Category: atheist-baiting

Sam Harris versus Reza Aslan

October 29, 2017 • 2:00 pm

Here we have two clips demonstrating the increasing polarization between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan over a year—or rather, the increasing hostility of Aslan. The first clip is undated, though because Harris cites the Pew Poll on the attitudes of Muslims, which was published in 2013, it would seem to be around then, which means Aslan’s hair got a lot grayer in one year. (This is part of a much longer discussion between Harris and Aslan that you can see here.)

Harris seems fairly conciliatory, asserting that his (Harris’s) rhetorical style is not suited to convincing Muslims to temper their faith (“I’m not a diplomat”); rather, that tempering must come from people like Aslan.

In response, what does Aslan do? At 2:41, he simply asserts his “expertise,” saying that because he doesn’t write books on neuroscience, Harris should shut up about Islam, implying he knows nothing about it. That’s not an answer to what Harris says, but an assertion that Aslan alone should be heard. And Aslan’s Islam isn’t extremist. This is when Harris brings up the Pew results, which, as I’ve said many times before, are disturbing to those who see Islam as a “religon of peace and tolerance”.

As usual, Aslan answers arguments by pulling rank, not by citing figures.

These two clips, put together by HuffPo in 2014, show a brief scene of Aslan accusing Harris of being a Biblical fundamentalist, and then a longer response by Harris. I have to say that Harris shows no stridency here, but rather a calm rebuttal of Aslan’s arguments. I wish I were as eloquent as he!

I append my badge of honor: as far as I know, Aslan is one of only two people who have blocked me on Twitter, despite the fact that I’ve never tweeted at him:

Once again: Is New Atheism dead?

October 26, 2017 • 12:30 pm

Reader Diane G. (and later a few others; thanks to all) called my attention to a piece by Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex called “How did new atheism fail so miserably?” It’s the usual stuff about Dawkins and the rest of us alienating the Left, and cites an even weirder article in The Baffler called “Village atheists, village idiots,” by Sam Kriss, a journalist who just got into trouble—and suspended from the Labour Party—for sexual harassment.

Kriss’s piece is simply unhinged, spewing out invective and then atheistsplaining that the New Atheists—among whom he wrongly includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, who doesn’t even like being called an atheist—have literally been driven insane by repeating their godless litany over and over again. Get a load of Kriss’s style and contentions:

SOMETHING HAS GONE BADLY WRONG with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.

Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.

His explanation, which is just plain dumb:

These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.

Under the correspondence model of truth—the one favored by scientific rationality—a true statement is a thought-image that mirrors actual events; truth is just a repetition of the world. But as anyone who’s spent time with the mad knows, there’s something dangerous to one’s sanity about doing the same thing over and over again.

It would be hard to maintain, I think, that Dawkins, Tyson (not a New Atheist) and Sam Harris are mad, much less people like Anthony Grayling, Dan Dennett, or even me (I’ll pass by Myers without comment). But let it be said that everyone mentioned is engaged in other activities, and hardly spends even 15% of their time promoting atheism. Richard is promoting his books and lecturing about evolution, as well as answering people’s questions (often about atheism) in public lectures, Tyson is popularizing astronomy and cosmology, Sam has largely given up talking about atheism in favor of his podcasts that cover a huge diversity of subject, Dan is writing popular philosophy books, and I’m back to writing books about science as well as a children’s book, and am more interested in free will than in atheism.  Kriss’s piece can be ignored largely as simple raving by someone who, for unspecified reasons, doesn’t like New Atheism.

Alexander’s piece is at least sane, but he makes the same accusation as does Kriss: the Left doesn’t like New Atheism. I’m not sure that’s true in general, since those who like it aren’t going to write articles about it, but it’s clear that many Leftists not only criticize New Atheists (see Salon, for instance), but also assert that New Atheism is a failure.  The former bit is true, but the latter is not. First the reasons for our failure:

According to Alexander, New Atheism has failed because

  • New Atheists were right, “but in a loud, boring and pointless way.”

Nope. The “Four Horsemen’s” books were all big best-sellers, and they continue to attract crowds wherever they go.  When Dawkins (or even I) give a talk, even about evolution, most of the questions are about religion, whether it comports with evolution, or simply about atheism itself. When I go online to answer questions from college classes about Why Evolution is True, about 70% of the questions are about religion and atheism, even though I don’t bring it up! Maybe Alexander was bored, but a lot of other people weren’t—and aren’t.

  • Other progressive causes, like feminism, environmentalism, and anti-Trumpism were, says Alexander, are guilty of the same thing, but New Atheism is special in that it alone has been demonized by the Left. According to Alexander, that might be because it “failed to make the case that New Atheism was socially important”, or maybe because we “just didn’t know how to stay relevant”:

“Trump resistance always has new tweets to keep its attention. Social justice always has a new sexist celebrity to be angry about. Sure, a few New Atheists tried to keep up with the latest secretly-gay televangelist, but most of them kept going about intricacies of the kalam argument that had been done to death by 1400 AD. This is just an example – maybe there are other asymmetries that are more important?”

