Open Season on Dawkins is in full swing, and Friday’s Catholic Herald takes a potshot at the quarry in a piece by Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, “The tragedy at the heart of New Atheism.”
On to the tragedy in a second, but Fr. Lucie-Smith’s piece doesn’t begin well:
I remember sitting up and taking notice of something Richard Dawkins once said, which was to this effect: “When aliens arrive here, the first thing they will ask is: ‘Have they discovered the theory of evolution yet?’”
The only problem with this quotation is that I can find no reference to Professor Dawkins actually saying it, or the occasion and context of him saying it. He may not have said it at all. If anyone can give me a reference (the link above, which is hardly satisfactory, is all I can find) then I would be grateful. It would be interesting to unpack the meaning of the words.
For crying out loud, anybody who has read Dawkins is familiar with this quote, which comes from the first chapter of The Selfish Gene. It took me all of two seconds to find the source with Google:
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?
Nice sentences, eh? Maybe they don’t teach Googling in Priest School. Anyway, the “tragedy” of New Atheism seems to be the despair and nihilism that comes with realizing that there is no god. As the good Father writes:
Here is a saying that I find particularly problematic: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” [JAC: That quote comes from Dawkins’s River out of Eden.]
First of all, notice the use of the words “precisely” and “observe”. It is surely impossible to observe the universe in its entirety. We observe parts, though we may intuit wholes. But these observations are not going to be precise – not if they are observations of “the universe”. So the use of the words “observe” and “precisely” here strikes me as giving the statement a scientific veracity that it cannot possibly claim, for this statement seems neither falsifiable or verifiable.
What the statement seems to be conveying, rather than a scientific observable truth, is an existential statement of belief about the nature of the universe. While Christians believe that at the heart of the universe there is Love, Professor Dawkins makes an opposing and opposite statement. But if the first statement is unscientific, so surely is the second one as well.
No, Dawkins’s statement is an inference from evidence, an inference that the character of the universe is precisely the opposite of that we’d expect under the notion of a loving and powerful god. Here is some of that evidence:
- Innocent people suffer for no apparent reason: children get cancer, thousands are killed by natural disasters. The problem of evil remains unsolved under the conception of the kind of god I mentioned above. The solution is either that there is a god, and it’s capricious, apathetic or malevolent (and no Christian believes that), or that a god doesn’t exist.
- The second alternative—no god—is more parsimonious in view of the complete lack of evidence for a deity.
- There could have been evidence for such a deity: miracles, regrowth of amputated limbs, and the efficacy of intercessory prayer. But there is no such evidence.
- Every bit of observational evidence previously adduced by religion for a God: creationism, the existence of morality, the motions of the planets, has given way to science. Science has never given way to religion. Thus there’s every expectation that the Last Redoubt of Natural Theology, the “fine-tuning of the universe” and the existence of physical laws, will also be explained by science. It’s more than just an unsubstantiated assumption, then, that the universe doesn’t care for us: it’s a judgment based on evidence.
Fr. Lucie-Smith apparently doesn’t grasp the evidential basis for rejecting god, for he sees atheism and religious belief as simply both manifestations of “feelings”:
What this might all boil down to are opposing interpretations of experience. Some may feel that they are being protected by a benign Divine Providence and that even when they suffer this suffering can be turned somehow to good. Others may feel that life teaches them that there is no purpose to anything, only blind, pitiless indifference.
How anyone can look at the world and think that a benign and providential God is protecting humans is beyond me. The parsimonious interpretation is “indifference”, i.e., no god.
And then the Big Canard: atheism is equivalent to nihilism:
It seems to me that if Professor Dawkins believes in pitiless indifference as the presiding spirit of the universe, then he is clearly in the camp of an earlier professor, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is a serious matter, because the Nietzschean vision is one that not only contradicts the idea of Divine Providence, but it also makes science of any sort nonsensical, in that it seems to deny intrinsic meaning to physical phenomena, attributing meaning only to human will. In other words, a Nietzschean would say that any theory of meaning is in the head of the person who holds it, not in the phenomena themselves. . .
Is this what Professor Dawkins believes? Is this what modern atheists believe? It does sound pretty close to the quote from Dawkins above. But if he believes this how can he believe in an ordered universe, one that is susceptible to rational and scientific observation?
