The New Atheism Once Again
My last post (which was really supposed to be about human dignity, but I got side-tracked, so archived the dignity piece for a later date) tried to identify what is new about the New Atheism. I think we should simply and unapologetically adopt the title and run with it. Christians did it with the word name ‘Christian’, and since they want to foist the name on us — and have even recognised us by that name in a recent Church of England report — it would be churlish simply to dismiss it. As Jerry Coyne says in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about the report to The Telegraph, it shows that we’re winning. This is no time to dump the winning horse.
However, back to the point. After my post yesterday there seemed to be a lot of helpful comment, and I think it is worthwhile to follow up on some of the things that were said. David M. actually suggested that there was enough there for another post, and I think that’s true. Therefore, the following …
Not surprisingly, commenters didn’t agree wholeheartedly with what I said, and some even thought that it was pointless to try to pin down something that is characteristic about the “new” atheists. It’s a bit like herding cats, as I believe Richard Dawkins pointed out. Atheists are, as Egbert says, resolutely individualist. Anyway, as Nicholas Lawrence pointed out, Richard Robinson said the same things way back when in An Atheist’s Values.
As the discussion went on I tried to firm up (in response to Egbert) what I thought I had tried to say in this way:
I agree Egbert, we are developing a new kind of culture. But I think that we have more in common than you suggest. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think three things define a New Atheist: (i) a belief in the harmfulness of religion, both in a political and an intellectual sense; (ii) a conviction that there is no evidence for belief in a god; (iii) a general agreement that (i) and (ii) mean that we must actively oppose religion. I don’t think we’re very far apart on those three points. (ii) is crucially important, because atheism is often taken to hold that the evidence for the existence of a god is weak. I think that New Atheists hold that there is no more reason to believe in a god than there is to believe in Santa Claus. Am I very far wrong?
Egbert had already said something about the creation of a culture. The New Atheists, he suggested, whatever term we choose to adopt in the end, are in the process of creating a culture in which religion, for those who can’t do without it, will be treated as an entirely private matter. That, it seems to me, is an important point, and perhaps this is precisely why we are perceived as strident, because we are, in fact, seeking to bring about widespread cultural change. But I thought, and I still think, that we have some important things in common, and I try to spell them out.
Some religious believers have accused the New Atheists of wanting to rid the world of religion, and they think of it as a kind of totalitarian move, as though we want to do this by force. But of course this misses the point altogether. We want to bring about cultural change by means of discussion, dialogue, argument, evidence and science. It’s important to notice that it’s not all based on science, as though science is omnicompetent, but whatever description of the world and human life and psychology ends up being dominant, the ways of accounting for it, describing it, and explaining it will be continuous with science.
This is an important point, so it’s worthwhile expanding it a bit. Religious believers often accuse the New Atheists of scientism. Now, some scientists are doubtless guilty of scientism. It seems to stand to reason that scientists would practice scientism, but that’s not what the word ‘scientism’ has come to mean. ‘Scientism’ means, roughly, that everything worth saying can be said with science. But religious believers will immediately cry foul, and point out that science can’t really say everything that needs to be said about love, joy, peace, friendship, poetry, music, art, architecture …, well, you get the point. And, while science can certainly say some things about all of these different aspects of human life and culture, we wouldn’t expect a scientific account of, say, Richard Wagner’s Vier Letzte Lieder, to say all that we would want to say about those enchantingly beautiful songs. And, indeed, some of the things that are important about the songs can’t be said at all. That’s the point of saying that what is worthwhile saying is somehow continuous with science, because — and this is the important point — there is an epistemological affinity between science and other things that are worthwhile saying. No matter how rarified some of the things we say may get, we will not require the kind of credulity which — in Sam Harris’ resonant phrase — “achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.” (The End of Faith, 65)
And it is just here that the Philosophical Primate had some interesting and important things to say in the comment thread on the last post.
I think the overwhelming majority of atheists think that the supernatural claims made by religious believers and institutions simply aren’t supported by evidence and reason — Eric’s point (ii) above. However, I think it’s important to realize that this isn’t simply an agreement on a particular conclusion; it indicates a set of common underlying values — epistemological values rather than moral values (not that I think the two are wholly separable), but common values nonetheless. Atheists, for the most part, care a great deal about attempting to discover the truth rather than assuming that one already knows it (i.e. fallibilism), and we reject anyone’s insistence that some claims can be or should be off-limits to rigorously applied critical thinking. Atheists care about evidence and reasoning, and think that claims ought to be accepted as true only to the extent that they can be justified.
But it’s just here that I want to enter a qualification. I’ve just begun reading John Shook’s The God Debates. In the first chapter he speaks about the different types of atheism. Amongst them are what he calls ‘apatheism’ and ‘sceptical atheism’ (he uses ‘k’, but that’s an American peculiarity that always strikes me as somewhat rebarbative!). An apatheist is an atheist who simply doesn’t think about god or gods, and maybe doesn’t even have the concept. A sceptical atheist is an atheist who doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to justify belief in a god. As Shooks says, “Lack of belief in something will ordinarily have two causes: inattention [apatheism] and skepticism [sceptical atheism].” (22)
And that’s just where I went wrong. I took for granted what Shook takes for granted too, that the only reason for disbelief is either inattention (or apathy), or scepticism. But this is wrong. And this is precisely, I think, what is new about the New Atheism, something I only gestured towards in the last post, where I thought, mistakenly, that I had got it cornered. New Atheists, although they may argue, like Dawkins, against the existence of a god or gods, using all the old arguments familiar to those who have studied philosophy of religion, are really not sceptical about the existence of a god or gods. We have no question about it at all, and this, not because of unwarranted certainty, but because we have no idea what a god is, and we don’t think that religious believers know either.