There may be some truth here, as the New Atheists have had their say and there isn’t much more to add. I myself have argued that, over the next 15 years or so, until the next generation needs educating, we don’t really need more atheist conferences. But, as I’ll argue below, New Atheists did achieve their goals, and, knowing this, and knowing that it will take time for society to change, have moved on to other things.

  • And Alexander adds this: “Maybe the New Atheists accidentally got on board just before a nascent Grey Tribe/Blue Tribe* split and tried to get Blue Tribe credibility by sending Grey Tribe signals. At some point there was a cultural fissure between Acela Corridor thinkfluencers with humanities degrees and Silicon Valley bloggers with STEM degrees, and the former got a head start on hating the latter while the latter still thought everybody was on the same anti-Republican side.” [See bottom for the definition of these “tribes”.]

That I don’t get, as New Atheist books and talks were attended by members of both tribes.

Finally, Alexander hits on one point that, I think, does account for some pushback against New Atheism: the fact that even liberal nonbelievers have a sneaking sympathy for religion, and don’t like people going after it. Or that there are more liberal feminists than liberal atheists, so success for New Atheism was bound to be smaller than for other liberal causes:

  • “And the cynic in me wonders whether New Atheism wasn’t pointless and obvious enough. There are more church-goers in educated liberal circles than Trump supporters, climate deniers, or self-identified racists. Maybe that made the “repeat platitudes to people who already believe them” game a little less fun, caused some friction – ‘You’re talking about my dear grandmother!’”

The thing is, I don’t much care about these articles that demonize New Atheists (except insofar as they slander my friends), for in the main we won. New Atheist books (especially The God Delusion) were huge best sellers, thousands of people wrote in to people like Harris and Dawkins thanking them for helping them give up their faith. And who can argue persuasively that New Atheism didn’t play any role in the increasing secularization of America? To paraphrase Dawkins on Darwin, the New Atheists made it intellectually respectable to be a nonbeliever.

There’s little more to say now: the arguments against God, never really “new”, have been made, and will need to be reprised for the next generation, and America continues to lose its religion. In most places save the South you are no longer ostracized for saying you’re an atheist. The only problem that remains is one that Diane G. raised: “Why is a movement that has been so successful also been so hated by the very people who should adhere to its claims?” Why do so many Leftists, including nonbelievers, rail and fulminate against not just the famous New Atheists, but against New Atheism itself?

Jealousy is one reason, I think, and so is a secret softness for religion—perhaps the view that society needs belief in God to remain cohesive (the “Little People’s Argument”). In the end, articles like Kriss’s and Alexander’s may raise questions about psychology, but what they haven’t demonstrated is their main premise: that New Atheism has failed. Hatred of a movement’s proponents is no sign that it has failed. Were that true, you could argue that the Civil Rights movement failed in the American South.

_________

*The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

More mush-headed atheist bashing

August 13, 2017 • 12:00 pm

This is a comment that I trashed, but wanted people to see it anyway. Reader “Kezzy” tried to append it to my post “I’m worried about North Korea,” and it shows the lack of thinking on the part of atheist-bashers. It’s inconceivable to Kezzy that atheists would worry about the welfare of others, of future generations, or even value their own life.  Does this person not realize that knowing that our time is finite, and there’s nothing afterwards, makes us value life even the more? Why would we be indifferent to life itself just because we don’t believe in gods?

Of course this person is also embittered and sufficiently steeped in faith that his thinking organs may be impaired.

Wow, look at all the worried atheists! You guys don’t believe in anything after death, so why are you so worried? What are you worried about? It’s either die now because of a conflict or live a few more years and then die, maybe of disease or old age. At least nuclear war would be a quick way to go…..actually I suppose there is always the radiation poisoning which could be pretty excruciating.

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect

August 7, 2017 • 10:51 am

Believe me, the last thing I want to do this morning is sit down and take apart another dumb article holding Richard Dawkins responsible for all the world’s wrongs.  I saw this article a few days ago when it was published on Alternet, but this morning it was republished on Salon with the same title: “The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins“, and since Salon is read more widely than Alternet  (though they’re both dire), I dipped my squib and got to work. Salon, of course, is a Regressive Leftist rag that will go to any lengths to smear people like Sam Harris and Dawkins. And their lack of journalistic standards is instantiated in the article at hand.

I seem to becoming to Richard what Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) was to Charles Darwin: a smaller fish who assumes the burden of defending the Big Shark.  But Richard is my friend, he’s not going to do this himself, and I feel that for his sake, as well as that of evolutionary biology (which is misrepresented in this piece, as it often is in Dawkins hit-pieces), I have to set the record straight.

The author of this dreadful article is one Jeremy Lent, an author who’s touting his new book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. He’s also head of a think tank called The Lilogy Institute,  Th aims of the institute seem to involve a kind of wooish holism:

Instead of the conventional view that our human existence is split between mind and body, liology sees our human organism as an integrated whole, where our thoughts are embodied and our bodies possess an intrinsic intelligence.

Liology sees no fundamental split between rigorous science and the source of meaning in life. Instead, it sees current findings in systems biology and complexity science as pointing the way to understanding our place within the infinitely complex and mysterious natural world in which we have evolved.

Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded.