Since when can one see science as “nonsensical” if there is no intrinsic (i.e., God-given) meaning to physical phenomena? Science works, whether it’s done by an atheist or a believer. Is it nonsensical to give antibiotics to an infected atheist, or for an atheist to develop new drugs? That is a meaningful endeavor regardless of whether there is a god. Suffering is relieved, regardless of whether the moral view that suffering is bad comes from God or an atheist. I swear, when I hear an educated priest make statements so palpably false, it makes me see how deeply religion can corrupt rationality.
And while I can’t speak for Professor Dawkins, yes, we atheists believe that humans make their own meaning in life, that science is a valuable thing to do, and that we can be moral without god. These are all observable facts. And we also believe that an ordered universe can arise from principles of physics, and does not require a caring God.
I even put “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence” on a t-shirt!
Jerry – is your next book biologically-oriented or more along the lines of posts like this? I think you have really nailed the crisp, succinct, rational, readable response to these theological nugacities. Great reading.
Given Jerry’s consistently cogent arguments, the real question is why these MANY accomodationists and woo-peddlers don’t recognize the vacuity of their own claims. You might think that these religious “intellectuals” or “philosophers” would have been exposed to an elementary course in logic. I wish they would all go back to debating the number of angels that could comfortably fit on the head of a pin.
They’re much like children who have hysterics when they finally figure out that Santa Claus is nothing more than a pleasant fiction.
Brainwashed early in life, they are incapable of changing their views. However, perhaps we can send them to China where brainwashing is a fine art; as the last emperor, Pu-yi, put it, he used to be a muddy drop of water, but was brainwashed to the state of a crystalline drop of dew. [Paraphrased]
Actually, children are much more “adult” about giving up Santa Claus.
“I used to hate Christmas when I was a child, because I believed in Santa Claus … and so did my parents.” — Carrot Top
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The comments section has a lot of heat from Catholics but I can’t help seeing their apologetic as meaningless (especially in light of yesterday’s Mars landing). The intellect that some Christians have is (mis)spent so much on finding ways to debate the veracity of their faith, they don’t investigate the realities we all still are puzzled by. They probably will be free-riders on the coat-tails of honest skeptical inquiry but I can’t see them moving forward or growing stronger.
Yeah, while Kierkegaard already almost 200 years ago pointed out what their standpoint should be: having faith despite everything. You can’t argue with that.
In my experience the “simple” believers who believe like that are the nicest ones. They don’t have arguments to convince you and don’t need to try that.
Yeah, while Kierkegaard already almost 200 years ago pointed out what their standpoint should be: having faith despite everything. You can’t argue with that.
Sure I can. “Having faith” is irrational and unjustified, does not produce knowledge or understanding, and is ultimately destructive to human welfare.
I mean the comments section at the Lucie’s editorial not here.
I don’t like that initial quote from Dawkins, it seems a very silly thing to say, if it was meant seriously.
You mean instead of them saying “What’s for dinner?”
Sure, for starters (no pun intended*). It just seems like a rather crass way to inflate the importance of evolution, entirely unnecessarily in my mind.
*I’m sorry, that’s a lie.
He was making the point that any civilization advanced enough to make it to another planet would use understanding of how live has come to exist as a measure of advancement. What’s crass about that?
The crass part (in my opinion) is the assertion that it would be the first question they ask. I mean, really? Before looking at how we generate power, say? Our offensive or defensive capabilities? Level of conflict? Quantum mechanics?
It sounds like I’m splitting hairs but as a quotation from the opening chapter of a book I just think it sounds silly.
Well, I can’t account for what you find silly. To me it isn’t silly at all. Much less “crass”.
Considering Darwin lived 200 years ago and the kind of nasty stupidity that has happened in the intervening years I’m not at all sure that knowledge of evolution is a particularly good pointer to anything.
Personally if I were a visiting alien the first thing I’d want to know is whether the locals are peaceful or if I’ll need to turn the phasers to kill.
Alien: “I come in peace…with a list of, um, requests.
1)A visitor’s pass to NORAD for me and my buddies.
2) coordinates to all your power plants and oil refineries.
3) A sit-in on some Pentagon military simulations
Remember, I come in peace.”
I took it as a description of a test of status of science vs nonsense, and a good one too. Just asking for advances in science and technology wouldn’t give crucial information.
How do you ask about religion and beliefs in general? For example, to paraphrase AC Clarke: ‘Any sufficiently advanced superstition is indistinguishable from technology.’
