State-of-the-Art Theism Goes on the Attack Against 'The New Atheists'

This is an excerpt from David B. Hart's withering review on the right-wing Catholic site First Things, of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, the title of which is self-explanatory. Hart is the author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies and has taught religion and philosophy at (according to his Wikipedia entry) Maryland, Duke Divinity, Loyola and most recently Providence College. He's actually Greek Orthodox, interestingly enough. He sets out in mock lament over the apparent transitoriness of "the New Atheists," wishing he had more worthy adversaries. Then he picks a few of their arguments and proceeds to tear them apart as if they were Freshman papers in his Introduction to Theology class. He certainly is erudite and a skilled writer, I will give him that.

I'll let his argument speak for itself and hope others will comment on it. The whole thing is worth reading. I'll post the most interesting reply in the comments section after you've all had a chance to chew on this for a bit:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not



The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments, as well as an ability to refute them. Curiously enough, however, not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this. And this is, as far as I can tell, as much a result of indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian. He scarcely bothers even to get the traditional “theistic” arguments right, and the few ripostes he ventures are often the ones most easily discredited.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: 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.

It is immaterial whether one is wholly convinced by such reasoning. Even its most ardent proponents would have to acknowledge that it is an almost entirely negative deduction, obedient only to something like Sherlock Holmes’ maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It certainly says nearly nothing about who or what God is.

But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress. It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew. And 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.

...

No, scratch that. I'm being unfair to slide rulers. They made a hones effort at approximating the correct results.

:patriot:

Trying to force your opponent into the limits of a proponents archaic thinking is sophomoric in the extreme.

Why would I expect athiests arguments to "grasp" sophisticated theological argumentation? It's like asking a paper basket to hold fire, or for water to assume the shape of a bowl when it isn't in a bowl.

Is the religiously impaired having their cake and eating it too. If the theists want to limit their god to a pantheistic all and everything and more, that is fine with me, I also am in awe of the transcendent nature of reality itself. However they invariably wish to go from there to exactly the personal deity-thing actively interfering in the world that we atheists reject as hogwash.

Pay attention to the last graph in particular, where he talks about the broken "God-man":

<<If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche’s unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling. For a short time I entertained the misguided hope that he might produce an atheist manifesto somewhat richer than the others currently on offer. Unfortunately, all his efforts in that direction suffer from the same defects as those of his fellows: the historical errors, the sententious moralism, the glib sophistry. Their great virtue, however, is that they are mercifully short. One essay of his in particular, called “Religion and Reason,” can be read in a matter of minutes and provides an almost perfect distillation of the whole New Atheist project.

The essay is even, at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that “an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.” Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.>>

of the christ-story.

I do find the christian-atheists at least interesting in their peculiar metaphysics. The references to Nietzsche here indicate that the author at least partially adheres to that view.

We all know that God created ape in His image!

First, maintaining that your adversary simply doesn't understand the finer points of your theology gives it away right there. Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins are not dumb people, and I'm pretty that while they may not be nuanced theologians, they know bullshit when they see it. The guy who is made the comment here is almost incredibly condscending when he states tha "not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this.". Basically he's saying that these atheists are just too dumb too understand "absolute reality". Unbelievable!This is all "unmoved mover" stuff, and it's not that atheists don't understand it, they just reject it. I mean, he states that "reality must depend on absolute reality"? Huh? Such unqualified assertions like that are what drive atheists crazy. Whoever wrote that piece of bombast needs to get his/her head out of the clouds.

Or in other words... Hart is incensed that these people are dealing with the concept of God believed in by 99% of everyday average believers on the street instead of the concept of God believed in by philosophers like Hart.

Tell you what, wheh Hart gets the average beliver thinking of God in the terms he does, then he can bitch about atheists not focusing their attention on his definition of God. I have yet, however, to encounter ANY person who believes in God who is closer to Hart in their definition of that entity than they are to the definition he is disparaging here who wasn't a philosophy major or something of the like.

So if he has an issue with that definition, I suggest he focus his attention on getting his own house in order first.




First of all, light IS illumination. So yes, if you want to say what caused illumination you have to at least say what generated the damn light.

Second of all, the infinite regress objection is raised in response to theist arguments that do exactly what Hart is complaining about atheists supposedly doing here. I actually just had an argument with some genius YESTERDAY who said that evolution was an insufficient explanation for the origins of biological diversity on earth because it failed to explain where the matter in the universe came from, therefore God has to be used as an ultimate explanation.

It is 100% legitimate to respond to that by pointing out that you haven't explained where God came from either, you just inserted it as a first cause, defined it to be the ultimate one, and begged out of any further explanation as if you had sufficiently accounted for the origins of the universe by assignging the name "God" to that origin whether you could describe or explain it in any way whatsoever or not... and without having ANY other justification for inserting God as a cause in the first place besides there being a blank space in your mind way back at the origins of the universe that you think should be filled by *something* so you just arbitrarily plugged God into it.

Kind of ignores the question of why the ivory tower's theism is so radically different from the street's theism in the first place.

Once you put theology under the microscope, things fall apart. Simple faith is simply not enough to hold it together. The structure to hold it up has to become more and more intricate as the various weaknesses become exposed. So now you no longer have God the Father, as the man on the street understands it. You now have "an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: 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." (Let's see, all the holes plugged up there? Any spots for an atheist to crawl in? Let's pray to God the Father they won't...)

They want athesits to disprove a meaningless term "God" --which is pretty clearly impossible-- so that they can claim that their individual gods actually exist.

The problem for theism is that whenever "God" is defined, it disappears into self-contradiction or irrelevance (indistinguishable from the laws of Nature). When they bring me a god or God that is defined and relevant, I promise I'll take notice.