It goes on from there, but I still have little idea of what this means except that it extols interconnectedness and holism, a theme of Lent’s attacks on Richard. Lent has four Big Points, all of which are wrong—in fact, they’re not even wrong.  I’ll take them in order.

1.) Dawkins’s ideas are wrecking the planet by encouraging unbridled capitalism, selfishness, wealth inequality, and a rampant reductionism that will wreck the truly holistic and interconnected view of life that we must embrace to save our planet.

I kid you not. Dawkins is Satan or the anti-Christ. Here are a few quotes from Lent. He begins with the KPFA deplatforming controversy and then says this:

What this controversy misses, however, is the far greater destructive force of other ideas Dawkins has promulgated over decades, which have helped form the foundation of a mainstream worldview that endorses gaping wealth inequalities and encourages the wanton destruction of the natural world.

There’s more:

The damage that Richard Dawkins has caused our global society goes far deeper than any hurtful comments he has made about Islam. As we face the gaping inequalities caused by uncontrolled capitalism, along with the looming threat of catastrophic climate change and other impending global crises, we must recognize the role that Dawkins’s ideas have played in forming the philosophical foundations of our unsustainable worldview.

. . .  just as religion has caused millennia of suffering based on delusional ideas, Dawkins himself has created a new delusional framework offering a false rationale for an economic and technocratic system destroying human and natural flourishing. The choice is not between religion and science, as Dawkins and his followers suggest. The real choice is between a flawed worldview that leads inexorably to globally destructive behavior and one that recognizes life’s deep interconnectedness and humanity’s intrinsic responsibility within it.

Now this is simply bullshit, and it rests on the three ideas (below) that Lent says that Dawkins has promulgated. They are these: that the “selfish gene” is somehow a both an explanation and a rationale for the idea that humans are “inherently selfish”;  that Dawkins’s reductionist attitude leads to a loss of meaning and wonder in life; and that by emphasizing the materialist and reductionist aspect of evolution, which devolves to genes, Dawkins somehow has prevented us from adopting the holistic, interconnected view of nature that is the basis of Lent’s “Lilogy” and the way to save the planet. Let’s discuss these briefly.

2. Selfish genes mean selfish people, ergo capitalism, inequity, and the destruction of human flourishing. This idea has been dispelled for years, yet it still persists in the minds of the ignorant. Over and over again, Richard has explained that the notion of selfish genes is a metaphor: genes behave as if they were selfish entities during natural selection, because the genes that replicate more prolifically are the ones that produce evolution, and come to predominate over time. This does not mean, as anyone knows who has read Richard’s work, that gene replication produces selfish entities. Altruism, parental care, and so on can evolve via selfish genes, through either kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Selfish genes can even produce a rudimentary but effective morality, as they apparently have in other apes. So Lent is wrong when he says that altruism is a “selfish behavior.” Rather, it evolved by genes that acted as if they were selfish. Here’s Lent:

Since Dawkins’s 1976 publication of “The Selfish Gene,” millions of people have come to understand evolution as the result of genes competing against other in a remorseless drive to replicate themselves. Ruthless competition is seen as the force that separates evolution’s winners from losers. Even altruism is interpreted as a sophisticated form of selfish behavior used by an organism to propagate its own genes more effectively. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins suggests, “because we are born selfish.”

It’s a harsh story, and one that has become a bedrock of modern economics, which argues that human beings are motivated by their own self-interest, and their collective self-serving actions result in the best outcome for society. This has led to a commonly accepted pseudo-scientific rationalization for laissez-faire capitalism, using the misappropriated term “survival of the fittest” to justify ruthless exploitation of the poor by wealthy corporations.

It is, however, a story that has been shown in recent decades to be erroneous at each level of its narration. Dawkins’s idea of the “selfish gene,” while still holding currency in the popular imagination, has been extensively discredited as a simplistic interpretation of evolution. In its place, biologists have developed a far more sophisticated view of evolution as a series of complex, interlocking systems, where the gene, organism, community, species, and environment all interact with each other intricately over different time frames.

Check out that link in the third paragraph! (Hint: it doesn’t go to any scientific discrediting.) In fact, the usefulness of the selfish-gene metaphor is alive and well, and has provided useful insights into how natural selection works. It is true that no behavior can evolve unless the genes underlying it outcompete alternative genes, but selection can produce behavior that involves compassion, care, and reciprocity. Yes, it must redound to the actor’s genes, but show me an evolved behavior that does not.

Further, Richard has always promulgated an ethic of compassion and unselfishness, which can overcome the real selfishness that is also an evolved part of our behavior. That is what he meant by being “born selfish,” for he certainly didn’t mean by that that every human being is solely out for itself, groupmates and relatives be damned.

Finally, it’s arrant foolishness to think that economics and capitalism are the outcome of The Selfish Gene. Need I point out that the book was published in 1976, but ideas of self-interest as underlying economics go back to Adam Smith? And Dawkins is not responsible for “Social Darwinism” justifications for capitalism, either, nor is Darwin. People are always looking for ways for science to justify their own bad acts, but that doesn’t make people like Darwin or Dawkins responsible for misappropriating what are, after all, simply scientific ideas about genetics. But it’s clearly and self-evidently wrong to blame “laissez-faire” capitalism on Dawkins. Shame on Lent for pulling such a shoddy move.

