protestant atheism of the 19th and 20th centuries) have by reason of superior rationality arrived at a truth which will organize society in good ways (no religion, no war!) and will be imposed by illiberal means.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:12 am
1) Anything that any known atheist says at any time, in any tone of voice, will be perceived as dickish and militant.
2) How on Earth am I supposed to believe that God doesn’t exist without simultaneously believing that if you do believe in the existence of God, you’re wrong? God can’t not exist for me and exist for you. God either exists or does not. As it happens, I believe I have pretty good reasons for what I believe, and I imagine you think you do, too. Is that not a conversation we can have? If you don’t want to talk about it, why do you mind so much if I have the conversation with someone else?
Why are the religious so touchy about atheism?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:12 am
I think there is a selection bias here. If an atheist discusses foreign policy in the context of atheism, what is he going to talk about? Atheist trade policy? Atheist mutual security agreements? That’s ridiculous. If an atheist is speaking of foreign policy in the context of atheism, they will talk about the harm caused by religion in foreign policy. Right now, that means criticizing Islamic fundamentalism. I don’t think there is an inherent problem in Islam so much as it is a matter of timing. If they were writing 400-900 years ago, they would be criticizing crusades, schismatic warfare, the wars spawned by the reformation/counterreformation, inquisitions, and treatment of western hemisphere peoples. You might as well say that writing about foreign policy in an atheistic context is anti-Islamic.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Ok, that’s the part where you’ve gone completely off the rails. Since when was writing books and making arguments an “illiberal means” of “imposing” anything?
WTF are you talking about, “imposing”?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Harris is into Buddhist meditatation. So much for your credibility.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Look, I get the idea that not all New Atheists are pro-genocide like Hitchens (anyone who continues to think invading Iraq was a good idea is objectively in favor of tribal death squads) or pro-torture like Harris.
So maybe that means that we shouldn’t hold everyone who adheres to a belief system responsible for the actions of everyone else who adheres to that belief system? Just a thought.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Matt’s hypothesis is interesting and, I can’t help but think, probably wrong. Frankly, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as New Atheism outside of a tiny publishing trendlet, and attempts to draw broader conclusions based on this trendlet are going to go badly astray. I don’t really know what caused Christopher Hitchens, but he seems representative of precisely nothing.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Harris is only “pro-torture” if “pro-torture” means “believes torture isn’t any morally worse than indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations.”
July 14th, 2009 at 11:23 am
“On the specific point of Dawkins and the Israel-Palestine conflict, you should read Wright’s argument. First, it’s quite obvious that the conflict is about land and money, like most all conflicts in the world.”
Similarly, if the protestant reformation had never occured, there still would have been a conflict between protestants and catholics in northern Ireland, because that conflict was really about land and money. Except, there wouldn’t have been any protestants on one side of the conflict, because protestantism wouldn’t have existed. Or something.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The only explanation I see for claiming right-wing atheism is in the context of cultural imperialism. Atheists generally don’t like foreign peoples engaging in religious practices that are at odds with our worldview, such as stoning for adultery, but, this is not intrinsically atheist. It is a part of the western liberal outlook, to which many religious people adhere. Right or wrong, we believe in laws based upon fundamental human rights, freedoms and equality. If you ask most religious westerners if a country should drop sharia and adopt a system of laws based on the fundamental rights we claim to recognize, they’d probably say yes. Ironically, you’d probably get a higher rate of disagreement from atheist anthropologists than from any other group.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:42 am
And Cromwell would have sent a bunch of Scottish settlers to Ireland because, well, just because. Oh wait, why would Cromwell have been in power in the first place?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Look, such critiques are cursory, even superficial, and Hitchens, especially, gets more than his fair share (which would be considerable anyways) of it. Hitchens support for the Iraq War and for a more general conflict with the Muslim world is of a piece with his long-standing pugnaciousness regarding any country whose rulers are oligarchs, aristocrats, authoritarians, totalitarians, and, yes, theocrats. Say what you will about the merits of atheism, Hitchens’ personal belief is in keeping with his consistent desire to liberate man from all his chains, metaphysical, intellectual, and physical. These kinds of drive-by guilt-by-associations do not, in any way, have material bearing on the beliefs of we atheists.
Normally I find myself pretty much in lockstep with Matt. But he has some sort of colossal burr up his ass when it comes to atheists, and I, for one, would like to know why.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:50 am
#26 is right on.
#29:
Utterly preposterous. Why is it that particular tiny piece of desert that has been the source of so much conflict over the past 2000 years? Why did Christians repeatedly try to take it from its Muslim occupants? Why did Jewish settlers go there in the 40s instead of, say, Mongolia? Why is about the most intractable issue between the Palestinians and the Israelis access to Jerusalem?
Could it be that Jews, Muslims, and Christians explicitly say that the land is holy? Or that a sizable percentage of Jews and Muslims claim that it was gifted to them by the omnipotent creator of the universe? You’re right, that’s silly.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:50 am
It’s really quite shocking to me that so many people supposedly of the left are willing to line up with Dawkins on the idea that we should not look at material causes of conflict, but turn to religion and see that changes in personal beliefs will end conflicts.
I should be clear, here, that I am an atheist. I was raised that way. I don’t think being an atheist makes me better, or more rational, than anyone else. I don’t think it makes me more ethical. It makes me fascinated by religion, it makes me believe that various forms of dialogue, negotiation, and alliance-building between people of various religions or of none are the way that we will move the left forward.
The people who come to atheism and see it as something that makes them ethically or rationally superior to others are the people who are leading atheism down the absolute wrong path.
The people who argue that atheists need to stop making political alliances with religious folk in the pursuit of good material outcomes, because that will harm the cause of advancing atheism, are simply put doing harm to the left. We cannot let atheism be a block, in any way, to the sort of coalition-building that is necessary to any leftist politics. As an atheist, I think I am bound to work on an internal critique to move atheists toward better political work.
On “illiberal” – the New Atheists are explicit anti-pluralists. They believe that the world will be better without the plurality of religions that we have. Acknowledging both the reality and the value of pluralism and diversity is a starting point for any liberalism I care to associate with. They argue pragmatically for advancing atheism as a political virtue, when it is not one, and making it a stumbling block for coalition building will harm the left.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Hitch isn’t a Socialist anymore, but he’s still fighting a revolution. Hence the constant calls to arms – literally and figuratively – against everything he deems unjust. Kind of annoying now and then, but it’s usually a fun read.
Anyway, while intuition says the vast majority of non-religious folk track left, you can also visit pretty much any city or college town and find bunches of churches with black “TORTURE IS IMMORAL” and rainbow-colored “ALL ARE WELCOME” banners.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I don’t remember who said it, but someone once made the point that religious people are “atheist except for one.” Meaning, sure a Christian may believe in God, but he doesn’t believe in Allah and Ganesh and Poseidon and Tlaloc and Coyote. So really, there’s a ton of gods that a Christian is atheist about. Welcome to the atheist club, brothers!
July 14th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
OTHER than Christopher Hitchens, can you come up with any examples of prominent atheists, new or not, on the political right with regards to militarism?
Note that criticizing someone in another country, even criticizing them strongly or even brutally, is not the same as advocating military action.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Why don’t we simply build a coalition of atheists, by increasing the number of atheists? The accommodationists are never entirely forthcoming on what we’re supposed to gain by these coalitions with the religious, beyond their numbers (which I think we can get anyway.) But the costs are manifest: our speech, our ideals, and our freedom to live lives free of ridiculous god-bother.
Is there truly no end to that virtue, though? Should we make common cause with the creationists if it means an end to the research in biology that offends them?
Is diversity and pluralism such a net positive that it should force us not to tell wrong people they’re wrong? Is it more important to have a tent full of different ideas, or right ideas?
Or is it just that you believe that religion is limited to the things it can’t possibly be wrong about? That strikes me as a failure of your understanding of the phenomenon of religion.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Dawkins has never said anything like this. Only a fool would argue that there are no material causes to conflicts, and only a fool would argue that religion has absolutely nothing to do with any conflicts anywhere.
Dawkins has never said this either. He’s worked with Bishop Harris of Oxford to help promote science teaching, like PZ Myers has worked with Ken Miller to promote teaching evolution.
I think most “New Atheists” (which are NOT just the loudest and most obnoxious–Hitchens, Harris) would agree that they are unlikely to convince most religious folk of the merits of atheism, and that political alliances are necessary with more liberal clergy. However, there’s also nothing wrong with noting the effects of really pernicious varieties of religious fundamentalism.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I can’t believe this needs to be continually repeated but atheism is not a belief system. It’s an anti-belief mantra. There are no tenets, no dogmas, no rules. The word “atheist” only describes what one doesn’t believe in, it says nothing about what one does believe.
Wright is just trying to preemptively smear his critics. It’s a cheap stunt to cover that his argument is basically “okay, God doesn’t exist, but religion is awesome so shut up”.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I have to go to work, but I want to point out the significant disagreements here between, say, Chet and Russell. Chet is pushing up against the value of pluralism and coalition-building, while Russell is affirming those values but arguing that most of the New Atheists actually uphold them and thus New Atheists should not be blamed for the minority of them who are anti-pluralist and against various forms of coalition-building.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I didn’t push anything; I just asked a question which you didn’t answer. How far does the value of pluralism and coalition-building extend?
I’m all for pluralism. I’m all for a big tent, but should the tent be so big that it includes a bunch of people who can’t even agree on what’s real? That doesn’t strike me as the basis of a successful coalition. Can you elaborate?
July 14th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Great, another evo-psych addled journalist trying to be a historian and failing in a most epic manner.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Anyway, while intuition says the vast majority of non-religious folk track left, you can also visit pretty much any city or college town and find bunches of churches with black “TORTURE IS IMMORAL” and rainbow-colored “ALL ARE WELCOME” banners.
They’re the exception in my opinion. Usually religion does poison everything it touches. Like Israeli settlers who believe a Sky God gave them the land other people are currently living on.
My view is that liberals who have this soft view of religion usually have a kind parent or grandparent who are religious and so have sentimental personal reasons to look the other way and be nonjudgmental.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Yeah, I think Chet and I were just disagreeing with separate part’s of DivGuy’s argument. I was mostly reacting against the ridiculous caricature of Dawkins, but I would also say there’s nothing wrong with attempting to convince others of the merits of secular humanism as a replacement for religious traditions.
I’d also like to mention this:
First, not identifying with a religious traditions covers a lot more ground than just “normal” atheism, whatever the hell that is. More to the point, the condescension here is grating. Somehow, if you’re an atheist, you can’t have strong views about such questions as “where did the universe come from?” Otherwise, you’re not normal.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with a “self-conscious atheist identity?”
July 14th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Matt -
Every post I ever read by you about atheists is ill-informed.
Learn more, or stop writing about it. You suck on this topic.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Concerning the likes of Dawkins and Meyers, it’s the crass scientism and not the atheism that grate so much. And were it not for Dawkins’ infuriating tendency to grossly overstate his case I never would have had reason to find common cause with the likes of Eagleton. Damn you Richard!
Although, it must be said, I’m terribly biased. I’ve nursed a passionate distaste for Dawkins ever since he foisted on all of us that ill-conceived pile of pure poppycock, memetics.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Harris and Dawkins are two of the purest lunatics ever to come down the pipe. Their essential argument is that the human species is at least four or five centuries behind in its development because of the impediments to progress that the world’s religions have imposed on us. How stupid is that?
Harris is particular is brutal on this issue. He believes that if it weren’t for Christianity, and more specifically, the Catholic Church, mankind would have landed a woman on the moon no later that the mid-16th century.
They are saying that humans should be much further advanced than they are. They are saying that, even now, the pace of our advancement is being artificially slowed to a crawl. They are saying that little old me, live human at the start of the 21st century, should have had the chance to Captain the Starship Enterprise.
What a couple of crazy dudes. Eh?
July 14th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Religions deter diversity of thought, they do not enhance it. If there were no Catholicism, people would still be free to believe every tenet of the Catechism. When people are indoctrinated into Catholicism, they become less capable of believing in those things that conflict with their indoctrination. The same is true for any religion.
Diversity for its own sake is not a worthwhile goal. Is a diversity of diseases, crimes, or modes of suffering good? There are people in prison for a lot of different kinds of murder. Is it good that we have serial killers, spree killers, hit men and those who kill in passion? Of course not. Diversity is good in cases where we can find at least potential value in the diversity of the elements in question. Some atheists contend that we are in an age in which the value of religions has declined to the point that none are worth having. If so, the problem then becomes finding the most moral path to its elimination. I, for one, think only a fairly passive approach to this end would do more good than harm.
I don’t think anyone claims atheism as a political virtue, nor have I heard anyone advocate for purist, atheist political blocs. Secularism is popularly believed to be a political virtue in western thought, but not atheism. What is claimed is that atheism is a more accurate and useful outlook which would result in more general satisfaction if it were more widely accepted.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Dawkins is in a particularly good position to know alternate historical progression. He is married to one of Doctor Who’s sidekicks.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Incredibly, South Park made a very effective point about religion’s divisiveness in the episode where Cartman ends up in the distant future populated by warring atheistic factions. That point, of course, is that we humans have some innate need to ostracize those who aren’t exactly like us, and we’ll always be able to find a difference to exploit. Religion just happens to provide a convenient proxy for that animosity, and without it we’d use some other characteristic – nationality, race, gender, eye color, etc – to draw a line in the sand.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
The main problem with the New Atheists is not that they are illiberal but that their book titles often use the word God as a synonym for religious fundamentalism, which is a silly, reductionist idea — one that does little to advance our understanding of consciousness, morality, or the cosmos. Maybe their publishers demand that the books be titled that way, because God sells.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Though I read your blog regularly, I’ve never commented. But I feel that I have to comment on “Elsewhere you have a liberal ethic adhered to by people who identify with different spiritual traditions and also by what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it.” This is a personal issue to me, as an atheist, and I think you’ve presented a false dichotomy here.
I think that I DO have a self-conscious atheist identity. It was formed through the prejudice that I encountered as a child growing up in the Bible Belt, and the prejudice that I encountered then, and encounter now, in the statements of politicians. It was also formed through my experiences as a scientist, and my own thinking about and understanding of philosophy. And I think it’s reasonable to try to convince others of atheism, and to advocate for atheists in general.