And when you get advanced science and technology sorted out, which may take a while if it is unfamiliar, it leaves the oddities of society. How do you identify taboos, and which are religiously founded: How do you identify rites as opposed to customs? Et cetera.
And that’s the first question you’d ask about? Fair enough, but I can imagine a different scenario, so I still think the assertion that it would be is silly & a cheap way to elevate the importance of evolution to set the tone for his book – unnecessarily, as I said earlier.
It might not be the first question I’d ask but it is a reasonable one to ask that establishes a significant level of understanding of the nature of the universe that a visitor from space would find useful when encountering life forms capable of communicating. That alone removes if from being called silly and crass.
The fact that you would prefer some other (unstated) question for establishing progress is not a measure of the statement’s crassness. But then, you don’t seem to think that understanding the process by which life has come to be as it is constitutes much of significance.
Well then we disagree.
In case it’s unclear, I’m not saying the statement itself is crass. I just see the assertion as an unsophisticated way of inflating the importance of evolution in a book about evolution. And, as I have said twice now, I think it’s unnecessary, so I’m not sure why you say that I don’t seem to think it constitutes much significance. I feel that evolution & our knowledge of it is of tremendous significance, so I wouldn’t employ (what I feel is) a hook to readers by saying “aliens would ask our civilisation right away if we understood it, so you really should! Read on…”. To my mind, it’s just there to ‘sex up’ the story of evolution when it’s already quite beautiful.
Now, I wouldn’t presume to know the first question that visitors from outer space would ask as we would have no idea what their culture was like; as I alluded to in a not-entirely tongue-in-cheek comment below, they might visit us to try to spread a religion! Although this would lead us on to a debate as to what exactly Dawkins meant by “superior creatures”… But that is what makes me think the hypothetical situation is posed cheaply – he can’t possibly know that it would be the first question put to our civilisation so why say that it would be, other than to draw in the reader? And I’ll say again (though I don’t mean to sound rude, merely emphatic), this is unnecessary! The story of evolution will draw the reader in on its own.
@ J
Well, of course it’s a rhetorical device, but rather an effective one. I don’t find it silly or crass, either.
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Just a difference of opinion then 🙂
Much ado about nothing, IMO.
Or “Take us to your leader!”
Or, “Take this book, called HOW TO SERVE MAN.”
“So tell us, what was Damon Knight *really* like?”
🙂
“Can you spare the time to hear about our Lord & Saviour Krsnlbarg?”
Or “I knew I took a wrong turn back at Alpha Centari.”
This is false.
Depends on the xians sect for what they believe is at “the heart of the universe.”
The fundie xians believe it is hate. Their whole religion is based on hate.
No hate = no fundie xianity.
The god of love is a modern invention, not really found in the bible. The bible god is an incompetent Sky Monster. It’s a big improvement though.
Dawkins doesn’t make the opposite statement either. He just says the universe looks like it would if there were no gods.
Right, that’s why it was quantified with “The universe we observe…”
But this is like saying we can’t observe all flow of electricity, so Ohm’s law is, “rather than a scientific observable truth, is an existential statement of belief about the nature of the [electricity].”
You don’t know how science works, do you? We recognize science can’t be absolutely right, and never claim that, but science works with that but updating theories with new info. Your religion is the one that claims to be absolutely true, and all on faith.
Just trying to bring science down to religion’s level.
Except the science “interpretation” lands rovers on Mars, and religion has never done anything like that.
Someone that believes in magic shouldn’t lecture on what good science is.
*by updating theories
From what, himself?
According to xian mythology, god created everything. Diseases, malaria, cancer, satan, hell, demons, fundie xians, Catholic priets, televangelists,, venomous snakes, TB, the Tea Party, and on and on.
Any more divine protection and we would all be dead.
Which, according to the fundies, is exactly the plan. Jesus is supposed to show up Real Soon, kill 7 billion people, and destroy the earth. Every few months, they set a date for the devoutly hoped for Final Genocide, and fortunately, they are always wrong.
How one gets from “Human scientists have done amazing but hardly exhaustive work at making sense of the evidence that surrounds us” to “Here, eat this cracker made from the living flesh of a zombie who likes getting his intestines fondled through his gaping chest wound” is utterly beyond me.