Until then...well, I guess this nonsense is better than molesting the congregation.

...than any atheist can possibly imagine using apparently tired old arguments like infinite regress (tired, regardless of the fact that plenty of modern theists continue to pull out their own tired and completely unsubtle, First Cause/Unmoved Mover arguments to which the infinite regress argument is a necessary retort), but of a completely utterly transcendent nature.

So what?

If you can't then prove that this amazingly grand whatever-it-is is an intelligence, a personality, a force of will, something with a plan for humanity and a concern for immortal souls, it's just a synonym for the universe itself, not a deity in any special sense that would be distinguishable in any way from an impersonal universe.

You want to tell me that the universe is stranger and more subtle than my tiny little human mind can grasp? You want me to understand that the nature of existence itself, the most basic question of why there's anything at all rather than a nothing so completely nothing that it would mean a total lack of anything that could even be empty of the anything that might otherwise exist?

That's no surprise to me. It's a given. I've accepted that for a long time.

What I don't buy is that transcendent words games of the theologians get them any further than pointing out that there's a big conceptual roadblock that they have no path to get around any more than I do. What I don't buy is that calling their conceptual roadblock "God" gives us anything more than a glorified "I don't know" to parade around as if it's mystical knowledge instead of an admission of human ignorance and the limits of human imagination.

If only we could all study the Church Fathers in their original Greek, and Nietszche (in his original German preferably?), we would all have that great, tragic sense of what the hell this old fart is talking about when he talks about god.

when injected into cosmology. That's the whole idea of asking who created God. God, as a supposed origin, either inserts one more slice into the infinite regress or steps past the problem all together, depending on what you mean by the word "God."

We should note that the "conceptual roadblock" version of God is parsimonious in the extreme compared to the God that at least two thirds of Americans believe in. That's something theists like to ignore.

... The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel ...

I am not — honestly, I am not — simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture — some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods ...

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe ...

... No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any ...

I think this bears repeating: The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture

Right after your quotation you want to repeat is this little gem of idiocy

Sound familar? Yeah, the "new atheist" isn't moral. And isn't smart. Really? Is that what you think of us? Because if it is, I would like you to take all of your "bigotry" arguments you have made in the past and apply them to yourself.

Then he continues this "'new atheists' are the stoopid" meme with this chestnut

1. Really? So would a truly profound theist also take the trouble to understand all those manifestations of god that they don't believe in? Cause I don't think that's the case. How far back into history do we have to go in our study of that which we don't believe in? Is this limited to gods or all mythology? Do we need to do extensive research into unicorns before we reject them? What a horseshit standard that in no way imaginable does this piece of work hold himself or others to.
2. I've done plenty of study on Christianity. Went to a Catholic seminary. Is that enough? Do you, s4p, really believe that the "new atheists" haven't studied theology?

I really do want you to specifically tell me what you think. Do you think that the atheists of today are significantly more stupid than the atheists of the past? Do you really think that Dawkins et al have not "studied" theology?

"A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection"

As if anyone expects any rational person to understand any other religion 'in its most sophisticated form' before they reject it... and... 'consequences'? Really?

What are the consequences of not believing in any other religion? This just highlights the arrogance of Christians like this. Dog knows they aren't all out studying Islam or Hinduism and getting all dramatic about the 'consequences' of not choosing to believe those myths.

I would add that the responses typically do not actually respond to what has been said

As an example, let me rehash some of my criticisms of what might be called the "scientistic critique" of religion. The "scientistic critique" goes somewhat as follows: the existence of a deity is a scientific hypothesis, and since no scientific evidence for a deity has been found, one should conclude on the basis of science that a deity is unlikely or that there is no deity. Dawkins, for example, is very fond of this argument

I think the "scientistic critique" is an intellectually careless and sloppy argument, and in a moment I will explain in more detail why. But before I explain my reaction, I want to point out clearly that I am here criticizing the argument itself, which is entirely different from taking a stand on the question Is there or is there not deity? You simply will not understand my criticism of the "scientistic critique" if you read my objection as taking a stand on the question Is there or is there not deity?

My primary objection to the "scientistic critique" is this: Science, by definition, concerns itself only with the natural world, as revealed by natural methods of study; it is not concerned with supernaturalities. I want to point out clearly that here I am not taking a stand on the question Are there or are there not supernatural phenomena? You will not understand my objection if you think I am taking a stand on that question, and you will not understand my objection if you think I am trying to argue here about whether the question Are there or are there not supernatural phenomena? is interesting or important. For the purposes of my first objection, the question Are there or are there not supernatural phenomena? is simply irrelevant. My point is simply that A scientific theory never ever introduces supernaturalities. Whether or not one believed "supernaturalities might be possible," supernaturalities never occur as scientific explanations. Never. Never ever. Supernaturalities never occur as scientific explanations BECAUSE science, by definition, concerns itself only with the natural world, as revealed by natural methods of study

I have made the above objection to the argument more than once in this forum, and the responses never suggest that the objection has been understood. Perhaps an analogy will help. Some mathematicians study "measurable cardinals," while others doubt that "measurable cardinals" exist. But it would simply be idiotic to ask a physicist whether or not he had found any evidence of the existence of "measurable cardinals" -- it is a question that cannot be resolved the methods of physics; it is not even a physical question. Whether one finds the question of the "existence of measurable cardinals" interesting or uninteresting, whether one considers it important or unimportant, whether one finds it meaningful or entirely meaningless, one should not expect to answer it one way or the other by using the measuring devices and theories of physicists. If a physicist were to attend a conference of mathematicians and say there, "I have never, in all my years of experimental work, found any evidence for the existence of measurable cardinals," then (no matter how competent a physicist he was) he should be regarded as having made an idiotic assertion. That physicist would be entirely free to regard questions about measurable cardinals as uninteresting (as many mathematicians do) or even meaningless (as some mathematicians do); he cannot, however, expect to be taken seriously if he claims his physical experiments shed any light on the issue

Gould's argument boils down to "Science is an inadequate tool to study the supernatural." But neither Gould nor anyone else who supports his assertion has been able to successfully state what an adequate tool would be for such study. On top of that, it is posited by those to whom the "scientistic critique" (:puke: at that wording) is leveled that supernatural phenomena have at least one effect or more on this current physical and natural universe, so how can anyone claim that these questions are beyond the scope of science?