However, I don’t relate to much of what Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins say. I think that theism is mistaken, but not inherently evil. I don’t share their hawkish foreign policy views, and I am really dismayed at what I see as Islamophobia in in some of their comments (it feels to me like they are co-opting a pernicious social trend in order to make atheism seem more appealing to the mainstream US). I think that religion can and does cause problems, but that it is not the sole source of many of the problems that they associate it with, and that it has also been the source of good things.
So, it is possible (and common, in my experience) to be a politically-minded atheist with a self-conscious atheist identity, but to not fit the mold of the most famous New Atheists, and in fact to find them annoying pretty often.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Dawkins and PZ Myers opposed the Iraq War. Matt crunched the numbers and voted “aye” for crunching Iraqi civilians.
Go suck on your God, Matt.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with a “self-conscious atheist identity?”
Ask anyone who has to listen to you talk about it.
As upyernoz says at #4:
what is new is that atheism as a concept is more socially acceptable so outspoken atheists are no longer marginalized and made invisible as they have for most of human history.
Here’s a hint: The less marginalized you are, the less interesting your viewpoint is. You’re not Bertrand Russell. You’re just an asshole.
However, the fun thing for people like me is that hardcore atheists are now just as easy to bait as hardcore Christians. So, I guess you can take that as a blessing…
July 14th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I don’t really know what caused Christopher Hitchens
Gin?
July 14th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
OTHER than Christopher Hitchens, can you come up with any examples of prominent atheists, new or not, on the political right with regards to militarism?
Karl Rove.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
This is like conservatives who love Palin because they think she pisses liberal off, not realizing that she actually amuses them. We’re not mad at you, we’re laughing at you.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
scythia:
However, the fun thing for people like me is that hardcore atheists are now just as easy to bait as hardcore Christians. So, I guess you can take that as a blessing…
The easiest people to bait are the anti-war crowd. Especially about Iraq, I mean you don’t even need to try.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Religion is fundamentally a means of group identity and solidarity.
There is the Group and the Belief; when one has to yield, it is usually the Belief. Religions historically modify their dogma to maintain their popular standing (the sun no longer revolves around the earth). Knowledge is steadily eroding religious belief and international interaction is eroding group identity.
The atheists can be patient, time is on their side.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
The easiest people to bait are the anti-war crowd. Especially about Iraq, I mean you don’t even need to try.
Oh, I don’t know about that. My view is that liberals who have this hardline negative view of religion usually have a disciplinarian parent or grandparent who were religious, and so have psychological motivations to loudly proclaim their nonbelief and be nonjudgmental.
Because honestly (if I may switch to my own voice here), it’s all about the void created by the gradual disappearance of a legitimate authority figure, as your parents change from omnipotent protectors to ordinary, flawed human beings like yourself. Religious people fill that void with the church. People like yourself fill it by ragging on religious people.
But it’s all compensation. And that’s why your skin’s so thin. All of y’all. Believers and non alike.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I suck at cut and paste. Obviously that should read “judgmental,” not “nonjugmental.” And to flesh out my argument away from Poptarts, you can add “science” or “reason” or whatever you like to the end of my penultimate paragraph. Point stands.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I’m sorry; I can’t resist…
Religion is fundamentally a means of group identity and solidarity….The atheists can be patient, time is on their side.
No comment, other than LOL.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
The fundamental problem with the more aggressive writings by Hitchens and Dawkins on religion is that they haven’t done enough homework on theology to make an argument that will impress anyone except other skeptics. They do a fine job of scorching the fundies, but when they go after the more sophisticated beliefs they make some very basic errors and end up doing little more than torching straw men. They tend to come off a bit like the creationists who try to disprove evolution with a butchered reading of the second law of thermodynamics.
Which is not to say that they’re wrong to make a case against religion that’s premised on making fundamentalists look bad. They’re just not going to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced, and their stronger arguments against faith irritate liberal believers who might otherwise be sympathetic to greater secularism in society.
I think it’s more productive to argue a positive case for pluralist secularism than to tear down the entire concept of religious belief. Appease the moderates and marginalize the fundamentalists, instead of provoking the whole lot of them. There’s a great deal of visceral appeal to telling everyone that they’re a bunch of silly, superstitious sods who still believe in fairies and unicorns. But it just pisses them off to no greater benefit.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
#72:
Argh.
“but when they go after the more sophisticated beliefs…”
What sophisticated beliefs? What the hell are you talking about?
People come to Pharyngula to make your complaint all the time. When pressed to come up with examples of “more sophisticated beliefs”, they always come up empty. Or they push some smug fool like Eagleton, who spouts a whole lot of vague nothing, but with really big words.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Ding ding ding, we have our first Courtier’s Defense!
As a Catholic-raised person and fan of both Dante and late antique / medieval history, I’ve probably forgotten more about Christian theology and Church history than you’ll ever know. You’re full of shit.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
All I got from the link is that he stated the Israeli Palestinian conflict would not have happened in the absence of religion. That seems pretty uncontroversial, if a bit banal, to me: I too find it hard to imagine a Zionist movement leading to the founding of the state of Israel if the Jewish religion didn’t exist.
I’d go further and say that I find it hard to imagine Jews even existing as a distinguishable group 2000 years after the Diaspora (assuming that there would even have been a Diaspora) if the Jewish religion didn’t exist and discourage marriage outside the faith. (Imperfectly, as you can see by examining the different ethnicities of Jews, but it was enough to keep them identifiably distinct from the populations around them.) Otherwise they’d have interbred with other surrounding populations and have about as much distinct identity a millennium later as the Visigoths. (Correspondingly, their descendants would have been much *less* oppressed, because inside a few centuries nobody would have either known or cared who they were – everyone would be part Jew and part whatever else.)
That, in turn, would have prevented a ruthless, violent, paranoid politician from exploiting centuries of his nation’s religious majority’s hostility toward a minority distinctly identifiable by its religion to come to power and then massacre that minority. Without the Holocaust, Jews wouldn’t be inclined to join a Zionist movement and other great powers wouldn’t be inclined to back it. (Imagine a corresponding Visigoth heritage movement to “reclaim” their pre-Volkerwanderung homeland. How far do you think it would get?)
Religion binds people to their separate cultural identities even when it doesn’t serve their *real* interests to keep themselves separate (and carry on conflicts with populations with rival religions).
mistaking the causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the best ways of avoiding its solutions – the issue is that Israel must withdraw from the occupation, and talking about religious issues as if they’re central helps to obfuscate that basic fact.
Why does Israel even exist as a political entity? Why did that particular group of people decide to converge on that particular area of land and take it over, dispossessing the then inhabitants? Why did the great powers at the time not only permit but encourage this? Why are the two populations still so separate and opposed after 60 years, with very little mutual assimilation? And why *doesn’t* Israel withdraw from the occupation, since it’s so obvious that they should? Which subgroups of each side are the most invested in continuing the conflict and yielding no ground whatsoever (metaphorically or literally)? Which are the most open to compromise in the service of peace?
It should be obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the conflict that attempting to answer any of those questions without acknowledging the role of religion would be taking tortuous verbal gymnastics to an extreme degree. Religion is extremely central to the cause, origin, and perpetuation of the conflict. (Contrast Northern Ireland, where the largely successful defusing of a similar conflict *just happens* to coincide with secularization of governmental institutions and a marked weakening of religious influence throughout society.)
July 14th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
The fundamental problem with the more aggressive writings by Hitchens and Dawkins on religion is that they haven’t done enough homework on theology…
Theology is a conclusion in search of supporting arguments. It bears little in relation to philosophy or any other field of intellectual endeavor. Rather than theologists, the “new” atheists take on apologists, which is rather the point.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Jesus. This is why people don’t like the “new atheists”. Touchy little bastards.
Look, I’m not religious. I haven’t studied theology at any truly advanced level, nor do I really care to. But have you noticed that it’s an academic subject that people devote their entire lives to studying, with a history and jargon and a literature? Have you noticed that Dawkins and Hitchens work in entirely different fields? Have you ever, in the course of your own professional life, run into people who have a Freshman-level understanding of your field, but presume to tell you why think you’re wrong about everything? How did that work out for them?
I’m aware of the P.Z. Myers snark you’re referencing… about theologians as courtiers of the Emperor with no clothes. And, in fact, I personally find it compelling. Because I’m agnostic! I think theology is about as relevant to the world as phrenology or astrology. But of course most people don’t see things that way. Dawkins, naturally, attempts to rebut the theological arguments in favor of God, and in so doing he butchers them rather badly and sets himself up to fail.
The problem with Myers’ argument is this: it isn’t the Emperor’s clothes that are invisible… it’s the Emperor himself. There’s no definitive proof running around in plain view that God doesn’t exist, such that you can point and shout about how obvious it is that the courtiers are wrong. For various reasons, it ISN’T obvious to most people. When you try to rebut theological arguments with scientific ones, you’re fighting on their turf by their rules. Only people who are predisposed to agree with you will think you won the argument.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Wow, I leave you guys alone for a while and you do a pretty good job of proving Wright’s point. Although I expect the weakest part is that, other than Hitchens, most of the atheists you could mention have zero impact on anyone’s foreign policy. Would that we could so readily ignore all the religious fundamentalists who think the other side is evil incarnate!
Practically speaking, it is certainly true that religious differences are a core issue in the Middle-east right now. Amazingly enough, the various empires, governments, and tribes that have been rivals there for centuries have managed to pick on each other when they shared a common religion and often lived in peace for long stretches of time when they didn’t. The deck of core issues gets re-shuffled every few decades. A hundred years ago, nationalism vs imperialism was the biggest cause of bloodshed. A century from now, maybe they’ll all be killing each other over water rights as the climate warms up.
If I’m a cop stuck with the job of breaking up a bar room brawl between the beer drinkers and the whiskey drinkers, I don’t accomplish much by shrieking out what a bunch of ignorant, primitive fools they are because they aren’t teetotalers like me and my friends.
Dawkins is about that useful in any discussion that might lead to peace in the Middle-east.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
LFP, I couldn’t help but notice Geoff directly asked you to name the sophisticated beliefs that you accused Dawkins and Hitchens of making strawmen of, and you just responded by making more vague allusions.
What are these “sophisticated beliefs”, and what strawmen are Dawkins and Hitchens making?
Of course on the one hand you compare theology with astrology and phrenology, then appeal to the Rich Intellectual Tradition of theology to swat away Dawkins as a freshman lightweight. “Jargon” isn’t one of the criteria for a serious science.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
“Theology is a conclusion in search of supporting arguments. It bears little in relation to philosophy or any other field of intellectual endeavor.
Theology has some particularly questionable assumptions that it is particularly unwilling to question. But I see no other reason to distinguish it from any other philosophical endeavor.
“Rather than theologists, the ‘new’ atheists take on apologists, which is rather the point.”
To the extent that is the point, I think contemporary atheist writers are often successful. But when they adopt a deliberately provocative title that calls the belief in God a delusion or a sickness, then they’re over-promising, under-delivering, and undercutting the alleged goal of taking on the apologists and the pseudo-scientists. Instead, they’re functioning as pseudo-theologians.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
LaFollette, the best response to the “Dawkins ignores theology!” argument that I’ve read was this blog comment by Jonathan Mayhew. An excerpt:
July 14th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Midland, “You guys take your beliefs seriously!” isn’t an effective take-down. Neither is, “Your beliefs are impolitic!”
July 14th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Geoff, sim…
Essentially, Dawkins and Hitchens conflate faith with fideism and argue almost exclusively against pseudo-scientific arguments for design rather than the case Aquinas and the like make for faith. Which amounts to a straw man. Most people don’t believe in God because they believe the universe was designed. Anyone of a materialist bent is likely to write off the stuff about beauty, truth, purpose, mystery, natural law, etc. But this is integral to what “faith” means to believers. Telling people that the flagellum didn’t have to be designed by a creator, therefore God is a delusion… that sort of thing doesn’t compute unless you’re already predisposed to believe it.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
From what I’ve been able to gather, what makes one a “new” or “strident” atheist – no, wait, fundamentalist atheist – is that, aside from arguing that there is no rational basis for belief in supernatural agents, one argues that we would be better people if we didn’t.
That seems to be the part that’s unacceptable, no?
July 14th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
“Telling people that the flagellum didn’t have to be designed by a creator, therefore God is a delusion…”
Okay, I want to make it clear I’m not trolling. I haven’t had time to read all the thread comments, but has anyone made this argument? I have seen the opposite argument made by a professor Behe at Lehigh University, i.e. the flagellum is too complex to have happened randomly, therefore there has to be design. One can (if one has the training in biology to make a scientific argument) certainly make the argument that the flagellum didn’t have to be designed by a creator, therefore your argument for intelligent design is bs. And is Hitchens really of the right because he strongly supports war in Iraq? I would say his political affiliations defy such simple categorization.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Interesting divalog between Wright and John Horgan at http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20951
Surely there must be something to Wright’s argument. There’s no way someone could embarrass themselves talking such absolute twaddle in public unless there was some higher power at work.
All I can say is, Wright’s incredibly lucky he wasn’t arguing with a mind the quality of Dawkins’. He would have been absolutely eviscerated.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
LaFolette Progressive,
You should make an effort to know what you are talking about before you make remarks on a given subject. It is clear you have not read the Courtier’s Reply. And the same can be said of Matt (whom I generally agree with) and other commenters here who have made statements about the so-called New Atheists that are at odds with the arguments that the New Atheists themselves make. These comments have all betrayed a complete ignorance of the subject.
The New Atheists make statements critical of the role of religion in domestic and international politics, but it does not follow that they advocate making war on Muslims in the name of atheism. Hitchens’ support for the Iraq War had less to do with religion than it did with a hatred for Saddam Hussein and a feeling of comraderie with the Kurds. The fact that the new Iraqi state is more religious than Saddam’s regime underpins that point. The war was advocated by neoconservatives, who tend not to be particularly religious but for whom religion is a useful tool. Atheists find the use of religion to control public opinion to be deplorable.
