I am getting so tired of going after the faitheists, atheist-butters, and believers-in-belief that I think I’ll take a break after this critique. Their comments are so similar, and so wrong, that one could guess that they’re simply copying and pasting the arguments of their predecessors—and without thinking.
The reason I want to post this critique is that the latest guilty party is none other than Reza Aslan, who’s become a darling of the religion-friendly and liberal media with the publication of his latest book on the inoffensiveness of Islam, No god but God, as well as his new bestseller on the life of Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. That new book portrays the saviour as an Iron-age Clint Eastwood, a revolutionary who asks the money changers, “Hey punks, do you feel lucky?”
A reader whose name I can’t recall (but thanks anyway) called my attention to a three-year-old essay by Aslan in the Washington Post‘s “On faith” column “Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett: Evangelical atheists?” You get the drift from the title. What disturbs me is that Aslan, who is supposed to be a thinker, and conciliatory, goes after the Horsemen with the fervor of Terry Eagleton and Andrew Brown, accusing them, wrongly, of the same old errors and misunderstandings. Aslan is a Muslim and a believer, so one can see the need to defend his faith—and all faiths—but he does it in a really trite and tiresome way.
Aslan’s accusations:
The new atheists are, in effect, religious fundamentalists.
There is, as has often been noted, something peculiarly evangelistic about what has been termed the new atheist movement. The new atheists have their own special interest groups and ad campaigns. They even have their own holiday (International Blasphemy Day). It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism–an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.
Exactly wrong; the New Atheists are precisely the opposite of fundamentalists. Instead of claiming we have the truth, we claim that we don’t have the truth about God, but that existence seems unlikely. In other words, the claim is a simple one: there is no evidence for the tenets undergirding religious belief. How can lack of belief denote a fundamentalist?
As for a “troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics,” why are we supposed to tolerate views that are not only wrong but harmful? As Peter Boghossian says, “People deserve dignity; ideas don’t deserve dignity.”
What “tolerance” should we have for the view, for instance, that women shouldn’t be priests, or that they don’t deserve an education? And the “sense of siege” trope is just wrong: the last thing that comes to mind when I think of Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, or Dawkins is that they whine about being marginalized. We all recognize we’re in the minority, but that just gives us resolve and purpose. These people are not whiners. Could anybody say that Hitchens gave off an air of being besieged?
The new atheists aren’t as serious as the old-style ones. Plus we don’t know our theology.
This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name). Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.
There is no real difference between “new” and “old” atheists in the arguments they make against God. The real difference is New Atheisms’s refusal to afford respect to religion, as well as its more science-oriented character, i.e., seeing God as an empirical hypothesis.
It is not less sophisticated than, say, Camus, to take believers at their word and ask for the evidence for their beliefs. What reasons do you have for accepting, say, Christianity’s doctrine that Jesus was the son of God versus Islam’s that he wasn’t—nor was he crucified or resurrected? This is the Eagleton ploy: but have you read Duns Scotus? I’ve read tons of theology over the last two years and haven’t found a single good argument anywhere for the existence of God. At some point you just give up and reject the whole premise of a divinity, as well as the revelation on which it’s invariably based. When you do that, you’re miraculously freed from having to deal with many of the other inanities of religion.
As for “shallow scholarship”, whose faith do we criticize: that of the Sophisticated Theologians™, barely embraced (or even known) by regular religious people, or the beliefs of most believers themselves? The Horsemen generally opt for the latter, though they do attack some of the Sophisticated Arguments for God. But absent good reasons to believe in God, one needn’t come to grips with people who are, as Anthony Grayling described John Polkinghorne and Nichols Beale, “members of the asylum”. (See also Grayling’s essay, “Can an atheist be a fundamentalist?“, which puts paid to Aslan’s claim that New Atheists are like religious fundamentalists.)
Religion is much more complicated than the New Atheists think. It’s not really about belief, it’s about transcendence.
The principle [sic] error of the new atheists lies in their inability to understand religion outside of its simplistic, exoteric, and absolutist connotations. Indeed, the most prominent characteristic of the new atheism–and what most differentiates it from traditional atheism–is its utter lack of literacy in the subject (religion) it is so desperate to refute. After all, religion is as much a discipline to be studied as it is an expression of faith. (I do not write books about, say, biology because I am not a biologist.) Religion, however it is defined, is occupied with transcendence–by which I mean that which lies beyond the manifest world and towards which consciousness is oriented–and transcendence necessarily encompasses certain theological connotations with which one ought to be familiar to properly critique belief in a god. One should, for example, be cognizant of how the human experience of transcendence has been expressed in the material world through historically dependent symbols and metaphors. One should be able to recognize the diverse ways in which the universal recognition of human contingency, finitude, and material existence has become formalized through ecclesiastical institutions and dogmatic formulae. One should become acquainted with the unmistakable patterns–call them modalities (Rudolph Otto), paradigmatic gestures (Mircea Eliade), spiritual dimensions (Ninian Smart), or archetypes (Carl Jung)–that recur in the myths and rituals of nearly all religious traditions and throughout all of recorded history. Even if one insists on reducing humanity’s enduring religious impulse to causal definitions, dismissing the experience of transcendence as nothing more than an anthropological (e.g. Edward Tylor or Max Muller), sociological (think Robertson Smith or Emile Durkheim), or even psychological phenomenon (ala Sigmund Freud, who attempted to locate the religious impulse deep within the individual psyche, as though it were a mental disorder that could be cured through proper psychoanalysis), one should at the very least have a sense of what the term “God” means.
Wrong all over. Many atheists were and are deeply acquainted with how religion works. Polls show, in fact, that atheists know more than believers about what’s in the Bible. As far as religion being a discipline to be studied, well, that’s been taken up by Dan Dennett and other religious scholars, many of them atheists. It’s perfectly fine to study the origins—evolutionary, social, and psychological—of how religion came to be, or how it operates, but that says not a whit about its truth claims. And most of the faithful actually believe those truth claims. It’s not the Sophisticated Theologians™, with their Grounds of Beings and Ultimate Concern gods, who damage the world, it’s their less sophisticated followers, who act on their religious morality, which itself rests on a religious epistemology of truth claims.