IE, if a supernatural phenomenon is supposed to have an effect on this universe, that effect should be quantifiable by scientific research. If a supernatural phenomenon has NO effect on our current universe, then what is the difference between the claimed phenomenon and imagination?

Furthermore, your attempt to compartmentalize fields of study and claim lack of overlap extends into science itself. Do you believe for one moment that physicists and mathematicians study completely separate and unrelated phenomena? No, of course not. So NOM doesn't work for your physicist analogy (there is incredible overlap) either.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria
by Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html

Reading it, I am not sure it is the same argument I just sketched above, complaining of the philosophically incoherent character of Dawkins' view of science: if it is the same, I have made a much more precise statement in exposing Dawkins' inconsistency than Gould made

gets around the problem presented in the second paragraph of #164.

Gould explicitly describes himself as a "Jewish agnostic" in his piece: he is not convinced by any Christian theology and probably not much interested. His discussion with Catholic theologians (for example) mainly concern evolutionary matters, and related questions about US politics, that DO interest him. His view (apparently based on such Catholic theology as he learns from such discussions) is that the theological views could not determine the science nor the science the theology

My criticism of Dawkins' argument (the "scientistic critique") is even more specific: it is that Dawkins' argument is intellectually dishonest and "begs the question," a sophomoric mistake in argumentation. The scientific method sets aside certain irrelevancies in the course of evaluating the natural material world: the honest investigator puts his or her religious or political or philosophical or artistic preferences at arms length and concentrates on reproducible material phenomena. The object is to discover and/or use "natural laws" to obtain predictable results in well-defined circumstances. Whether or not such "natural laws" actually exist and are simple enough to be found and to be applied, is an interesting philosophical question -- but the scientific enterprise does not concern itself with such a philosophical questions: it simply assumes as a pragmatic working hypothesis that such laws can be found and sets out to find them, not because it is intellectually certain that the whole of the world can be described by discoverable "natural laws" but simply because the scientific project IS NOTHING OTHER THAN the effort to describe the natural world by discoverable "natural laws." There is no scientific attitude towards "supernatural phenomena" because it is the scientific presumption that all phenomena are natural and material. If, in a long series of experiments, the investigator at one point were to see a bright shining being who announced "I am an angel from beyond the realms of space and time, and I have been sent here to show you that there is something more than the natural material world that you study," and if that one particular experiment then produced very strange results, with all other experiments in the long series producing the results expected by the theory, the experimenter might (as a human being) have various personal reactions, but if the experimenter is a good scientist, the angel would be omitted from the published account, but the single odd result would not be omitted in publication: it would be published with the other results, and there would be a bit of discussion along the lines that the outlier did not accord with the well-established physical theory, was not yet properly understood, and was therefore disregarded in the analysis section of the paper. No matter how the investigator were to explain to him/herself this strange vision, an "angel from beyond the realms of space and time" really just cannot play a serious role in any scientific paper, since such beings (if they actually existed) would not be natural material phenomenon reproducibly subject to natural laws. If over many decades a scientist published tens of thousands of experimental results, which other people were able to reproduce, and by these experiments advanced a physical theory, no one could complain of the scientific work if that person later remarked in his/her memoirs that three earlier outliers (discussed briefly in his/her published papers) had been associated with strange visions of angels: whether or not one "believes" the person "actually saw" angels, such visions obviously do not belong in a scientific work, and any person who attempted to include such visions in a physical paper has somehow failed to understand the scientific enterprise. But for exactly the same reason, it would be a sophomoric begging of the question to argue A review of the scientific literature reveals no evidence of angels, so angels are unlikely to exist, since "angels" -- not being natural material phenomenon reproducibly subject to natural laws -- simply could not possibly be discussed scientifically. It is entirely possible for a very bad argument to reach by accident a correct conclusion, but the argument itself must be judged on its on merits and not according to whether we like the conclusions of the argument. I am NOT discussing whether angels exist or not, nor am I discussing how one might decide whether or not to believe in angels. I am simply objecting to the childish intellectual incoherence of a particular sort of argument Dawkins makes

A: There's no real evidence in the newspaper I read every day that Fidel Castro speaks Spanish: in all the quotes I've seen, he's speaking English
B: Do you ever look at the Spanish language papers?
A: No, I think that here in America everyone should read and write in English

Therefore, I'll say it again:
IE, if a supernatural phenomenon is supposed to have an effect on this universe, that effect should be quantifiable by scientific research. If a supernatural phenomenon has NO effect on our current universe, then what is the difference between the claimed phenomenon and imagination?

This isn't just my argument, it's Dawkins' argument as well. THIS is the attitude that science has toward the supernatural. We should be able to investigate any supernatural phenomenon that supposedly interacts with our natural world. Science doesn't completely reject supernatural phenomena, it simply requires that the natural effects of those supernatural phenomena be tested and verified before the supernatural phenomenon can be said to exist.

You call Dawkins' argument sophomoric, and yet you grossly mischaracterize the scientific method on which Dawkins bases that argument.