3. Dawkins’s reductionism and naturalism have taken the joy out of life. Yep, that’s what Lent says (my emphasis:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have been responsible for foisting a cruel myth on thinking people around the world: that if they reject the illusions of monotheism, their only serious alternative is to believe in a world that is harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning. Their ideas arise from a particular form of scientific thought known as reductionism, which holds that every aspect of our world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is “nothing but” the mechanical motion of particles acting predictably on each other.

I challenge Lent, or anyone, to find where in Dawkins’s work he’s said anything even remotely like this. Yes, he’s said we should reject the illusions of monotheism (and polytheism like Hinduism, which Lent curiously neglects), but has never claimed that this leads to a view of the world that is “harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning.”  In fact, Dawkins has repeatedly argued that embracing reality and science rather than numinous illusions makes the world more enjoyable and meaningful. Has Lent read Unweaving the Rainbow, or The Magic of Reality, and pondered the title of the latter work?

Lent has simply made stuff up here in an attempt to smear Dawkins. It is an old but untrue trope, which Lent may harbor in his unconscious, that atheism leads to nihilism. I suggest he go to Sweden and Denmark and observe all the joyless and lugubrious people in those godless lands!

4. Dawkins’s reductionism is not only untrue, but is ruining the Earth. To wit:

Richard Dawkins has been responsible for popularizing an updated version of this Cartesian myth, writing famously that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” adding: “That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.” Open any science magazine, and you’ll see genes described as programmers that “code” for certain traits, while the mind is discussed as “software” for the “hardware” of the body that is “wired” in certain ways. Thanks to Dawkins and his followers, this deluded view of nature as a machine has become ubiquitous, creating the moral sanction for corporations to treat the earth as a resource to plunder, beguiling techno-visionaries to seek immortality by downloading their minds, and inspiring technocrats to argue for solving climate change through geoengineering.

It goes on, touting Lent’s own ideas of holism, and heaping praise on Lynn Margulis (who accepted the discredited Gaia hypothesis), but let me say that there is nothing in Dawkins’s own writings that have justified or encouraged plundering the Earth, nor have I even seen a hint that people are using Dawkins’s writings as a rationalization to destroy the planet. Have the Koch brothers cited The Selfish Gene?

Scientific naturalism happens to be true, and everything comes down to the laws of physics, although we also see higher-order phenomena that are “emergent” in the sense that while we don’t know enough to predict them from the laws of physics, they must be consistent with the laws of physics. That is what reductionism means, and there is no “holism” completely independent of reductionism. That said, I’d like to see Lent’s evidence that corporations have relied on Dawkins’s ideas to justify plundering the Earth. Corporations have plenty of justifications for rapacity—when they even offer justifications—and the selfish gene is not among them.

Let us remember again that Dawkins’s genetic reductionism does not come with any ethical implications, and Richard has said that over and over again. Yes, people can misuse his ideas, as they did Darwin’s, but that is neither Darwin’s nor Dawkins’s fault.  And that is one of Lent’s big errors beyond his mischaracterizing the science. Lent’s other error is to claim that people have actually become rampant, Earth-destroying capitalists, as well as depressive nihilists who have no meaning in their lives, because of what Richard Dawkins has written.

Only someone set out to smear Dawkins could have written such nonsense, for there is simply no data, scientific or anecdotal, to back it up. Lent has blamed Dawkins for all the wrongs of the world because Dawkins is a convenient (though battered) scapegoat. That’s a common tactic, but is employed only by the malicious, the ignorant, and the publicity-hungry who want to use Dawkins’s name as clickbait. Lent, after all, has a book to sell.

h/t: Rodney

 

Richard Dawkins responds to Kerry Walters’s distortions

August 5, 2017 • 10:00 am

Yesterday I reported on a HuffPo hit piece about Richard Dawkins by an academic and Catholic priest named Kerry Walters. I sent the links to Richard, who of course is used to this kind of thing, but wanted to set the record straight about some of Walters’ misrepresentations of his words (Dawkins pulls no punches, calling them “lies”). Richard’s response, which I publish with permission, is below (indented):

There’s not much left of Kerry Walters by the time Jerry Coyne has finished dealing with him. I would add only this.

Walters wrote the following. “Dawkins is also a master of outrageously unjustified moral claims about religion: religious education, he says, is child abuse, religion is responsible for most terrorism (a claim, by the way, that’s time and again proved to be not at all self-evident), and faith makes people “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.” I’ll take his three allegations in order.

First, far from saying religious education is child abuse, I have been a strong and frequent advocate of religious education. I’ve repeated, to the point of tedium, that children need to be taught about religion so they can understand history, current affairs and art. More particularly, I have advocated education in the King James Bible, without which you can’t take your allusions in English literature.

I am opposed to indoctrination in just one particular faith, such as is done in British state-supported faith schools of many denominations. However, I don’t think I’ve ever called even that “child abuse.” What I have called child abuse, and do so again without apology, is terrifying children with threats of hell, and labelling children with the faith of their parents: “You are a Catholic child” or “You are a Muslim child” etc. I have ridiculed this practice by comparing it with “You are an existentialist child” or “You are a logical positivist child” or “You are a Gramscian Marxist child”. I have said that the very phrase “Catholic child” should sound as aversive as fingernails on a blackboard. The proper phrase is “child of Catholic parents.”