And as for our lacking a sense of “what the term ‘god’ means,” pray enlighten us, Mr. Aslan! What does it mean? Does it mean the same thing to Rick Warren as it did to Kierkegaard? Does it mean the same thing to John Haught as to Al Mohler? How people conceive of ‘god” is all over the map, but there is a commonality of how the average believer conceives of God—as an anthropomorphic and disembodied being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent.
The fact that so many cultures believe in a transcendent divinity is evidence that it exists.
Of course, positing the existence of a transcendent reality that exists beyond our material experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of a Divine Personality, or God. (In some ways, the idea of God is merely the personal affirmation of the transcendent experience.) But what if did? What if one viewed the recurring patterns of religious phenomena that so many diverse cultures and civilizations–separated by immeasurable time and distance–seem to have shared as evidence of an active, engaging, transcendent presence (what Muslims call the Universal Spirit, Hindus call prana, Taoists call chi’i, Jews call ruah, and Christians call the Holy Spirit) that underlies creation, that, in fact, impels creation? Is such a possibility any more hypothetical than say, superstring theory or the notion of the multiverse? Then again, maybe the patterns of religious phenomenon signify nothing. Maybe they indicate little more than a common desire among all peoples to answer similar questions of “Ultimate Concern,” to use the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich’s famous phrase. The point is that, like any researcher or critic, like any scientist, I’m open to possibilities.
The big error here is the last sentence. It sounds so liberal, so conciliatory, to say “I’m open to possibilities,” but it’s a mistake. One should be open to probabilities, not possibilities. I’ve found, during my brain-numbing reading of theology, that the major error of theologians, here committed by Aslan, are that they mistake logical possibilities for probabilities. That, for instance, is the besetting sin of Alvin Plantinga. It’s as if our lack of certainty that god exists means that we should assume that it has at least a 50% probability. We must apportion our belief in phenomena according to the evidence, and there’s precious little evidence for god. (That is, by the way, how we live our regular lives. We don’t worry about the oxygen moving to the other side of the room because it’s a logical possibility, as it is. Rather, we go on our experience and the low probability that that would happen.)
As for the fact that something might be true because everyone believes it, that’s just dumb. There were lots of false beliefs and morals in the old days, and these are changing fast. That is in fact the point of Steve Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Just because humanity has passed on comforting superstitions over millennia is not itself evidence for the truth of those superstitions. One must always ask oneself, “Why do I think that? And how would I know if I were wrong?”
New atheists are mean to believers. And science has done bad things, too!
The new atheists will say that religion is not just wrong but evil, as if religion has a monopoly on radicalism and violence; if one is to blame religion for acts of violence carried out in religion’s name then one must also blame nationalism for fascism, socialism for Nazism, communism for Stalinism, even science for eugenics. The new atheists claim that people of faith are not just misguided but stupid–the stock response of any absolutist.
No, the New Atheists claim that people of faith are deluded and misguided, not stupid. Who would call Terry Eagleton or Karen Armstrong stupid? They are misguided—guilty of wish thinking.
As for science being guilty of eugenics, yes, some scientists were racists or jingoists and pushed a eugenic solution to “the race problem”. But should you blame that on the methodology of science, or on the preexisting racism of humans? The racism was there; science just gave it one more reason to operate. After all, selective breeding (eugenics of animals and plants) long antedated the Nazis.
The new atheists, like religious fundamentalists, lack complete assurance about gods and should accept revelation as a source of evidence for God.
What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims–be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth–are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science. That may not be a slogan easily pasted on the side of a bus. But it is the hallmark of the scientific intellect.
What? Fundamentalists admit that metaphysical claims are unknowable? No way! They may say that some of them are beyond the purview of science, but, as Dawkins has said repeatedly, if there were scientific evidence for God, believers would hop on it like white on rice. That’s why there’s so much natural theology going on: people doing Biblical archaeology like looking for the Ark, arguing about the Shroud of Turin, adducing the “fine-tuning” of the universe, the “moral law,” or “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” as empirical evidence for God, and so on. If belief didn’t need evidence, those things wouldn’t be happening. The search for evidence for one’s religion is also the basis of intelligent design and scientific creationism. No, the faithful do not abjure science; it’s just that science gives them no evidence for their God. But they keep trying to find it, and assure their flocks that it is there.
The hallmark of the scientific intellect is reason, or rather rationality. We have confidence in a phenomenon in proportion to the evidence in its favor. I think that’s a good way to live one’s life in every respect, including one’s religion.
In the end, Aslan proves himself an unctuous and annoying person, but only because the “Aslan phenomenon” is symptomatic of one of our biggest social ills. As science and reason begin to erode religion, people are loath to let go of their comforting beliefs. And people like Aslan are always around to assure them it’s okay to have unevidenced beliefs—and make a few bucks doing so. I’m not accusing Aslan of being mercenary, for he seems like a sincere guy. What he is is an annoying but erudite species of accommodationist. He’s the opposite of the people kings used to keep around to remind them of their mortality. What religion needs now is precisely what the New Atheists provide: people who stand behind the faithful and whisper in their ears, “You might be wrong, you know. Look at the evidence.”
I find the “fundamentalist” claim to be ignorant of the term’s history. It relates to the 19th Century Christian Conference were irreducible theological tenets where set to defeat the modernist sensibility to transform Christianity from a systematic base of knowledge, to a subjective attitude. By the historical meaning of the term, as metaphor, I am a fundamentalist because I will not allow knowledge to be asserted without the fundamental of evidence. I am proud to be a fundamentalist atheist with the primary fundamentals to be evidence and systematic logic.
Pardon my typos. Where should be were and vice versa. I am only on my second cup of coffee.
Well said! The inability to correctly define terms is exactly the problem with most who comment today, whatever the topic. At the same time, the recent interview of Mr. Aslan by a Fox talking head was hugely offensive on many levels.