You are confused about the validity of the argument, because it reaches a conclusion you like, even though it begs the question to arrive at the conclusion

If you like the assertion, There is nothing but the natural material world, and we can know nothing about that world except what is revealed to us by reproducible scientific experiment, then you should be intellectually honest enough to start with that as an axiom and follow it wherever it may lead. But you would go a step further, and in doing so, you reveal the shallowness of your thought. For you effectively talk in circles, saying

There is nothing but the natural material world, and we can know nothing about that world except what is revealed to us by reproducible scientific experiment. But when we examine what we learn about the natural material world from reproducible scientific experiments, we never see any evidence that there is anything beyond the natural material world as revealed to us by reproducible scientific experiment -- and so there is nothing but the natural material world, and we can know nothing about that world except what is revealed to us by reproducible scientific experiment

Whatever anyone might think about the conclusion, it is in any case the very assumption from which the argument began, so the argument itself is worthless

The assertion you have italicized is not my assertion, nor is it the assertion of standard scientists. Our assertion is that if supernatural phenonema DO exist, and DO have an effect on this natural world as people claim, we should be able to measure the effect.

You've built a nice little strawman, putting forward an assertion that no one has actually made and then using it to demonstrate circular logic.

ETA: "Inconsequentiality...you are confused...shallowness of your thought..." Come now, s4p, I thought your vaunted intellectualism and deep searching capacity were above ad hom. :eyes:

indicates a certain dislike for Nietzsche, perhaps I can contrast (say) Sam Harris and Karl Marx

Marx brings to the table a view of the world, which is informed by a thorough detailed study of the exploitation of the industrial factory workers of his time, by the owners who profited from the impoverishment of the workers; his moral indignation arises from actual circumstances, and he plods through volumes of dry economic reports to document those circumstances; he pays careful attention to the politics and mythologies of his era; and his atheism is grounded in his understanding of the world he is trying to change. Marx, as an atheist, attempts to understand religion as an expression of human hope, as a collective hallucination of a better world in which the impoverished and the exploited are no longer impoverished and exploited; he sees religious ideology as soothing the distressed without challenging those who distress them; he sees religious culture as a part of human culture, evolving as the surrounding culture evolves. Marx challenges the whole of early industrial civilization from the point of view of some of its victims: he examines its organization; he examines the mythologies it spawns to sustain itself and suggests how the mythologies arise and what interests they objectively serve. When one finally understands what Marx is saying, one can only gasp "Oh!" A gigantic boiling tradition flows from Marx: it includes philosophical, political, and sociological elements

On the other hand, in reading bits of Harris, I find little that challenges me; the discussion mainly reminds me of little disputes I had in sixth or seventh grade, perhaps collected and organized and improved somewhat by an adult who is still captivated by the arguments of childhood. If the swallowness of Harris provides the intellectual standard of the so-called "New Atheists," then the movement has very little to offer and it will leave no lasting tradition

What about Christian intellectuals of this age? Have you compared them with the great Christian intellectuals of the 19th Century?

The assumption that everyone had the same beliefs about God? Wasn't that a false assumption? The position and prestige of Christianity in culture? Is it atheism's fault that Christianity couldn't maintain its own prestige and relevancy for our times?

As for the consequentiality of atheism, Hart seems to actually think its not so inconsequential after all. He seems to want to blame all of his religion's woes on atheism.

PS: We still have Christianity. We still have the cultural artifacts--the music, art, literature, etc.--Christianity wants to claim it contributed. That's why I'm sure Hart isn't talking about losing the religion. Any nut on the street can be a Christian and believe with all his heart and soul in Hart's God and Christ. No, what Hart is missing is the respect he thinks Christianity is due. Well, as we're all finding out, it's only due what it actually deserves.

beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse ... But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on .. the historical and cultural changes that made it possible .. for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the .. center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations — and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them."

:shrug:

Agamemnon concerns the king of Argos; Antigone is about a woman who is betrothed to the son of Creon, ruler of Thebes, and whose brothers took opposite sides in a civil war; Hippolytus tells about a bastard son of Theseus, king of Athens

What's your point?

an occupied territory by nailing up a homeless man with a nasty crown of thorns and a sign proclaiming "Here's Your King" -- the obvious unwritten subtext being By the way, we won't take any of the rest of you any more seriously than this, either

Futthermore, he's God made flesh only begotten son. This is how his character has been understood through the centuries by lay person, priest, theologian... It's not until modern times that he's turned into a simple man like any one else.

to be of Herod's house or related to the Caesars; but the Roman mockery is inverted and the Caesar's pompous claim to be "Son of G-d" is taken from the Caesar and reapplied to an innocent man degradingly executed

and that is what Jesus was to most Christians throughout history. No ordinary man at all. Please don't try to tell me the early Chrisitans thought Jesus was just a man. That idea doesn't arrive on the scene until Yvonne Elliman sang it in Jesus Christ Superstar.

His tortured, self-referential mental masturbation about transcendence has precious little to do with religious belief for anyone other than a few theological scholars. Is his idea of "consequence" creating one more ponderous tome to collect dust in a seminary library, or publishing one more article in a religious journal that will stir the divine imaginations of literally dozens of people?

...and emotive yourself. Much easier than answering the question.

I started to read it, but I think I fell asleep somewhere around "indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance..."

Anything exciting happen in it? Car chases? Anything?

:popcorn:

:hi:

Every time I try to read one of these hi-falutin' windbags, I call up H.L. Mencken's words about them and have a laugh:

Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say. Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the astrologers...