Second, the claim that religion is responsible for most terrorism. I agree that it is not self-evident and I have never said it was. I do think an extremely strong case can be made for it, and that is all I have ever said or implied.

But it is Walters’ third allegation that disturbs me most because it is a damaging lie. How could I possibly have said “faith makes people ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked”? To do so would be to insult such respected friends as the former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. If Kerry Walters had read more carefully, he would have noticed this: I wasn’t talking about people of faith but people who don’t believe in evolution! Here are my exact words, in a book review in the New York Times. “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” I was careful to add that ignorance is by far the most likely cause of non-belief in evolution. We are all ignorant of many things. I am ignorant of baseball and Polynesian nose flutes. In the time of Martin Luther, the Catholic church regarded ignorance of the Bible as a positive virtue. Though neither a virtue nor bliss, ignorance is no crime. In the light of that and the proven fact of evolution, “Anti-evolutionists are ignorant, stupid or insane” becomes not an insult but a simple statement of fact. An evolution-accepting Catholic like Walters cannot logically deny it.

I have paid Walters the compliment of assuming that he accepts the fact of evolution. Yet his garbling of my statement — missing what, for him as a Catholic, ought to be the massive distinction between people of faith on the one hand and fundamentalist creationists on the other — might be revealing if not positively damning.

Anyway what he wrote is a damaging lie against me. I believe it is customary for a lie that is damaging to elicit a public apology. No doubt it will be forthcoming and I shall accept it graciously.

I’ll put a link to this post on the HuffPo site, and we’ll see about that apology. . .

Priest at HuffPo: Dawkins is dangerous and has damaged our culture

August 4, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Amazingly, the link to the “religion” section at HuffPo seems to have vanished, so there’s no way to see its articles except by Googling “HuffPo religion”. This is good, for there’s no longer one-click access to the panoply of HuffPo pieces extolling all religions save fundamentalist Christianity, and the endless Islamsplaining articles by Carol Kuruvilla. Most of the pieces you get under “religion” seem to have been pulled from other sections of the site.

When I did the requisite Googling, however, I found a pretty odious piece, which you can get it by clicking on the screenshot below.  The author, Kerry Walters, is an retired academic and a Catholic priest. He’s quite prolific: his Wikipedia bio shows that he writes about three books a year (theologians can do that)—eight in 2013 alone. His latest is St. Teresa of Calcutta: Missionary, Mother, Mystic, (he should have added “Malefactor”), which appears to be a hagiography of the old charlatan.

Walters simply cannot abide Richard Dawkins, who’s now coming to stand for all bad things atheist and secular.

Walters begins his attack by going out of his way to pat atheists on the back—he avers that in his previous books he’s actually praised atheists, but only the Right Kind of Atheist. What kind is that? You know the answer:

People who have read my books and articles know how greatly I admire and learn from atheists who do the hard work of familiarizing themselves with the religious beliefs to which they object so that they can offer rigorous arguments against them.

Yes, he likes those atheists who have read the Bible, the Qur’an, and perhaps some Hindu scriptures, as well as some Christian theology. Well, Dr. Walters, I HAVE DONE THAT, and I still find religion a manmade set of fairy tales for which there’s not a bit of evidence.  Will you admire and learn from me? I don’t think so. What Walters is advancing is the Courtier’s Reply: that you can’t criticize religion unless you’re deeply familiar with scripture and theology.

And I agree that you have to know something about religion to criticize it—and to see its falsity. But the main criticism of religion by New Atheists is that its existence claims—about the existence of God, Jesus, and Allah, of Muhammad’s taking the Qur’an from an angel, of Joseph Smith being angel-guided to the golden plates, of the reality of the Resurrection and Moses’s journey in the wilderness—have no supporting evidence. Some of the existence claims are even contradictory among faiths: Islam, for instance, claims not only that Jesus was not divine, but that an impostor was crucified in his place. And the God-given moral codes are also contradictory. If religion is true, then there is at most one true religion.

But it doesn’t take much knowledge of scripture to realize two things. First, most adherents to religions don’t know their scripture. It’s well documented that atheists know more about the Bible than do Christians. Most believers don’t believe because evidence has convinced them that their faith is true; they believe because that they’ve simply been indoctrinated when young by parents and peers. So the claim of “brainwashing” that Walters finds so harsh and odious is in fact accurate.

Second, there is no evidence for the truth claims of religion. We have no substantive evidence (save the words in the Bible) that a Jesus person even existed, much less was divine, crucified, and resurrected. And, at bottom, the hold of religion on people depends on the existence of those truth claims. If Jesus wasn’t resurrected, if there was no Original Sin, if Mohammed didn’t take down dictation by Allah via Gabriel, then Christianity and Islam fall apart. Yes, they have moral codes, but those codes depend crucially on the authenticity of the religion’s truth claims.