…unless, of course, you can charge your marks insane amounts of money for the privilege of pretending they’re in the crowd scene of a George Romero flick….
Cheers,
b&
Well put! I believe the Catholic priests say “The Body of Christ” when they place the communion wafer on the tongue (at least they used to). Wouldn’t it be GREAT if they instead switched to “Here, eat this cracker …” I would go to Mass regularly just to see that!
Hic comedetis hoc plana panem.
The Catholic church hasn’t been able to get good priests for decades. Few normal people want to be life long (supposed) virgins with no girl or boy friends, children, family, and so on.
Most of them are warped and not very bright old men. Even the higher ups aren’t impressive.
The few younger ones I’ve seen are hate filled warped bigots of one sort or another. Catholic fundies.
I’d like to say they aren’t all that way. In the past, I’ve seen a few who aren’t. But those types aren’t very common or visible anymore.
As far as The Netherlands go that’s not really a problem – there are not many catholics left visiting church every Sunday either.
It’s always amazing to me to see the twists and turns of thought and semantics, the “mental acrobatics” necessary for an individual to cling to, and defend, the tenets of Christianity, let alone the other major (and minor) religions. What’s funny about it is that all the fallacies involved have been thoroughly studied and described by the scientific method yet, like TV wrestling fans, they exhibit an astonishing persistence in clinging to a worldview that is so obviously incorrect. This phenomenon, too, has been studied and described and recent findings in neuroscience have shown clearly that not only do our supposedly “intelligent” brains not work in the way we supposed they did, but also they don’t work nearly as well as we suppose they do
To use fear as the main reason that people cling to religion is to misunderstand how the mind works: it’s been said that we operate on the “carrot and the stick”- we act out of a desire for a reward (eternal life in Heaven; peace, happiness, health, and prosperity during our lives on earth, etc.), or from a desire to avoid the punishments that may come as the result of “bad” behavior (eternal torment in Hell, poverty, want, and misery on earth, etc.). Yet the human mind equates the AVOIDANCE of a “loss” with a “gain”; there is no “stick”- it’s an “all-carrot” system! People adopt religious beliefs because, in some way, shape, or form, they think they are going to get something out of it, an extremely powerful motivation that is basically behind all the actions we choose (?) to take in life.
When doubts arise, the exhortation to “just have faith” is dragged out (a defense mechanism of the “meme”)- it is widely considered to be the foundation of religion (which is entirely true, as it takes a lot of faith to swallow the tales we are told)but is an example of just how backwards the whole system is: faith is “belief without evidence”: in other words, it is an “inferior” form of belief (“to recognize, or accept as true, or real”); a “starter-tool” that should be discarded as soon as the facts prove otherwise. It is indeed true that “Religion is how we used to do science”- faith is the hypothesis, but when the subject being “studied” was beyond their ability to examine accurately, they simply clung to the original hypothesis.
Yes, that’s how I see it: “mental acrobatics”.
Or as Ben Goran would put it, “Language Abuse”.
All religionists ultimately resort to these “word constructs” that sound usable, such as “North of the North Pole” or “married bachelors”, but are in fact, pieces of a large shield of words behind which a coward may comfortably prostrate himself and hide from an indifferent (but, to the coward, frightening) universe, and his own mortality.
Hmmm…”language abuse” isn’t a phrase I frequently turn, though I’ll admit I am fond of referring to the married bachelors who live north of the North Pole…I do believe that one of them leaves brightly-colored egg-shaped crackers filled with wine under the pillows of good little children who’ve just lost their teeth….
Cheers,
b&
It seems that many apologists, clinging to the last tattered strands of their defense of faith, give into the temptation to wield the ludicrous presuppositional argument, or some version thereof.
This argument deserves only a two word reply: PREMISE REJECTED!
Russell Glasser is really driving this point home with his ongoing debate with a presuppositionalist: If you are going to claim that an atheistic universe would amount to nothing more than chaos and disorder, then you better get to work demonstrating how and why the Christian god is required for order to exist.
In the end, it’s just another version of the argument from ignorance. “I don’t know why logic works, therefore God did it.”
It’s a damn hell of a pity that someone like Lucie-Smith, inadvertently and undeservedly, show mark a point. Rather, one point, or perhaps half a point. That quote from “River out of Eden”, in its extensive formulation, could indeed be misread as “an existential statement of belief about the nature of the universe” (Lucie-Smith’s words). It did so when I first read the book. It does so even more now, the way it stands. Perhaps it’s just a slight rhetorical overreach on the part of Richard Dawkins.