You can’t prove a negative. That’s the prevailing wisdom. And that’s what Russell’s teapot, too small to be able to be observed with the most powerful telescope, is all about. Dawkins says this, and therefore says that he can’t be 100% sure that there is no god, but he thinks the probability is pretty low that there is one. He’s 99.9% sure. That’s the kind of epistemological modesty that is usually required for knowledge claims. There is no logical certainty about empirical knowledge. All we get to go on are probabilities, even though the probabilities for some things are so high that there’s very little difference between that and certainty.
But what if someone is claiming that something, they know no what, exists, something, as Karen Armstrong says, beyond the reach of reason or description? The fideist thinks that this is our situation, and that the only possible response to this situation is simply to believe. There is no other way. If something is beyond the reach of our capacity to know, then we must travel there by faith. But what is beyond our capacity to know, is beyond description too. As Wittgenstein says somewhere, if you don’t know it you can’t say it either. At this point, says the fideist, you simply have to let go and let God. Well, but … Just because people have been talking about god or gods for thousands of years doesn’t mean there’s any such thing, and since there is no clear understanding of what is meant by the locution ‘god’, what reason is there for supposing that there’s anything answering to the many different accounts that people give of the meaning of this word?
That’s what’s new about the New Atheism. We simply refuse to be drawn into this blind alley. John Shook, H. Allen Orr and Terry Eagleton and so many others think that it’s just laziness to refuse to inform ourselves about the theologians. But PZ Myers got it right in response to Eagleton, in his The Courtiers Reply. Eagleton had the nerve to chide Dawkins for not having taken Duns Scotus into account in The God Delusion. Orr claims that “[t]he most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way.” But what would engaging religious thought in a serious way look like? Would it accept that there is, in fact, something to think about? But why should we think so?
In other words, I agree with Egbert. We’re in the process of creating an alternative culture, a culture which takes the epistemological values of empiricism seriously, in which, in order to qualify as reasonable, thought must indicate that there is some empirical ground for the beliefs or thoughts being entertained. That, of course, was the point that I was trying to make when I remarked, in the last post, that if you trace the textual traditions of sacred texts you will come at last to someone with a pen, and if there’s a reason to go further, the person who makes this claim must make it good, before what he says has a claim on our attention. And this is new. Atheists, until now, have taken religious belief seriously, and have tried to respond to the claims of believers. There are books and books of argument and counterargument. They will not change many minds. The only thing to do is to keep repeating that we need some reason to take these beliefs seriously. We need evidence. We are Thomases. We do not think that it is blessed to believe without seeing first. In fact, without seeing, what are we to believe? We still await the answer, and that gives us all the reason in the world to try to fashion a world in which religious belief is not taken seriously, but is relegated, like belief in ghosts and astrology, to a private world, where it only does harm to the minds of those who entertain such foolish beliefs.
Eric, you are an inspiration.
Beyond atheism, old or new, there is worldview naturalism: the positive affirmation – based in a commitment to empiricism, our most reliable means of deciding what’s the case about the world – that nature is what there is and that it’s enough. There’s nothing particularly new about naturalism, of course, but only recently has it been articulated as a comprehensive alternative to faith-based worldviews, one which can speak to the full range of human experience, http://www.naturalism.org/systematizing_naturalism.htm
Defending empiricism as the primary epistemic basis for naturalism (and atheism as one of its corollaries) is, as you suggest, a crucial undertaking, and I think it helps to engage the theistic, non-empiricist opposition in a serious way in order to sharpen our understanding and arguments, http://www.naturalism.org/theology.htm
It’s too bad that major science-promoting organizations have taken the accomodationist line, since that essentially undercuts what should be their main message about science, that it has no rivals in reliably representing reality, http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm#rivals Such a forthright declaration would do much to help the cause of “creating an alternative culture, a culture which takes the epistemological values of empiricism seriously, in which, in order to qualify as reasonable, thought must indicate that there is some empirical ground for the beliefs or thoughts being entertained.”
@ Tom Clark,
I have tried to push naturalism in the past, something that Victor J. Stenger also sides with in his book ‘The New Atheism’,
“I think this is a good summary of the new atheism position on the nature of the world, with a few minor exceptions. I see no reason to insist that only science can understand causes and explanations. And, while philosophers identify different forms of naturalism, most naturalists including the new atheists subscribe to scientific naturalism. Also, nature is not self-originating if it always existed. When I speak of naturalism without any modifier, the reader can safely assume I am referring to scientific naturalism.” (p.160)
However, I think that naturalism is as hard to pin down as new atheism, and so although they share a similar intellectual enterprise, new atheism is not only about science but about politics and everyday life. Which is why, along with Eric MacDonald, that it is best to describe New Atheism as a new culture.
Yes, someone tried that “you can’t know the mind of god” trap on me just the other day.
And my reply to him was “then why do you claim that you are certain of what its name is, how it wishes to be worshiped, how it wants us to behave, and all the rest”?
Its theists who have the explaining to do when they present this argument. How can they express certainty in something that they acknowledge is beyond their own comprehension? And especially, how then can you reconcile that with the thousands and thousands of individual religions that claim precisely the opposite?
It’s just a moving-the-goalposts sleight of hand trick. You’re invited to look behind the curtain and ‘voila’, and elephant disappears. Only the elephant was never there in the first place.