From here, as a now-retired teacher of Humanities and Religious Studies (among other subjects), I find all this dithering by both the atheists and anti-atheists so much wasted air and breath. Quite frankly, tiresome in the extreme (I have read Dawkins’s book and others – will eventually read Aslan’s as well.) in their fulminations at each other over that which can be neither proved nor disproved.
Your final sentence should be read by those on both sides of this particularly little useful topic (Well, I suppose it is useful for stirring up a good sized tempest in a tea cup.).
Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve some rather more important matters which concern me at the moment.
You can’t think outside the box until you know its dimensions.
Has there ever been the slightest indication of anything meta-physical?
Has there ever been the slightest evidence of a transcendent being?
Has there ever been the slightest evidence that the birth of an incarnate god has happened any place in the universe, let alone on planet earth?
This dude talks about the hallmarks of an intellectual scientist, and yet the absence of evidence doesn’t seem to concern him. After all, god is ultimately unknowable and we can never scientifically say anything for certain about his existance.
What an intellectually dishonest disposition and what a waste of time. I’m glad you’re taking a break from refuting these kind of “arguments”, Jerry. They do get so tiresome and repetitive because, as you said, the faith-heads just keep repeating the same drivel over and over again.
Good call, mate.
Tons of indications. But they take place in peoples minds.
A major difference between someone like Aslan vs someone like Jerry is that the Aslans of the world consider what they think or feel about something, especially if it is a strong feeling, is evidence that it is true / accurate. The Jerrys of the world might use such feeling as a starting point, an inspiration, to find out more about the phenomenon, but understand that considering such feeling as good evidence is a real quick way of getting it wrong.
What’s more, there are so many examples of where ‘internal feelings’ are misleading on the one hand and detectable as physical brain stuff on the other, that all credibility for ‘transcendence’ goes out the window.
We don’t hear so much these days, as the moral conservatives and goody sophisticates pontificate on transcendence, about the supposedly transcendent experiences of hippies of the sixties. It’s pretty much accepted that drugs are ‘brain’ altering and not really a route to astral planing and other flights of fancy. Religious transcendence seems pretty tame by comparison.
I’ve never really got to the bottom of who or what does the transcending anyway, and what exactly is being transcended. Are they supposed to be in touch with God during prayer? How do they distinguish that from mere brain fuzz?
That’s the trouble with meta-physics.
Where is the evidence?
“This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche… ”
Isn’t this a more-or-less direct quote from others’ attacks on “New Atheism”? Aslan is just as lazy as any of the others.
Anyway, this is irrelevant, as you suggest: New/gnu atheism isn’t philosophical atheism, it’s empirical atheism.
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I think the only difference between those old more sophisticated, more honorable atheists, vs the gnu atheists is that the old ones are comfortably dead and distant in time while the gnu’s are right here, right now.
When they say the new atheists are different from the old atheists and agnostics, do they really mean they have read all their works? Voltaire said men shall not be free until the last priest is gone, Col Ingersoll wanted man to be free from religion, d’Holdbach writings spelt the end of superstition and encouraged men to learn from nature, Meslier wrote about it,saying all religion is based on fear and ignorance, Nietzsche was very vocal in his writings about the death of god and the bad that christianity and by extension Judaism, even Kant said the arguments for the existence of god lead nowhere. These apologists have to tell us what we have said different from the old atheists.
We don’t need a new argument to refute the bad argument of Anselm about the greatest possible being or that of Aquinas of First Cause and we need not a new argument to tell Craig he is wrong to suggest that morals come from a deity. They should be put to task to prove their claim that we lack scholarship in religion to talk about it.
Indeed, the so-called “old atheists” didn’t deliver a consistent message but that’s because the “old atheist” moniker is something applied to distinguish thinkers of the past from the so-called “new atheists”. In my opinion it’s a forced grouping that borders on the anachronistic.
I’m pretty sure Nietzsche for one, didn’t call himself an atheist and when he posed the “god is dead” question he was asking if we as a human race were grown up enough to live without god.
And they didn’t have internet. I do think the NA is a term that is used not in the best lights when referring to current atheists.
No, I haven’t found anywhere Nietzsche calls himself an atheist. The closest he comes is free spirit.
The primary difference between the “old” and the “new”atheists, is that the latter can point to scientific theories such as evolution and big bang cosmology. Theories such as this have almost completely eliminated the need for god as an explaination for the world we live in. The “new” atheists can make an ever stronger case than the “old” atheists, since they can add science to the philosophical arguments.
+1
Not only have scientific theories almost completely eliminated the need for god as an explanation for the world we live in but they have put significant limits on what God could do and could have done: LHC shows that God could interact with the material universe only via one of the forces that we already know and can detect (see Sean Carroll’s Skepticon 5 presentation); Planck shows that we live in a zero-energy universe, and thus that there cannot have been an act of creation, which would have put energy into the universe (if I’ve correctly understood arguments that Torbjörn has made elsewhere).
These are far stronger than any philosophical arguments; science hasn’t added to those, it’s obviated them. Thus, we can be empirical atheists.
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Most philosophical arguments for atheism are in fact rebuttals of theist arguments, which are always flawed. It’s my impression that many atheists are both emperical and philosophical atheists.
“Not only have scientific theories almost completely eliminated the need for god as an explanation for the world we live in but they have put significant limits on what God could do and could have done”
Which explains why so many theists are pissed at science, it takes away too much freedom from their celestial overlord.
Isn’t that like saying that Tolkien could not have created Middle-Earth because that would be inconsistent with Middle-Earth’s internal logic? If God is the Author of the universe he can do whatever he likes with it.
No. Nothing like that.
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one other key difference…old atheist = dead atheist = no rejoindre
new atheist = alive atheist = not on my watch you don’t
Very true, though Voltaire was not actually an atheist but more of a deist accommodationist, since he attacked genuine atheists like D’Holbach. Nevertheless, your larger point remains correct. Those who whine about New Atheists being less nice/thoughtful than the old ones haven no grasp of the history of atheism.
