Chris over at Mixing Memory has been blogging a fair bit on New Atheism of late. And typically catching a lot of flack for it. Now on the one hand I don't really ultimately have a horse in this race since I'm not an atheist and I doubt atheists particularly care about what I think. However after Chris' latest post I thought I'd make some comments.
It seems to me that the debate and actions within the atheist community are pretty similar to what goes on in religious communities. Among atheists you have some who take a live and let live attitude and some who are more zealots about things. They feel strongly that their evangelism is very important because otherwise society will fall. Thus all the heated rhetoric about the coming theocracy or civil rights. However this, to me, reminds me a lot of some heated Evangelicals who feel that America is becoming an anti-religious degenerate secular society. It's not true of course but these particular Evangelicals really need to fee that it is. Likewise America is really in no danger of becoming a theocracy and arguably religion has less influence than it did in the 19th century. For instance I can't see the government sending US troops against a religion they don't like nor allowing States to have genocide orders against a religion. Yet those things were done in the 19th century to my religion.
Now the one place I think the New Atheists may have a point is about this, to me, very fundamentalist approach to secularism. Arguably in terms of religions, the very evangelical (in the sense of pushing their religion) and dogmatic tend to grow the most. Even my religion, while it proselytizes a lot isn't very "in your face." It's much more about presenting our views and letting others accept it. That's probably why despite our reputation as the fastest growing religion we have at best slight growth. Most of the fundamentalist Protestant movements are growing considerably faster than we are. So if the atheists do this, it may well be that they will grow quickly.
But is it worth it? I'll be the first to admit that I don't like the "in your face" Christian movements. I think they give Christianity a bad name. They may grow fast, perhaps in part due to the dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion. (i.e. akin to what happens to football fans) But they alienate as many as they convert. I suspect this will happen with the New Atheists.
What bothers me the most about New Atheists is how they tie atheism and science so closely together. Not only is that somewhat offensive to the many theists who are scientists or have a science background but it seems to me that it will drive more people away from science. That is, if you give people the false dichotomy of religion or science, what do you think they will choose? If they have much by way of religious commitment (as many do in America) then they'll choose religion. This will in turn drive more people into adopting silly anti-scientific stances. That in turn won't just lead to ignorance. It'll lead to bad policy decisions regarding everything from global warming to teaching of evolution to medical practices to the very funding of science.
I understand that many of the New Atheists have very real concerns about the way science is treated politically. But the approach they are taking is just going to polarize things more.
For instance I can't see the government sending US troops against a religion they don't like nor allowing States to have genocide orders against a religion. Yet those things were done in the 19th century to my religion. I don't see how this shows that the U.S. government is less theocratic now than in the 19th century. Besides, they have done this recently, ask the Branch Davidians.
That in turn won't just lead to ignorance. It'll lead to bad policy decisions regarding everything from global warming to teaching of evolution to medical practices to the very funding of science. It's a democracy, people vote what they want. The religious can't fund religions through the public coffers. Any funding decision would just be to defund certain scientific ventures, meaning scientist go elsewhere for $ and the American people have less of a tax burden. a slightly smaller tax burden. That's not anti-science, it just allocating resources differently. Teaching of evolution is not in any danger, in fact each court case strengthens the case for teaching evolution (as it should be). I don't see how it affects medical practices, people have legitimate religious reasons for which medical procedures they undertake and how they undertake them, which the government should stay out of. As for global warming, it already is a religion and a theology of its own complete with sin, indulgences, apocalypse, Eden etc.. If anything religious people seem to be taking a more reasoned and scientific approach to global warming than are the atheists.
Re: tying atheism and science together. Is the justification for this a crude sort of positivism, viz., 'only beliefs that can be empirically verified are rational'?
Chris has had a few posts on scientism applying it to New Atheists like Dawkins. I'm not sure I agree how fair that is. I think Dawkins and company aren't saying that only science can produce knowledge, although clearly they think that science produces the best knowledge. (But then I tend towards that position as well) Rather I think they argue that in light of science and the arguments for God that God is a falsified thesis. That is there is evidence that God does not exists and no evidence that he does exist. Which is a somewhat more subtle position and not really scientism per se.
My big worry also has to do with the supposed science/atheism relation. While I think that the two MIGHT be a little more mutually supportive than are science/theism, I don't think the difference is big or significant. Science does not seem to directly support atheism in any way and even if it did, the very limited scope of science would make such hypothetical support largely inconsequential.
While I mostly agree with the objectives of the new atheism, I disagree with these objectives being pursued in the name of atheism. (How can one help but laugh at Dawkins' crusade to prove that there are no atheist crusades, that atheists don't do anything in the name of atheism?) I think that the way the objectives are pursued in the name of atheism has 2 unfortunate consequences:
1) It makes a social entity out of atheism, which is largely indistinguishable from a religion.