Finally, it seems that atheism really gets under a lot of people’s skins. Making arguments that there is no God or openly admitting to having no belief in God is bound to get a lot of people upset. But these hurt feelings – and, more broadly, the social consequences of the collapse of religion – do not concern most atheists. We are skeptics not becaue we do not want to believe, we are skeptics because we want to know. Whatever the advantages of religious diversity, the fact of the matter is that there either is a supernatural anthropomorphic being who created the world and watches us, after the manner of Santa Claus, cateloguing our various good deeds and misdeeds in preparation for punishment or reward in the afterlife – or there is not. More broadly, there either is such a thing as a ghost or supernatural entity (and afterlife, fairies, gods, ghouls, etc), or there is not. I think that the assumption that all there is is the material world has been pretty powerful in the scientific method. Show me the causal links – the mechanics – between a supernatural entity and a physical substance.
Belief in ghosts and demons and fairies and gods is an artifact of the animism of children, and is related to the theory of minds. If it moves, it is alive and must have a mind behind it. But it just so happens that this intuitive answer is just plain wrong in most cases. If it hurts someone’s feelings to admit that, then I don’t care. If they can’t see that because they refuse to give up their beliefs which give them a very childish hope for an afterlife, then that’s their problem.
I also find it rich that the theists here want to say that all atheists had a strictly religious upbringing. I was raised by milquetoast Lutherans who never went to church, and who had more interest in science than in religion. The burden is on you, theists. I am not making a profound statement about reality on shaky grounds. No gods is the null hypothesis.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
I suck at cut and paste. Obviously that should read “judgmental,” not “nonjugmental.” And to flesh out my argument away from Poptarts, you can add “science” or “reason” or whatever you like to the end of my penultimate paragraph. Point stands.
Jebus Cripes, you sound like an insufferable twat.
No offense.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
There certainly ARE certain kinds of conservative bias in the new atheism. This bias is pretty apparent when you get into reading the literature of the various “skeptic” movements floating around out there (all four of the prominent “New Athiests” have appeared at the Skeptic Society’s events).
A lot of this has to do with the politics of academia. The Gould/Dawkins arguments are a good example. In the popular conversation, “skeptics/new atheists” are opposed to religion and especially to fundamentalism, which seems to make them natural allies of secular liberals. But in academia, the enemies of the “post enlightenment empiricist/common sense” school of philosophy are post-structuralists, radical feminists, and Marxists. The “science wars,” which pit a bunch of french philosophers against a bunch of scientists is a great little demonstration of all this in action. The “common sense empiricists” against the pointed headed language theorists. (I sympathize with the pointy heads, by the way.)
While nobody espouses neo-Darwinism anymore, there is a little twinge of that kind of thinking in the thinking of these folks. (Micheal Shermer gave a lecture about the similarities between Darwin and capitalism that can be easily seen on youtube.) I would never go so far as to accuse these guys of some of the more silly charges one could make from these associations, but there is a relationship there. Once skepticism and naturalism becomes something like a political ideology, markets can start to look like ecosystems.
As someone who’s sympathies are defiantly left, I chalk some of this up to people working outside of their specialties. Dawkins is (from what I hear) a brilliant scientist, but he’s a lousy philosopher and a worse theologian. He has a decent enough grasp of the evil that religion does, but I don’t think he has a grasp of what religion actually is. I’ve read his complaints about philosopher that I care about, and I see the same stubbornness and disengagement from the substance of the conversation at hand.
If you want to see the prepackaged fun version of this, check out Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit.” (Hitchens and Shermer have been guests.) They are against religion, superstition, the death penalty, environmentalists, and the government. It’s basically a libertarian show. Penn has shared a stage with Dawkins more than once.
I have plenty of sympathy for this whole “new athiest/skeptic” thing if only because we need more respect for science and more skepticism in our popular discourse, but I worry about the kinds of concensus that some of these folks are arriving at.
I don’t like religion either. That doesn’t mean that we have to engage in a violent war against Islam if we want to keep civilization.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Dawkins addresses the relevant material for his main question: does God exist? Less than 4 pages of The God Delusion are spent disposing of Aquinas’ “5 proofs of God’s existence”, because they are so weak. And surprise!
Proof #5 of Aquinas is the Argument from Design. It turns out those Educated Theologians with Jargon and Literature can have as depressingly lame arguments as the unwashed rabble. The whole edifice is built on God’s existence, take that out and there’s no need for navel-gazing over Faith and Mystery and Beauty.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Re: Similarly, if the protestant reformation had never occured, there still would have been a conflict between protestants and catholics
It would have been ethnic based: between the Scots-Irish and the native Irish.
Re: Oh wait, why would Cromwell have been in power in the first place?
Yes. The reason for the 17th century English republicans dissastisfaction with Charles I were mainly secular. Religious differneces were just the icing on the cake. And Cromwell was an intelligent, capable and charismatic leader with a bent toward fanaticism: perhaps with no Protestantism he would have been a Catholic fanatic, an English Savanarola. As for the Scots Irish, it was King James I who started settling them there, to get reduce poverty in Scotland and create a class of loyal landowners in Ireland, which no English king had yet managed to fully subdue. Even Henry VIII and Elizabeth had failed badly there.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Essentially, Dawkins and Hitchens conflate faith with fideism and argue almost exclusively against pseudo-scientific arguments for design rather than the case Aquinas and the like make for faith. Which amounts to a straw man. Most people don’t believe in God because they believe the universe was designed. Anyone of a materialist bent is likely to write off the stuff about beauty, truth, purpose, mystery, natural law, etc. But this is integral to what “faith” means to believers. Telling people that the flagellum didn’t have to be designed by a creator, therefore God is a delusion… that sort of thing doesn’t compute unless you’re already predisposed to believe it.
That’s some first-class sophistry, but as others have pointed out, it’s *painfully* obvious you’ve never read “The God Delusion”, and haven’t a clue about Dawkins, other than hearsay.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Correction: a lot more than 4 pages are spent on the 5 proofs, because the Argument from Design is a pretty worthwhile target to demolish and sprawls over into the rest of the book. The point is, the “educated” thinkers like Aquinas the writers are supposed to be targeting tend to trot out the same dull arguments.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Who said atheists are overwhelmingly left-wing? I’d wager that a sizable percentage of American atheists voted Republican until that party was hijacked by the Christian Right in the 90s.
Do not conflate a disgust with Republican bigotry with an adherence of traditional left-wing foreign policy positions.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
…what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it.
Ok, let’s get something straight. Atheism has nothing to do with whether you identify with a religious tradition (that’s a consequence of atheism) or whether you construct an atheist identity or go to battle. It is purely determined by whether you believe in God, a god, or gods. Additionally, the New Atheists are not “New.” They’re just atheists. The “New” label is merely an epithet attached by critics and those who would like to delegitimate belief in no-god with resect to agnosticism or belief in God.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Re: Yes. The reason for the 17th century English republicans dissastisfaction with Charles I were mainly secular. Religious differneces were just the icing on the cake. And Cromwell was an intelligent, capable and charismatic leader with a bent toward fanaticism: perhaps with no Protestantism he would have been a Catholic fanatic, an English Savanarola.
JonF,
I very strongly disagree with this. The argument certainly can be made (and Marxists have made it often) that the English revolution was in large part an economic revolution of the rising capitalist bourgeoisie against a post-feudal aristocracy. No doubt there’s some truth to that (though the roots of English capitalism had already been put in place in the time on Henry VIII). But Cromwell would never have become a charismatic leader with the ability to sway masses of people- for good and for ill- without being an ideological fanatic, and in his particular case that ideology was religious. The English revolution happened in large part because the ideals of the revolution- which were religious ideals, and which heavily invoked the books of Daniel and Revelation- were powerful enough to win over the hearts of a great many Englishmen. Cromwell was very much a man who believed he was doing the Lord’s work, and it’s likely that there had been no Luther, there would have been no Cromwell. (Although you never know, maybe Cromwell and his men would have taken their inspiration from Montanus anyway.)
I don’t think there’s much doubt that religion has been the cause of very many social conflicts. The flip side, of course, is Rousseau’s question in his ‘Discource on the Origins of Inequality’: men are more likely to fight over the love of a woman then most other reasons (at least throughout human history, if not in civilized society today). If you did away with romantic love and the pair bond, and we resembled one of the more promiscuous primate species where males compete through ’sperm competition’, you would probably have a good deal of social peace. Would it be worth it? Perhaps the Georgetown swingers would say yes, but most sensible people would say no. Romantic love is analogous to the love of God, as everyone from Dante to Theresa of Avila have told us, and in both cases we see the same truth demonstrated: that inasmuch as evil is the corruption of good, the greater the good the greater the evil that can arise from its corruption and misuse. Now the more intelligent atheists will of course say that the difference between God and your lover is that your lover actually exists, whereas God doesn’t. Religious people like you and me, of course, are unlikely to find this a convincing argument.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I think it’s more productive to argue a positive case for pluralist secularism than to tear down the entire concept of religious belief. Appease the moderates and marginalize the fundamentalists, instead of provoking the whole lot of them. There’s a great deal of visceral appeal to telling everyone that they’re a bunch of silly, superstitious sods who still believe in fairies and unicorns. But it just pisses them off to no greater benefit.
That’s a fine idea if such things are your goal. But some people’s goal is just flat-out debating the existence of God. The effect of your position is to take that debate off the table. People have every right to object to that.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Quote above from LaFollette Progressive @ 72.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
From what I’ve been able to gather, what makes one a “new” or “strident” atheist – no, wait, fundamentalist atheist – is that, aside from arguing that there is no rational basis for belief in supernatural agents, one argues that we would be better people if we didn’t. That seems to be the part that’s unacceptable, no?
Yes. Exactly. Stop evangelicing. It’s obnoxious when the Jehovah’s Witnesses do it, it’s obnoxious when the Mormons do it, and it’s obnoxious when you do it.
No one cares what you believe. Just shut the fuck up. If atheism’s really a rational position, rational people will come around to it on their own. You’re not convincing anyone.
(PS @#88: None taken. I kind of am.
)
July 14th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Convert to New Atheism! Or you will burn in Atheist Hell for all Eternity!!
(Plus you get the added benefit of not coming across as a superstitious ignoramus.)
July 14th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Definitions:
A nonbeliever does not believe there is a god.
An atheist believes there is not a god.
A religious person may or may not believe there is a god, but participates in the activities or some organized religion–many Buddhists and some Jews do not believe in the existence of a god.
An agnostic does not know what he or she believes or doesn’t believe; is uncertain; doesn’t know how everybody else comes up with beliefs in a realm of unprovable tenets and indescribable experience.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
The “fundamentalist evangelical atheist” criticism is stunningly dumb. Rejecting irrationality makes you evangelical? I can’t believe anyone thinks this is clever or insightful.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Believers’ and militant agnostics’ version of polite discourse with those who believe there is not a God:
“Just shut the fuck up.”
-scythia
July 14th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Re: No one cares what you believe. Just shut the fuck up. If atheism’s really a rational position, rational people will come around to it on their own. You’re not convincing anyone.
Why?
Look, I’m perfectly convinced of the exitence of God, of the Trinity, of the holy angels and the demons, of the war between God and the devil, of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the healing miracles of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, the sinless conception and assumption of the Mother of God, transubstantiation, and other articles of the Christian faith. That said, if someone wants to dispute any of these things, why the hell not? Go ahead and make your case. The true threat to the faith isn’t hatred or unbelief, it’s indifference. I’d much rather have a world in which atheism and Christianity are vociferously debated in the public square then one where no one ever talks about these matters in public.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Regardless of whether or not right-wing new atheism is a significant phenomenon, for those of us unbelievers who are more interested in advancing progressive policy than in futile jousting about religion, especially as the latter has distinctly worse prospects than the former, I consider it basically sound strategy to make as much common cause as possible with progressives of whatever religion may be found. Once we say, “Usually religion does poison everything it touches,” we’re trying to operate successfully where we’ve defined the problem so strictly we can’t possibly succeed. I have a hard enough time trying to argue for a decent approach to health care; but if we have to cure everyone of theology before we can improve healthcare — making a really hard problem far more difficult, anybody? Strategically, it just isn’t sensible.
Personally, I argue religion only when severely provoked.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
There’s no such thing.
He happens to have views that one might describe as “hawkish” on some topics, liberal-left on others. Mostly Hitchens just likes to stir the pot.
I wouldn’t call Sam Harris “right-wing” either. True, he thinks he’s smart enough to take on Noam Chomsky, but so does Matt Yglesias. Harris strikes me as within the mainstream of American liberalism, calculatingly positioning himself as pragmatic, but I don’t hang on his every word (he’s the stupidest “new atheist” for sure) and there may be a conservative money quote in his closet. As for Dawkins, on what basis is he judged to have a “right-wing bias”?
I don’t think Yglesias understands what Dawkins is trying to do. In fact, Dawkins himself speaks to this bigoted viewpoint. Everybody speaks forcefully for their own point of view, but when an atheist does it it becomes “illiberal evangelizing.” As opposed to any viewpoint you forcefully express, right Mr. Yglesias?
July 14th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
None of these people do credible work when it comes to philosophy of religion. In fact, it’s laughably bad. (See, e.g. Tom Nagel’s review of _The God Delusion_. See also Alvin Plantinga’s review of the same book.) Dennett, once a pretty good philosopher, has descended to Hitchens/Dawkins-type work. (Compare his philosophy of mind from the 70s (e.g. _Brainstorms_) with the audio of his exchange with Alvin Plantinga at the Central APA last Christmas.)
I wonder why the smartest, most capable (at least philosophically) atheists don’t enter the fray. Maybe it’s because these issues are complex and take much care to get right, and that sort of care doesn’t score points in the gladiator arena.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
@Poptarts
“Religion is rightwing, which is why all of the hardcore Christians are Republicans.”
I think the link between right-wing politics and Christianity is more vexed, and it’s as much an issue of the sociological context in which Evangelical religion arose as it is the content of the religion. This is shown by the many left-wing Christians all over the world (they take the words of Jesus seriously–funny that).
July 14th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
It’s just not so. PZ says.
In fact, it’s more than a little absurd. We all know that reality has a liberal bias, right?