The thing that makes philosophers respected is not actually their profundity, but simply their obscurity. They translate vague and dubious ideas into high-sounding words, and their dupes assume, as they assume themselves, that the resulting obfuscation is a contribution to knowledge.

named Darron Knutson (none of the following are my words, though I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of them):

Hart's produced another example of what biologist P.Z. Myers so memorably labeled "The Courtier's Reply" to what's come to be called "The New Atheists" ("TNA"). "The Courtier's Reply" employs an outer show of erudition and "insider knowledge" as it concedes TNA's central arguments against simple, outmoded, "unsophisticated" versions of faith and religion that no "serious," "thoughtful" believer worthy of current consideration any longer professes, complains that TNA do not address "sophisticated" theologies and understandings of God, do not understand the depth of what they criticize and the implications of abandoning faith, and offer "shallow" arguments with no content that hasn't been around for over a century -- yet all the while never providing any reason to show how their "sophisticated" God beliefs avoid TNA's arguments, let alone any good reason to accept those beliefs. All the elevated, learned discourse serves to obscure the utter failure to answer TNA's central challenge, much as the parading guards', nobles', and other imperial courtiers' empty assertions served to distract the crowd from the Emperor's nakedness in the familiar old story "The Emperor's New Clothes." To "The Courtier's Reply" Hart adds the complaint that their absence of fear and trembling at the prospect of a Godless world proves that TNA don't fully understand what they're asking for. As have so many other similar critics, Hart's criticisms fall wide of the mark:

1. TNA didn't coin that term and have not, so far as I'm seen, claimed to offer novel philosophical arguments to reject belief in God or the supernatural (although they have used recent scientific advances to support some of their claims). In fact, they often contend that apologists for belief have yet to answer persuasively arguments that have been around for millennia. The only thing "new" about TNA is their attitude and contention that religious faith should be as susceptible to criticism as any other belief or opinion about how the world works.

2. The books commonly associated with TNA were intended for a popular audience, not those with graduate degrees in philosophy and theology. It should come as no surprise that TNA focus on the beliefs held by the bulk of self-identified believers rather than the tiny minority of "theological sophisticates." Directed against "50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists," such criticism is particularly off-base. One cannot expect pieces of only several pages each to address systematically and thoroughly all 3,000 plus years of thought inspired by the Abrahamic tradition. If it were fair to criticize the contributors to "50 Voices" for that failing, it'd be equally fair to criticize Hart for his failure to offer in this review (of approximately equal length) a compelling rational argument for belief.

3. Hart's placing fancy labels on the problems theism has faced for centuries proves only the extent of Hart's vocabulary; it does not solve the problems.

Take, for example, the infinite regress problem. Changing God's label from Aquinas' "uncaused First Cause" or "unmoved First Mover" to "an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such" doesn't help at all: it amounts to the same thing, an asserted exception to an assumed rule that everything is contingent, not necessary, but for which no evidence is offered. People's difficulty getting their minds around infinite regresses of contingent phenomena in conventional space-time provides no support for some "necessary being" existing in a state outside space and time, which, I respectfully submit, is equally -- if not more -- resistant to coherent definition and understanding than an infinite regress.

The same can be said for the response that's been made to the contention that explaining the complexity of the reality we observe around us by reference to an intelligent act of creation by God fails to account for the complexity that such a God must have possessed to have committed such an act of intelligence. Recognizing the obvious difficulty, Hart and others say that they're not talking about simplicity in terms of mere everyday matter and energy, they're talking about "divine simplicity ... logically follows from the very idea of transcendence" and that "God the transcendent fullness of actuality ... differ in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity." Is it unduly churlish of me to point out that TNA also argue that no one has offered a coherent, comprehensible definition or description of such a "divinely simple," "transcendent fullness of actuality," let alone offered any evidence or other good reason to believe that such a "qualitatively different" ontological substance actually exists -- and that Hart doesn't either? Nearly as I can tell, the definitional boundary of this "being," "thing," "stuff," or whatever is the rim of the logical hole that theists have to fill to account for reality's complexity without contradicting themselves or nakedly begging the question. As such, this concept of the "divinely simple" isn't so much a solution to the difficulty as it is just another empty relabeling of the problem. Invoking a gauzy, unobserved, and for all meaningful purposes undefined "transcendent" reality beyond human understanding to overcome a contradiction equally resistant to human comprehension is simply dressed-up misdirection, no matter how many six-bit words one uses to try to impress the rubes.

Accordingly, it's hardly a compelling criticism of TNA that it merely offers the same criticisms skeptics have offered for centuries using the same familiar terms theism's apologists have used since time out-of-mind. As noted, TNA address a popular audience likely more familiar with the older terms and, in any event, the newer more "sophisticated" terms theists now employ don't effectively advance the argument anyway. I liken it to a game of philosophical "Calvin Ball" where every time they're "tagged out," the apologists for the God hypothesis coin a batch of new words to paper over the same old contradictions and begged questions and declare, by fiat, that they're got yet another exception to the rule that should allow them to stay "on base."

4. TNA's failure to exhibit the degree of chagrin, melancholy, and "dread" Hart apparently deems requisite to the passing of Christianity as the dominate force in Western culture is not a particularly impressive criticism. I realize that religion's "sophisticated" apologists feel compelled to praise Nietzsche as allegedly the only atheist thinker to have properly appreciated the consequences of atheism, but claiming that TNA cannot possibly have comprehended the full import of their views simply because they aren't trembling in their shoes in dread at the prospect of a Godless world is, to put it bluntly, fatuous. His condemnation that TNA offer as replacements for Christianity only mere "scientism" and "tenuous vestiges of Christian morality . . . absurdly denominated 'humanism,'" reflects Hart's own timorousness and ignorance far more than it does the rich resources for constructing a worthy life and culture without God that have been available for centuries and at increasingly growing pace for the last 250 years.