Thank you Tom. I agree, and it is in fact this culture, that takes the natural world as our only (or our onliest) home, that we should be trying to create. Accommodationism is simply a confusion, and it is unintelligible for scientific organisations to be involved in it. They are, effectively, cutting off the branch they’re sitting on. I have often come to your naturalism.org page, but have not spent enough time on it. I think I will in the future. One thing that AC Grayling repeats quite often is that the name ‘atheism’ is in a sense self-defeating, because it is wholly negative, and, in a sense, sells the store to theism. He prefers ‘naturalism’, and I agree. I guess that’s why I prefer ‘New Atheism”, because it goes beyond the purely negative. It includes a positive reference, anyway. One problem with ‘naturalism’ is that it doesn’t wear its disbelief on its sleeve in the same way that ‘atheism’ does, and religion is still a powerful force, and needs to be negated. But to be successful, the positive must be primary. Otherwise, we will be tied in an eternal dance (something like Shiva’s) with religion, and this is something we need to get beyond. Obviously, naturalism is the only way.
Ok (for the sake of argument). I’ll do it.
…………………….
Er
believe what?
I’ve found that the only way to deal with Tom’s stuff is to print it out so that you can read it comfortably and slowly in a reading chair. I have a folder dedicated to his articles.
Yes, precisely. But, of course, there are always traditions ready to hand.
Yes, I think this is the only way. I have started turning things into Kindle readable text, and that has helped a lot.
I would insert a new (iii) (thus making your iii a iv). It is that ii combined with the social near-demand that one at least treat “faith” as a virtue is a highly offensive (to use that word for once, because it fits) imposition.
I think the newness of my atheism has to do with profound irritation at this imposition, which only grows with each new instance of it.
Yes, but the apophatic god is supposed to be just that. It seems rather…wobbly to try to “believe” in the apophatic god via tradition.
Ah! Now that makes me want a Kindle.
Come now, Ophelia. Don’t be willful. It’s very clear what Karen Armstrong and her fideist cohorts want you to believe: You’re supposed to believe that compassion and universal love and transcendent warm fuzziness is the one true underlying message at the heart of all religious traditions and institutions, and you’re supposed to believe it so fervently and passionately that you ignore and even actively conceal (from yourself and others) all evidence to the contrary. And you’re supposed to believe that it is somehow perfectly legitimate to slap the word “God” on the inchoate, substance-less conceptual muddle I put in italics above, completely ignoring all of the other uses for that word which have very different, wildly incompatible, and altogether more concrete meanings.
Tsk tsk, Ophelia. I know you know that’s what you’re supposed to believe because, brave New Atheist soldier that you are, you’ve actually struggled through at least one of Karen Armstrong’s books. (Which, incidentally, I consider the intellectual equivalent of leaping on a grenade to save the rest of us. Thank you.)
I’ve even read a bit of Tillich, G! That was perhaps even worse. I must read more when my constitution has recovered.
Thanks Eric, Ophelia, Egbert, et al. Whatever we call ourselves, whatever we happen to emphasize about our naturalistic orientation, and whatever particular issues we tend to focus on, we are all allies in this effort.
Or “concrete” meanings?
Yes Ophelia, I agree that one of the defining characteristics of the New Atheism is this refusal to treat faith as a virtue, and irritation at being told that we have to. The idea that believing things without evidence is a good thing seems ingrained in so much western culture – and not just religious culture. It crops up again and again in Disney films and other Hollywood schlock, for example. Many people (and, significantly, not just religious people) find it shocking when they hear it said that, on the contrary, faith is bad thing – that we should have good reasons for our beliefs, and faith isn’t one of them.
Great blog, Eric. Keep up the excellent work.
Ah, but you didn’t read Tillich closely enough. The myths permit you to step — but only in imagination — beyond the point of understanding. That’s what myths do, after all. And what makes them true is that they are somehow concordant with our being, existentially. (Hey, I don’t know what this means either. I’m just telling the story as ’twas told to me.) This was Bultmann’s contribution.
Fair enough, though I think it’s probably included in the three points. No one would bother making the three points if there wasn’t something in need of opposition, and the bland assurance that faith is a virtue is one of them.
Two points:
1. I think any definition of the New Atheism must take into account the enormous success of the scientific method in providing tangible benefits to the vast majority of the world’s population. It’s not merely there to provide evidence that metaphysical beliefs don’t work, it provides superabundant evidence that materialism DOES work; materialist nations are healthier, happier, longer-lived and better fed than theocracies, and theocracies are parasitic for their development on progress made in materialist nations. Contrast this with the situation when Russell, say, was writing, and over fifty percent of the population of the West still lived in rural communities and made a living from agriculture. At that time it was still possible to extol spiritual values as a genuine benefit over material ones, and get away with it. Very few people are game to even attempt that today. In our world technology is the Great Exemplar, and New Atheism would be dead in the water without it.
2. I think the ‘But God is incoherent’ approach can be overemphasised. There are millions of people who would quite happy to call a technologically advanced alien ‘God’ if it manifested the appropriate powers and issued the appropriate orders. While the detailed descriptions of God’s properties are clearly hyperbole, it’s not impossible that there exists a being much more powerful than I am who wants me to behave in a certain way — and this is all that many people ‘really’ mean by ‘God’. So I think it’s important for atheists to go on showing up the merely physical claims made for the existence of God as well as fighting metaphysical battles in the realms of Logic.
This will be the broadest of generalisations, but that fear of force you mention is, I think, at the heart of accomadationism, at the heart of any argument from any non-believer who wants to handring and I also think it’s at the heart, tangentally, of a lot of opposition to both choice in dying and abortion.
It’s a fear of the slippery slope. And I really do think that people jump, in their minds, and often with a none to subtle push from a commentator or two, to Eugenics, Hitler, or Communist Russia, or [insert bad stuff here].
When talking of abortion, if the “pro-lifer” doesn’t jump straight to talking about killing babies, they will go for the marginally more moderate argument that it will lead to abortions of convenience, and people just popping in to have a quick ‘un, or something. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Eric, of the equivelent argument with regards to assisted dying.