July 14th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Bingo. In fact, it’s one of the last socially acceptable forms of bigotry.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Jamie @89 has a really good comment. Though some of us are in the humanities and side with Sokal. I was wondering when someone would mention the Skeptics Society.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Wonderful that someone came out and called this trend for what it is at last. Among the intelligentsia in America and the UK, it has become reflexive to dismiss anyone with ties to Christianity, in particular, without the slightest effort to distinguish between the many shades of belief or their implications. This is both ill informed and dull; it closes doors on whole ranges of experience, accumulated wisdom, and complexity. The association of this brand of militant atheism with militant positions on the Middle East, in particular, has begun to seem the norm among certain circles, a kind of default position supported by many brilliant minds using that brilliance not to make connections and tease out grey areas but to reduce the meaning of words and values to the lowest common denominator: that of rhetorical manipulation for ends known only to themselves.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Steve S. – read “The End of Liberalism”, linked above. Harris is a neoconservative. He is a shithead, and he is not a leftist.
This is amazingly wrong – which makes the “childish” crack at the end particularly funny. The belief in cultural evolutionism implied here – that “primitive” civilizations share characteristics with the children of “advanced” (white) civilizations, has been definitively challenged in anthropological literature on religion, and is espoused by absolutely nobody working in the field. (It’s also crypto-racist.) The 19th century imperialist ideology that lurks under the surface of much new atheism makes itself evident in these discussions at regular intervals.
On the cracks about the “courtiers” – what PZ Myers fails to understand is any current work on what religion is. I recommend the work of, among others, Talad Asad Genealogies of Religion and Foundations of the Secular, Catherine Bell Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Jonathan Z. Smith’s article “Religion, Religions, Religious”. Current work in theology and religion simply does not view religion as composed of truth claims assented to or dissented from. The people who believe that religion is fully constituted by truth claims assented to or dissented from are the protestant evangelicals of the 20th century. Religion is actually an amalgam of many things, practices, institutions, community formations, political allegiances, as well as various beliefs. Religion is much more something that people do than something that people believe. Dawkins’ theology and theory of religion fail because he believes that he can engage with these topics while discussing only truth claims, and dissenting from them. He has made no effort whatsoever to engage with contemporary work in the field.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
This is very well said.
To be more inflammatory about things (sorry Virgil), it’s also simply a fact that religion doesn’t poison everything – unless your argument is that the civil rights movement was “poisoned” from its roots. (If that is your argument, either you’re an asshole, or you have redefined “poison” in such a way that it’s meaningless.) The claim that religion poisons everything is one of those claims that these supposedly ultra-rational atheists like to make that has no particular material evidence behind it, but makes them feel good.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
No, actually, they are. People’s minds are being changed by the rise in atheist voices. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and all the rest can tell you a dozen stories each of people who have written them letters saying basically “I read your book, and gained the intellectual support for what I suspected all along – there’s no such thing as God. Now I call myself an atheist.” After all we did it your way for generations – where atheists kept silent, often at the risk of their livelihoods or even lives – and the result was the persistence of religion.
It must be something you believe is unique to atheism that you believe it’s so reasonable, people will come to it without being exposed to it in any way. Where else does that work, I wonder? Is there no longer a need to vote Democratic or post on blogs, because liberal ideas are so rational that people will come to them on their own?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I’ve read an article of his which excerpts the basic ideas of the book, and it’s not neoconservatism. Not everything that pisses you off is neoconservatism, you know. In fact, what Harris has to say about these issues is nearly indistinguishable from what Barack Obama might sign his name to.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Pick any four new atheists (say, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris & Dennett)
I defy anyone to find a topic (other than the non-existence of God) where they agree.
The idea that have anything in common on foreign policy is ludicrous.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Not everything he’s written is aggressively neoconservative. however, Sam Harris is quite clearly a neocon shitbag.
Here’s the link again. Enjoy.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
@77:
Oh for fuck’s sake. So are chiropractic and homeopathy.
Since you know nothing about theology why don’t you STFU about it. I’ difficult to be “nice” when people say such goddamn stupid things with such arrogant confidence. (Abd being liked by you appears nowhere on my list of priorities.)
July 14th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
> The claim that religion poisons everything is one of those claims that these supposedly ultra-rational atheists like to make that has no particular material evidence behind it, but makes them feel good.
No. It’s the kind of claim that Hitchens likes to make, taking us back, full circle, to Matt’s and Wright’s observation that you can generalize about New Atheists by listening to Hitchens.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
@107:
FAIL. That review would get a freshman an “F”. Plantinga is an idiot and a thoroughly, pitifully incompetent philosopher and you reveal your own intellectual inadequacy by taking him seriously.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
But the religious do view their religion that way. Your local pastor doesn’t view “God” as a linguistic entity representing cultural truths, or whatever – he views “God” as a real being, to whom supplication can produce manifest results in the real world. And that’s very much what his congregation believes, too. It’s all very well and good that the rarified, insular world of theology has advanced beyond God as Santa Claus; that’s just a function of the fact that the theologians and philosophers and sociologists you mentioned don’t study actual religion, they study their own navel.
Nobody in your entire local church community is having their faith defined for them by Talad Asad. They’re having their faith defined for them by the claims of fact in the Bible, and the claims of their pastor, who tells them that if they pray hard enough and if it’s God’s will (and maybe if they tithe enough), their mother will be cured of cancer.
PZ doesn’t know about any of that work because it’s completely irrelevant. Talad Asad and Johnathan Z. Smith are talking about dye patterns and thread counts of invisible clothes. They’re talking about forms of religion that almost nobody actually practices. That’s the Courtier’s Reply. You don’t need a degree in Invisible Tailoring to see that the Emperor has no clothes!
Why don’t you put down Talad Asad and go talk to some believers? You’ll find out how worthless the “work” you’ve referred to really is.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
@113:
1. I was exposed to a lot of that kind of stuff when I attend Unitarian Universalist churches. It’s content-free doubletalk. Made me long for Aquinas.
2. It also bears no relationship whatsoever to what’s in the minds of 99% of actual religious believers. If you would FUCKING READ DAWKINS’S BOOK, like all the other twits above including Matt who presume to criticize (strawman travesties of) what they know nothing about, you would discover that this is why he specifically disclaims any interest in dealing with the “sophisticated” stuff. He’s concerned with the real fucking world, not a few rarified academic enclaves.
What YOU don’t understand is that you’ve merely repeated the Coutier’s Reply, for the umpteenth time. FAIL.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Kevin – the quote is from poptarts at post #52.
One of the constant features of these debates is that a bunch of more reasonable folks challenge the claim that New Atheists are properly characterized in relation to the more extreme claims of some folks like Hitchens, while at the same time the committed anti-pluralists make those precise same claims, and argue that those extreme claims – about religion as near-universal “poison”, about the (lower) evolutionary status of religious belief, about the desirability of the end of religious pluralism – are in fact correct.
I’m perfectly ok, I should say, with some atheists focusing their critical effort on developing atheist as an identity category and fighting for atheist rights in the public square, and not working heavily in the sort of internal critique against the more unsavory new atheists. I think we can’t all do everything. But I want to (a) put forth what I think is an important critique of certain false, politically dis-enabling, and dangerously imperialist beliefs that risk making atheism unproductive for the left, and (b) point out that these problematic beliefs and allegiances are quite common among atheists, as is made clear regularly through this thread.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Maybe you’d like to ask some gay men or women about how Christian evangelicalism poisoned the civil rights movement.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I think the New Atheist program is founded in the idea that the grovelling ‘respect’ we atheists are expected to show to the religious should be reconsidered. They do not respect us and they seek to diminish our place in the public sphere. They have too much influence. It is a public service to treat them as another self-interested informal political federation and to point out honestly that their ideas are wrong. When they say God intervenes in evolution, they are wrong. They are making materialistic arguments that can be disproven. Prayer has been disproven with regard to healing from disease and injury. It is silly to pretend that they are not wrong out of a misguided sense that the religious are owed more respect than the holders of other equally preposterous notions. also, mockery doesn’t hurt.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
I’ve read God Delusion. It’s a book written by a man who appears to espouse the same anti-intellectualism that you do – he didn’t bother to read contemporary work on religion and theology because he thinks that those people aren’t “real” and he can know about religion in a global sense by thinking that he can have pure and full sociological, anthropological, and psychological knowledge by, well, just thinking that he does. These sorts of knowledges are complicated, and require complicated empirical and theoretical work.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
You have to remember that Dawkins invented memetics and Dennett has written at book length about the mechanisms by which religions change and grow. It would be very natural for them to notice that outside science, rhetorical devices and in-group/out-group dynamics are much better predictors of an idea’s spread than its truth. Then, given that they do think the spread of atheism is a good thing, why not encourage that end in the most effective ways? Which is to say, claims of superior rationality make for good branding.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Div-
Is it, or is it not true, that more than 50% of Americans think the Earth is only 6000 years old? Is it, or is it not the case that they think so only because it’s a truth-claim of their religion?
He’s got a pretty extensive list of sociological sources on the actual phenomenon of religion as practiced by the religious. How is it that you missed all that if you actually read his book?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
@Steve La Bonne 121
I say this as an atheist.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Most contemporary philosophers think that Plantinga’s theism is a bit strange. But he’s one of the most important living philosophers, and if you don’t know that, you simply don’t know contemporary philosophy. He’s the most important philosopher of religion since Hume, one of the 3-5 most important epistemologists alive today, and (along with David Lewis) the most important voice in understanding the metaphysics that underlie the very important developments in modal logic during the last 50 years.
And, he destroys Dawkins’s book in that review, quite apart from his standing in the philosophical world.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
The issue is that the real world is complicated. It’s not a place where things are determined by assent to truth claims, where human behavior can be modeled based on their assent or dissention from a few basic claims. Religious folk engage in shared practices, work in various institutions, practice rituals variously and differently, work for various political goals, and have various beliefs. Taking what they do simply as assent to a belief that you can disprove misses badly what is going on in most everyday religious life.
It is true that some of the real people out there don’t see their belief this way. These people are some of the more conservative protestant evangelicals. If you would like to dispute theology with one limited subsection of religious folk, go ahead, but don’t tell me that you’ve met all of religion in the bargain.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
You realize how emotionally and irrationally you’re behaving right now, right?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Correct. Not everybody you dislike is a neoconservative, though in a simplified world that might be the case.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
127: It’s an observable fact that your precious courtiers aren’t “real” in the specific sense that they represent nobody but their tiny divinity-school coterie.
On the other hand if you actually want to read “contemporary work on religion” that’s valuable and insightful, try (to use one example to stand for a whole field of inquiry) Pascal Boyer. (You’re at least on the right track in mentioning anthropology and sociology, as opposed to theology, which i actually quite worthless for understanding religion in society.)
(Dawkins’s book is not intended as an academic study, and it’s also not directed at people like me. It’s a polemic primarily intended to serve notice that nonbelievers aren’t going to hide quietly in the corner any more, and a primer, and an assurance that they’re not alone, for those beginning to have doubts about their own religious indoctrination. As such it’s actually quite boring to me, but is well adapted to its intended purpose.)
July 14th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
[Plantinga]’s the most important philosopher of religion since Hume
Surely it’s too early to judge his influence, and if you mean the novelty of his ideas, then, ahaha, Nietzsche is ahead of him there.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
In private many are a lot less polite. All he does is recycle obviously fallacious medieval arguments that have been refuted over and over for centuries. And no, there are not a lot of serious philosophers who regard him as a major figure. You need to get out more.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
And you seem to miss what the actual atheist critique of religion is. We don’t care that they work for political goals, practice rituals, work at institutions, or engage in shared practices – because we’re all doing those outside of religion, too. Indeed we hope as atheists that people continue to do those things, and believe that they don’t need religion as an excuse to do so.
It’s the bit where religion makes you believe things on the basis of bad evidence that is the unique downside of faith; indeed, that is the very purpose of faith. Insofar as that area of religion is solely the target of atheist criticism – we don’t care about the bake sales – that’s the only aspect of religion it’s necessary to address. Is that all religion is? Of course not. But that’s the part that is objectionable to atheists. The rest is not truly unique to religion, and will not be lost in religion’s passing.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
@Steve LaBonne
Look, I’m in academia. I’m a philosopher. I’m 10 years off my Ph.D. I know what’s what in my field and my world. And Plantinga’s a huge figure. He has been since _God and Other Minds_, certainly since 1974 in _The Nature of Necessity_.
And that’s my last salvo in this silly exchange. You can believe whatever you want to believe about the guy, and my field, more generally.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Amongst a small coterie of religion-oriented peers, not in analytical philosophy in general. As you very well know (but choose to misrepresent).
July 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
@Nathan Cook.
I think his influence inside academic philosophy of religion is pretty clear. You’re right about Nietzsche, though. In fact, to go further, he certainly has a more widespread influence than Plantinga ever will. But, of course, they have different projects and appeal to different sets of people.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
One more, Steve LaBonne. Have a look at _Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga’s Theory of Knowledge_. Look at the stature of the (non-theistic) contributors there and what they have to say about Plantinga’s epistemology.
Now I’m done.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Heh, they couldn’t even find enough reputable epistemologists to fill a volume without multiple contributions from several of them. To take one with whose work I am rather familiar, van Fraasen’s mystical anti-realism went completely off the deep end quite some time ago (plus he’s a fellow-traveler of Plantiga’s precisely because of his own religious conversion.) Thanks for making my point for me.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Van Fraassen is the most important philosopher of science alive. People like Richard Foley, Earl Conee, Richard Feldman, Bill Lycan, Keith Lehrer, George Pappas, Ernie Sosa are at the forefront of contemporary epistemology. All athiests, btw.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Oh, horseshit. (And I have read quite a bit in the philosophy of science, I’m a scientist with a strong and longstanding avocational interest in it). He’s provocative- which has its place- but thoroughly perverse.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
My only problem with this is that while Hitchens has, I assume, always been an atheist, he hasn’t always been a right-winger. When he first started out he was a solid leftie, and has only moved to the right over the years, primarily I think in reaction to Islamic extremism. So I’m not sure the point entirely applies.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Plantinga, by the way, is also an Intelligent Design apologist. That’s an intellectual disgrace of the first order.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Re: Dawkins’ theology and theory of religion fail because he believes that he can engage with these topics while discussing only truth claims, and dissenting from them
DivGuy,
While I appreciate your attempts at support, you’re wrong here. Christianity (to speak of just one religion) is absolutely about a set of truth claims. Dawkins and Hitchens are dead right about this. It stands or falls on whether Christ was really, truly divine, eternally begotten by the Father before all the ages; whether He was really born of a perpetual virgin, multiplied loaves and fishes, healed lepers and raised the dead; whether he was really tempted by a real Devil in a real wilderness, and whether he rose from the dead on Easter Day. As the Apostle said, if Christ has not risen then our faith is in vain, and is utterly worthless and deserving of mockery and ridicule.