Hart sees the glass as half-empty and fears the loss of good things he thinks wouldn't have happened without Christianity; TNA sees the glass as half-full and looks forward to the better world made possible by leaving behind God-belief and the irrationalities and horrors it has fostered. By TNA's reckoning, people were responsible for any good Christianity may have caused, not God, so people have the capability to retain everything worthwhile Christianity helped create -- for its own sake, not God's.

Beyond that, before accusing TNA of anything like vagueness or lack of meaningful content in what it offers in lieu of faith, someone like Hart who's been spewing clouds of verbal inert gas such as "ground and depth of being," "transcendent fullness of actuality," "absolute plenitude of actuality," "infinite act of being itself," or "one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates" should show at least some awareness of the resulting gargantuan irony. I've read plenty of modern, "sophisticated" theologians and I've yet to find anyone who can say what terms like that actually mean -- aside from "words that provide 'sophisticated' believers that warm fuzzy feeling that belief is justified without even though no one can say precisely what's actually believed."

5. Finally, Hart's claim that TNA have simply traded in one unjustifiable certainty for another equally unsupportable, close-minded dogma isn't quite fair. So far as I've been able to find, all of TNA say that all "truth" is tentative and subject to revision in light of experience and that they are perfectly willing to change their minds about anything if provided some evidence that they're mistaken.

No doubt Hart would claim that TNA's naturalism and epistemological empiricism are "blind dogmas," but Hart and other apologists for religion are free to attack those starting premises. Nearly all people - even most theologians and philosophers {8^) - accept that the material reality of energy and matter really exists and that our senses can provide us useful information about it. TNA's refusal to go beyond naturalism and empiricism merely reflects the absence of any evidence or other reason to do so, hardly a closed-minded, unreasoning insistence on just another unwarranted certitude.

Perhaps I'm not doing Hart complete justice; after all, I haven't read his "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies," nor any of his other books. If this review of "50 Voices" is any fair indication, though, I'd guess he's just one more courtier spouting yet more empty, jumped-up persiflage in the hope of distracting the crowd and so they won't notice that Emperor "Belief" has no clothes.

..., and for all meaningful purposes undefined 'transcendent' reality beyond human understanding to overcome a contradiction equally resistant to human comprehension is simply dressed-up misdirection, no matter how many six-bit words one uses to try to impress the rubes."

Hey! Dressed up misdirection is an important contribution to human culture! It's a sad thing when people go around tearing this stuff down, rather than contributing to the noble, life-enriching cause. Gauzy and unobserved is where it's at! :)

Like a spider web. I'ts pretty. :crazy:

And they even used 'beg the question' properly.

<3

:rofl:

David Bentley Hart interview: ‘Revolutionary Christianity and its alternatives’
http://cruciality.wordpress.com/category/david-bentley-hart/

to see if his spoken voice is as pompous as his written one. ;-)

At least, I've always thought Sagan was adept at that, and that it was something to strive for. I don't know how much I could admire this guy for maintaining the tone of this article anywhere, however.

without saying anything profound or even all that intelligent.

But it has big words so it pleases a certain segment of believers who are looking for smart sounding confirmation of their own belief.

Blech. :puke:

Chris Hedges' article here was published about 3 weeks after this, and was criticised on DU here. Hedges says he's agnostic, but seems to have picked up on Hart's lament - if only these atheists had thought their atheism through fully, then they'd have to come to Nietzsche's conclusion that western civilisation's morality must be thrown out, because it has too many Christian roots (and an implied rejection of any other societies' morality, because both writers are convinced that western civilisation is the only culture that counts). And it seems both authors are rather peeved that atheists haven't all claimed to be supermen with the will and right to do whatever they want, or reverted to pure pleasure seeking.

Hart, being an Orthodox Christian, thinks that atheism is a passing fashion, and feels sure that people will flock back to his One True Faith in the fullness of time. Hedges is pessimistic, and thinks that religion has blotted its copybook so badly that people will turn away from it, and then fall into the Nietzschean abyss which he dreads himself. He wishes that people would believe, even if it's in baloney, because it's good for them.

Both seem to miss a fairly simple point: if you don't believe in gods, then you can see religious ethics as ideas that humans have constructed by themselves, rather than receiving them as divine revelation. That doesn't mean they have to be thrown out; just examined, criticised, and combined with other ideas on how we should behave. Humanism (not that it's a compulsory part of atheism, but it's an example of atheistic ethical principles) can draw from whatever humans have done, which includes making up morality based on the claim of gods. There's a lot more to atheistic philosophies than Nietzsche.

I think Hart and Hedges would like atheists to be selfish or even 'evil' - because sometimes we can all agree that an act, or a person, is 'bad', and they'd like their opponents to be ones that everyone boos and hisses. It makes it easier to persuade people the opponents' arguments are wrong.

I think you're right that he was inspired by Hart. You make some excellent points about both and about this whole tack against the new atheists. Bravo!

:applause:

Hart explicitly criticizes the so-called "New Atheists" for their intellectual shallowness and lack of serious historical knowledge; in pointing to Nietzsche, he indicates that at least Nietzsche has the courage to take a definite stand and follow it through. In this sense, I think he is correct; I read quite a lot of Nietzsche at one point and at least found that it forced me to think carefully and choose my positions deliberately, whether or not I agreed with him. I get no such challenge from Sam Harris or from Richard Dawkins, both of whom argue loudly about dull stupid views held by no one I know, neither of whom says anything to which I might respond "Whoa! I That never occurred to me!" or "Wow! I think that's wrong but I can't say why! I better think about this more!"