Meslier (whose “Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier” has been recently translated into English) was a priest who saved his rage against God and Christianity for his writings, designed to be found after his death. There is far more vitriol in his Testament than in anything by Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett.
D’Holbach was similarly tireless in excoriating religion as a fraud and blight upon civilization, most famously in “The System of Nature,” which was The God Delusion of the 1700s–a scandalous success that inspired many outraged theist rebuttals and attacks. As for Nietzsche, his late work “Antichrist” is perhaps the most over-the-top denunciation of Christianity ever penned. All of this suggests that the New Atheists are actually LESS strident than the old Atheists!
I agree with you here. Our accusers are liars, they say we aren’t scholarly but it seems to me this is their major undoing for if they would read a book like Good Sense by D’Holdbach, not even the deist god gets a chance to lift its head!
I’m trying to read your essay, but the preacher on TV won’t let me.
I’ve yet to hear a good reason why these people think “old” atheists like Nietzsche, Feuerbach, etc. are preferable to the new atheists.
It can’t be because they gave more serious arguments against the existence of god. The philosophers Aslan mentions were not even interested in arguing against the existence of God. They took that as granted.
It can’t be because they were less “strident”. Here’s Nietzsche on Christianity:
Sounds pretty strident to me.
So what is it then? Why does Aslan look back fondly at the good ol’ atheists?
Probably because they’re dead.
Is that all you have to do for the faith heads to like you? Get dead?
It didn’t seem to work for Hitchens.
Give it a few years and we’ll see.
Very good observation, stated very clearly. I would have spent ten times as many words describing specific instances in order to say the same thing. I’ll have to remember that distillation. Thanks!
This [possibilities vs probabilities] will be a useful distinction to summon on those occasions when I bother to read or listen to something an apologist has to say, or if I ever again allow myself to be baited into a debate about the supernatural with anyone in my circle (alcohol avoidance helps me avoid stepping into that trap more than any other thing.) I think it’s also true, though, that apologists don’t always ‘mistake’ probability for possibility. Their audience’s cognitive bias (and their own, too, except for the stealth huckster’s in the bunch)results in belief in literal metaphysical-object existence. This both enables and requires them to speak with truth conviction of supernatural entities/events sans any evidence and contrary to anything remotely related to critical analysis.
Good point Richard,
cognitive bias = deliberate blind spot = belief = motivated failure to falsify
It’s not possible to argue with someone who deliberately closes their eyes when asked to see.
Dr. Coyne came up with a good “deepity” that I’ll have to remember. He said,
“Why do I think that? How would I know if I were wrong?”
It’s why I gave up on belief so long ago. Who needs it? I find that I am capable of thinking all kinds of things and that most of these thoughts are poor representations of whatever it is they are supposed to represent. Certainly it would be a mistake to believe in any of my thoughts without refining them by way of Coyne’s deepity.
I agree that that pair of questions makes for a great belief test; but I think you’re misusing the term deepity. 🙂
A deepity is something that is sounds deep but isn’t, because it is only true on a superficial level, and untrue on a deeper level. See Dan Dennett’s explanation below.
http://goo.gl/OyGJaq
PS. Note clever shortening of URL as per instructions! Assuming it works that it. 🙂
As I said here after Aslan wrote this misguided piece, I just couldn’t credit him with objectivity of any kind and suspect his latest work also lacks it. I find this whole attack on the New Atheists tiresome but also somewhat encouraging because the attackers are taking notice that the New Atheists kinda have a few good points.
Aslan does seem like an astute fellow (I saw him on Real Time last week) and it’s too bad he’s deluded.
Also, this was my favourite part of the post, “anthropomorphic and disembodied being”. It’s so “invisible pink unicorn”. 🙂
There are two separate issues with Aslan: Does being a Muslim make one incapable of writing competently about Christianity, and Is Alsan a competent scholar and thinker. I didn’t think about the second issue until recently, and the answer appears to be: perhaps not.
I’ve seen several friends on FB raving about Azlan’s new book. I’ve been tempted to ask whether he addresses the possibility of the “historical Jesus” being a wishful fiction, but haven’t wanted to stir up trouble. I mean, so far as I am aware there is NO historical evidence for any person named Jesus Christ outside of the gospels written decades after the fact. So on what (besides the Bible) is the Historical Jesus based?
I did ask this question on a political blog by several academics and was surprised that it got hand-waved away as a question from someone who doesn’t understand history. Admittedly, I’m no expert in the field, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Richard Carrier’s peer-reviewed book “On the Historicity of Jesus Christ” will get a similar response despite his expertise and phds in ancient history, philosophy and the classics.
-Exactly. Aslan is a minor courtier (he has a Theology degree from Harvard), so he uses the Courtier’s Reply.
One gets to stop paying attention immediately whenever someone employs the phrase “atheist fundamentalism”.
Hey, I’m a fundamentalist when it comes to basic math. I do not stray from dogma.
That’s militant mathematicism!
How strident of you.
It’s a red herring…it’s an old magician’s trick – look over there while i do my ‘magic’ over here…fundamentally it boils down to the provision of evidence in support of a claim…there is a dearth of evidence so they turn to distraction, philosophy and word play (when not incorporating scientific advancements and claiming it was there all along in the their scriptures)
Prof. Coyne: “One should be open to probabilities, not possibilities. I’ve found, during my brain-numbing reading of theology, that the major error of theologians, here committed by Aslan, are that they mistake logical possibilities for probabilities.”
Bingo. A well-stated encapsulation of what we keep trying to tell theists over and over.
That should be written in fireworks in the sky. Made a banner and put behind every atheist debating a theist so that principle can be kept in mind.
Vaal
I hate to help the faitheists out, but they could deflect (y)our rebuttals concerning this silly “fundamentalist” charge by simply calling the new atheists zealots or saying that the new atheists are as annoying as evangelical fundamentalists because what is most annoying about evangelical fundamentalists is their zealotry.
Of course, that reduces them to little more than a big group of tone trolls, but I think it would get them more traction.
