PoMo Conservative against Atheists

> Was Heidegger arguing against the Creator God or just the way philosophers had engaged language to talk about him?

He’d abandoned the old God, and was waiting for the new one. He wasn’t an atheist – one of his fourfold is God – he was just picky.

I actually think Hitchens gets a bad rap. Some of his arguments are fairly obvious and there is the naive kind of positivism behind it. But I think there is a point. It is to raise the “why do you believe” question. And for most people, they don’t exactly have a good answer. Hitchens argues that this, along with problems with the traditional beliefs about God (primarily within Christianity) are good reasons to think it a false belief.

I think he has a good point at times, even though I clearly am a theist and believe I can defend it. I just can’t defend it on the public information grounds where Hitchens wants to conduct it. Effectively he’s arguing that if you can’t rationally persuade me with evidence that there is no evidence. Which is the public evidence view of scientism which I think simply false. But I don’t quite understand the fear he strikes. I can think of many more groups of theists I fear more. After all beyond the atheism angle at least Hitchens is preaching tolerance and other ethics that I think most of us believe in. The idea that atheism leads to ethical monsters is just nonsense – as silly as the New Atheist argument that most terror and violence comes from religion.

The place where the New Atheists bother me is the same place it does for Rob. The idea that evolution is coupled with atheism – effectively the attempt to make science entail a claim about religion. This isn’t just worrisome to theistic scientists and how they are viewed in the academy. Rather I think there ought be the worry that this will turn more theists away from science than it will theists away from theism.

Enowning, that’s certainly one of the ways to read Heidegger. Although I think how to take his fourfold is so controversial I’m not sure I’d take that as an argument for his thought. In any case he clearly had moved beyond Christianity to the point of taking a dim view of it at times. And his God, whatever it was, wasn’t the personal God of Christianity. As I said, Gadamer saw him as a seeker who just hadn’t found God. I’m not sure that justifies calling him a theist though. Maybe an atheist hoping to be shown wrong?

His argument (I forget where now – I can probably find it if I look) about how someone who is a theist already has an answer to the question of why there is something and not nothing and thus can’t really ask the question is quite intriguing and I think undermines the idea of him as not an atheist. He’s an atheist of a sort.

Yeah, but we’re the group that unifies the Evangelicals and New Atheists. They both join in their dislike of us. LOL. Just kidding since that stereotype is often unfair and untrue.

Dawkins argument is a little more subtle than you portray though. The fact God (Christ) doesn’t do anything about it is evidence that either he countenances it or is too weak to actually be God. Combined with the argument from ignorance it’s actually a fairly strong argument unless the believer has strong positive evidence from which to believe.

That’s why I think believers discount him too quickly. And why he’s very persuasive to many people.

Sorry, where I wrote Hitchens I means Dawkins in the above. Although I suppose a lot of it applies to both. I just find Dawkins far less annoying than Hitchens.

Michael, I think that illustrates a good point about tolerance. There will always be disagreement over where something is or isn’t tolerance. So the value of tolerance is insufficient in many social situations. Political debate where real changes take place is an obvious example. If I strongly value a political position and feel not having that position affects me, then I won’t see those who disagree as tolerance. While the Prop-8 examples is a good one a better contemporary one is health care reform. What does it even mean to be tolerant to our political foes? My personal feeling is that you allow democratic voting but don’t retaliate against individuals. But clearly that just doesn’t always happen (as the aftermath of Prop-8 demonstrates)

I think too many people expect tolerance to be able to do too much whereas in reality our choices affect other people. That intrinsically leads to conflict when those are highly valued effects. (Such as in Prop-8)

As for Rob, I think his point is that what a religion teaches as principles and what individuals act upon don’t necessarily match. However I think the problem for Rob is that you can’t simply separate out the teachings from the structure or incentives the religion provides. To give a perhaps better example consider the early years of the Utah war. There you clearly had incentives provided by the Mormon leadership which made atrocities by Mormons more likely. The fact that Brigham Young taught tolerance and the like didn’t alleviate those negative incentives. So religious structure ends up being more complex than it first appears and good intentions don’t overwrite structural problems. That said, I don’t think one can necessarily point to religion on this either. A lot of the structural problems are general structural problems inherent to any organization and not particularly unique to religion. Indeed one might say the structures arise somewhat independent of religion due to the nature of human organizing. It tends to be now, as we’re better able to study all this, that we can make our structures better. Put an other way, a big problem I have with New Atheist critiques is that the “human” aspect of religion is ignored.

As for welfare, I don’t want to speak for Rob, I think his point is just that religion properly lived leads to helping others such as the strong Catholic or Mormon welfare programs. (I’m kind of skeptical we’re one of the largest though given our small population) I don’t think he was making a claim about non-religious charities. Just that religions as human structures have multiple sides and any analysis of religion as a human structure can’t be myopic. Further in ones analysis one has to ask why sometimes you get the Crusades and why sometimes you get charitable aid. Without answering that question (which Dawkins and company avoid) I think you get a very distorted analysis.

As for Christ’s hidden wishes, that is of course a good point. But I think one can at least look at the statements attributed to him in the Gospels (even ignoring the “historic Jesus” arguments by scholars) You just don’t see him asserting the things done by Christianity through a lot of time. Typically they instead appeal to OT passages or the like or just ignore the issue. If you’re going to criticize religion I think you have to at least acknowledge the fact ideas can be abused by human organizations. Put an other way, the human organization and its tendencies (even in non-religious organizations) are often in tension with religious teaching. I think that’s a tension that has to be acknowledged.