Now of course I believe that the orthodox account of Christ given in the Gospels and the Creeds is correct, and that Dawkins and Hitchens are wrong, but they are right in that this is very much a matter of literal truths.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
This premise is almost too thin to even legitimize with a comment.
Dawkins is most assuredly not “right-wing” and Yglesias’ double-talk explanation is as unpersuasive as it is unintelligible.
Hitchens is also most assuredly not “right-wing”. His fascination with imperialism has a definitive Stalinist bent. His belief in the welfare state is as devout as his glee in military expansionism. He’s as right-wing as Trotsky.
Sam Harris is the only genuine right-winger of the bunch. Harris could even be accurately described as a fascist. It is unlikely that Harris will ever have much sway outside so-called “libertarian” circles–and his irregular moral compass guarantees that he will be remembered in sentences and forgotten in paragraphs.
I’m curious why Bill Maher is not included in this discussion, especially given how the reach of his TV show and his film far exceed the popular influence of all three authors combined. I would love to hear how Maher qualifies as a right-winger.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Plantinga isn’t an ID proponent. As he put it, “I believe intelligent design, not Intelligent Design.”
And by your own admission, you’re not an academic philosopher. As I said before, you have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to the sociology of another academic discipline.
@hambuggery Yes, I was going to mention Bill Maher, but got distracted with this other discussion.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:45 am
More bullshit. He has gone so far as to attack the Dover decision on the ground that the judge was wrong to conclude that Intelligent Design, Capital I Capital D, is not science. His name figures constantly in Discovery Institute propaganda and I am unaware that he has ever objected to this.
Really, your intellectual dishonesty, like Plantinga’s, is becoming very tiresome. I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing aside from embarrassing yourself.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:58 am
There no such thing as “new atheist” and Dawkins is not a rightwing hawk. That’s BS.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:05 am
RE: Steve LaBonne @#119
I find it pretty richly fucking amusing to be informed that I’ve been writing stupid things with “arrogant confidence” by the person who attempted to rebut a book review by saying “Fail! That review would get a Freshman an F!”
It’s also pretty amusing to be informed by sim that Dawkins “disposed of” the entire works of Thomas Aquinas in four pages and I obviously haven’t read the God Delusion because I noted that Dawkins doesn’t substantively address Aquinas in it. The sad thing is you probably think you scored some sort of point with that comment.
I’m just going to reiterate what I said earlier. Have you ever, in the course of your own professional life, run into people who have a Freshman-level understanding of your field, but presume to tell you why think you’re wrong about everything? As a biologist, I get that all the fucking time from religious fundamentalists. It doesn’t come off any less smug or anti-intellectual when atheists return the favor.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:07 am
P.S. A fellow of the late and unlamented ISCID (a “distinction” which Plantinga shared with the likes of Dembski, Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, Jonathan Wells, and other such “luminaries”) is by definition an Intelligent Design advocate, as well as being thereby discredited as an intellectual to be taken seriously.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:10 am
That’s an entirely accurate description of the truly abysmal quality of that review.
Also as a biologist, I get it from moronic accomodationists like you.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:11 am
The difference is that biology is a legitimate effort with rigor and intellectual honesty, and theology is not. Again, you don’t need a PhD in Invisible Tailoring to see that the Emperor wears no clothes. The truth of the matter is that proving the existence of God is not something theologians ever even attempt to do, despite the fact that their entire field would be obviated by God not actually existing.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:41 am
religion makes you believe things on the basis of bad evidence
So do political identification. And love. And culture. And social milieu. And television. And political rhetoric. And sports fandom. And a million other things that can’t conceivably be done away with because they’re inherent parts of human cognition. If you dispute this, you do nothing but evince a staggering ignorance of human psychology. If you think it can be changed, you are, to borrow Richard Dawkins’ favorite word, flatly delusional.
Nobody is 100% rational or correct about everything. Not you. Not me. Not Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris. No one. I’m not a religious believer, but I’m not going to claim that I’m somehow more rational or better or more moral as a result because I don’t believe in things that religious people do, just because they believe in those things on the basis of a suspect rationale. It’s extremely likely that I believe in many things I believe in on the basis of a suspect rationale as well, and I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to claim otherwise. I am a human being, and human beings have a fundamental and inescapable proneness to irrationality.
The idea that society can be cleansed of religion and aberrant ideology and falsehood if people just scream loudly enough is, I think, self-evidently wrong. I also think that making the elimination of religion a political goal is extraordinarily dangerous. History has conclusively demonstrated that actively anti-theistic (as opposed to secular) ideologies are no less prone than explicitly religious ones to doing abominable things when they gain power. The Jacopins, the Soviet Communist Party, the Khmer Rouge all thought they were going to create a utopia on earth by moving humanity to a more rational state of existence, doing away with all the old superstitions in the process. And they killed hundreds of millions of people and stomped on the freedoms of billions to do so. That of course doesn’t mean that atheists are inherently evil people – though I don’t claim the label for myself a lot of people would call me an atheist. But pardon me if I don’t decide that a live-and-let-live, pluralistic secularism that lets my neighbor go to church on Sunday while I listen to jazz records is a much better system under which to live. And pardon me if I tell loud, self-righteous blowhards like Hitchens who claim to be sticking up for me as an irreligious person when they attack peaceful co-existence with religious folks as “not good enough” to put a sock in it.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:03 am
True, but when people believe things on the basis of bad evidence because of love, or because their culture said to, or because the TV said to, they’re rightly and justly derided, mocked, and educated.
But for some reason, when it comes to religion telling people to believe things on the basis of bad evidence, that’s celebrated. We call it “faith” and assert that only bad, evil people don’t do it.
As an atheist, I’m simply saying – let’s stop treating religion differently.
Nobody is 100% rational or correct about everything.
Nobody’s saying they have to be, or that they ever will. Let’s just stop celebrating when it happens as a result of religion. You really think that’s impossible? How can it be, when people are already doing it?
I’m not a religious believer
Oh, I see. You meant “an inherent part of human cognition”, except for you. Well, that’s certainly not a claim of superiority! Nope, not at all!
July 15th, 2009 at 2:14 am
Hooray! I’m an “accomodationist”! Could you throw in a “self-hating atheist” insult, just to complete your blissfully irony-free descent into sectarianism?
“The truth of the matter is that proving the existence of God is not something theologians ever even attempt to do…” Um… what? They’ve spilled more ink on that subject than any other, dating back at least to Augustine. That’s a perfectly nonsensical thing to say about theologians.
The thing is, most atheists I know are people who have adopted a rigorously empiricist epistemology, which I think is generally a good thing. The problem is that some can’t seem to accept that this is not a self-evident vantage point for most of their fellow human beings.
Many people have faith that justice will ultimately be meted out to the bad and the good and grandma is in a better place now after shuffling off her mortal coil. It’s one thing to convince them, with very solid evidence, that the Biblical creation story is a myth. It’s another thing entirely to convince them that everything we value about our human existence is a freak coincidence stemming from a very lucky set of conditions in a superheated gas cloud 15-odd billion years ago. I don’t believe in God. But I believe people ought to have the humility to admit that we live in one hell of a coincidence, and there’s an awful lot we don’t know.
People see order and complexity, and they not unreasonably assume design and purpose. Telling them that this assumption is disproved by a set of calculations and experimental results that neither one of you fully understands, and therefore grandma is not in heaven, and then making fun of them for not seeing it your way, is only going to impress people who already agree with you.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:35 am
LaFollette,
“People see order and complexity, and they not unreasonably assume design and purpose.”
People see affirmative action, and they assume racism. They see abortion, and they assume murder (or at least, ickiness). They see taxes, and they assume theft. There are plenty of common-sense assumptions like that—hell, I’ve held a few in my time, when I was much younger—and while I now disagree with those positions for what I think are good reasons, I certainly would not mock someone, or think them stupid, for holding a belief like that. Same with a belief in God.
However, when someone attempts to change public policy based on these beliefs, they lose the protection from my strong disagreement. And when someone says I should keep my disagreement to myself because the belief is sincerely held, or because it’s a common-sense belief, or because there’s a long intellectual tradition supporting it, l don’t see any reason I should honor that.
I can’t think of another set of beliefs that progressives say should not be criticized, even though they (the progressives) don’t hold them. Not racism, not laissez-faire conservatism; just religious beliefs and their corollaries.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:37 am
“The idea that society can be cleansed of religion and aberrant ideology and falsehood if people just scream loudly enough is, I think, self-evidently wrong.”
You’re right. Which should have been your first clue that no one is claiming anything within a thousand miles of this.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:23 am
@Steve LaBonne
Plantinga merely rebutted the judge’s (philosophical) reasoning. He did not argue that ID was correct in that piece.
And of course, I’m sure that even you know that arguing that a series of propositions don’t entail a particular conclusion isn’t tantamount to denying the conclusion.
Even if he had, though, it wouldn’t change the fact that he (and Peter van Inwagen and William Alston) and a number of other pretty serious Christians are philosophical heavy hitters.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:03 am
tomemos — “And when someone says I should keep my disagreement to myself… I can’t think of another set of beliefs that progressives say should not be criticized… Not racism, not laissez-faire conservatism; just religious beliefs and their corollaries.”
This type of sentiment is common in this thread… but with one possible exception I don’t see anyone saying that religion should be immune from criticism, or that atheists should keep quiet about their beliefs.
I think creationism and the “Christian Nation” bullshit should be fought at every turn. And I’m happy to see atheists publicly pronounce their lack of faith. But I can’t imagine how it serves any public good to tell 70% of Americans that you think they’re stupid and/or crazy regardless of their opinion on the relevant aspects of public policy.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:12 am
@tomemos/LaFollette
I think there’s no need to go on the offensive save for potentially dangerous beliefs. But many in the New Atheist crowd believe this, too. It’s just that they think all religious belief is dangerous. I think LaFollette and I and many others think that a great deal of religious belief is innocuous. But the Christian Nation stuff is dangerous and should be attacked. (As should beliefs involving the teaching of ID in classrooms, for whatever that’s worth.)
July 15th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Wow.
(Note: Please excuse my comment’s length and relative incoherence. The preceding debate covers far, far more important branches of human investigation and discourse than anyone could possibly address or, frankly, be even remotely close to competency within. It involves strong feelings and social affiliations. It is a mess. My contribution follows this precedent.)
This is probably banal, but, as an atheist, discovering that an educated and rational atheist can be just as much a huge asshole in exactly the same way as the fundamentalist Christians that have so often plagued my life was a crucial moment in my developing worldview about religion, belief, and social affiliation. These arguments are not about what they’re ostensibly about. They’re about other things.
First and foremost, for American atheists, the argument is about cultural repression and the anger and resentment that causes. If you don’t understand that many outspoken atheists are intolerant as a result of suffering from ubiquitous intolerance, then you have missed a crucial aspect of this debate.
Secondly, there are multiple paths by which people will come to strongly identify as “atheist” (as opposed to being merely a “nonbeliever”). Insofar as Wright’s and Yglesias’s notion is correct (and I think it largely is not), it’s because there’s a libertarian/Randian version of the outspoken atheist, and they’re best described as right-wing. However, Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins are not among this group. Still, it exists.
Another path to atheism are via a strong affiliation with science and empiricism—that’s how I got here. But this group shares some unfortunate traits with the Randroids—it is philosophically sophomoric. These folk are typically naive and ignorant but aren’t aware of it. Not all: as wrong and as repellingly arrogant as the above Steve LaBonne is, he nevertheless obviously is more knowledgeable on the topic than most of his fellow travelers. Even so, he’s still sophomoric, willfully ignoring that he is not an authority on the topic. Which says something about those with an even more paltry command of the relevant subjects.
Both examples above have an affiliation that is stronger than the cultural/philosophical one they share on the topic of religious belief: they are on the “science” side of the science/humanities wars. There are atheists on both sides, of course. But the real philosophical divide here is about absolutism versus relativism. Those on the science side tend to an absolutism. They are naive believers in Truth, as revealed by Reason and Science. (This once described myself; and describes me still as a practical, not philosophical, matter.) And in this we see the underlying psychological distinction: it’s the distinction between certainty and doubt. It’s ironic, the loudest atheist scientists are often skeptics, loudly claiming their devotion to doubt yet, in practice, they experience very little doubt (outside the technical expression of their vocation). I call myself a skeptic. But there’s a fine line there somewhere between pure skepticism and skepticism utilized as a weapon against opposed belief. And isn’t this the same division which exists between atheism as a lack of a belief in a God and atheism as an affirmative belief in the non-existence of God?
We atheists constantly carefully parse this distinction with theists, who are utterly blind to the distinction. And, within our ranks, we parse it yet again. Nominally, the party line is that atheism is the former and not the latter. In practice, there’s a culture division in atheism on this matter.
Xeynon’s comment above was among the most insightful in this thread. While I make a very strong effort to be rational, empirical, and skeptical; I’ve also come to have so little faith in an individual human’s rationality that I think that I, or anyone like myself, is perhaps only slightly more rational at the margin. I have little confidence in making large distinctions between myself and, say, a theist in this regard.
All this argument really results from the fact that atheism is no different from all the other cultural categorical divisions which we popularly imagine, wrongly, indicate essential and uniform differences. Atheist or theist, contrary to either Yglesias or LaBonne, do not indicate some deep and essential character traits coupled with worldview that exists in everyone for whom the terms can be applied. The most rational and scientific atheist can be as narrow-minded as the most irrational and metaphysical fundamentalist theist. The most irrational and metaphysical fundamentalist theist can be as broad-minded as the most rational and scientific atheist. These traits are not causally related, as so many believe. Conservatives can be gentle, kind, and forgiving; liberals can be harsh, cruel, and judgmental. The world, and especially people, are complex.