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose.”
Full stop.
This should suffice. This is perfect. The scientific statement ends here. Apply the razor of parsimony.
Speculations about “good and evil” should be left to the babblers who make a living out of deepities. “Blind, pitiless indifference”: shove that existentialist drivel to Sartre and “enlightened” theologians. No need, and no excuse, to anthropomorphise the Universe, to endow it implicitly with an agency it does not possess.
Correction: “should”, not “show”, in the first sentence.
iA Writer is a truly brilliant editor, but automatic spell-checking isn’t its most stellar feature.
‘Pitiless indifference’ imparts agency to the universe and the phrase, unfortunately, lends itself to anthropomorphic inference by religious disputants who desperately require anthropomorphism to establish debate terms for the pitiful arguments at their disposal in support of supernatural agency (of course there are none that are legitimate), and thus for any of their woo to make sense.
Lucie-Smith attempts to further buttress his claim with the nonsensical ‘the presiding spirit of the universe’. There is no spirit in the universe, no presiding entity. The friar’s word choices seek to establish a dichotomy between agency he chooses to infer from Dawkin’s text, and his own personal belief in the existence of a very specific presiding spirit.
Speculations about “good and evil” should be left to the babblers who make a living out of deepities.
So…is Jerry a babbler for stating “Suffering is relieved, regardless of whether the moral view that suffering is bad comes from God or an atheist”?
It should be perfectly clear from the context that the statement refers to the Richard Dawkins quote. There is a clear cut-off point in the incriminated sentence, after which it veers off into speculative territory and implicit anthropomorphism.
Jerry’s sentence quoted by you, by contrast, is a perfectly valid factual statement. Wish Dawkins had stated it so unambiguously. Nice bait, derekw, but I don’t know that Jerry has ever been guitly of too many deepities. Not his genre, is it?
Really I cannot find the time over my coffee to tell you what I think of Lucie-Smith other than that he clearly has no comprehension of what Richard Dawkins is saying & has not bothered to try reading him. Lucie-Smith has a fixed idea of a world made by his fantasy god that is TOTALLY based on what he WANTS to be so, rather that what ACTUALLY IS!
Sorry for shouting.
By the way, is Lucie-Smith related to the poet, Edward?
Dominic, the question is:
What does Lucie-Smith have any real comprehension of?
Have you seen his newest folly (same website as above)?
After a bravura act of twisting a quote of G.G. Simpson, via Dawkins, out of all reasonable context, he goes on:
(italics mine)
Spiral tailchase backwards.
Googling for answers beats praying for answers.
There has to be a t-shirt slogan in there somewhere.
“it seems to deny intrinsic meaning to physical phenomena, attributing meaning only to human will. In other words, a Nietzschean would say that any theory of meaning is in the head of the person who holds it, not in the phenomena themselves […] But if he believes this how can he believe in an ordered universe, one that is susceptible to rational and scientific observation?”
Interesting (and fallacious) conflation between “meaningful” and “ordered”. Of course physical phenomena don’t have intrinsic meaning, because something is meaningful only to the extent that it has been assigned a meaning by some agent or other. But accepting this is not remotely inconsistent with believing the universe to be ordered and susceptible to investigation, (a) because it quite evidently is, and (b) because orderliness has nothing to do with meaning.
That is, of course, a popular creationist canard — that something cannot come from nothing, life cannot come from non-life, order cannot arise out of chaos. And the implication is always that it needs the Big Mind / Hand / Wang of Jesus to get the ball rolling.
I like to respond by asking who it is who so neatly stacks the gumballs in the gumball machine. For some curious reason, not only do I not get an answer, but merely asking the question seems to cause a great deal of distress….
Cheers,
b&
I’m sure there are scores of theologians in schools that fall in your third camp attempting to determine if it was in the manner of croquet or a golf putt.
Nice bit about the gumball machine. Similarly, the angle of repose “created” by pouring a powder into a pile.
I still don’t understand the need for prayer, since a deity-ruled universe would be self-correcting, and already possess my thoughts.
You’d think that before Jesus died, he’d have left behind his Twitter address!
@αω?
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Ha! +1.