I must admit, that I really hadn’t given abortion much serious thought for quite a chunk of my life. I hadn’t been put in the position where it effected me personally, and I think I tended to fall on the pro-choice side as it fell within the remit of the broader left leaning worldview which I would say I still associate myself with. But that slippery slope was, and probably is, still in the back of my mind.
The reason I think it’s such a compelling underlying argument is that we are seen as fallen, sinners, or whatever you may call it, by religionists, and that that view is even held by non-religionists, either through having it drilled into our heads overtly by the religious, or by simply looking at the world and not liking what we see. (Watching Pinker’s TED talk about violence was an eye opener for me.)
It’s a pessimistic view of the world, it’s expecting the worst of people, it’s judging things by the lowest common denominator. I think it’s also (though they won’t phrase it this way) projection. The staple things we accuse religionists of doing, the killing of Doctors who perform abortions, Taseer in Pakistan, etc, are done by “the foot soldiers,” if you will, and we, as atheists, will point to either the holy book in question, or the religious leader who condoned either pre- or post- mortem, as the major problem.
I suspect that religionists see the potential for the same sort of thing from atheists (even though I’m really yet to see this in practice at all – Mao and Stalin, I think, are problematic examples to try and throw at the feet of atheism). If an atheist talks about destroying religion, or whatever phrase you care to mention, there seems to be a fear that some atheist foot soldier will come out of the woodwork and follow through.
Oh, I think the usual meanings of “God” claims are concrete enough: God is a person. God is all powerful, all good, and all knowing. God created the universe, and Earth, and us. Et cetera. All of this is false, and much of it is mutually contradictory, but it is concrete in the sense that “God” often refers to a specifically conceived entity with a specific set of attributes, in contrast with the fuzzy apophatic nothingness Armstrong prefers. That is, what (or whom) is being referred to by the word “God” is often quite clear (as long as you don’t look too closely), in the same way that “Santa Claus” or “unicorns” or “leprechauns” have fairly clear referents. The failure of any of these referents to exist does not render the words which refer to them meaningless.
Of course, the more clarity and specificity found in claims about God, the more quickly those claims can be convincingly and completely refuted — which is what motivates the retreat to fuzzier and fuzzier claims about God. Theology has always been and always will be nothing more than an exercise in goalpost-shifting rationalizations.
It is interesting to see that The New Atheism – is under attack from the C of E. But it should come as no surprise since one of the bishops involved in writing this report is the evangelical/charismatic Bishop of Birmingham Colin Urquhart. In my lifetime, there have been several perceived threats to evangelical Christianity in the UK over which there was much fuss at the time, but that appear to have not had any lasting effect on the “faithful” here are a few that come to mind:
1) Starting in the 60′s with the liberalism of John Robinson reprised in the 80′s with David Jenkins (bishop of Durham) public airing of his liberal views on the virgin birth and the resurrection. Now largely ignored.
2) The changes to the laws on abortion, and on censorship/obscenity in the arts, which gave rise to the Festival of Light led by Christians like Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse.
3) The charismatic movement mistrusted for the divisiveness of the “second blessing” of the Holy Spirit – now whole heartedly embraced – just look at the Alpha course material.
4) The rise of New Age mysticism and alternative therapies. Where are they now?
Now its “The New Atheism” that is caught in evangelicals ‘cross hairs’. That’s no bad thing, I would like to hope that this time, the new focus on atheism might generate some real debate among Christians, and perhaps help some to see the poverty of their own position. But I am afraid that evangelical leaders tend to quickly latch on to things that can be used to frighten the faithful, and which provide a focus for repeating the certainties of evangelical Christianity. I doubt they will want to encourage public debates. I expect we will just see another wave of books taking on atheism – probably generating more heat than light, just like those written to answer the issues raised by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion.
Sorry I,m being unduly pessimistic! Keep up the good work I really appreciate your posts, even the more painful ones that deal with dignity in dying, I find them very thoughtful, and I like to hear how other people respond to your comments.
David M.
The problem with any discussion about abortion (or euthanasia) is that no-one can be completely objective. However, there should be an allowance for debate without stigmatism – I should feel able to talk about my experiences without fear of condemnation but I know I can’t and therefore I don’t hence the lack of real understanding by those without personal experience (sorry – a sore spot for me).
Foot soldiers appear when there is no dialogue between the leaders of different power bases for that is what they are.
Ah, yes, of course. I followed all those trends too, and watched how they impacted the church. Jenkins was the cat’s whiskers in my bad old days as a priest. And John Robinson too — though he went all weird when he dated all the gospels before 70. But the Alpha course made it clear that there is no real forward movement possible in religion. It always returns to type. I hope the New Atheism will help people look more sensibly at what they are doing when they set out to believe impossible things. The good part about books about atheism is that, despite themselves, they spread the atheist meme around. It’s different with apostates like Jenkins and Robinson. They can be made to look scary, because they subvert faith. Atheism is not faith at all, so you can’t deal with it without raising the question.
Eric – I much prefer you arguments today – they are clearer and more rational
Ophelia -
” I would insert a new (iii) (thus making your iii a iv). It is that ii combined with the social near-demand that one at least treat “faith” as a virtue is a highly offensive (to use that word for once, because it fits) imposition.
I think the newness of my atheism has to do with profound irritation at this imposition, which only grows with each new instance of it.”
This is how I have felt all my life and didn’t realise it!
This seems an important point. You’re absolutely correct. My post was actually a little all over the place, but I think that the fear of the slippery slope I was talking about is exactly what creates the stigma. There’s a whole raft of assumptions going on because people deal with what’s in front of them, and rely on recieved wisdom for the rest.