Yglesias is being no more rigorous and fair in this discussion than anyone is (and basically no one is). He seems to be responding to a certain type of obnoxious atheist with whom he’s had experience. That’s the only kind of atheist which exists for him. In this, he’s no different than many atheists with regard to theist. These are stereotypes; and, like all stereotypes, they are about as accurate and unfair in equal measure. That is to say, they are very dangerous and lead to more confusion rather than less. Not unlike naive scientism—which did, you know, bring us things like phrenology and modern racism.
A more recent Yglesias post led me to read some very interesting excerpts—from a book looking at political theory in science-fiction—discussing the inherent tension in Ian M Banks’s Culture novels between his imagined liberal utopia value of diversity and tolerance and its implicit absolutist rational liberalism. That is to say, The Culture is tolerant of everything rationally liberal but verges on the aggressively intolerant of its own version of the “Other”. This is the paradox of liberalism and it is involved in this debate, as well.
I think that you might compare this argument—about what kinds of people atheists are—to arguing about what kinds of people the individuals of the Culture are. When confronted with the aggressive, technologically equal, expansionist and theocratic Idirans—who, importantly, had not attacked the Culture itself—the Culture was divided. Most decided to support a war against the Idirans. A portion found this repugnant and seceded. All quite certainly agreed upon the Culture’s rational liberal ideals. Yet, here, there was deep disagreement. And the disagreement, really, was whether these ideals are universal, or cultural. And that is a very deep disagreement.
Cutting this even more finely, I’d also argue that even when some of us agree, ostensibly, that these ideals are universal—when push comes to shove, we find large differences of opinion about how sure we are and how confounding other factors become when attempting to impose these ideals on others (or even merely proselytize them). I, for one, am not so certain about them and am even less certain about imposing them upon others. Others are much more certain. And these differences, though nominally about variations in doubt, seem to reach deep into temperament. They appear, anyway, to say things to us about character. I mistrust people who are so certain as to be willing to impose their beliefs on others, even those who are merely certain enough to proselytize their beliefs to others. And they, no doubt, mistrust me for my hesitation.
Are these differences which can be resolved rationally? Well, sadly, we’ll disagree about that, as well.
This conflict exists in theism and has been rationally and more deeply discussed throughout human history. It is an incredible and, frankly, ignorant hubris of contemporary atheists to believe that they are the first and best of those who have grappled with the nature of Truth. But they are certainly only among the most recent of those to make this mistake. Arrogance and intolerance come easily to the intelligent and educated.
July 15th, 2009 at 6:32 am
@ Keith M Ellis:
Here’s a theist who is skeptical in your sense of the word:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ctwR21sCzIQC&printsec=front_cover
July 15th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I would associate the “new atheism” more closely with libertarianism than with what is typically called conservatism. Hitchens, Dawkins, et al are certainly not speaking in support of social conservatism, the basis of which is almost completely derived from religion.
And it makes sense; to an atheist, the universe is simply a framework of pre-existing conditions allowing for the flourishing of life by an evolutionary process. In other words, it is essentially a biological free market. The basis of evolution is free will and competition. It’s no surprise that those of us who believe in it might also believe that the same environment of free will and competition can be successfully employed in areas other than biology.
So yeah, these guys might be considered “Hawks”, but their positions are easily explained in terms of their metaphysical philosophies.
July 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
True, but when people believe things on the basis of bad evidence because of love, or because their culture said to, or because the TV said to, they’re rightly and justly derided, mocked, and educated.
So you’re telling me that you go around deriding, mocking, and “educating” people you meet who think they’ve found the person to spend the rest of their life with in their new mate, or that freedom of the press is necessary for a healthy society, or that an electric guitar solo sounds better than sitar music, or that it’s rude not to look someone in the eye when you speak to them, or that the Boston Red Sox are more fun to cheer for than the NY Yankees? Somehow I doubt that that’s the case, but if it is – my oh my, are you an asshole.
But for some reason, when it comes to religion telling people to believe things on the basis of bad evidence, that’s celebrated. We call it “faith” and assert that only bad, evil people don’t do it.
As an atheist, I’m simply saying – let’s stop treating religion differently.
Do you really think it’s being treated differently? I see a pretty vigorous public debate on the pluses and minuses of faith underway whenever I look around the public square. And with Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. having such prominent soapboxes I hardly think it’s fair to say that militant atheism isn’t represented in the marketplace of ideas. What you really object to, it seems, is that it doesn’t have more currency than it does – sorry, but just because you think your ideas on a given subject are correct does not obligate other people to agree with you.
I’ve occasionally been criticized for a lack of faith, but for the most part, religious people I’ve met have been pretty tolerant. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I’m not a confrontational person by nature, or perhaps due to the part of the country in which I grew up (a rather liberal, secular one in which even the evangelicals had nonreligious friends), but I’ve just never experienced this widespread hostility to nonbelief of which you speak. On the few occasions I have run into those sorts of people, I’ve shrugged it off. Whatever you believe, or don’t believe, somebody somewhere is going to criticize you for it – why have a thin skin about that?
You really think that’s impossible? How can it be, when people are already doing it?
Because while it may be possible for you or me, it’s obviously not possible for a huge number of people. To make an analogy – it’s possible for some people to enjoy eating liver – supermarkets stock it and people buy it. It’s not possible for others. To me, it tastes like shoe rubber boiled in motor oil. I’m not about to go around telling people they’re deluded idiots for liking liver though. It’s their preference. For me to deny the validity of that preference is for me to do violence to their dignity as human beings. As long as someone’s religious beliefs are benign or largely so (and I happen to think that the case with the vast majority of religious people I’ve encountered in my life), I have no real leg to stand on in criticizing them. Yes, what they believe is irrational (and many religious people are perfectly cognizant of the fact), but so long as it fails to harm them or those around them, it’s no worse than my irrational distaste for certain bovine internal organs.
Oh, I see. You meant “an inherent part of human cognition”, except for you. Well, that’s certainly not a claim of superiority! Nope, not at all!
I said that IRRATIONALITY is an inherent part of human cognition, not religious belief per se. If you’re going to misrepresent my position, at least understand it first. And yes, the former is a part of me, even if the latter is not.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:13 am
You’re right. Which should have been your first clue that no one is claiming anything within a thousand miles of this.
Oh, I don’t know about that. It certainly seems to be the assumption underlying a lot of what the more militant on the atheistic side of the argument here are saying.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:52 am
At one time, people thought that gay pride parades were about convincing or “recruiting” straight people, too. A lot of people’s feelings were, “I don’t care what they do, but can’t they keep it in the privacy of their own home?” Flamboyant displays, it was said, would disgust and alienate people and make them unsympathetic to the cause. Of course, they were wrong: after the initial shock to the system, these displays made people more aware of and accustomed to the gay community that lived, it turned out, all around them.
The level of repression is not equal—obviously gays were and are harassed much more commonly and thoroughly than atheists—but it is comparable, particularly in the Bible Belt. Atheists want atheism not to be seen as weird or freakish, and we think we can get that by “coming out of the closet,” rigorously defending our ideas, and encouraging other people who feel the same way to come out as well. Obviously, in the process, some people will be obnoxious, as there are obnoxious people in every movement. But if you perceive the entire movement as “screaming” and “telling people they’re stupid,” that has a lot more to do with how religion and atheism are viewed in this country than with what the atheists are actually doing.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I hope I don’t presume too much to answer for Chet: if there were movements in place to teach the superiority of the Red Sox in school, or to recognize two soul mates’ anniversary as a national holiday, or if a politician couldn’t get elected to high office in this country without believing that an electric guitar solo sounds better than sitar music—then we would be dealing with a comparable situation, and you would have a better sense of why the atheists feel it’s worth publicly defending atheism as a rational and viable position. The problem with religion isn’t that it’s irrational, the problem is that it’s an irrational position whose adherents are by and large taught that it’s pure and unquestionable truth.
(Your “freedom of the press” example is just bizarre, by the way. That’s a rational position that we can agree or disagree with based on empirical examples. It has nothing to do with “Yankees suck” or “When we die, our souls go to Heaven or Hell.”)
July 15th, 2009 at 11:04 am
It’s a book written by a man who appears to espouse the same anti-intellectualism that you do – he didn’t bother to read contemporary work on religion and theology because he thinks that those people aren’t “real” and he can know about religion in a global sense by thinking that he can have pure and full sociological, anthropological, and psychological knowledge by, well, just thinking that he does. These sorts of knowledges are complicated, and require complicated empirical and theoretical work.
More exquisite scholasticism. V. entertaining, thanks!
July 15th, 2009 at 11:31 am
I certainly attempt to correct my friend, who, out of love, believes that this time she won’t cheat on him with her ex again; or my co-worker, who saw magnetic bracelets on TV and thinks that they’ll cost a lot less and be just as effective as her arthritis medication; or my neighbor who believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Because they believe those things on the basis of bad evidence. And I suspect you do exactly the same thing. After all, aren’t you trying to do it to me right now?
Abso-fucking-lutely I do. I don’t see how it can be denied. I don’t see a rigorous public debate on the merits of faith – I see a culture that has simply assumed that faith is a necessary requirement to being a good person. Why, the biggest deal in atheism in the past year was Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, where he merely indicated that atheists could be good Americans, too. An incredibly rare admission from an American politician. In the meantime, you can see just in this thread that the debate isn’t about whether or not faith is good – it’s about whether or not atheists should be allowed to speak at all.
I don’t have a thin skin about it. I’m kind of wondering why you do, and why the religious seem to.
You just don’t have any basis for that opinion. In America people change religions more than they change political parties. And remember, nobody is born with religion. Or consider the example of Santa Claus – a fully-fledged religion for children, believed fervently by pretty much all of them.
But somehow nobody enters adulthood still believing in Santa Claus. It doesn’t take re-education camps or “illiberal imposition” of any kind. It is possible to disabuse pretty much everybody of their religion – we just have to have a culture that recognizes that there’s no good reason to be religious.
Then you’re grappling with a strawman. No atheist thinks we’re going to defeat human irrationality. But people can be talked out of their desire to celebrate irrationality. We do it with Santa Claus to pretty much every man and woman in our society; there’s no reason we can’t do exactly the same to Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, which are just Santa Claus for grown-ups.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Oh, we’re “militant” – because we’re speaking! (Never mind that militant religiosity means terrorism, suicide bombs, and dead children – apparently an atheist writing a book or posting on a blog is just as bad.)
Boy, that never gets old. But thanks for revealing yourself as someone who can’t possibly be taken seriously on this subject.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Just a point of history. Cromwell didn’t start the Ulster Plantation, that was started in 1606.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster
He and the civil wars were very important to the history of the Ulster Plantation and Northern Ireland, but to say that he is required for the existence of it is incorrect.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
But if you perceive the entire movement as “screaming” and “telling people they’re stupid”…
Just to be clear: I don’t perceive the entire movement that way. I see a movement full of otherwise good, decent, smart people that aggressively defends writers who refer to religion as a “delusion” or a “sickness” and don’t seem to care that they’re alienating people who might otherwise be supportive of making our society more secular and improving science education. I’m far more interested in the latter goals than in promoting my own beliefs, or lack thereof.
The analogy to the gay pride movement is a fair one, but it cuts both ways. A comparable Atheist Pride movement would probably not be going around talking about how “heterosexuality poisons everything.”
July 15th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
You’re not arguing in good faith. Militant is often not used literally and you are aware of this. Worse, Xeynon wrote “what the more militant on the atheistic side of the argument here” by which he clearly meant a tendency.
Yours is one of several examples of commenters here being far more aggressive than those with whom they are arguing. Every one of you are atheists who treat the atheists with whom you are arguing as if they were theists. I think this is revealing. You are intolerant and narrow-minded. You aren’t arguing in good faith, you are looking for opportunities to distort and ridicule. You deride entire domains of human knowledge as wrong, stupid, and irrelevant. You are a mirror to your enemies.
Most of my fellow atheists I’ve known are not like your lot. You seem to be over-represented on the Internet, quite a bit like how Objectivists and Libertarians are over-represented. All three groups are very similar sorts of people. All three are sophomoric assholes who think they’re competent where they have no training because they can’t even imagine that many people before them have thought long and deeply about these matters. Their epistemologies are infantile and in this way they are as laughable as the theist epistemologies they attack. Listening to you strident ‘net atheists talk about theology is exactly like listening to strident ‘net Randroids talk about philosophy. You’re arrogant children who know only enough to be dangerous to yourselves and others.
Dawkins is one of my favorite scientists and public intellectuals (so is Dennett). But it is always an intellectual embarrassment when a scientist takes himself so seriously as a “public intellectual” that he begins writing popular works on subjects outside his expertise. (At least Dennett is a philosopher and almost certainly has some professional training in moral philosophy, theology, epistemology, and their histories.) Your average hubristic scientist wrongly thinks he/she is a philosopher of science and an epistemologist in exactly the same respect as a chef wrongly imagines himself to be a chemist. It would be laughable if it weren’t so pernicious.
I’m all for a higher public profile of atheists in the US. We’re a variously (mostly mildly, sometimes not so mildly) oppressed minority here and we need to be more socially empowered. In such social movements, there are always a hostile and angry core who, sadly, often do as much damage to their cause as good.
This is not about moderation—I’m certainly not “moderate” in my atheism with regard to my belief itself. What this is, is about toleration of those who are different, those who belief differently. Tolerance doesn’t require that one accept a conflicting belief, it doesn’t require that one refrain from judging a conflicting belief. What it does require is that one treats those with different beliefs and lifestyles assuming the same good-will and intellectual competency as one assumes for oneself. Intolerance is being certain that one is “right” because one is virtuous; and those who are wrong, are wrong because they lack virtue. Theists typically believe that atheists necessarily lack moral virtue. But many atheists similarly take it for granted that theists lack intellectual virtue and, worse, some of them argue that this leads directly to a lack of moral virtue. In this sense, this sort of atheist is recapitulating the religious intolerance to which he loudly objects, merely in a different guise. It is wrong to claim that because the abstract belief system related to atheism is qualitatively distinct that the two cannot be compared. It is wrong because both as a psychological and practical matter, the two are far more alike than different. And this is why I can share, probably almost without any distinctions at all, the same view of reality as strident atheists and yet they are as divided from me across a chasm of human behavior and psychology as is Pat Robertson.
Abstracted beliefs about the nature of reality are psychologically shallow. They mean little, and signify little.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
From the Terry Eagleton review in TLRB:
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right.”