2) It alienates what would otherwise be allies in their struggles to limit certain forms of religious influence.
Jeff I fully agree, including the irony of Dawkin's methods. (Something South Park lampooned quite well)
David, I think that while there are definitely parallels to the Branch Davideans and various actions in the 19th century the parallels aren't as strong as you suggest.
The simple fact is that religion - predominately Protestant religion - was much more ingrained in society and government in the 19th century than today. Heavens, even prior to the 1960's. Look at the kerfuffle over the 10 commandments in a court house. Then look at most architecture prior to the 1960's which had tons of overt Christian symbols, quotes or references in government buildings.
Oh, Richard has up a post on this that I had somehow managed to miss. I'll make some comments over there later. I'll probably mention them here afterwards.
A big beef which I have with the whole thing, though, is how Dennett gets uncritically lumped with Dawkins and Harris. The latter two certainly see religion as something bad which needs to be done away with. Dennett, on the other hand, is genuinely agnostic on this matter and has never said anything (that I know of) to the contrary.
Dennett certainly is a strong atheist, but I just don't see him as a strong evangelizer of atheism, contra Dawkins and Harris.
Yeah. Dennett is a skeptic about a lot of things but he doesn't appear to be a zealot over it from what I can see. (Maybe I'm just not reading the right articles) Of course even Dawkins is a very polite zealot so I don't mind him that much. A lot of the bloggers over a Science Blogs though engage in a lot of pure zealotry as I see it.
Read Darwin's Dangerous Idea if you want to see Dennett frothing at the mouth against religious people.
I'll confess I've not read that one. (I've mainly read his more philosophical stuff)
Dennett is pretty good when he sticks to his core competency, philosophy of the mind. When he gets away from that he becomes almost evangelical. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, he hasn't really being doing much with philosophy of mind lately, instead he is busy evangelizing evolution and hanging out with the edge.org crowd. Man, I wish I was a tenured professor.
He did do some recent papers on the free will issue. I enjoyed it.
I've read Darwin's Dangerous Idea 3 or 4 times. He never argues against theism at all in it. Sure, he does say that when religion becomes dangerous it should be appreciated from a safe distance, like a lion in a zoo. This, however, isn't a very daring opinion to have. I've never seen anybody really take Dennett to task for a specific instance of atheistic zealotry.
I have a hard time buying that Dennett and Dawkins are far apart on many issues. He's just a better salesman than Dawkins is.
http://www.the-brights.net/vision/essays/dennett_nyt_article.html
Unfortunately I can't provide exact quotes from Darwin's Dangerous Idea because all of my books are in boxes because I just moved. However, I remember one passage in particular where he basically puts religious parents on notice. He says something like, "If you religious parents teach religious ideas to your kids, then we atheists will fix the damage you do and there isn't anything you should do to stop us." Very reminiscent of Dawkin's "teaching a child religion is child abuse" idea.
These discussions depend, of course, on the definition of God.
What science has done to further atheist thought is to obviate the need for the popular conception of God to explain the natural world. While science can never prove the non-existence of God, it shifts the balance of confidence away from theism toward atheism.
While science-theism may be a false dichotomy, theists are right to feel threatened by science. Science has done very little to support the assertions of theistic religion. It has instead forced religion to surrender belief after belief throughout the history of science. The common opposition of science against religion is based on a solid understanding of history.
Science has less to say about less popular concepts of God: a deist or pantheist God or a "God is the sum of all potentialities" kind of God, but none of those require the traditional kind of religiosity, to me anyway.
Jonathan,
It is unfortunate that there are not really any deists any more. Modern society for some reason has pushed everyone to either theism or atheism. I guess there is agnostic as well, but that's really just a form of scepticism. Deism would provide a middle ground for those who don't accept the extremes of theism/atheism, but are not skeptics. It would also provide a common point of discussion for everyone since both theists and atheists would find points of agreement with deists.
Was that Dennett who came up with that annoying "brights" label? Dang. If so then I change my mind. Man that annoyed me to no end. Talk about presumptuous and arrogant. I'm glad that never caught on.
Regarding deism, I think there's some truth to that David. Although I think in practice a lot of folks are deists or at least pantheists like Einstein. They just don't call themselves deists. It's more of a labeling issue than really an issue of content.
The Brights things is a bit of an uphill battle. Calling oneself a Bright would always require an explanation to avoid looking arrogant. Despite looking arrogant, I think the original intent was to share the light analogy with the Enlightenment. If you think about it, calling the rise of reason over faith the Enlightenment expresses the same kind of arrogance.
The problem with the "bright" label is it comes off as "I'm smart and you're dumb." Bright simply already has an established usage in our culture.
I think he meant to create something out of "bright" that paralleled the use of the word "gay". Unfortunately, memes aren't so easily engineered. Dennett has some of the most intriguing ideas in 'mind' but even on that subject, his writing drives me nuts.