I think you are simply wrong about this, David. That is, I don’t think that the overwhelming majority of people who express fears about the rise of violent totalitarian anti-religion political power and attribute the desire for such to atheists actually has the slightest fear of any such thing. Rather, pretending that opposition to religion necessarily and always equates to or will lead to such violent extremism is a scare tactic useful to those with certain agendas. It’s a trick — a pretend fear, not a real one, for all but the most extreme the-apocalypse-is-always-just-’round-the-corner believers.
Slippery slope arguments are classified as fallacies because they are logically flawed, but every variety of flawed argument does not have a named fallacy — only the common ones. So why are slippery slope arguments so common? Because they are easy rhetorical devices that appeal to people with conservative change-is-by-nature-bad inclinations (who are sadly common). Such people are easily persuaded to pretend that super-extreme consequences are an inevitable result of any state of affairs they simply don’t like — e.g. any law placing any limit whatsoever on gun purchases and ownership => the gub’ment’s gonna take everyone’s guns as the first step in a totalitarian takeover. However, I’m fairly certain that the overwhelming majority of those who use such rhetoric, and even a significant majority of those to whom such rhetoric is appealing and effective, know that it’s just pretend. For every wacko who went out and bought thousands of rounds of ammunition when Obama was elected “just in case,” dozens and perhaps hundreds of others merely talked about the ammunition-purchasers approvingly and publicly, ostentatiously pretended to be as fearful about upcoming changes as the wackos were — but they didn’t go out and buy ammo themselves.
Exaggerated pretend fears, both encouraging them and pretending to feel them, are a very widespread feature of political rhetoric in every context — so it’s no surprise to see such rhetoric applied to the New Atheists by those who see them as threatening in a more mundane and plausible sense. New Atheists are an actual threat to the status quo, to the unearned privilege and authority enjoyed by religious leaders and the undeserved cultural hegemony of religious believers. Consequently, we must be portrayed as a much more dire (and wholly unrealistic) threat to life and liberty. After all, cries of “They’ll force you to abandon your religion at gunpoint!” have a lot more rhetorical oomph than “They’ll make convincing public arguments that religious leaders don’t really have any special insight into moral claims, and their views shouldn’t be privileged at all in public discourse and shouldn’t influence public policy which governs believers and non-believers alike!”
Eric, the things you wrote in this post has been clear to me for a while. I read Shook’s book and was upset at the mistakes he made.
I think the reason all this is ‘a given’ to me is that I have read many books by and about atheism lately and these themes keep on coming through. I have been with Stenger’s arguments all along.
At last, a banner I will joyously march behind!
Believers fall into two classes: apophasist and reckless. The apophasists can be divided into the scholarly unintelligible (Cupitt, Plantinga, …) and the meaningless schmoozers à l’Armstrong. The reckless, such as the author(s) of Job, say intelligible things about their supposed god, thus proving it to be wholly human.
Couple of trivial pedantic footnotes, Eric, in case you are thinking of working this wonderful stuff up into a book.
1. Unless I’ve missed something, Rowan Williams didn’t speak to the Telegraph; their journalist just drew on the published report GS1815. (Strewth, does that mean the Synod had 1814 reports, just as turgid, before this one?) GS1815 has a beyond-parody foreword signed by Rowan Cantuar and Sentamu Ebor:
2. Did you mean Richard Strauß‘s Vier Letzte Lieder? You have indeed written so memorably of how you and Elizabeth ‘[seid] durch Not und Freude/ gegangen Hand in Hand.’
Re 1. You are right — after rereading the article, it seems to be based on the report. 2. Re 2. That will teach me to type too fast. Yes, of course I meant Richard Strauss’ Lieder. Well spotted. I was just listening to Wagner when I wrote that.
Hmm. There’s something to think about.
(On a side note, I’d love a shortened version of “thephilosophicalprimate” for ease of use.
)
If I’m reading you right, you’re arguing the slippery slope is a pretend fear, rather then a root cause or actual fear.
The problem with what I’ve put forward, and I’m willing to admit there’s problems, is I may have done a little too much “pop psychology” and a bit too much “other people think X and for these reasons” which is always problematic.
my question here is, I guess, if we’re going to call them pretend, if they’re still widespread and pervasive, are they any less of a problem? What is the behavioural difference between someone who’s pretending to have a fear of the slippery slope and someone who actually fears the slippery slope?
(That is a genuine question, not rhetorical, by the way. I’m very much thinking through this. Despite my assertiveness in the above post, I’m far from certain on this.)
Drawing on a few things that have been said in this and the last post (and their comments, of course), one of the main things that does set today’s vocal atheists apart from the “old” ones is just how much more we know about our world, because of what science (yes, atheism’s natural ally) has discovered in the intervening decades. It’s no accident that the phrase “god of the gaps” is a recent coinage. In the same way that Dawkins has said Darwin made intellectually fulfilled atheism possible, the more recent subsequent advances in knowledge have created the “god of the gaps.” But that’s hardly where it stops.
What is the big difference between religious “knowledge” and secular knowledge? Well, partly it is that secular knowledge is discovered because it’s there to be discovered, whereas religious “knowledge” is made up, without it having to be there, or anywhere, in any real sense. But what this means is that the secular variety is constantly growing, whereas the religious doesn’t.
Our starting point may have been very little real, secular knowledge and an enormous amount of myths and their related dogma. This huge imbalance has been changing since the beginning of civilisation and only in one direction. After a certain tipping point, it even got so that secular knowledge could damage religious “knowledge” by the mere fact that so much of it existed. Certain explanatory myths can no longer survive the establishment of competing explanations. The only way any religious “knowledge” can be added is by more stuff being made up and that doesn’t happen in established religions nearly as often as the discovery of previously unknown scientific facts.