At first glance, it’s difficult to tell if he’s making an argument in earnest, or just plagiarizing PZ Meyers.
An astrologer can even make the argument that critics of astrology are ignoring all this wonderful sophistication. Which is the sort of argument that the Courtier’s Reply is directed at. In effect, don’t brag about what a wonderful theoretical superstructure you have; show that your subject matter is real.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
One last link that speaks to those Dawkins critics who criticize him for not engaging in the argument of just how many angels will dance on the head of a pin:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2006/12/orr_on_dawkins.php
July 15th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Richard Dawkins does not have hawkish foreign policy views. He has written many letters to The Independent newspaper (London) criticizing the invasion of Iraq, and he has often expressed his contempt for George W. Bush. I worked on The Independent OpEd pages for many years, and I know Dawkins. He is not right-wing in any policy matters (foreign or domestic) to my knowledge.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Does it strike anyone else as odd that we are thousands of years — not a few years, not a few dozen years, THOUSANDS of years — into the theological project, and we’re still not past the “does the fucking thing really exist” stage?
July 15th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
“Yours is one of several examples of commenters here being far more aggressive than those with whom they are arguing.”
Arguments about who’s been meaner or more unreasonable are usually a mug’s game (and the first step in the death of a thread). But this is worth taking up. Did this argument not start with the following claimfrom Yglesias?
Then LaFollette said of the same group, “They tend to come off a bit like the creationists who try to disprove evolution with a butchered reading of the second law of thermodynamics.”
So some people responded strongly to being compared to the very group they’re fighting against, just like pro-choicers object to being compared to the religious right, or like Zionists object to being compared to you-know-who. To which objection LaFollette said:
“Jesus. This is why people don’t like the “new atheists”. Touchy little bastards.”
And Scythia added, calmly:
So, no, I don’t agree that the people we’re arguing with have not been aggressive. But more to the point, as Chet has asked, why is there all this whining about atheists’ tone, when there simply isn’t any whining regarding the tone of other groups?
I mean, this is Yglesias’s blog we’re talking about, right? Everybody swears, everybody insults each other. No one ever complains that “yes, Krauthammer is wrong, but calling him stupid will scare off potential allies and is disrespectful to the tradition of conservatism!” But when atheists say that we believe what we believe, and we hope other people will join us in that, other people–invariably other atheists!–respond with, “But why are you so strident! Why don’t you see the benefit of this belief system which I don’t share!”
That’s one of the main goals of the atheist movement: to eliminate the idea that stating our beliefs is somehow offensive, unnecessary, or beyond the pale.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
It’s astonishing to me just how willfully ignorant this argument both appears and actually is yet those utilizing it imagine themselves to have taken the intellectual high road.
First and foremost, the strident atheists here are primarily and repeatedly making a utilitarian argument against theism. Given this, the truth value of its central argument is not determinative. And, in particular, with regard to the implicit argument in the quote above, the subject matter of theology is emphatically real because in this regard all the innumerable arguments these atheists are dismissing and in ignorance of are addressing the atheists’ central claim that theism is bad for people.
This intellectual incoherence reveals the lie that is these atheists’ presumption of rational superiority. An analogy might be if the subject was “hope”. Suppose that a group of people determined that hope was irrational and caused people to behave in ways that made the world a worse place than it otherwise would be. They are therefore outspoken against hope. In response, a cadre of social scientists (including even some who agree that hope is irrational and leads to negative outcomes!) responds that this is a complex matter, there is a huge body of social science research and thought attempting to grapple with this, and these strident anti-hope proponents are not sufficiently qualified to make such sweeping judgments on these matters when they are ignorant of the relevant intellectual corpus. And how do the anti-hope brigade respond? Well, they say, being that hope is irrational, then all that discussion about it is superfluous.
This is obviously nonsense. But the anti-hope brigade is sophomoric even outside the context of utility. They’ve very simplistically determined exactly what “hope” is while social scientists and psychologists, in attempting to rigorously determine its nature, have found that it is a complex phenomenon. No, say the anti-hope brigade, it is exactly what we say it is and by that definition, it is self-evidently absurd.
Who are the anti-intellectuals—indeed, even the anti-empiricists!—in this picture?
God does not have to exist for a belief in God to be socially or psychological useful. Religion is not simply the belief in a God. To critique religion without having a facility in the scholarship of religion is to be incompetent. To argue that because no one has proven God exists therefore there can be no valid religious scholarship is to move beyond incompetency into idiocy.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
But that’s exactly what religion, and covering for religion, and accommodation of religion strike at – the capacity of people to act in good faith, with good will, and with intellectual competency.
That’s the whole point. That’s the harm of religion.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Well, no. We’re rebutting utilitarian arguments for theism, which themselves are a response to the unanswerable critique of religion by atheists that religion is simply false.
You’ve gotten the topography of the debate precisely backwards, Keith. Or perhaps you’re misrepresenting it. The foremost atheist critique of religion is that it takes as true things that are obviously false. Since accomodating atheists can’t rebut this point, they turn to arguments like “you can’t ignore the social good of religion, even if it’s false – well, the social good to everyone but me, I mean. I mean I’m too smart to fall for it, but what about all those other rubes? Those poor dumb masses need their opiate.”
Ignoring for a moment the incredible arrogance and self-centeredness of that claim – offered, of course, at the exact same time that my side is being accused of delusions of superiority – the rebuttal is that religion is not a social good, never has been. And, of course, contrary to people like you Xeynon, my side makes no claims of superiority except a superiority of accuracy on one crucial point (the existence of God.) Where’s the arrogance in saying “I’ve come to a more correct position about the existence of God – and you can, too“? Remember, it’s your side that says the debate is hopeless, religion will always be here to stay because people are just too damn dumb to give it up.
How is that not absolutely the most arrogant position taken in this thread?
July 15th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea how it’s being used, or what it’s intended to mean, since the derisive “militant” label is always applied to any atheist who speaks publicly about atheism in any voice higher than a whisper, and in any tone less than one perfectly obsequious to the concerns and feelings of the religious.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Your argument is tautological. It’s I am not being aggressive, therefore the claim that I’m being aggressive is itself inherently aggressive and thus you are the aggressor and I am merely the defender. It only works if you assume what you prove. If you don’t, as I don’t agree that you’re not actually being aggressive, then it fails as a defense of your behavior.
Here, or in the context of the rest of society? Those are two very different things and it’s dishonest to conflate them.
In the context of US (or anglophone, perhaps) culture, the reason is just what you suppose: ours is the minority and very popularly disliked view. It’s therefore scrutinized with extreme negative prejudice. It’s similar to how racists are extremely sensitive to anti-white bigotry and whine about it incessantly.
But within the context of this thread, and elsewhere where atheists themselves are critical of strident atheism…that’s a very different matter. Some of us are very resistant to responding to hate with hate, intolerance with intolerance. You are free to argue that we’re too sensitive and we tend to see it where it doesn’t exist. Just don’t attempt to argue that A) it doesn’t happen or that atheism is immune to it; or B) it’s really about “self-hate” or somesuch convenient argument of delegitimatizing a differing point-of-view.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
But that’s a trivial critique that is also true of a bazillion other things that people like you (and I) hardly care about. It’s true of ESP, alien visitation, and astrology. It’s true of peoples’ belief that “nature abhors a vacuum”. It’s true of peoples’ belief that glass flows as a liquid. To the degree to which anyone, ever, writes an angry book about any of these things, it’s because he/she is convinced that bad things follow from these wrong beliefs. Therefore, that it’s false is not the foremost critique of religion, assuming “foremost” means “most essential”.
You act as if merely being empirically false, as far as we can tell, is the essential characteristic that makes this particular belief bad when it’s obvious that you and everyone else never apply that principle uniformly. If you did, you’d be very, very busy.
Therefore, when you write:
…you’re not only arguing in bad-faith, you’re arguing with a false premise. We don’t need to “rebut” that point. We agree with it. But whether we agree with it or not, it’s trivial. It is almost entirely unhelpful in determining whether or not being aggressive about atheism is a good or a bad thing or whether theism is a good or bad thing. If I had ever, ever met someone who applied the simple logic that “false equals bad” uniformly in the totality of their belief systems, I might be more sympathetic to your childish certainty that the falseness of theism is the essential self-evident reason to oppose it. But since you and no one else is such a person, it’s obvious that you oppose theism for reasons other than its simple falseness. Therefore, your assertion that theism is a false belief is not the magic wand you (self-servingly) think it to be.
Because it is obvious to everyone that the true rational argument against theism in practice is a utilitarian argument, then those of us you call “accomodationists” quite naturally and rationally ask you if you are certain you’ve evaluated its utility correctly.
For what it’s worth, I see no one here who is saying that because they’re smarter than all the rest then they don’t need theism the way most everyone else does. I certainly have not said such a thing and don’t put those words in my mouth. I don’t pretend to know what is best for most people to believe with regard to this particular question which seems to be deeply important to most everyone, atheists included. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. I’m inclined to believe that atheism is better than theism, but I’m deeply unsure if it’s enough better to matter; and, furthermore, I’m deeply unsure that even if it were better than theism that, among all the things that people wrongly believe, it’s of great social utility to correct. And I’m very strongly suspicious of the social utility of being intolerant in the name of disabusing people of their wrong belief in God.
You end with a series of false (!) statements:
“Your” side constantly makes claims of superiority beyond the superiority of simple accuracy. Considering that we’re all atheists here, “your” side by necessity is those who assert that theism is bad enough to loudly condemn. You call my side “accomodationist”…what exactly is the antonym of that? It’s incredibly dishonest of you to attempt to argue that your position is merely one of correcting an error of fact. This is not about being confused as to which planet is fifth from the Sun. It’s a fundamentally moral argument. To attempt to claim that the moral freight all lies in the simple error of fact is mind-bogglingly dishonest. And, at any rate, Hitchens’s and Dawkins’s books and numerous preceding comments belie your assertion.
There are certainly those on “my side” of this debate who might say, as you claim, “the debate is hopeless, religion will always be here to stay because people are just too damn dumb to give it up”. But there are people on my side who will say that white people are smarter than black people. Both assertions are irrelevant to our argument. Don’t try to tar me or all those who disagree with you with that brush. Different atheists have different reasons to argue against your aggressive proselytization of atheism and its explicit intolerance of theism. There’s been numerous examples of those reasons here in this thread and, unsurprisingly, absolutely none of them were “people are too damn dumb to give it up” version.
Are these arguments of your examples of the supposed higher rationality of atheists like yourself? Because, if so, you’re a walking argument against the credibility of your premises and conclusions.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
“Remember, it’s your side that says the debate is hopeless, religion will always be here to stay because people are just too damn dumb to give it up.”
Chet is right, and gets at one of the more frustrating parts of this discussion. Pro-religion atheists (and just about everyone arguing with us atheists have taken pains to say that they are atheists too!) take it as a given that anyone who practices religion gets something valuable out of it. In fact, though, there are lots of people who practice religion out of social or family pressure, and/or because they aren’t aware that there’s a real alternative. Thousands upon thousands of people are made by religion to feel guilty about their sexual feelings (gay or straight), or are prevented from being with the person they love or taking the job they want, or simply feel the stress of exhibiting belief for something they’re not all that into. The existence of a public and unequivocal atheist movement can give people an alternative to that. It is so patronizing to act as though you’re defending those poor, simple religious folk who just want to live their lives free from atheist harassment, when many people in religious communities are actually being helped by the growing awareness of atheism.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“Some of us are very resistant to responding to hate with hate, intolerance with intolerance.”
For this argument to have a clear meaning, I would need to know what you mean by “intolerance” and “hate,” and how those are different from unequivocal disagreement.
Certainly it’s possible for atheists to cross the line into intolerance. I would put something like PZ Myers destroying a communion wafer into that category—a superfluous act of hostility that’s about insulting people rather than convincing them. It’s the same kind (but nowhere near the same degree) of attack as Fred Phelps’s various disgusting statements about Matthew Shepard. So, sure, I’ll agree we shouldn’t do stuff like that, though stunts and attacks of that nature seem extremely rare to me. If you’ve got more in mind, go ahead and name them.
But if you’re using “hate and intolerance” to include saying that religion does no good, and that we would be better off without it, then you’re using a double standard, since of course people are allowed to say the same thing about slavery, or union-busting, or what have you without being labeled as “intolerant,” let alone “hateful.” What you and others seem to be proposing is that we completely cede the field to the religious side, allowing them to proselytize freely and lobby for their interests while we assure everyone that our own beliefs aren’t important to us, in fact that it’s just a coincidence that we hold them, and a matter of no consequence since they’re no better than anyone else’s. No, I am not willing to do that.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I’m not proposing that. And I have no problem with respectful unequivocal disagreement. I mean, look: I’m quite certain that God doesn’t exist. On that, I’m unequivocal. Where I seem to disagree with you and those like you is what follows from that belief. Chet, especially, seems to take it for granted that a great deal follows from it.
What interests and bothers me is that I feel like there’s a double-standard here for atheists like yourself about what is acceptable public speech and behavior with regard to your beliefs and what is acceptable public behavior and speech with regard to theists’. Now, to be clear, I used the word “feel” because (as is often the case with these sorts of claims of hypocrisy) I’m generalizing. An example of what I have in mind is the Christian fundamentalist assertion that all sorts of people are going to Hell. This seems to piss people off and a great many people assert that it’s self-evidently intolerant. Well, it seems to me that the atheist argument that belief in God is irrational, causes social harm, and (perhaps) that theists are stupid or willfully ignorant is pretty much an equivalently offensive assertion. Maybe you…maybe no one…is offended by claims about Hell and yet makes such claims about theism and theists, but I suspect that there are people who do. And my point is that what seems to you to be a simple statement of unequivocal belief about reality can easily be offensive and intolerant to those who disagree with you.
Many, many beliefs have implicit value judgments about other people and it is disingenuous to claim that you aren’t aware that this is the case. Think about the “your favorite band sucks” thing. People get offended not because the band is insulted, but because the person who likes the band is implicitly insulted. And this is about popular music.