I spent over two years reading theology, beginning with scripture and progressing through “folk theology”, as exemplified by C. S. Lewis, to the “sophisticated” lucubrations of people like Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart. And the deeper you dig, the more bullshit you find. It’s excreta all the way down. Sophisticated theology provides no more evidence for God than does C. S. Lewis or children’s books on Christianity. There is no “there” there. And yes, I’ve read the entire Bible and Qur’an, and some Hindu theology, as well as part of the Book of Mormon (I couldn’t finish it).

To evade this factual disproof of religion’s strong claims, Walters simply defends faith as a virtue—it doesn’t need evidence:

Additionally, Dawkins trashes religious faith by inevitably conflating it with gullibility and superstition—it’s “weird,” “brainless,” “a crutch for consolation,” and a “cop-out.” These are soundbites that people who’ve never really bothered to listen to what serious students of religion say about faith typically toss around.

But it gets even sloppier. As an alternative to faith, Dawkins recommends reason. (Never mind that this is a tiresomely false dichotomy.) But he dubiously identifies reason with the scientific method, which he appears not to understand. Science’s methodology is specifically fitted to examine the physical world and generate hypotheses about it. As any good scientist will readily concede, science oversteps its mark and betrays its own methodology when it makes untestable metaphysical pronouncements. [JAC: like “there’s no empirical evidence for a theistic god”?] But Dawkins, in the name of science, does precisely this, claiming that science proves the through-and-through physical nature of reality—a metaphysical rather than scientific assertion.

Translation: “We don’t need no stinking evidence for what we claim is true.” Seriously, that’s all this says. As someone said, “It’s called faith because there isn’t any evidence.”

In the end, Walters simply doesn’t like three things about Dawkins. The first is his supposed ignorance of religion (see above).

The second is Dawkins’s tone, the supposed stridency that we hear so much about but is really just passionate writing. And, after all, a lot of “good” atheists, which I suppose include Bertrand Russell and Robert G. Ingersoll, were just as passionate. Wasn’t Russell’s classic treatment called “Why I am not a Christian”?

The stridency sniffed out by Walters includes this:

But Dawkins does neither. Instead, he gut-punches intelligence right out of the discussion.

To begin with, he demonstrates no real familiarity with scripture, instead cherry-picking passages from the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim holy texts that, because they’re ripped out of context, easily make religion look stupid and cruel.

A representatively screechy passage from his best-selling The God Delusion gives some idea of what I mean. The “God of the Old Testament,” Dawkins sputters, is “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

No one who’s actually taken the time to read the Wisdom books, prophets, or large sections of the Pentateuch could possibly write such nonsense. This is the sort of wild exaggeration you hear only from people with huge chips-on-their-shoulders.

Umm. . . what about Dan Barker, an ex-evangelical Christian preacher? Barker’s just written a book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, which agrees 100% with Richard’s characterization, and in fact, goes through each of those 19 characteristics of God, showing how the Bible supports them. And yes, Dan knows his Scripture; he preached it for years.

Finally, Walters objects to Dawkins “coarsening the culture” by using strong language:

Having said this, however [to his credit, Walters says KPFA shouldn’t have deplatformed Dawkins], I also agree with KPFA: Dawkins’ remarks about religion, Christianity as well as Islam, have indeed been abusive, contributing to the coarsening and polarization of our culture. And lest you think, “Well, of course a priest would say that,” let me assure you that my objection has nothing to do with my faith and everything to do with my regard for reasoned and civil discourse.

When I say that Dawkins is abusive, I don’t simply mean that his harsh remarks about religion have hurt this or that person’s feelings. Feelings get hurt all the time in this world, a sad but inescapable fact. Better to grow a slightly thickened skin than to petulantly nurse an attitude of permanent grievance.

No, the damage Dawkins has done is cultural rather than personal. Dawkins has basement-lowered the tone of discourse when it comes to religion, thereby giving his adoring fan base permission to do likewise.

and

[A few years ago], I merely considered Dawkins a parvenu and a nuisance. But over the past few perilous months, with the rise of an “alternative” facts and “fake news” ethos in which truth is ignored and bluster reigns supreme, I’ve changed my mind. I now think Dawkins and his ilk are downright dangerous—not because they say nasty things about religion, but because they feed, in their own small way, our increasingly toxic culture of vituperation, distrust, and ignorance.

Voices like Dawkins’ oughtn’t to be silenced, as KPFA chose to do. But they definitely need to be called out and challenged.

What Walters seems to be saying here is that Dawkins needs to be more polite about—more respectful of—religion, and engage with sophisticated theology rather than religion as it’s practiced by the average person. Well, refuting Alvin Plantinga will have no effect on that average person, because they could care less about Plantinga. It’s more important to engage religion as most people practice it, and that means engaging its truth claims. Further, as I said above, reading Sophisticated Theology™ doesn’t give you any more confidence that the truth claims of religion are valid: it’s just C. S. Lewis dressed up in fancy language.

When Waters bangs on about Dawkins “damaging the culture”, and being “dangerous”, I sense that what he really means is an unspoken fourth criticism: Dawkins has been successful in turning people into unbelievers. There is absolutely no doubt about this, and this is what bothers Walters. That’s where the “danger” lies. Walters is losing his flock! People are starting to question and abandon the doctrines Walter preached his whole life!