Unlike the old atheists, who already knew enough to have a good basis for their atheism, we now know so much that religion knows we are a real threat. It can now do one of two things: it can become entrenched in its dogma and become an open enemy of science (as well as of atheism), or it can try to soft-pedal the conflict and that is where I find the phenomenon becomes really interesting and explains that other more recent wave in pro-religious writing – the Karen Armstrongs and the Terry Eagletons.
There’s an absolutely direct relationship between how much we know and how clearly we can express it and how fuzzy and vague they are forced to be. That, it seems to me, is the end-product of our “newness.” Let’s not just look at how Bertrand Russell and his contemporary atheists expressed themselves; how did religion respond at the time? It barely had to, people like that were freaks, they obviously didn’t belong to decent society. Religion isn’t crumbling quite yet, not even in the western world, but there’s a sense in which it knows it is on the ropes and is conflicted between reverting to viciousness and pretending to deny its identity, which is the only way it can appear non-threatening. We are “new” because we don’t have to settle for being rebels against the concensus of society. We have finally positioned ourselves to say we represent society as much as any believer and demand to have our say in shaping that society.
‘You can’t prove a negative. That’s the prevailing wisdom.’
Stated as it is, it’s just plain wrong. Of course you can prove a negative. In mathematics and logic. I don’t know why it bothers me, but it’s wrong.
‘And that’s what Russell’s teapot, too small to be able to be observed with the most powerful telescope, is all about.’
Now we’ve narrowed the scope to negative statements regarding the existence of beings. Which means that we can’t demonstrate that something (i.e. god) doesn’t exist, and also we can’t demonstrate that it does exist (sorry ontological argument). We need to go out into the ‘world’ and collect evidence of existence.
Yeah, these scare tactics are just appeals to emotionalism. Why engage someone’s capacity for higher reasoning when you can hit them in the their gut? Fear is primal. It resides in our ancient reptilian brains. Fear works really well as a motivator, plus a fearful person is resistant to rational argument. The Republicans have absolutely mastered this rhetorical device. The libs are going to take your guns. The illegals are going to take your jobs. The gays are going to entice your children into debauchery. Etc. When people are threatened to think about something they’d rather not, you can often see them manufacture some fear to get all emotional over in order to override their own innate penchant rational thought.
I actually saw a great example on this very blog a short time ago. Eric wrote the post Julian Baggini and the New Atheism in which he concludes that there isn’t much in religion worth keeping and that it should be entirely discarded. The very first poster in the comments (Uzza) then makes the ridiculous leap that Eric must be implying he wants to eliminate religious people, despite never indicating anything close to it, and calls this perceived threat “obvious and rather chilling.”
Now, how could a religious person like Uzza read the words of someone as intelligent, sober, and civil as Eric and then come to the conclusion that Eric is advocating mass murder? Because Eric made sense, most likely. Unable to fashion a reasoned response, Uzza was forced to quite literally try to scare his or herself. Get those irrational juices flowing and it will push out troubling thoughts. Demonizing your opposition creates clarity amid confusion. It doesn’t matter what Eric says, he’s evil. He want to destroy me. I am justified in ignoring him, or perhaps even in preemptively attacking him and his allies. It’s a psychological defense mechanism that allows the mind to ward off perceived attacks to its belief structure.
It’s just a sad fact of life that most people are not rational and can easily be manipulated into acting irrationally. Some people can even subconsciously manipulate themselves this way, as Uzza has shown.
Until recently in human history (perhaps pre-Galileo) it was commonly believed that everything worth knowing could be worked out philosophically. The concept of an experiment or empirical evidence was not foremost in people’s minds, and the scientific method was not well established. Therefore, it is not surprising that people sought out philosophical answers to the most universal problems (for example, where do we come from, what is the purpose of the universe?). E.g. Descartes ontological argument for the existence of god:
“But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something that entails everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature.”
However, with the development of the scientific method and the extremely dramatic results of its application in regards to our new understanding of the universe and control over our environment, we (and “new atheists” in particular) now generally reject beliefs or statements that are made in the absence of empirical evidence. As you point out, this does not mean that all such statements are without value or that science is the only means of gaining real knowledge… see art, literature. However, there are also important religious debates made based on logic and not purely on thousand-year-old penmanship. See, for example, the ontological argument made above by Descartes, or the ontological argument posed by Kurt Godel based on modal logic.
Furthermore, there are similar debates that apply not simply to religion, art and literature, but to the limitations of knowledge, including scientific knowledge:
Many people do not realize that there are important and possibly unresolved philosophical debates regarding what science can or cannot tell us. Among these are the Problem of Demarcation (what is science?) and the Problem of Induction. (For lengthy explanations, see Wikipedia and/or “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” by Karl Popper). The Problem of Induction is particularly fascinating. To briefly summarize: in formal logic, it would be a fallacy to make a statement such as “no one has ever seen a swan that was any color but white, therefore all swans are white”. However, this is the exact mechanism by which science works: empirical/experimental evidence is gathered in support of a theory (all swans are white) and the theory is accepted until proven false (by finding a black swan). This is contrary to the operations of philosophy, logic and mathematics, in which statements are formally proven, not supported or disproven. This works up to the grandest of scales in the cosmological principle, which states: “viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers.” Again, this is a theory – obviously no one has observed the universe from all possible points. The problem of induction is then: “how we know what we deduce from experimentation here will be true over there?” Or: “if science is logically flawed, how can it tell us anything?” or: “is science actually logically flawed? If “yes”, why does it work? If “no”, how does it work?” I will not attempt to answer these questions here, but simply say that a number of solutions to the problem have been proposed, see Karl Popper et al.