As I said this is a problem with both sides – religious critics and defenders. After all a lot of the religious tend to like to ignore the human aspect of organization and the flaws that entails.

Rob, I don’t think that a fair characterization of his argument. The argument he makes is much stronger and more subtle. I just don’t think you can divorce religious communities from their acts the way you are attempting to. You can’t simply say that the communities that agree with your view of what the founder taught are the only real religious ones to judge. You have to look at how religion works across a broad spectrum.

Now I’d agree that Dawkins tends to look at only a small spectrum, but I think you’re doing the same thing he is here.

Rob, that doesn’t make much sense. How could Dawkins hate the Biblical God because he causes believers to be delusional? Dawkings doesn’t think there is such an entity. He thinks it’s the believers who cause the ideas of God. And his point is that you can’t just appeal to some texts by the originator of a religion. Rather he says religion proper always leads to these sorts of things where religion as practiced doesn’t line up closely to the founders writings because the writings are used to placate and then justify violence or the like. So just because the founder’s writings sound great means nothing independent of how they are used in religious societies.

As I suggested above, the bigger problem with Dawkins and others appeals to social history is simply distinguishing religious organizations from human organizations in general. If there is this human quality then it is that which is the problem and not religion as such. Religion is just a manifestation of something deeper in humans. So it’s akin to saying you hate coughs but don’t mind colds or flus.

The problem is that if you view religion as a threat and not human organization you have to show why particular beliefs lead to those actions independent of the humans. Not only don’t I think you can do this, I think the history of communism, the People’s Liberation Party and lots of other groups shows that non-religious groups are just as able to fall into these same patterns.

Now to his arguments about God, those have differing degrees of strength. But his arguments for the threats of religion just seem implausible on the face of it.

There are many philosophical answers to the New Atheist “vulgar positivism” (I like that phrase; I’m going to use it from now on), including any of the answers to positivism from the 30s-50s (I’ve always liked this one), and virtually any philosopher prior to 1900, and even many analytic philosophers today. Heidegger definitely seems like a strange philosopher to pick.

But I think a larger problem with philosophical answers to New Atheism is that they’re utterly pointless. The New Atheists of the Dawkinsian sort are, almost to a person, non-philosophers (it’d be hard to be a philosopher and take Dawkins’ scientism seriously), and their reactions to philosophical arguments tend to range from blatant hostility to simply ignoring them.

I’m honestly not sure how to answer them. I’ve tried pointing out the risks of equating science with atheism, of insulting those you’re trying to educate, etc., to no avail, and many others have tried reasoning with them philosophically, theologically, or by making points about psychology, sociology, or history. None of this makes a dent. I think the best way to deal with them is not to try to answer them at all, recognizing that their “converts” are likely to be those who are already disaffected by religion, and that their influence is their for pretty minor, is to simply ignore them.

The best analogy I can think of for the Dawkinsians is the Randians. These are mostly malcontents, and they’ve become enamored with an idea, or set of ideas, and there’s no convincing them they’re wrong. Unlike Randians, however, they have no real cultural or political power.

Chris, note that my point was more that while there are positivists among the New Atheists I don’t think it describes everyone. Further many of the arguments are strong independent of that issue.

BTW – great to hear from you again. Any chance of Mixing Memory starting up again? It’s the blog I miss the most.

Mark, I agree. And I find myself in the odd position of defending the New Atheists while being of critic of theirs. I just find that a lot of the responses to the New Atheists aren’t much better than what the New Atheists themselves do. Unfortunately because I think, as Chris noted, that there are lots of good responses. And, as Chris exemplifies himself, there are plenty of atheists uncomfortable at the tactics of the New Atheists. To me there is often a stunning parallel in methods between the New Atheists and many (clearly not all) Evangelicals.

Rob, I do think we’re basically saying the same thing in terms of what Dawkins and company have as a weakness. I think we just need be careful how we express it lest we fall into the same traps they do.

That last part wasn’t addressed to Clark, obiously.

And I would add that one of the great things about atheism, traditionally, has been its “big tent.” We haven’t always gotten along, but atheists for most of my time as one have been incredibly tolerant of the many different types of atheists. One of the things I find most disturbing about “New Atheism” is its insistence on a sort of atheist orthodoxy, both in attitudes towards religion and science and in attitudes towards less scientifically based strands of atheism, which are usually lumped together and labeled “PoMo.”

Also, Mixing Memory may come back (on blogger) someday, when I am much less busy both at work and at home, but it’ll be a while.

Heh. The Randian analogy is even better than the Evangelical one.

Chris, that “orthodoxy” within the New Atheism is an interesting point I’d not thought about. That parallels Evangelicals more than Randians.

Regarding the three types of New Atheists, I think that was more or less the point I was getting at as well. Yeah there are folks who adopt a naive positivism without thinking through the implications. I’ve no idea what percentage they make of the movement, but it seems quite unfair to tar the whole movement because of that. I’d go one step further and say that even when Dawkins regularly falls into such ruts it doesn’t mean one can simply dismiss everything he says — something I think too many do. Even positivists have some good arguments. And their positivism doesn’t inherently invalidate those arguments.

Too bad about Mixing Memory. But I can understand. The technical level of my blog posts had to drop a fair bit the last couple of years due to time. And there were six months there where I posted very rarely because of time issues.

You’re definitely right about how some Christians can’t conceive of atheism except in terms of their own religious beliefs. It’s very provincial and is kind of a shocking view given the place of Asia in all this. (And frankly the low place of religion in much of Asia – let along Christianity which at best was a footnote)

That’s usually the best bet in all discussions – especially in more academic settings.