On the surface, it does seem as though the most annoying thing about evangelical fundamentalists is their tendency towards zealotry, but after you consider what they are pushing (as opposed to how aggressively they are pushing it), the message is much worse than the annoying way they shove it down the throats of everyone they can. Nevertheless, as long as people haven’t realized that, it is the “evangelizing” that many people who buy the faitheist line think is religion’s most objectionble characteristic.
Except of course that the new atheists are not zealots.
I don’t see that any of the new atheists are fanatical or uncompromising. They reach their conclusions based on reason and will change their conclusions based on reason.
Speaking for myself, I AM a zealot when it comes to not creating dispalys of antique carriages.
One should be uncompromising to those who consistently make conclusions not based on reason.
Zealor! 😉
Muphry’s – zealot.
To the charge that he’s a “fundamentslist”, Richard Dawkins says he’s passionate. As a matter of strategy for the faitheists, they could get more traction, I think, by using the word “zealot” – it has the negative connotation they want (ceiling cat knows why) – faitheists can score points that are harder to refute. One person’s passion is another person’s zealotry. Incidentally, I do not mind being called “uncompromising” when it comes whether I consider faith to be a virtue or a vice; it’s a vice. If that makes me a zealot in that respect, so be it.
simply calling the new atheists zealots
The problem is that almost all words of this sort are rooted in religious origins.
Dictionary.reference.com:
zeal-ot … 3) A member of a radical, warlike, ardently patriotic group of Jews in Judea, particularly prominent from a.d. 69 to 81, advocating the violent overthrow of Roman rule and vigorously resisting efforts of the Romans and their supporters to heathenize the Jews.
I Love this: “One should be able to recognize the diverse ways in which the universal recognition of human contingency, finitude, and material existence has become formalized through ecclesiastical institutions and dogmatic formulae.”
CLASSIC theobabble.
Here’s a small challenge for you: Can you translate this fine piece of theobabble into a coherent sentence using common sense english/american?
😉
“Religion and religious institutions evolved to help people cope with their fears.”
If you say this in an approving voice, with a smile and nod — then you “get” it.
If you say this with a disapproving voice, with a frown and shake of the head — then you just don’t “get” it at all.
I find it surprising how many of the atheist criticisms of religion are brought back as garbled defenses of religion. Apparently the critical issue is really your attitude.
Well done! 🙂
I’m afraid I’ll never get it. I simply lack the emotional depth it takes to understand and appreciate the beauty of godly beliefs and institutions, and I am lost in a sea of self righteousness failing to realize what greatness religion has bestowed upon humanity.
5 years of theology studies and the grace of God will open my eyes though. That and a hefty paycheck might do the trick.
I can be shifty like that.
Or hurled back at atheists with the intention of insulting them, thus apparently conceding the original atheist criticism and stressing irony meters for miles around.
Yes indeed. As far as I can tell writing and talking like that is the main purpose of an education in theology.
No matter how you embellish it, it is still juvenile and irrelevant. High marks for creative vocabulary, low marks for relevant semantic content.
And still, some can make a living out of it.
Yes. Just a fancy way of saying, “People know they’re gonna die, don’t like it so much, and make up all kinds of different stuff that ain’t true so it don’t hurt so bad.”
I disagree. I don’t think they are mistaking logical possibilities for probabilities at all. Not if you examine the mindset closely. They LOVE the distinction; it makes them special.
I think they first emphasize the difference between possibility and probability — then slip an empirical issue into another category — and finally trade on the virtue which would be merited in the analogy. The existence of God (or the Loch Ness Monster or alternative medicine or ‘transcendence’) — is confused with whatever glories would come from it being true. The evidence then is only insufficient for people who don’t like the conclusion.
If you rely only on an objective examination of the facts and an unbiased approach then sure — you won’t believe. It’s not probable. But the people who leap at the possibility alone are displaying something the so-called ‘objective’ people lack: a heart.
This is category conflation. They’ve gone from evaluating the outer world to establishing their inner one. Given this new narrative framework the religious see themselves as having a sort of sensibility which needs the Truth … and this gives them an extra-sensory perception which allows them perceive it. They are spiritually receptive because they feel and think at a deeper level than those who don’t.
No, they’re not being judgmental about us. Why? Because they say they’re not, that’s why. Conclusion = identity. Doubt = character flaw. What could an atheist bring to the discussion any more? Nothing but our unfair judgments about how they’re not justified in making this leap and playing this little game.
As Jerry points out, faith is an immunizing strategy: they’d drop it in a second if they felt they had a rational case. But ‘possibilities’ only turn into ‘probabilities’ when being the right kind of person gives you a better view of the Big Picture. The ‘gift’ of faith — wanting something to be true — is suddenly supposed to grant the believer an empirical advantage. It opens them up. A fact question is slipped into moral and meaning categories and thus who you are and what you need matters. It leads to what you believe.
In my opinion the major error of theologians is the same major error of the average believer: category error. Science tries to eliminate bias and “Faith” positively revels and encourages it by turning factual conclusions into a personality test. It’s an extended insult to dissent and dissenters. Approaching God like a hypothesis is now deemed to be like refusing to believe that love matters because you can’t see it through a microscope and so you’re going to use that as a pitiful excuse to narrow and limit your life.
That beautiful, charming “faith” we’re supposed to respect and admire is actually a punch to our gut.
And it doesn’t help them do what they think it helps them do. It doesn’t make them better people.
This is precisely why science and religion, at their essence, are incompatible. Religion begins with THE answer, and science begins with a hypothesis. For the religious GOD DID IT is the beginning of the dialog and not the end. For the scientist, GOD DID IT is the hypothesis (the jumping off point if you will)…we must then generate evidence to dismiss the null hypothesis (God did not do it) – the onus is on the claimant to provide evidence in support of the claim…
btw, most believers (as most people) are not trained in the scientific method and in my experience make the following mistake all the time: they attempt to turn the tables on the skeptic and ask the skeptic to provide evidence in support of the null hypothesis (i.e. prove that god doesn’t exist)
I wonder what Aslan thinks of the “Christian love” he has been receiving, which is usually reserved for atheist writers. One can only hope that Richard Carrier manages to get himself on FOX when his book about the mythic Jesus comes out next year. After the Superman tie-ins and Jesus as human revolutionary this year, perhaps American Christians will be primed for going one step further with the idea of Jesus as elaborate rumor.