Interestingly, I believe the Problem of Induction is relatively obvious to those less familiar with science (and may underlie intuitive rejection of scientific theories such as evolutionary theory by some religious individuals), but rarely considered by those who actively participate in science.
Thus, the same philosophical traditions and methods that underlie certain (but certainly not all) religious debates also help to define the limits of scientific knowledge, and therefore it would be difficult for “New Atheists” to discount all religious debates without also finding themselves without a logical platform on which to base scientific inquiry, short of “this seems to be working so far,” i.e. “we haven’t found a black swan yet”.
H.H. –
That’s pretty funny. At issue was Eric’s stance that one cannot separate out the good parts of religion and thus people must give up religion entirely. In pestering him to be more specific about his goals, I quoted him saying that
(a) we must eliminate religion, and
(b) people will not give up their religion.
I put this in the context of Islamic extremism, where exactly the same arguments are as common as dirt, along with the conclusion that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”
Eric, at least, saw the rather obvious parallel between his framing of the issue and Coulter’s, agreed with me, clarified what he meant, and identified the problem as divergent definitions of religion, with neither of us leaping to the planet of your conclusions, thankfully.
Uzza, please. Yes, it was pure emotionalism that led you to equate Eric’s essay with Islamic extremism, since “the rather obvious parallel” is totally absent. And the fact that you even required “clarification” of his “chilling” comments was fucking ridiculous. He humored you because he is patient and thoughtful, not because you made a valid point. You didn’t.
Bravo, Eric. The closing para was brilliant. Thank you.
As a philosopher by training and profession, I call bullshit on this attempt to carve a space for the unsupported assertions of faith out of legitimate philosophical questions about the nature and operations of science. The problem of induction is a real problem, with real proposed solutions and no universally agreed-upon best one — but “just decide what you want to believe” is not a feature of any of the proposed solutions, so excuse me if I don’t see quite how the problem of induction is relevant to faith-based religious beliefs. Similarly, the demarcation problem — the question of what separates science from non-science or pseudo-science — is interesting in its own right, but it does not therefore mean we cannot distinguish between honest intellectual inquiry and unmitigated bullshit. And, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit is exactly the right term for the ontological argument. It’s a transparently flawed argument, and the flaws have been pointed out again and again. The only people who take the argument seriously are people who desperately want its conclusion to be true. Ditto for the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, and the argument from design. (None of which ever supported the specific claims religious believers want to make about their particular gods anyway, so they are all red herrings in addition to being simply bad arguments.)
(I’ve noticed that theologians are a lot like creationists: No matter how often a specious argument is publicly and decisively refuted, the argument will be trotted out again and again as if the refutation never happened. Arguments are occasionally refined — that is, rephrased slightly so the flaws are a little less transparently obvious, but not substantially revised. But bad arguments are never, ever retired.)
More generally, the attempt to build categories and walls around subdivided realms of human knowledge is primarily engaged in by those who want to pretend that there are “different ways of knowing.” But there aren’t. There are many different ways of pretending to know, but one way of knowing — justifying your claims. Philosophy, when done well, is continuous with science and with every other realm of honest intellectual inquiry: It starts with fallibilism, the recognition that we might be wrong about any given truth claim, and proceeds by asking tough questions and not settling for easy answers. There is MORE to science that makes it science, as opposed to history or philosophy or any other productive discipline. But no area of supposed inquiry can be LESS than that and still count as a realm of knowledge.
Theology, of course, always has been and always will be less than that. Theology never has accepted and never will accept fallibilism as its basic operating principle; the existence of the subject matter of the discipline is always a smuggled-in assumption, and never a conclusion that is truly in question. Since no one has ever demonstrated any way to support any claims about a God or gods in any form without giving up fallibilism and embracing faith*, no one unwilling to play the self-deceptive game of faith has any reason to take such claims seriously.
*I should note here that giving up meaning and embracing gobbledygook — apophatic theology, fideism, and other forms of post-modern theological folderol — is just another way of giving up fallibilism. The gobbledygook contingent dodges the need to acknowledge that any given truth claim might be false only by taking all the important claims they want to preserve — all the stuff about God and “the Divine” and so on — and emptying them of all meaning, turning them into poetry and metaphor and vague gestures pointing towards that which cannot actually be expressed or conceived and blah blah blah. Of course, this avoids the risk of saying false things by not saying anything meaningful at all, but then they make a lie of the game by continuing to talk and talk and talk ad nauseum as if they are saying something when they have already admitted that they cannot say anything. In the end, their conviction that their empty talk is somehow worthwhile is just another unsupported and unsupportable faith conviction.
Good call on bullshit TPP. My own opinion about the repeated use of refuted arguments is that the people are not (necessarily) cunning, but just all too human.
Anyone who has a full emotional acceptance of a particular way of life has solid unconscious habits and emotions to maintain that world view. There are many identified psychological terms like ‘confirmation bias’ and ‘priming’ which apply. Similarly because we tend to think by abduction – looking to what we already ‘know’ to best explain the ’cause’ of what we see – contradictory evidence has to be overwhelmingly undeniable to upset our worldviews.
I believe that this is particularly true of people in the shackles of a strong faith or social identity. Their emotional commitment is so strong that (for many people) contrary logical argument, facts, and reflection do not achieve salience. No salience, didn’t happen. Didn’t happen, same faithist argument can be used again because the refutation did not register as a worthwhile fact.
As an aside, the same mechanisms apply to worldviews other than god belief. Soldiers can end up unable to re-adapt to civilian life. Politicians can lie convincingly because they (temporarily) truly believe. Sports fans believe their team will win, discounting the likelihood of failure.
no one has ever demonstrated any way to support any claims about a God or gods in any form without giving up fallibilism
Wouldn’t Hawking’s or Einstein’s “god” be an exception?
