Archive for the ‘New Atheism’ Category
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
Bill Vallicella on the New Atheists:
Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a certain amount of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.
For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible.
[From Maverick Philosopher: "Some of Us Just Go One God Further"]
His topic is what I have called the Arithmetical Atheism Argument, or the Magic of Misdirection. It’s the atheist’s canard, “everyone’s an atheist, we’re just atheistic about one more God than you.” This amounts to misdirection, in that its apparent reasonability is nothing but illusion. It would be a great argument if it had anything to do with the real question. Its success, however, such as it is, depends on directing one’s attention away from all relevant considerations: for example, “What kind of universe do we live in?” It is the very finality with which such hopelessly flawed arguments are brought forth that produces the asymmetry of which Vallicella speaks.
I expect some atheists to object to his thought that “a sophisticated living faith involves a certain amount of purifying doubt.” It’s not the easiest thing to explain in this format, but he’s right: there is for me a sense of groping toward reality, especially in prayer. Like the Psalms, my prayers are full of questions on the order of, “God, if you’re there, then why … ?” That question ends differently almost every day, for there is so much I don’t understand. I can lean on what I do understand, thankfully, which is enough for now.
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While I’m sharing links, I’ll mention a couple more. A new semester is starting soon. Going to college was one of the best things that could have happened to me. For some students it’s one of the worst. Being involved in study and fellowship with other students can make all the difference; it did for me! The Christian Colleges and Universities page has listed their “Top 10 Christian Study Groups,” a guide to getting connected with Christians on campus. A couple of their suggestions are more for high school students, which is fine. I would add InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Navigators to their list.
And one more for you who are social networkers. Other than blogging, I’m pretty far behind the times with that. I have a Facebook page, and I spend probably as much as five minutes a week on it. But that’s my flaw, not yours, if it is a flaw. You might enjoy connecting with others at Christian.com.
Friday, July 9th, 2010
… even I can see that this Slate author hasn’t done his “grade-school” homework on Thomas Aquinas.
And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of “uncaused causation” to be created in the first place.
This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs.
[From The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine]
Need I spell out the problems here? Or are they too grade-school obvious?
The most difficult thing about it all is figuring out how he could get anyone to publish it.
More interesting yet is the way Rosenbaum closes out the piece. It’s quite consistent with the theme of the whole:
Wilkins’ suggestion is that there are really two claims agnosticism is concerned with is important: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are.
The courage to admit we don’t know and may never know what we don’t know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.
As Errol Morris put it in the conclusion of one his epic multipart New York Times examination of anosognosia—not knowing what we don’t know:
We have “the desire but not the wherewithal to make sense of experience. One might easily forsee that this would lead to unending unmitigated frustration and suffering. But here’s where self-deception [and] anosognosia … step in. We wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything, but we would never be aware of that fact.”
Like I said, it’s complicated. But the world has suffered enough from oversimplifications. The agnostic moment has come.
Theism and atheism are both for the simple-minded, he thinks. I won’t defend or even comment on atheism in that respect. But I’ll note that Rosenbaum has provided further evidence he’s never read Aquinas. Or Calvin, or Augustine, or maybe even Lewis. Nor does it seem likely he has spent much time in any decent theological library.
And theism is for the weak-willed, too, he says. That would come as quite a surprise to a lot of Christians.
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
From Trent Dougherty at the Prosblogion:
I just can’t take naturalism seriously. That is, I can’t take seriously any view that entails either the proposition that some contingent fact occurred for no reason or that in essentials, the universe (or world or nature or whatever you want to call it) couldn’t have been relevantly different from the way it in fact is….
I try extremely hard to take seriously all positions, especially rivals to my own views (there weren’t always, after all, my views). I read every academic book I can find defending atheism (which excludes about anyone who might appear on television, especially people who’s name starts with “D”). I try to enter into the mind of the naturalist, really try to see it from the inside. I publish more against views I hold than in favor (in PR, not Epist/Lang). I spend so much time considering the problem of evil–the only possible rational basis for disbelief I’m aware of–that I may well have damaged my psyche even more. I’m a haunted, hunted man.
But when it comes to “Scientific Naturalism” in its many and varied forms, I draw a total blank. The Dennet/Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris stuff is a total loss. But there’s not much better…
So here’s a question. Has anyone given a decent academic case for naturalism?