Hedges has explicitly pointed out similarities between the intellectual styles of the Fundamentalists and the so-called "New Atheists." I suspect the problem many people will have with Hedges -- and therefore the point at which they should meditate most closely on what he has said -- is that Hedges thinks It is important to acknowledge the sinful nature of humanity. It is an unpopular view, that regardless of how we might prefer to think of ourselves, we all regularly compromise our stated ideals and behave otherwise, by action or by inaction

I think one can can profit from reading Paine's Age of Reason, if only for the sometimes brilliant rhetoric. Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian at least makes some effort to indicate what Russell DOES believe. The Marxists had an interesting view of religion: one can find work deserving careful attention from Marx or Kautsky or Bloch; one has the interesting discussions between Marxists and Christians in the wreckage of Germany after WWII; one has an interesting synthesis of Marxian analysis and Catholic social teachings in Latin American liberation theology. In the West, the sixties produced a challenging "God is dead" theology and Althizer's "Gospel of Christian atheism." But the so-called "New Atheists" are doing nothing so challenging and interesting: they are merely shouting again and again the same sophomoric arguments, based on high school philosophy and crude misrepresentations of history, with a casual indifference to coherent dialogue; they will ignore that Occam's razor came from a churchman, as did the experimental philosophy of Roger Bacon, and as did the heliocentrism of Copernicus

Someday, perhaps, someone will tire of the constant idiotic noise (such as the claim in this thread that Hart wants a new Inquisition) and will cross over the floor briefly to attempt to teach the "New Atheists" how to read the New Testament profitably from an atheistic perspective: I am reasonably certain that such a project could produce interesting insights, but (to judge from the noise in this thread) the target audience would not bother to try to understand the work

Perhaps you don't know anyone personally who holds them, but you know of public figures: the pope, his cardinals etc. They claim the members of their religions hold them too, and that seems to be the public claims of the members too, though it's possible many just repeat them so that they fit in better in society. The number of people who believe Jesus was God is quite remarkable, for instance. Many other people believe Mohammed was God's Prophet. Add in Hindus who believe in that religion's gods, and you've probably got over half the world's population who say they hold these dull, stupid views.

It seems to me your first paragraph just confirms what I said about Hart - that he thinks that if you're going to be an atheist, then you have to follow Nietzsche, because he's the only 'respectable' atheist, intellectually.

Hedges tried to compare 'new atheists' to fundamentalists, and failed miserably. Fundamentalists draw their ideas from an old book, with a rigid, intolerant interpretation of it, and try to restrict other people's freedoms. I agree with you that he thinks "it is important to acknowledge the sinful nature of humanity". But in his pessimism, he thinks it's impossible for mankind to become less 'sinful', and he thinks that any claim that it may have already done so (such as, say, the way slavery became morally unacceptable) shows the person that makes that claim doesn't know what they're talking about. He sees himself, and us all, on the point of falling into moral degradation, which only the shreds of religious morality to cling to, even if he doesn't himself believe in any god.

The 'New Atheist' arguments may be sophomoric; but they are an advance on Hart's infantile "my God will come and make all things good" argument that we see in #54 below, or his adolescent "look at that suffering in that painting! Cool, dude!" argument from the OP article. Yes, the NA arguments are aimed mainly at the dull, stupid views of the pope, Mohammed and the members of similar religions. They are easily up to the task of demolishing the regular religions. Spinoza can come later.

to point at your caricature of Hart's comments about crucifixion art as look at that suffering in that painting! Cool, dude!

It would, of course, be dull and stupid of anyone, regardless of their religious belief or non-belief, to respond to such images in such a fashion. But, of course, that is not what Hart says of the image, and that you attribute such a reaction to him says much about your own style: you are certainly free to disagree with him or to find his remarks so uninteresting that you choose to ignore him completely; it is unclear to me why, instead, you choose to attribute to him such a particularly dull and stupid view (look at that suffering in that painting! Cool, dude!)

...was a religious man. I simply consider it an interesting irony, not a reason to assume that the Razor must actually lead to religious faith if properly used.

Whatever scholarship survived in Europe in medieval times mostly had to happen within the Church because the Church had a near monopoly on reading and writing and then-expensive books. Apart from nobility, typically only monks and priests had the time to spend on study.

Given the circumstance of his life, the culture he lived in, and the fact there was not yet a well developed science to explain much of the world around him, it's not at all surprising that William didn't use the Razor to cut away his own God.


This is beginning to sound like a round-about "Courtier's Reply". You're ready and eager to dismiss any theological argument as "idiotic noise" unless it pays homage to every winding, twisting turn in the labyrinthian history of theology and philosophy.

history of theology and philosophy," since I find most of that history uninteresting. Most metaphysical discussions merely expose the confusions of the parties, and I have doubts whether much more than that could be expected of such conversations. And quite a lot of theology merely seems to reflect the results of power struggles conducted in high-falutin language

religion or nihilism, as the "baby and the bathwater problem". Religious apologists view dismissing the baggage of God-belief as "throwing out the baby with the bathwater". The absurdity in the cliche is that it maintains that something is so important it must be kept--the "Baby".

But keeping the "Baby" is no reason to keep the bathwater. It's just had a dirty baby in it, after all. In fact, the bathwater was drawn specifically for the Baby, not the other way about.

I tend to think that religion only provides a certain context through which the moral aims of a population can be read, but it can not provide the "reasons" for them anymore than science can. Both are tools. The commandments enshrined in any religious creed may have reflected the opinions of the religious founders regarding what the higher goals of the society should be, but don't provide any basis other than, basically "God said so", and that is a very limited premise. What if one's holy book doesn't even mention internet porn, stalking, seems to condone slavery, etc?

The pessimism of Hedges is correct in that religion has become something like my analogy's "dirty bath water". But I maintain that bathwater wasn't meant to be permanent and that the "baby"--human society" can be maintained without any particular "bath." "Baths" plural are needed as society realizes it's code needs to be updated to meet its current reality. We should have a construct of laws and ethics--but the need for it to be supernaturally-based is out-moded. We are switching from the baby-tub to the big-boy tub now that we have the motor-control to hold our little heads out of water. Or....oh hell, I've really sucked that metaphor dry, haven't I?