For those interested, here’s a debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan
youtube.com/watch?v=gKjcvZoxT9Q
I did watch it some time ago but can’t remember the content… I just remember thinking that Harris won it hands down but then again, I’m no faitheist.
I’d seen that before but just revisited that debate.
It reminded me of how utterly terrible Asian’s arguments were in that debate. The epistemology of mental-jello-presented-as-greater-wisdom.
Sam was brilliant, putting as many nails in that jello as he could.
Vaal
Sorry: the “epitome” of mental-jello-presented-as-greater-wisdom.
Vaal
“The fact that so many cultures believe in a transcendent divinity is evidence that it exists.”
I hate the argument from numbers. Why should the number of people who believe anything matter? One of my favorite exchanges from the Movie “Elmer Gantry” is “Once there were only twelve Christians. Was Christianity a failure? Did God go out of business?” Neither the small nor large number of adherents to an idea is proof of its truth, any more than long duration is.
Definitely. But, the number of people that believe, or accept, something can be relevant. IF consideration is given to how those people came to hold their position.
The argument from authority is always a fallacy in that what people believe or accept can never be sufficient evidence by itself to suppose that the belief is accurate. But if the authority figure is an authority in the sense of being an expert in a relevant field of scientific study, compared to merely a social superior, and many such authorities agree on something having to do with that field of study, then it is reasonable to suppose that what they are agreeing on is accurate. At least it is likely to be the most accurate that we are capable of at the moment.
Numbers may not be proof, but they are evidence. If a hundred people are given a math problem and they all respond with the same answer then in the absence of evidence to the contrary it is rational to conclude that their answer is probably correct. Theism is very common. Obviously, something is causing that. But we have evidence that the cause is probably something other than that Gods really exist.
No.
Numbers are not evidence, If you give 1 million people a math problem and most give you the same answer whether they are correct or not depends on whether or not they know how to the math in question.
Theism is common because it spreads itself, that is its whole purpose. So many of them are related and stem from the same source, the argument from numbers might be a reasonable argument if completely unrelated and isolated peoples came up with the same theism, but that is not the case.
Numbers are not evidence, If you give 1 million people a math problem and most give you the same answer whether they are correct or not depends on whether or not they know how to the math in question.
That’s irrelevant. The point is that you can draw rational conclusions about whether an answer is likely to be correct on the basis of how many people give it. If a math problem is given to a large number of people who all respond with the same answer, it is very unlikely that they all just happened to come up with the same wrong answer. Absent evidence to the contrary, the more likely explanation for the overwhelming agreement is that the answer is correct. Numbers matter.
No.
If you give the same math problem to 1 million people who all believe 2 + 2 = 74 they would all come up with the same wrong answer.
The number of people who believe something means absolutely NOTHING when trying to determine if its accurate or not. Billions of people believe have the same wrong beliefs about many things. Half the planet still thinks the earth is the center of the universe. More than half the planet thinks the moon landings were faked.
What a lot of these people are defending is their culture. I would almost bet that if you asked them to define and describe their concept of god then they would come down a diests, not true theists who actually believe that their holy books are the inerrant word of a god. I have read Admstrong, but not Aslan and her definition of her god is awfully nebulous.
That’s cold.
I remember hearing Reza discuss his special elixir of hero-worship apologetics with Terry Gross the other day while I was on my way home from work. His crap about the “truth” was nauseating and self-serving because he essentially speaks of “truths” and “meaning” as immune from any framework of empirical restraints. It’s nothing more than post-modern poetry from an articulate obscurantist infected by post-colonial cultural values meant to vindicate his theological expertise.
http://www.npr.org/2013/07/15/198040928/christ-in-context-zealot-explores-the-life-of-jesus
Does Miranda have a Muslim Holy Rabbit? 🙂
Nothing illustrates that better than the contrast between the number of Amazon reviews of the book The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview (a measly 1) and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (5,398)! The fact that the latter has been out for ten
months and the former for only one doesn’t account for a disparity of that magnitude. What does is the pathetic hope for truth in the words of a medical con artist.
Just wanted to say how well I thought this was written:
“We must apportion our belief in phenomena according to the evidence, and there’s precious little evidence for god. (That is, by the way, how we live our regular lives. We don’t worry about the oxygen moving to the other side of the room because it’s a logical possibility (it is). Rather, we go on our experience and the low probability that that would happen.)”
Well said! (That’s all, carry on.)
I think we need a more effective polemic than to merely say “No we’re not, YOU are.”.
We DO claim to have the truth; the truth we have isn’t any particular conclusions, but the correct methodology to determine truth.
Yes. As usual they are making a category error.
I’d be interested to hear the thought process by which Aslan converted from Evangelical Christianity to Islam. Let’s see…virgin births make no sense but horses with wings do?? Killing apostates is sooo much more humane than sexual abuse of children??
I notice that he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, from which I infer that he’s good at making stuff up (as he would have to be given his wooly-headed religious thinking).
The “Aslan phenomenon” exists solely because Fox News doesn’t think a Muslim can write honestly about Christianity. It has nothing to do with this old article. Complaints about his other work apologizing for Islam basically agree.
If someone insists on redefining religion as the aspiration to goodness, and God is the ideal of good, they are not going to listen to you claim that they can’t define religion and God. Also, I tend to admire the aspiration to goodness and wish for an ideal of good myself.
Now I personally am an old fashioned- materialist and realist, so I believe that science really has disproved the supernatural, from astrology to the end of the alphabet. But most scientists appear to be probabilists. This makes their concerns about the truth claims of religion rather problematic. They should be concerned instead with religious bigotry. At this moment, between Lauren Green and Reza Aslan, I believe that the problem is Lauren Green.