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Joseph Bottum Joe Carter, writing at First Things, speaks of atheists’ uncanny powers of belief. Brief, biting, and exactly on the mark.
(See the first comment regarding the correction made here  ).
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
Stanley Fish has published a New York Times opinion piece on recent work by Jürgen Habermas titled Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? Habermas is a German philosopher, an atheist, who in Fish’s words,
has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them
What Habermas has come to recognize, according to Fish, is where secular reason cannot go and what it cannot do.
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments….
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.
The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.
Although in his solution there is still “something missing,” Habermas’s analysis of the problem (as summarized by Fish) is by far the best I’ve seen from any secularist.
Friday, December 11th, 2009
This post differs from many others on this blog in that I am going to base it on my settled belief in the God of the Bible, and not try to make an argument this time in favor of that belief. In other words, you will agree with this or not based on your existing beliefs regarding God and the Bible. Or maybe, just maybe, by seeing how one atheist treats morality, some skeptics, agnostics, or atheists will come to recognize that to deny the God of the Bible is to take up a seriously untenable view of life.
In comments following my post on The Basis for Moral Realism, doctor(logic) has persistently stuck with his opinion that morality must be evaluated and regarding strictly in terms of one’s feelings. You can pick up that line of his starting about here.
As Thomas Reid wisely pointed out,
A feeling is a temporary state of sensory, subjective experience. It has different properties than a belief. It is not possible for a feeling to be true or false (my “happiness” is not false).
So we see that a feeling is not a belief, and therefore it is impossible for one to have a feeling of a moral proposition. This is not to say that feelings cannot have beliefs as their causual antecedents, of course.
Nevertheless, we cannot deny that there are propositions that can be attached to feelings. “I feel good,” or “Seeing people hurt makes me sad” are both propositions about feelings. But these are statements about self. So when doctor(logic) insists that all moral opinions and evaluations are feelings statements, he is saying that all moral opinions and evaluations are made with reference to self. Moral opinions are not about acts, he would say; they are about my reactions to acts.
doctor(logic) confirmed this by saying,
What do I mean when I say morality is subjective? I mean that if I draw a line around the mugger and his victim, morality is nowhere to be found there. But if I draw the line around you (as observer), the mugger and his victim, then morality is objectively in your preferences. It will be an objective fact that you will disapprove or feel bad about the mugging you are observing. However, the immorality will not be in the mugging itself.
Is mugging good? No, it’s not good. Is mugging bad? No, it’s not bad either. It’s neither, in itself. But you may disapprove or feel bad about it. That’s what morality is, to doctor(logic).
Even from a simply ethical perspective, this has a nasty, putrid, awful smell to it. It literally makes morality all about one’s preferences. It makes me my own king of morality. It is idol-worship of the worst kind, for it is self-worship, putting self in the place where all good and evil is decided, the place that is rightfully God’s.
On this view I can—or must, for I cannot avoid it—set up my own moral system over and against God’s. Quoting from doctor(logic) again:
Look, let’s suppose Horace is a rapist. He likes raping for lots of reasons, including the feeling of power he gets. He thinks that girls who dress in revealing clothes deserve it. He’s integrated his rape behavior into his personal identity. Jesus comes along and says that rape is objectively evil. If Horace believes Jesus is real, tells the truth, and is an authority on morality, wouldn’t Horace then be in some sort of conflict?
Which is followed by,
To Horace, God is subjectively evil, even if he believed God was objectively good.
doctor(logic) thinks Horace’s view is to be taken as equivalent to God’s. The next paragraph says,
If my space ship approaches yours, and relatively, our ships are inverted, I could say you were subjectively upside down. If the universe had an objective “up” direction, we might agree that you were right-side-up, but you would still be subjectively upside down to me.
Space ship 1 or space ship 2, neither has authority over the other. Horace or God, neither (says dl) has authority over the other.
Idolatry always leads to corruption. The form of corruption that comes from this particular idolatry, making oneself king over one’s own morality, is not just that one might decide to do anything, and call it right. It is not just that every person can be right in his or her own eyes. It is both of these. But it also entails the plainly unethical view that morality is whatever suits me best. What could be more obviously wrong than that?