I have a vague recollection of a (UK) Royal Institution Christmas (Science) Lecture demonstrating exactly this effect. The lecturer poured some solid spheres (perhaps 2-4cm in diameter?) haphazardly into a bin, and they ‘magically’ stacked themselves, IIRC, into a perfect pyramid. I think I remember the audience being amazed; few of us are used to seeing order arise spontaneously like this.
I’d love to show this to creationists who insist that this sort of thing can’t happen – an incomprehension of thermodynamic principles.
Does anyone remember the name and/or year of the RICL series and perhaps the name of the lecturer?
Thinking about this, I wonder if Lucie-Smith’s conflation of “meaningful” and “orderly” reflects the not uncommon theistic confusion between “law” as in “prescription to be obeyed” and “law” as in “description of observed regularities”. It’s as if he thinks that if the universe has no meaning, then this is aking to saying that it has no social order, and he’s mixing this up with the idea of order as regularity and predictability.
Which looks incredibly stupid, but then how many times has anyone here uttered the words “laws of physics” only for some wannabe apologist to assert that laws require a law-giver? It’s not just educationally-challenged internet creationists who think this way. It’s an oddly pervasive theistic blindspot.
Er, “akin to”, not “aking to”. Must learn to proofread.
I saw that “Laws require a Law-giver” given by a person who proclaimed that he had “irrefutable proof” that there was a omniscient deity. You had to pass through several portals of begging requests before you got to his version of “true”.
I wonder what sort of punishment is in store for bosons that pretend to be fermions or that travel faster than the speed of light…
Or is the punishment severe enough that even a proton bent on mischief simply dare not travel faster than c anywhere we can observe it?
Particle hell must be particularly nasty.
Lawgivers indeed.
They’re probably forced to read Deepok Chopra books.
Quantum noise. If they know quantum mechanics, they will have to accept that it is genuinely random. (Obviously not Miller with his quantum woo for the genome.)
At the same time you can have weighted quantum noise, like shot noise. It results in an observed regularity, not a prescription.
This was the quote I found really stunning. If there were intrinsic meaning in nature, how on earth would the good father observe it and discover it?
What is the meaning of water boiling at 100C? What measurable or observable property of water reveals its meaning?
This is a failure to distinguish a concept from the object it represents. This fundamental error seems it could be at the root of the religious confusion behind the belief that prayer can alter the world, that mind is something out there we receive as if we were an antennae.
The religious mind seems to suffer from the illusion that our consciousness is somehow directly in contact or fused with the world around us, that somehow we directly see the world, rather than our brain constructing a visual representation from reflected photons. This confused illusion seems only half a step away from solipsism, as though reality were just a kind of mental experience or dream.
I don’t see how this man could make such a statement unless he is unable to distinguish mind, thought, ideas, language, concepts, and consciousness from his natural material surroundings.
Because if you want insights about honesty and morality, your best bet is to talk to, you know, a Catholic priest. Not that an entire class of supposedly well-meaning people should be painted with the same broad brush … but I think for this class there is an exception to be made.
This entire essay is a fancily-worded lie. This man knows exactly what Dawkins really wrote and means, and he is defiling it as surely as a Fox News writer twists what people say and mean. What else would one expect from someone who remains affiliated with the most vile rape-enabling organization in the West. Indeed the only rape-enabling organization of any size in the West.
So this clown and liar for Jeebus can shove it: his views are irrelevant
Richard Dawkins features in this great (short) video by the British Humanist Association, which counters this nonsense about nihilism and immorality directly: http://youtu.be/DZN8Ne1nmr4
I particularly like the quote from Dawkins: “Science is the poetry of reality.”
Christians have had 2,000 years to propagandize the culture with their view of “atheism,” which I call Fantasy Atheism (FA). Christians even promoted FA when they lacked real examples of atheists to point to, which made it that much easier to fool people into accepting FA as the real thing.
The Fantasy Atheist in this propaganda suffers from angst, despair, hopelessness, nihilism, etc., apparently like a teen going through a goth phase or something. Though at the same time, despite this chronic despondency, the Fantasy Atheist also engages in swinging sexual promiscuity, like we see at those atheist conferences. (Oh, wait. . . Never mind.)
So what do these clergymen and theologians do when they encounter cheerful, socially functional atheists who don’t conform to their FA model? Why, they denounce us as poseurs, simpletons, superficial atheists and the like.