I do not see how you come to that conclusion. Unless you first concede that the concept of philosophically pure, platonically perfect truths is valid in the context of, well, reality. Critically, that is one of the main religious concepts that non believers argue is bunk. That doesn’t prevent us from understanding what religious truth claims mean, or that the findings of scientific inquiry often clearly indicate, to very high degrees of probability, that their truth claims aren’t true. For any useful meaning of the word true.
And pointing out that the explanations that religion has come up with about reality are wrong is eminently worthwhile.
Many scientists are capable of concerning themselves with multiple aspects of an issue, or even multiple issues, at the same time.
It is probabilists who concede the possibility of metaphysical truths, and only dogmatic materialists such as myself who claim this metaphysical claptrap has been disproven. I know of no probabilist who has ever given any reason why people could not simply play the low odds: After all, somebody does win the lottery. Also, the probablist concession that mere logical possibilities of very low probability also concedes that science as a whole cannot devise a coherent model of the universe. They are pushing a logical impossibility against a logical possibility.
Correction: “mere logical possibilities of very low probability still count, however little, solely because they are logically coherent,”
I have no idea who you are talking about.
Where are these probabilist creatures you speak of typically found? Sounds like you don’t have a very good understanding of how science works, what statistics mean, or the differences between beliefs and knowledge. And you have constructed a strawman to take out your frustrations on.
The only types of people I have come across that might be similar to your probabilists are believers and accommodationists grasping at straws they don’t understand at all, trying to coopt science to support their religious views.
Not where, but who?: Every scientist who says science can’t actually prove anything, just demonstrate a high probability; Every scientist who says that science doesn’t describe reality but is the current best explanation of measurements; Every physical scientist who attacks the possibility of social science; Every scientist who rejects materialism in favor of naturalism; Every scientist who denounces scientism; Every scientist eager to declare the limits of science in public discourse; Every scientist who concedes the impossibility of justifying induction; Every scientist who accepts mathematical Platonism, in whatever guise.
But why are you commenting on posts you didn’t read? (Unless you’re Lauren Green?) I specifically said I believe that science has disproven all forms of the supernatural. Unless you’re paying no attention at all, you know that this is an extremely widespread view, probably the majority view in the whole scientific community (though possibly not the elite view?) There’s no way that this position could possibly be twisted into something a believer or accommodationist would want to believe.
Either your reading comprehension sucks or your bias is skewing your perceptions.
I think we can do both. We can say that Reza Aslan is, based on his other works, hardly objective. In this way, this “old article” is relevant. At the same time we can say that Lauren Green/FOX are bigoted in their line of questioning and we can reject those criticisms of Aslan because they are unjustified.
Yes that’s logically possible. But it is also extremely improbable that in this context justified criticisms that should have been made three years ago will not be affirmation of the thesis that Reza Aslan is a Muslim apologist, which thesis I remind you has already been advanced on this website.
I find logical possibility to be vastly overrated, but then again, I am a dogmatic materialist, even fundamentalist if you define dogmatism and fundamentalism as attitudes (especially negative attitudes.)
I guess I’m not concerned about Aslan being a Muslim apologist. I’m concerned that he lacks general objectivity which seems to seep into his scholarly work as well.
In Bible scholarship, refusal to take the New Testament at face value, then work to reconcile contradictions, is about the highest general objectivity you can obtain, short of accepting the possibility that it’s all mythology/fraud. This website is neutral on this point (but tends more towards accepting that the New Testament has some minimal historical value.) Therefore this website has no more problem with Aslan’s objectivity than any other religious studies, bar Robert McQueen Price and Richard Carrier.
In this context then, I don’t see how this practically can be perceived as anything but an effort to improve on Lauren Green.
You’ve lost me.
Religion is much more complicated than the New Atheists think. It’s not really about belief, it’s about transcendence.
Paul Kurtz, “The Transcendental Temptation”
addresses to this illusion – wishful thinking – very nicely.
I call this going into Academic Mode(or Therapist or Anthropologist Mode.) It’s also known as the “Hey — look out the window!!!” Strategy.
“Stop caring about whether religion is true or not, or whether God exists or not. Be objective and sensitive and study it as a discipline. See and understand how it works, how it helps, and how it finds expression around the world. And then celebrate it! You don’t have to actually agree with it to appreciate its importance to others… and therefore God ‘exists’ in a way that you, too, can accept.”
Blah, blah,blah. Yes indeed, REAL atheists don’t try to refute religion. They go instead into Academic Mode and become harmless. It’s just not important whether it’s true or not if it works for people.
Right. That’s bull and at some level they know it. Try and get a person of faith to clearly admit that they themselves are not interested in whether God exists or not and see what happens.
But faitheists often think this is a powerful argument because they seem to buy into the idea that religion is simply one of the many dishes people bring to the Identity Smorgasbord. No right; no wrong : just different. The more diversity the better! Be an academic and focus on the believer, not the belief.
And theists think this is a powerful argument because it works.
No, it’s not true that they or other believers think the existence of God or the truth of religion or the validity of interpreting ‘transcendent’ experiences as evidence for a transcendent reality doesn’t matter. They think it matters more than anything else. But if they demand that nonbelievers behave like aloof academics and consider religion only as a discipline or therapy then the atheists shut up … and your own doubts quiet down.
A tour de force. That should relieve the itch for a while.
I would expect a scholar of religion to be familiar with pertinent statistics, instead of having a simplistic, “exoteric and absolutist” knowledge. Alas.
The distinction between probabilities (science hypotheses) and possibilities (philosophic hypotheticals) is telling. Both superstrings and multiverses are models connected with existing physics, and we have a tentative handle on how to test them. If we could reach Planck scale, we could test superstrings. And anthropic selection as well as bubble universe collisions seems to give us a handle to test multiverses.
I doubt anyone know, or ever will know, how to test “transcendence” since by definition it has an existence where physics suggests there is none (“beyond our material experiences”).