This is the characteristic idolatry of our generation. It is the idolatry that at this point is likely astonished that I would state the matter so bluntly and negatively, and would fault me for doing so. But if I am wrong and these idolaters are right, then there is no fault in my act, just as there is no fault in mugging. The only charge they can bring against me is, “That made me feel bad! If you make me feel bad, then you’re an awful person!” My answer to that is, I do not glory in making others feel bad. I do not like to do it. But I do not accept feelings as ruling sovereignly over what is actually true, and sometimes idolatry must be confronted for what it is.
Moral relativism is idolatry. Those who do not know that God is the only God may not recognize the malodorous nature of this idolatry, but those who do know God in this way must realize that it is a stench in his nostrils.
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, asks this question in his excellent book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God :
How does a life in which one speaks the creative word of God differ from a life of voodoo, magic, and superstition?
Here is part of his answer (the section begins on page 137):
The word magic in this context refers to … the attempt to influence the actual course of events, as distinct from their appearance, by manipulation of symbolisms or special substances such as effigies and incantations….
Magic and witchcraft … are forms of superstition. They work from belief that some action, substance or circumstance not logically or naturally (or even supernaturally) related to a certain course of events does nonetheless influence the outcome of those events if “correctly” approached. Prayer and speaking with God must be carefully distinguished from superstition.
The word superstition is derived from words that mean “to stand over,” as one might stand in wonder or amazement over something incomprehensible…. Martin Buber rightly says that “magic desires to obtain its effects without entering into relation, and practices its tricks in the void,” the void of ignorance and selfish obsession.
Superstition, then, is belief in magic; and magic relies on alleged causal influences that are not actually mediated through the natures of the things involved. Suppose, for example, someone ways they can throw you into great pain or even kill you by mutilating a doll-like effigy of you…. It is superstition or magic, for there is no real connection between someone’s sticking a pin in a doll and your feeling pain….
In our faith we do not believe that the power concerned resides in the words used or in the rituals taken by themselves. If we did, we would indeed be engaged in superstitious practices. Instead we regard the words and actions simply as ways ordained in the nature of things as established by God for accomplishing the matter in question. They work as part of life in the kingdom of God. They enlist the personal agencies of that kingdom to achieve the ends at their disposal and are not mere tools by which we engineer our desired result. We are under authority, not in control….
It is the very nature of the material universe to be subject generally to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.
Three times in this excerpt Willard refers to the natures of things:
- Magic is not real because its “alleged causal influences are not actually mediated through the natures of the things involved.”
- Christian prayer (or speaking with spiritual authority, the real subject of this chapter) has its effect by working in concert with “ways ordained in the nature of things as established by God.”
- “It is the very nature of the material universe to be subject generally to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.
Although one specific recent controversy over the term “magic” has been resolved, this passage from Willard helpfully speaks to a larger question regarding the supernatural. Atheists generally consider belief in the supernatural to be not just wrong; to them it is mindlessness or idiocy. In one of the ellipses (omitted passages) of the above passage, Willard tells how Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court was able to get the superstitious Old Englanders to believe he had magical powers, when he was in fact working by natural methods known to 19th century science. Christians, according to the naturalists (this was not Willard’s point) are gullible in the same way, imagining there is more to the universe than the natural course of events, and misattributing natural effects to unnatural causes.
The consistent, supernaturalist theistic position is that supernatural causes and events actually are natural, though not in the sense of being susceptible to study by science or occurring within some closed system of matter, energy, natural law, and chance. They are natural in the sense that they involve the universe and its parts acting according to their natures; where the nature of everything is to be “subject to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.”
Whether using the term “magic” or the more acceptable “supernatural,” naturalistically-inclined atheists typically consider it risible that Christians believe in a “fairy-tale” view of reality. But it’s far from clear to me what’s ridiculous or even odd about this, if we view the supernatural and the natural as intertwined, all of it together subject to the word of God. It fits logically; it works; it’s not incoherent. Of course it is a strange, unfamiliar viewpoint for the mind trained to see nature (matter, energy, law, and chance) as a closed system. But what if it’s that training that’s confused? Is that not at least logically possible? If so, then it’s also logically possible that to mock supernaturalism might be to display one’s own confusion regarding the true nature of reality. And it might also be that this very confusion is what causes some to miss what’s really there.
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