Also notice the secular philosophers these christians point to as examples of “serious” atheists: Russell, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus. Why do these christians like these philosophers? Because they allegedly support the FA model: Godlessness leads to angst, despair, hopelessness, nihilism, etc. In other words, christians approve of these philosophers’ view of “atheism” because when these guys tried to imagine themselves as “atheists,” they wound up thinking like christians who imagined themselves as atheists.
I say that we have a unique opportunity now to disregard the christian FA nonsense and discover for ourselves what atheism means. In my case it hasn’t proven scary at all, though I still haven’t gotten the hang of the godless sexual fulfillment all those christians promised us as a benefit of becoming an atheist.
They’re essentially picking and choosing amongst atheists & philosophers. They prefer guys like the 18th century philosopher Jean Paul (not Sartre) who said “The only true atheism is despair”. They ignore fellows like Voltaire and Percy Shelley while embracing Nietzsche.
They definitely ignore 18th Century atheists like Holbach and Diderot. Philipp Blom in his recent book about Holbach’s circle recounts the odd reactions he got from priests at the Paris church in Holbach’s old neighborhood when he asked questions about him. The Catholic Church to this day wants to shove Holbach, by all accounts a convivial, sexually regular fellow who didn’t follow the FA model, down the Memory Hole because of the damage he did to its impostures ~ 250 years ago.
In Lille, the rue d’Holbach runs parallel to the rue d’Alembert.
In Béziers, the rue d’Holbach intersects the rue Diderot.
But the most philosophically astute town, Enlightenmentwise, seems to be Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in the southern ouskirts of Paris: parallel to the rue d’Holbach run both the rue d’Alembert and the rue Rousseau. All three intersect the rue de La Mettrie. From there on, things becomes confusing. The rue d’Holbach ends in the Avenue de la Liberté, which is quite fitting. But the rue d’Alembert continues as the Avenue Charlie Chaplin, while the rue Rousseau is prolonged by the rue Max Linder, who was Chaplin’s contemporary and French counterpart.
Where the Enlightenment ends, slapstick comedy is around the corner.
+1
I loathe it when religious people start talking about Nietzsche. Invariably they use him as a kind of philosophical rorschach into which they can read all their greatest fears. The idea that Nietzsche was anti-science, regardless of how some of his writings on the topic read, is preposterous. He accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and built much of his philosophy on its foundation (also Lamarckism, but that is kind of forgivable given the time in which he lived). He also considered taking a degree in the sciences at one point.
The problems Nietzsche had with science were twofold. One, he viewed it quite early on as having certain limits in its ability to discover “truth” – he was what today you would call an instrumentalist about science. Second, he was wary of its potential to be a sort of Christianity-lite type of value system of the sort that today goes by the name of secular humanism.
Given that, this guy’s hyper-subjectivist, even solipsistic reading of Nietzsche is just the sort of mindless caricature that reputable scholars have been writing against since Walter Kaufmann.
I agree with what you wrote, and I advise here, one should never invoke F. Nietzsche without first reading the several available biographies of the man. He was a complicated (aren’t we all) product of his time, voluminous writer in whose work plenty of quotes can be lifted, and then patched into many many places. Thus Nietzsche can be inserted into whatever the construct you wish to build.
And, “Also” (<<Deutsch) seemingly add gravitas (by the Nietzsche imprimateur) into any argument you are constructing.
On the other hand, Richard Strauss took Nietzsche’s arguments and added even more gravitas to them….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSC4w-fvojA
Cheers,
b&
I should add…it’s Johann Strauss, Jr., who’s known for writing waltzes, but Richard’s waltzes are better — and you’ll hear an example in this one, plus in Der Rosenkavalier.
Cheers,
b&
Further proof of Kubrick’s genius: he managed to use both Also sprach Zarathustra and An der schönen blauen Donau in the same soundtrack. I’ve never seen such a feat in a concert programme. I wouldn’t argue with you about who wrote the better waltzes, but perhaps you’ll concur that a smooth space docking sequence had better be musically underscored by Johann Strauss II than by Richard.
Well, there’s no accounting for taste…especially considering that yours is so obviously worng….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKurWW5lFtE
Offhand, I also can’t think of any concert that had both Strausses on it…but I’d be surprised if nobody’s really done it. At the very least, I’d expect somebody to have done it either in a “tribute to Hollywood” type of program, if not an actual “Battle of the Strausses” one. I think I know somebody who could pull it off, too….