So now intercessory prayers studies, and phylogenies and especially genome sequencing showing that humans are hominids and that there were no single human breeder pair, testing metaphysical claims of “prayers” and “you from woo/fall of man” with no more difficulties than other testable claims, are not the very hallmark of the scientific intellect?
Here Aslan leaves religion and academics to venture into absurdity.
I thought the idea of multiverses were on its last leg?
What the new atheists do not do …is admit that all metaphysical claims …are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science.
The Ultimately Unknowable Sword he’s waving around here seems to have two equally sharp edges.
And as for our lacking a sense of “what the term ‘god’ means,” pray enlighten us, Mr. Aslan! What does it mean?
That’s just more New Atheist insufficiently-serious attitude there, trying to define a word, using other words!
And for Aslan’s sake, don’t try to draw a picture of one either — I understand he identifies himself as a Muslim these days, and that would be taken as a direct insult.
“It’s as if our lack of certainty that god exists means that we should assume that it has at least a 50% probability.”
Reminiscent of a tagline I saw once – “All probabilities are 50-50. Either a thing happens or it doesn’t”.
This means, of course, that if one adopts this approach with every possible god, the probability of a significant proportion of them existing is overwhelming. And considering the thousands of putative gods that have been contemplated, that means there must be hundreds of the blighters around. Choose one!
I think I’ll stick with Anoia, the Goddess of Things Stuck in Drawers, myself.
Interesting. I have not read the recent book but I find the author appealing, along with this topic.
In terms of science and religion, can’t much of what you compare in defense of the “actual” scientific method in relation to science-gone-racially-wrong as being influenced by preexisting racism or “other issues” preventing the more glorified purity of the scientific method from being clearly seen/practiced – could be the same argument for the actualized benefit of “god” or religion? That preexisting issues prevent the realizing of the actual benefit of it, or some, or the suggestion of.
Perhaps as though religion attempts to “wake the atheist in the night with the subtle question that you might not know what you know.”
I don’t think your analogy holds because science is a method and ‘the existence of God’ a conclusion. You’d have to compare method to method (science to faith) or conclusion to conclusion (naturalism to supernaturalism) and then your point breaks down.
In order to answer the “subtle question that you might not know what you know” you need to become more objective — not less. This brings in reason and science.
The “benefits” of religion come with a heavy price. Its virtues are undermined by the way it elevates its vices.
Aslan annoys me too. In No God But God, he refers many times to Western and Christian imperialism, but when referring to the imperialism of the Muslim Caliphs or the Ottoman Empire, he invents the handy euphemism “The Islamic Expansion”. Presumably he believes that Islam spread all the way from Spain and North Africa through to India and beyond solely by the evangelism of peace-loving pilgrims.
It’s a recurring (and annoying) theme with liberal commentators: All of the ills of the world can be blamed on Western and Christian imperialism. To them, the “expansion” of the Muslim caliphs, along with a slave-trade that saw more people stolen and sold into servitude than in the New World, isn’t really imperialism. No, how could it be? Muslims have always been the victims of imperialism, never the purveyors
A good book on the Islamic slave trade if anyone is interested: http://www.amazon.com/Islams-Black-Slaves-Other-Diaspora/dp/0374527970
Status of the notion of the transcendent as possible reality? Equivalent to superstring theory and or notion of the multiverse?
No way. Superstring theory is mathematically consistent with the two fundamental theories of modern physics: the equations of Quantum Mechanics and the equations of General Relativity. Superstring theory is a mathematical formalism which predicts the existence of a multiverse. A multiverse scenario also falls out of applying the equations of Quantum Mechanics to reality as a whole instead of arbitrarily restricting them to the sub-atomic realm. Inflationary big bang theory also gives rise to many universes. And if, as appears to be the case, the universe is infinite in space, then there opens up the prospect of there being an infinite number of localised universes, like and unlike our own, forever forbidden by the equations of relativity theory from ever exchanging information with one another.
Transcendent isn’t the word for these predicted other universes. Their prediction derives from our best understanding of our own universe. They represent the most profound expansion of physical reality, that science has ever conceived.
“Transcendent reality” by definition is supposed to be a reality higher than the physical realm – and also higher than reality of individual minds.
Claimed experience of this greater reality could be nothing but a feeling generated within the brain. Neural activity in areas of the brain associated with claims of such experiences can be monitored. The question is whether that neural activity has a transcendental cause or a physical cause.
The scientific assumption is that the cause of all conscious personal experience is physical. Conscious personal experience appears to be utterly dependent upon having a properly functioning brain. The evidence is overwheming. Loss of brian functionality leads to all manner of loss of conscious and non-conscious capacity.
So the religious notion of the transcendent is nothing like superstring theory or the multiverse notion. Indeed, one has to be careful when talking about “theory” and “notion” in scientific contexts. Their meaning is different from common parlance. We are talking about our best understanding of all the scientific evidence and predictions arising from such.
In short: The religious notion and the scientific notion of the nature of religious (transcendental) experience are in conflict. One is based on empirical investigation of the physical substrate of conscious experience, the other is a metaphysical hypothesis.
Science and metaphysics do not equate.
Interesting article on today’s Washington Post regarding Aslan .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/reza-aslan-a-jesus-scholar-whos-hard-to-pin-down/2013/08/08/2b6eee80-002b-11e3-9a3e-916de805f65d_story.html?hpid=z4 Both the religious and non-religious questioning his scholarship credentials (and that within his recent work.) Though his creative writing woo seems to have many under a spell given the best selling status.
“As Peter Boghossian says, ‘People deserve dignity; ideas don’t deserve dignity.'”
That’s what I was trying respectfully to suggest when you called Rabbi Jonathan Sacks “an ignorant fool.” But for some reason people didn’t agree with me.
Great article in the Nation questioning Aslan’s credentials.
http://www.thenation.com/article/175688/reza-aslan-historian#
“The fact that so many cultures believe in a transcendent divinity is evidence that it exists.”
Beliefs in dragons, fairies, werewolves, and vampires of one form or another are nearly universal as well. Does that mean any of them exist?