Unbelief is growing throughout the West, and some of that is due to Dawkins. The “respectful” atheists—people like Robert Wright, John Horgan, or Michael Ruse—don’t deconvert anybody, because they’re always making nice with religion and, in fact, telling people it’s okay to believe in God. Most likely they don’t care about deconverting anyone, which is fine, but in the end what really scares people like Walters is not the presence of atheists, but the presence of atheists who turn believers into atheists. That is why Dawkins is “dangerous.”

National Review pronounces the death of New Atheism

July 31, 2017 • 9:00 am

 National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr., was a widely read magazine—probably the most important such organ for American conservatives. It has an online version, and I really should be reading it (all of us should read at least one site or magazine that opposes our own philosophy); it came to my attention only when it took out after me for my views on infant euthanasia.

Now, in a section called “The Corner”, which Wikipedia characterizes as representing “a select group of the site’s editors and affiliated writers”, there’s an interesting atheist-bashing piece,”What ever happened to the New Atheists?“, that makes three points, two of them half right and one dead wrong. Total evaluation: 1/3, or 33%, correct. Here are their points (in bold) and below them my responses; the article’s quotes are indented in my discussion:

1.) New Atheism is dead since it’s been rejected by both ends of the political spectrum.

2.) New Atheists are rejected by the Left because they criticize Islam, something that offends Leftist sentiments that favor the underdog and people of color.

3.) New Atheists are rejected by the Right because their arguments against God are silly and superficial.

Let’s take these one by one:

1.) There really isn’t a New Atheist movement; what we have are some people, like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on, who have gained renown (or, in the eyes of many, infamy).  What distinguishes New Atheists from Old Atheists is said to be that the former are anti-theistic: they explicitly criticize religion instead of keeping their nonbelief to themselves, and they give public talks and write bestselling books.

But the claim that anti-theism is dead is simply wrong; there are many people who criticize religion, and there’s plenty of evidence they’ve been effective rather than moribund. First, look at the testimony on Dawkins’s “Converts Corner“, which has 159 pages of individuals’ testimony on how Richard Dawkins not only helped people to accept evolution, but also to abandon their faith. These are more than just anecdotes: they’re data destroying the claim that Dawkins’s supposed “stridency” has actually prevented people from becoming nonbelievers. In contrast, there is not a jot or tittle of evidence for the claim that the New Atheists have, by their stridency, actually prevented “deconversion”, or hardened people in their rejection of evolution; there is no “Anti-converts Corner.”

And, as we know, America is becoming more secular over time; the religious believers who run the National Review are in the ever-waning minority. We can debate how much of this is due to the inevitable loss of faith in a progressing Western society (see Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”), but I’m pretty sure that bestelling books like Dawkins’s “The God Delusion”, “The End of Faith” and “God is Not Great” helped this along, for many people cite these works as pivotal in destroying their religious belief.

But anti-theism is not new: many “Old Atheists”, like Robert Ingersoll, H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and even Carl Sagan, were antitheistic.

At any rate, I don’t see “New Atheism” as a real movement. Yes, there are atheist meetings, but most of the organizations that actually accomplish things beyond mutually reinforcing nonbelief are secular and humanist organizations, and aren’t strongly anti-theistic. If “New Atheism” consists simply of its major exponents like Dawkins, Harris, and the late Chrisopher Hitchens, then it’s not a movement, but a collection of a few individuals.  If they vanished, anti-theism would remain. There are plenty of non-famous antitheists, for I’ve met them. These people, because they don’t have a public forum, are not demonized by the Left and have not been rejected by the Left. When people say that “New Atheism is dead”, they simply mean that its major figures have been vilified. That does not mean they’ve been ineffective, because they still pack meetings and talks, and their books remain best sellers. They are far more effective than the “non-strident” atheists who spend their time accusing New Atheists of white supremacy, racism, and misogyny (false accusations, by the way).

Now it is true that the major New Atheists have been demonized, with the possible exception of Dan Dennett: National Review says “The only actual philosopher of the bunch, [Dennett] is far too boring and ponderous to be noticed, let alone denounced, by anyone”. But that slur on Dennett is false. He’s neither boring nor unpopular!

It was inevitable that there would be criticisms of the New Atheists, for much of the “Silent Left” has a sneaking sympathy with religion, if for no reason other than faith is conceived as keeping the “little people” satisfied. Society, these people say, would fall apart without faith. (That’s false, too: viz., Scandinavia.)

I also feel that beyond this residual respect for religion, the accusations of stridency—along with the deliberate distortion of the words of people like Harris—are helped along by simple jealousy. Much of the criticism of New Atheists comes from those people who have not been successful in gaining the public ear (I won’t name them); and I think they’re simply envious.

2.) National Review is partly right when claiming that the Left has demonized New Atheists because they criticize Islam and see that faith as the most dangerous of going religions. As National Review argues:

Confirmation bias deserves at least a part of the blame. The New Atheists have long harbored an irrational fear of Christianity, but Christophobia doesn’t worry the Left. Combatting Islamophobia, however, is a progressive priority, and so it is noticed and addressed when it strikes.