Hawking’s and Einstein’s gods are not gods!
Well, touche, Eric, you’ve said that. However it’s hard to reconcile with your new ignostic position that “we have no idea what a god is”.
This points up again how much of this is merely terminological. Until you said this I assumed that by ‘god’ you meant a supernatural entity.
Although you once stated that there are no authorities here, I’d say that it being your blog makes you the authority on whose definitions we should go with in this discussion. Telling us what you have in mind with ‘religion’ helped a lot.
Come, come Uzza. I am not speaking from authority here. It is well known that both Hawking and Einstein recognised that they are using ‘god’ in an extended and figurative sense to refer to their response of wonder to the natural world, and it is scarcely an unfair use of my “moderator’s authority” to point this out.
I’ve always (at least, that is, since I heard the term in this context, via A. C. Grayling) had reservations about the term “naturalism”, or more particularly about calling myself a “naturalist” lest people think I mean I’m “an expert in or student of natural history”, which is far more commonly understood than “a person who adopts philosophical naturalism”.
“Philosophical naturalist” – like, I suppose, “naturalistic atheist” – is a bit of a mouthful.
This is the ground that Dennett was trying to claim with the Brights, isn’t it? The definition of “a bright” is “a person who has a naturalistic worldview”. (The upper-case term is reserved for those who register on http://www.the-brights.net/!)
But (even though I am registered), I’d hesitate to actually use the term, but for quite different reasons.
Would, do you think, everyone who self-identified as a New or Gnu Atheist happily self-identify as a (philosophical) naturalist?
Naturalism seems consistent with your definition of New Atheism, Eric. Is it consistent with the definition of Gnu Atheism that PZ Myers presented in Montreal (and a don’t mean the “someone who’s a dick” one!)?
Well, my question was directed at TPP. Kind of OT really, but it seems to me a loophole in the cosmological argument that I have not seen addressed.
Re your comment, you once again appeared to contradict yourself, by insisting that “X are not gods” even though we “have no idea what gods are”. This makes little sense to me. Even more confusing, up till now you’ve held that gods were supernatural deities, which is not an ignostic position either.
Arguing that “there is a god” is false because it is an incoherent proposition, is not the same as arguing that it is false because it has no real world referent.
WTF “unfair”? Looking to you as the authority on what you mean is no criticism.
Come on, Uzza! When people like Einstein and Hawking use language deliberately in a figurative and not in a referring way, then we can say with some assurance that they are not talking about what other people are trying to refer to with their word ‘god’. That seems like simple common sense to me. Nor does it contradict what I said before. Figurative uses of words are not literal ones. Literal uses of the word ‘god’ refer to beings of which we can have no real knowledge. Einstein and Hawking are quite plainly using the word in a different way. And even though your comment was a response to TPP, it was a general point, which I thought worthwhile responding to. Would you like to explain what you mean by “it seems to me a loophole in the cosmological argument”?
I think this is a point that PZ Myers often makes and justifies his assertion that he can’t imagine any evidence that would convince him that a god exists, as you, Eric, mentioned in the “Julian Baggini and the New Atheism” thread.
But there are those (eg, Explicit Atheist) who still think this is a philosophically untenable position – ie, the unwarranted certainly problem, as highlighted by Professor Matt McCormick: “[Atheists et al.] are just as guilty of conflict if they rail against religious beliefs for lacking rational justification, but in turn there are no possible considerations that could ever lead them to relinquish their doubts.”
I naïvely suggested that PZ might have had a failure of imagination – but, of course, how could one imagine evidence for something undefined‽
Moreover, if and only if evidence arose that could only be explained by hypothesizing a “god” would we be in a position to meaningfully define that “god”. (Although it’s not immediately clear how what we hypothesized would be clearly recognized as a “god”.)
Otherwise, as empirical naturalists, we have no need at all to hypothesize a “god” that fits an arbitrary definition suggested by any religion or wild imagining! And therefore we have no obligation whatsoever to even consider the notion of evidence that could validate (or falsify) that unnecessary hypothesis.
Is this a stronger statement of your position, Eric? I’m not sure whether I’m being profound or naïve (again).
But almost certainly Laplace was already on this path…
I’m not saying that existing ontological arguments and solutions to the problem of induction are equally meritorious. I’m saying that they originate in the same philosophical tradition, which is still actively being applied to both the question of “what is science” and “what is god,” though admittedly there is more agreement on what science is than what god is. However, by rejecting the concept that a valid ontological argument may be possible, are you not also rejecting fallibilism? Alternatively, it seems that the definition of “god” must include “that which cannot be successfully demonstrated by any past or future argument”, which seems quite specific.
A similar problem comes up in the discussion of miracles. Miracles cannot be demonstrated to have occurred by scientific inquiry, because of the underlying assumptions that the laws of physics (for example) are infallible, i.e. the universe is governed by principles that are never violated. Therefore, an apparent miracle indicates that there must be a problem with the observation, or that the laws of physics must be refined. How is this belief in infallibility different from religion?
Tom : You have a very fine site there! Is there any special significance in your “sun and spiral” symbol?
He dated all the gospels! The hussy.
I’m just leaving…
In a sense no one is without personal experience. They’re different levels of experience, to be sure, but everyone (except the known infertile – even the celibate can always stop being celibate) potentially has the experience of fearing unwanted pregnancy.
Or to put it more modestly, the experience of fearing unwanted pregnancy is a relevant experience too.
Jennifer, I didn’t really realize it either until comparatively recently. Maybe around the mid-90s.
Very clever!!
No: what I would like is an answer to how that is not a contradiction.