Yep, it was Dennett who tried to coin "bright." Since he said brights should "come out of the closet" in his initial NYT essay, he is trying to liken it to the homosexual use of the word "gay." By the way, that is a travesty, I still can't read "The Gay Science" without my first thought being that the book talks about homosexuals, which it doesn't.
About the word deist. I agree that there are deist/pantheists out there, but because they don't publically identify as such they can't serve as a mediating influence as no one knows who they are. The Enlightenment was well served by deists such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.
Dennett did not invent or coin "bright." He was simply one of the first to endorse the name. The name was invented by a couple of people in Sacramento. While I'm not as bugged by the name as Clark is, I'm not terribly fond of it.
I think my biggest beef with it derives primarily from any kind of atheist organization. For starters, it could be argued that an atheist organization is simply retaining the bad parts of religion (organizational structures and hierarchies of sorts) while dropping the good stuff (hope in afterlife, etc.). Secondly, such organizations seem to be entirely about other people and how wrong they are. Such a message/organization is bound to be cynical to the extreme.
The value of organizing those who believe in naturalism is to promote that viewpoint in the public forum. This is not so different from different ideological movements through history which centered around civil rights for example. If someone believes that theism is a problem for society, it makes sense to try to organize for change.
The organizers of the Brights movement attempted to avoid a hierarchy, preferring to keep it an informal movement as much as possible.
Yes, "bright" does have an established usage. I grant that it may be hopeless, but they want to establish a new usage as a noun rather than an adjective: "I am a Bright" rather than "You are bright". When asked for a religion, the answer "I am a Bright" is meant to open a discussion. Perhaps "I am a metaphysical naturalist" would do just as well.
As I said, the connotation due to the existing word means it'll always be offensive to many of those excluded. It would be on par to a religious person calling themselves "the good" and all the atheists and agnostics "the evil."
On scientism and new atheism:
Dawkins has, at points, clearly argued that science doesn't answer ethical questions. That's clearly a non-scientistic position, and I'm glad he made it, even if his pragmatism on questions of value (science is good because it works, religion is bad because it doesn't) is ultimately very close, if not identical with positivism (this was, of course, the problem with Dewey's positivist pragmatism).
However, in the hands of people who are probably not as bright as Dawkins (including Sam Harris), the positivism turns into outright scientism. There was a debate in the comments to one of my atheism posts about what, if anything, other than science can provide knowledge. The general consensus among the new atheist commenters was that nothing could.
"If someone believes that theism is a problem for society, it makes sense to try to organize for change."
See, but this is exactly where I get off the boat. Theism certainly can tend toward problems, but focusing on theism rather than the problems themselves leads to problems. Furthermore, I don't think that theism, rather than the problems which it can lead to, is actually a problem.
Jeff, I agree 100%. I've argued that, as well, to mostly deaf ears. Theism in general, and religion in particular, tend to be mirrors of their societal context. That's not to say that there aren't components of specific religions that remain constant, but religion is fundamentally a hermeneutic enterprise, and the interpretive framework, and more importantly, the practical framework, will differ depending on the society in which a religion exists. If you want to change religion, you work to change society. Sometimes that will involve working on religion directly, but more often than not, it won't.
Jeff, if the New Atheists were able to change only what they perceived to be the problems arising out of theistic religion rather than working to eradicate it, religion would be very different. I don't think we would generally recognize it. Every church would probably be Unitarian Universalist. :)
LOL. I think Jeff meant more the social aspects. For instance Chris is quite right that religious people do tend to follow social trends, even if perhaps often lagging a bit. Thus despite Catholic theology most Catholics use birth control. So if atheists find something objectionable it's probably better to attack the social environment rather than religion direction.
There's a lot of frustration from a lot of quarters about the perceived rise in importance of fundamentalism. The New Atheists are certainly frustrated, but I see that many other people also share this frustration. I think the new outspokenness of atheism results from the belief (right or wrong) that the epistemic and metaphysical vices endorsed by most religions are at the root of fundamentalism. Rather than striking at the branches of religion, these atheists are fed up and want to strike at the root of the problem as they see it.
What's funny to me is that theological philosophers will often accuse the New Atheists of crude arguments against silly, simple-minded straw men concepts of God. If these philosophers agree that these concepts are unsuitable despite being held by the majority of religious adherents, why not join forces with the atheists and raise the bar, encouraging the public to think more closely about their beliefs about God? It could make society more hostile to the dangerous kind of fundamentalism that we feel threatened by.
Jonathan, I think most thoughtful religious people do ask the tough questions. If you go through most of the LDS links on my blog role I think you'll find that almost all are doing that. (I can't speak for other religious, although clearly many in those faiths also have a thoughtful faith)
I think the problem many of use religious people have with what Chris is calling New Atheism is that, to us, it seems like just an other kind of fundamentalism.
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