Theists quite typically make value judgments about atheists. They typically believe that atheists are immoral, or are merely disaffected. I don’t see any difference between this and the facile reasoning that many atheists use about the character and personalities of theists and the implications they suppose follow from atheism. It truly is facile to assert that theists are in some deep sense delusional, or that theism is authoritarian and stultifying, or that it’s self-evident that theism has made the world a worse place than it otherwise would have been. Yet, just as the theists think that their conclusions about atheism and atheists are self-evident and therefore shouldn’t be offensive (because, as so many self-servingly believe, the truth as they understand it shouldn’t ever offend), many atheists believe their conclusions about theism are self-evident and not inherently offensive.
Again, I’ll state that I think the real argument here is about how to think of and treat other people. It’s not about the intellectual abstraction of God. It’s not about what one believes about the existence of God; it’s about how one treats people who think otherwise than oneself. Many theists are arrogant, narrow-minded, judgmental, and ignorant. Sadly, so are many atheists. This isn’t a quality essentially related to theism or atheism, as much as either side would like to claim it so about the other. It’s just about how people behave towards others unlike themselves.
July 15th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Astrologists aren’t flying airplanes into skyscrapers, or trying to prevent 10-year-old girls from receiving vaccines that could prevent a type of cancer. 51% of Americans don’t reject the scientific consensus about the age of the Earth (not to mention global warming) because of ESP. 90% of Americans or more aren’t going to alien abduction support groups every sunday.
I’m every bit as opposed to ESP, astrology, bigfoot, and all the other woo. I’m vocal about religion – in threads that are about atheism – because its religion that is foremost the clear and present threat to a truly secular, reasonable society.
It’s true of your belief, apparently, that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” (I wish we could retire that phrase. Every time I hear it I feel like one of the Geico cavemen, slapped in the face by the casual bigotry of a culture that just doesn’t get it.)
No, I don’t. It’s religion’s falseness combined with religion’s scale that makes religion my most immediate target in the War on Things That Are Not Accurate.
You most certainly have said it, Xeynon has, and it’s the position of the atheist accomodationists: people will never give up their religion, well, people besides me I mean. How arrogant can you get? What’s so special about you that makes you think you’re the only one who can be talked out of your religion?
What possible intolerance could you be talking about? All we’re talking about is a conversation. Trying to talk the religious out of being religious, like what happened to you and me. Like what happens to every child who grows up believing in Santa Claus and then, suddenly, doesn’t.
What could possibly be intolerant about saying “belief that things that are false are really true is a delusion”, when that’s an accurate description of what it means to be deluded?
No, we don’t. We’re the ones who are convinced everyone can be atheists, if they want. Your side is the one convinced that only you, me, and others exactly like us could possibly be smart enough, or independantly-minded enough, to be atheists; and everybody else is lost to their ignorance and should be abandoned.
Gawd, what could be more arrogant than that?
I’m comfortable with “non-accomodationist”, if you want, but “New Atheist”, to the extent that there’s anything new about it, is emerging as a popular term.
Absolutely false. There’s been only one argument by your side, repeated over and over again – it’s useless and it makes us look bad to try. It’s hopeless. There’s no point in it.
That’s the whole and the entirety of the accomodationist perspective, and it’s predicated on the assumption that most people are too dumb – or too something – to ever be atheists. How arrogant and patronizing of you.
I claim no “higher rationality”, and never have. That’s your side, remember? I claim only a slightly more accurate position on one small point than the theists have.
July 15th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Sure. And that double-standard is that we atheists are to be lumped in with the political views of Hitchens, and told we’re militant fundamentalists, and any effort on our part to disagree is merely further evidence of our militancy, right-wing imperialism, and fatwa-envy.
How very perceptive of you to have seen the double-standard!
Ridiculous.
But the case has been made that these things are true, by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, and the rest. Your only response seems to be to call these truths “facile.”
Do you see why I perceive you as not discussing in good faith? You won’t permit even the discussion of whether these things are true; we’re supposed to cede to the religious their position that religion is a net good, it makes people better, and we’re worse people for rejecting it. The accomodationist position in a nutshell, I suppose.
How do you treat your friends and family who are wrong about things? I imagine you’ll find I treat the religious, particularly my religious friends and family, the exact same way.
It’s certainly how you’re behaving towards us. Oh, I’m sorry, it doesn’t count as arrogance and intolerance when you do it?
July 15th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Keith, you are conflating different arguments which can be easily separated.
“An example of what I have in mind is the Christian fundamentalist assertion that all sorts of people are going to Hell. This seems to piss people off and a great many people assert that it’s self-evidently intolerant. Well, it seems to me that the atheist argument that belief in God is irrational, causes social harm, and (perhaps) that theists are stupid or willfully ignorant is pretty much an equivalently offensive assertion.”
Well, wait a minute; is there now no difference between an empirical belief and a non-empirical one? “Religion causes social harm” is a position that can be defended or attacked with empirical evidence: “What about 9/11,” “what about the pretty cathedrals,” etc. “Sinners go to hell,” though, is non-empirical by definition. One should expect to have one’s beliefs assessed on empirical grounds, but your non-empirical moral code can’t be expected to apply to me. (By the same token, “Religion is irrational” is a position that any honest religious person would agree with, and even embrace, if the faith/reason distinction has any meaning at all.) Beyond which, as a simple matter, “You are going to suffer for all eternity, because you are evil” and “You are not going to suffer for eternity, because your beliefs are wrong” aren’t anywhere near the same level of offensiveness.
You keep including the “theists are stupid or willfully ignorant” position, even though no one on this thread, nor Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens, has said it. Do you want me to argue against some arrogant 16-year-old atheist now? Of course our side has jerks, every side does. I hope you haven’t spent 3000 words to get me to admit that.
“Many, many beliefs have implicit value judgments about other people and it is disingenuous to claim that you aren’t aware that this is the case. Think about the “your favorite band sucks” thing. People get offended not because the band is insulted, but because the person who likes the band is implicitly insulted. And this is about popular music.”
Of course, which is why it’s important not to criticize someone’s beliefs and preferences unless there’s a clear good reason for doing so. I believe that that reason exists with religion. No one has a right not to come across opinions which they find offensive, and it’s not “intolerance” to expose someone to such opinions. By the same token, I don’t have the right not to come across religious beliefs which I find offensive, and I don’t want that right (except in schools and government offices, of course). We’re looking to participate on the same grounds—but not with the same tactics—as the religious, or any other group looking to change minds.
“It truly is facile to assert … that it’s self-evident that theism has made the world a worse place than it otherwise would have been. Yet, just as the theists think that their conclusions about atheism and atheists are self-evident and therefore shouldn’t be offensive (because, as so many self-servingly believe, the truth as they understand it shouldn’t ever offend), many atheists believe their conclusions about theism are self-evident and not inherently offensive.”
Self-evident? Who’s saying that it’s self-evident? If it were self-evident there would be no need for a book. It is, however, evident—that is, there is evidence—and on that ground there’s no reason it should be off-limits to say it. Apparently our desire to have an argument about it based on evidence makes us just like the theists? Our argument is completely different from the argument the theist makes when he tries to get me to be afraid of Hell based only on his say-so and that of his favorite book. If he wants to debate me on the benefits of religion, on the other hand, I’d be thrilled, except that you seem to want to shield him from that debate.
Beyond which, I never guaranteed that people wouldn’t be offended. Who’s saying that? Any position will offend someone, and I don’t see any reason to offend people less with my beliefs about religion than with my beliefs about taxes or homosexuality. However, you say that my claims are “inherently” offensive, which puts religion in a privileged category: religious beliefs, unlike any other kind of belief, can’t be criticized in a rational manner without being “inherently” offensive. Do you see why it looks to me like you’re trying to superfluously defend theists?
July 15th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
To pile on: Keith, you are absolutely correct that the fact that religion espouses false beliefs is not the primary point of the “new atheists’” (ugh) critique of religion. So it is a little baffling why you seem to stubbornly refuse to engage the actual point of the critique in an honest and forthright fashion.
Your earlier example of “hope” as a counterfactual is actually a good one, but you seem to not see the significance. The reason that no one would ever form a rude movement in opposition to hope is that hope is patently unoffensive on precisely the same grounds that religion, to the outspoken atheist, emphatically is.
That is, hope does not pretend to be anything that it is not. Specifically, it has no pretensions to be a special epistemologically privileged form of knowledge or truth, and it does not purport to represent any special insight into the actual reality of the external world. Religion, even modern liberal “moderate” flavors, cannot make that same claim, at least not in good faith (pun intended) – no matter how much theologians and philosophical fellow travelers like Plantinga might wish to temporarily dilute it down for rhetorical purposes.
This is actually a big damn deal. Start with the notion that some people have a special privileged insight into the Truth, one that is not subject to the same logic and standards of evidence and reason that all of our other judgments of fact are based on. Now combine that with deep historical antecedents of tribalism and in-group exceptionalism, and mix it with the notion that this “mysterious” unkowable Known supernaturally derived Truth actually knows us and wants something from us. Finally, add the notion that challenging both the absurd truth clams and the very usefulness/meaningfulness of an entity that simultaneously transcends and inhabits our physical world is not just rude, but heretical. And we are not allowed to point out not just the absurdity, but the danger in this state of affairs, as passionately and emphatically as we can? We’re just supposed to be quiet and wait our turn? Really?
You seem to object to the strident tone of certain atheists as if the atheist critique is directed towards an aesthetic judgment. This would make sense if the history of theocratic and religious sentiment, and the social realities of how religion is practiced worldwide today, were on a par with expressions of hope or fandom or utilitarian or aesthetic appeal.
Well, overwhelmingly, they were not and they are not; at least, that’s not how the religious themselves see it (yes, even modern “moderate flavors”, with the possible exception of the most extreme denominations such as Unitarian Universalism). And it is absolutely critical to delve deeply into how they are different, and why that difference matters. People weren’t burned at the stake in the 17th century over matters of aesthetic judgment. Young girls aren’t being stoned to death in modern times over fashion.
We can’t as a society even begin to hope to treat this openly and honestly unless we can overcome the massive asymmetry in how our society treats critiques of God and religion, as opposed to pretty much any other topic. And this asymmetry is most definitively not simply an accidental happenstance that results from differences about what people hope is true.
In any event, I think that it is uncontroversial that if Alvin Plantinga were to write an essay wherein he admitted that his entire notion of religious truth was really just an aesthetic concern, or that it amounted to nothing more than a fervent hope in God’s existence, then he would no longer be subjected to any impolite invective from those mean old intemperate atheists and their rude little minions. We don’t tend to criticize other people’s fantasies, as long as they don’t hurt anyone and as long as they don’t intrude into the world, at least that part of the world where keeping fantasy distinct from reality really matters.
But that’s not what he and his ilk are really on about, is it?
July 16th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I do not KNOW god – I am as certain as I can be that there is nothing too know….
I am politicaly conservative – in an Andrew Sullivan manner.
The very word conservative was stolen by zelous thugs after Barry Goldwater -he was no angel mind you, but he saw the future danger that blending religion and politics would create. On this point he was dead on!
I am also a Life Member of the NRA.
I support and continue to support BOTH Irag invasions – feel strongly that we botched the first at the end, and started the second on very poor footing. I hope the Iragi people will one day reaslize the full potential of ALL of the sacrifices made to rid their world, and ours, of the Butcher of Bagdad (BOB) and his dreadful spawn.
It did not take much persuasion to convince me that BOD had to go – and the Iraqi people AND all of their neighbors would be far better off. It was how we did it – or didn’t do it that was the tragedy.
I hope the Iranian people will have the fortitude to stand up to thier theocracy – but I am not so blind to realize that the improvements they are seeking bring them only slightly closer to the middle. There will be far more to accomplish.
I’m certain the Bush 2 admin did NOT persue the second war for most of the reasons that I would have hoped they would – it was and still is a tragic endeavour. But it would have been more tragic to have permitted BOB to continue on with his merry ways. The price for stopping him is great – but the greater price to pay (long term) was leaving him alone.
I know that changes like those I advocate are almost ALWAYS bloody – but from time to time this price must be paid. And we have to remember this price always.
I feel certain we should be leading efforts (better planned and executed of course) like this in MANY other areas around the world – our behaviour in this last war has ruined my hope of ever having the moral authority to get that done – yes I think the US has an obligation to help police the world, cooperativly with those that will and can. We should have the balls to actively stop human suffering where ever it occurs!
I think religion is the foundation of much of the suffering in this world – and to stop it we must call attention to the absurdities that religion fosters. Some will find that offensive – I find living with lies and all that those lies support far far more offensive.
Atheism – in all it’s flavors does not have to imply passivity – or a lack of will to step in and stop human suffering. In my book true conservatisim and atheism go best hand in hand!
all the best
July 16th, 2009 at 8:12 am
“Chet is right, and gets at one of the more frustrating parts of this discussion. Pro-religion atheists (and just about everyone arguing with us atheists have taken pains to say that they are atheists too!) take it as a given that anyone who practices religion gets something valuable out of it. ”
I certainly don’t think this–at least not if you mean that the net effect is always good. Of course, even if it’s not good for the individual, the prima facie duty is to let the individual alone in his belief.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:16 am
“You keep including the “theists are stupid or willfully ignorant” position, even though no one on this thread, nor Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens, has said it.”
Dawkins thinks this. So does Dennett. Here is the Dennett v. Plantinga exchange last Christmas
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WN2X9G6W
He’s positively scornful.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:22 am
“It truly is facile to assert that theists are in some deep sense delusional, or that theism is authoritarian and stultifying, or that it’s self-evident that theism has made the world a worse place than it otherwise would have been.
But the case has been made that these things are true, by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, and the rest. ”
But it hasn’t. At least not well by those authors. Mostly it’s just asserted flamboyantly. Better are people like John Mackie in _The Miracle of Theism_ and Richard Gale in _On the Nature and Existence of God_.
July 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Quite untrue, and it’s necessary for you to actually, you know, respond to their arguments rather than just saying that they’re “flamboyant” or “facile.”
July 16th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
“It truly is facile to assert that theists are in some deep sense delusional, or that theism is authoritarian and stultifying, or that it’s self-evident that theism has made the world a worse place than it otherwise would have been.
But the case has been made that these things are true, by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, and the rest. ”
I would say there is a very strong case that religion is delusional etc., and inevitably leads to hatred and violence. Read “Fighting words” by Hector Avalos. For that matter, read a history book.