But as for your last challenge: it depends. Am I (or my family / friends etc.) on that space station / shuttle, or is Darth Vader?
b&
Regarding the spaceship’s complement: Ben, I’m afraid some hapless recipients of your kind words on this website would not draw too sharp a distinction between yourself and Darth Vader… 🙂
As for de gustibus ain’t what they used to be, my sentiment mirrors yours, when I see Karajan and Bruno Walter in the same thread, almost in the same breath.
Stanley Kubrick even managed to add gravitas to the Strauss waltzes in a no-gravity environment.
🙂
Ba-dum-dum!
Smartass:-)
It’s not “Ba-dum-dum”, it’s “Oom-pa-pah”.
Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky8Id8_kJyQ
It may be pure meanness to bring the subject up, but let the question be asked: how many boys has Father Alexader buggered?
Simply put, the Vatican’s retrogressive attitude toward the complex problems of modern life, coupled with their systematic hiding of sexual offenses by priests all over the world, means that nothing any RC priest says has the slightest credibility.
1. Big name atheist claims belief as truth
2. Big name atheist belief’s are uglier than Christian beliefs.
3. Jesus wins
“Maybe they don’t teach Googling in Priest School.”
We know they teach rhetoric in Seminary, poorly.
Say what?
Rhetoric is supposed to have three components, logos, pathos, and ethos.
They might teach pathos and ethos quite well in seminary. (The seminary I went to was pretty solid and sound in demanding good writing & historical research skills.) However, scientists and folks more focused on the conventionally spiritual tend to disagree on what constitutes a logical argument.
At best, religionists think if something “makes sense” i.e hangs together and “makes people better” it might be true. (William James, for example.)
Unfortunately a lot of religious thinking at its best is a shared subjectivity which makes a good cultural system.
As anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, religion is a cultural system which is
(1) a system of symbols
(2) which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men
(3) by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic
Fr. Lucie-Smith is, I think, making the assumption that the most important thing humans can do is make proper decisions about how we understand our experiences (i.e. believe in God and be Christian no matter what). The nature of those experiences, and how well those experiences represent the real world are of serious interest to him only to the degree to which it becomes easier or harder for people to make proper decisions about how we understand out experiences.
For those of us in the ‘Reality-Based Community’ the proper interpretation of our experiences is an important thing, but it is completely and thoroughly subordinate to the question “is it true?”. Unfortunately Fr. Lucie-Smith probably interprets our attempts to point out the importance of an accurate understanding of reality as an invitation to drone on about the importance of making proper decisions about our understanding of our experiences.
>>I swear, when I hear an educated priest make statements so palpably false, it makes me see how deeply religion can corrupt rationality.
To be wrong is one thing. But this guy is not even thinking.
It’s always nice to be told by a misogynistic, misanthropic virgin who tells us every Sunday that we are worthless maggot scum. That we atheists cannot ever be happy without their delusions. 🙂
A section of the article not quoted by JCoyne illustrates the problem.
The padre writes
This strikes me as being the essential difference between comedy and tragedy. The characters in a tragedy frequently experience this Dawkins-like sense of desolation. Remember the Duchess of Malfi? “Look you, the stars shine still” – in other words, the heavens are indifferent to human suffering. Indeed, the characters in tragedy often call upon the heavens for justice, but answer comes there none.
But the stars still shining is surely a sign of the cosmos remaining well-ordered, the exact opposite of his central claim that “Belief in an ordered universe is hard to reconcile with a tragic view of life”
Well, the padre is weak in lit. crit. too. The essential difference is that a tragedy’s main character is brought to ruin or otherwise suffers the extreme consequences of some tragic flaw or weakness of character. 😉
/@
“What this might all boil down to are opposing interpretations of experience. Some may feel that they are being protected by a benign Divine Providence and that even when they suffer this suffering can be turned somehow to good. Others may feel that life teaches them that there is no purpose to anything, only blind, pitiless indifference.”
This is an ad hominem attack, because once again it neglects the arguments and instead goes after the person.
Why can’t the new atheists be attacked on their arguments? Surely the arguments aren’t perfect…
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
“Catholic Herald”
Stopped reading there. Preaching to the choir, that will be drivel all the way down.