However, the argument that the liberal obsession with Islamophobia stems from a healthy regard for the status of minorities only goes so far. As Michael Walzer, the socialist intellectual, has written in Dissent, “I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist zealotry.” There is a reason, after all, why many Democrats stubbornly and proudly refuse to say the words “Islamic terrorism,” preferring to speak of generalized “extremism.”

. . . New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”

Where the piece goes wrong is equating the Left as a whole with the Regressive Left. The latter folks do criticize people like Dawkins and Harris, but remain atheists. Yet there are plenty of Leftists who don’t criticize “New Atheism”, and it’s a flaw in the article that it doesn’t make the distinction between the Progressive and the Regressive Left. Also, while much of the vilification of New Atheist “leaders” comes from misguided Regressives who feel they’re virtuously protecting Muslims of color by attacking criticism of Islam, a lot of the public criticism is based on jealousy (indeed, Michael Ruse had admitted that he’s jealous, and that his books don’t sell as well as Dawkins’s.) Accusations of bigotry are confected to support the critics, leading to claims, always given without data, that women and ethnic minorities used to be fine with New Atheism but have left the “movement” in droves.

The unholy confluence between the progressive Left and the Right in criticizing Islam is real, but stems from different motives. The right doesn’t like Islam because it’s not Christianity, and because Muslims are said to endanger the American way of life. The Left doesn’t like Islam because it is both regressive and theocratic, and, for many adherents, promotes values inimical to social equality. (There is some agreement by both sides on the dangers that Islam poses to democracy.)

But this claim about why New Atheists are rejected by the Left is largely true, so long as we’re talking about the Regressive Left.

3.) The arguments of New Atheists against god and religion are neither superficial nor wrong; they’re based largely on a lack of evidence for the tenets of religious belief. The way National Review defends religion (they are, after all, conservative) is both interesting and familiar. They claim that New Atheists ignore Sophisticated Theology; that we don’t need evidence for God because it’s self evident; and that there is evidence for God in the “first cause argument”. I quote at length:

Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious. It does not even try to address the theistic arguments for the existence of God. Indeed, philosopher A.C. Grayling insists that atheists should not even bother with theology because they “reject the premise.” Our new “rationalists,” it turns out, will not even evaluate arguments that do not conform to their prejudices. Battering a fundamentalist straw-man with an equally fundamentalist materialism, New Atheism is one big category error. Over and over, its progenitors demand material proof for the existence of God, as if He were just another type of thing — a teacup, or perhaps an especially powerful computer. This confusion leads the New Atheists to favor the rather elementary infinite-regress argument: If God created everything, then who created God? But as the theologian David Bentley Hart replies:

“[God is] not a ‘supreme being,’ not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates. . . . Only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.”

This is just an attempt to immunize religious belief against disproof by redefining god as “the infinite act of being”, but also to say that there simply has to be “a transcendent source of all existence and knowledge” because of the First Cause Argument.  Well, we already know the fallacies of the Infinite Regress (one being “Where did God come from?”), and the rest is the kind of gaseous piffle that Hart is prone to emit. And of course “New Atheists” do attack the theistic arguments for God’s existence; see “The God Delusion” or my own book, “Faith Versus Fact.”

The article continues:

The rest of the New Atheists’ arguments can be handled even more quickly. Dawkins sees God as a complex superbeing subject to natural evolution and then deems him to be statistically improbable. He may be right, but why he thinks he has in the process critiqued anything resembling “religion” is beyond me. Dennett, who endeavors mainly to show that religion is a natural phenomenon, seems to confuse his validation of a religious claim with its refutation. Hitchens offers no real argument and plenty of historical inaccuracies. He is generally content to list the bad deeds of believers, explain away or ignore the good deeds of other believers, and then pretend that he has somehow disproven Christianity. Harris, to quote David Bentley Hart once more, “declares all dogma pernicious, except his own thoroughly dogmatic attachment to nondualistic contemplative mysticism, of a sort which he mistakenly imagines he has discovered in one school of Tibetan Buddhism, and which (naturally) he characterizes as purely rational and scientific.”

This itself is a superficial and misleading analysis. If there’s one thing that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old Atheism, it’s the influence of science on the former. New Atheists say, “Where’s the  evidence that your religious beliefs are true, as opposed to the beliefs of other faiths?”

It is a perfectly valid critique of religion to ask “What’s the evidence for your truth claims?”, for at bottom all religions—save perhaps the numinous species espoused by people like Hart—are based on claims about reality.  If those claims are wrong—if Jesus wasn’t crucified and resurrected, if an angel didn’t dictate the Qur’an to Muhammad, if Joseph Smith didn’t really find those golden plates—then religion is based in lies and fairy tales. And where’s the convincing evidence for a divine being, one that takes a benevolent interest in our species?

That is a perfectly valid line of criticism, and one that National Review ignores. If religious truth claims are false, then religions are false, even though they usually come with a moral code that may be partly salubrious. Yet you can have an even better moral code without gods, and atheists—New and Old alike—do.

If New Atheism is really dead, why does it refuse to lie down? Religion will eventually go away, with a few pockets of resistance, and we see this happening before our eyes in poll after poll. People like David Bentley Hart and the editors of National Review may remain, bawling their faith in the wilderness, but the rest of us will find our solace in rationality rather than fairy tales.