Anyway, you can still throw out the bathwater without putting Baby in the corner, is what I think I was getting at.

and the end was just so perfectly tongue-in-cheek.

After reading that, I think I love you. :applause:

I also hope the other thing I've said on this thread makes sense. Addressing this thread in the meta-sense, it looks like we've got epistemic issues rotting throughout--here's my solution:

(BTW: This metaconversation might actually involve the validity of this whole thread. You don't even know.)

Can we ascertain there is a universe?

Yes, because we need one to assert that David Hart exists. His article is in fact proof that he is a real thing we have to contend with, because we are reading his article, and if it didn't exist, man, how would I have known he existed? I'm series.

Did god make David Hart? Because if David Hart exists, there has to be a reason for him, wouldn't you think? Because if people just existed for no particular reason, wouldn't that give all of us "a sad"?

All "sads" aside, I think I could account for David Hart's existence without asserting a priori that there is a god. The conditions of the universe are such that they inevitably produced humanity. Come on. Why else are we carbon-based, bilaterally-symmetrical, oxygen-breathing reasoning bipeds, except for the very universal conditions that would have needed to appertain to guide our evoluton to be....like that?

So stick with me--if a universe needed to produce a David Hart-and since there is one, obviously it needed to--how would it get one?

You might say it only needed to get David Hart's mom and dad together--but that would be so improbable based on how doable both of them seriously were. How do any people ever meet and decide others are doable unless God ordained they would bump uglies? Oh--wow. There totally had to be a God there. Sorry, David Hart. You existing is specifically a result of all your previous ancestors' being so totally undoable as to never sexually result in you except through Divine Intervention. Therefore, God exists because you do. My bad.

I mean I will use this myself with your permission.

I think it isn't a bad little argument or I wouldn't have forwarded it. Try to work in a link to Strangely Blogged though...eh?

"Baths" plural are needed as society realizes it's code needs to be updated to meet its current reality.”

Ok….There are currently 33-34 million Americans receiving aid and support from the Salvation Army alone.
Add to that the millions who receive formal support through other churches/religions social welfare agencies- Rehabs, Refuges, Schools, Homeless Shelters, Soup Kitchens etc etc etc…..
Add to that the millions more who find informal support/surrogate family in church communities- aged, lonely, homeless, reformed addicts, post institutional care, youth etc etc etc….

Can you please outline how society “can be maintained without any particular "bath” underpinning, prompting and motivating these formal and informal social supports?

How are they and/or how will they be replaced or rendered unnecessary? By which "Baths" plural" and do we have any indication this is taking place?

also being done by religious institutions, and there are hospitals, churches etc. that are run by religious organizations of all kinds.

My "bath" analogy pertains more to outlook than institutions, so what you've kind of given me is the example that supports my point: human beings think helping people in an emergency is good. They tend to think educating their children is good (except radical Islamists who don't want little girls in school, and creationists who want their kids to learn bullshit). They believe in tending to the sick and dying. There are atheist doctors--do you think they don't believe in restoring people's health and saving lives? Atheist teachers. Atheist aid workers and diplomats. The answer is we're human and have empathy. We can anticipate that bad things could happen to us, too, that society works better with educated people in it, etc.

So I don't think that a person who believes in feeding the poor needs religion to do that. I don't think that no one would even bother if no one was religious. We'd be motivated to rectify the problem because we could feel for the starving. Do we need to be told that it's wrong, or do we just kind of know?

Most are Government Institutions and some are secular Non Government Organizations.
And then there are the Churches and “religious organizations of all kinds” that provide a range of social services. I would suggest that there are significant differences and distinctions in scale, role and approach between Government, secular NGO’s and Religious Institutions.

“the example that supports my point: human beings think helping people in an emergency is good… educating their children is good… tending to the sick and dying…”

Agreed. And a variety of agencies meet those needs and good intentions. My question inclines towards your “more to outlook than institutions”…and asks- Who provides informal surrogate family/community for the elderly? Who provides informal post hospital care/community for adolescent psych disabled? Who provides informal role model/community support for reforming alcoholics/drug addicts?
The State? Secular NGOs? Or religious communities?

“There are atheist doctors--do you think they don't believe in restoring people's health and saving lives?”

Of course not…Am not suggesting anything of the kind. Recognising and applauding ‘Doctors Without Borders’ also.
I am however asking- When the young reforming drug addict has seen the doctor, done the Rehab, is still struggling and wants to stay clean, change his life, avoid the old crowd and temptations……..Who provides the informal support, surrogate family, supportive community?

I’m an agnostic. I have no church or faith. But my observation from three+ decades in the Welfare Sector is that the Churches best meet these needs and I can’t see any secular agencies/ communities/ groups replacing them.

“So I don't think that a person who believes in feeding the poor needs religion to do that.”

No. Neither do I. But I am daily confronted by the reality that in the poorest districts there are far more religious agencies doing such work as there are secular NGOs.

“I don't think that no one would even bother if no one was religious.”

No, Nor do I. But I am still confronted by the reality of the Salvation Army alone doing 33-34 million acts of “bothering” per year and I am yet to hear of any secular NGO coming even close to the “bothering” of that >one< religious organization.

“We'd be motivated to rectify the problem because we could feel for the starving.”
If “no one was religious” we would be so “motivated to rectify the problem”?

Then what are we waiting for? Why haven’t we risen up, taken up the slack that the churches are missing, shown them how to rectify the problem without all the god bothering, and surpass the efforts of the churches and make them redundant?

Suzy Q. Godbagger isn't going to give her money to (for example) a secular humanist organization when she could give it instead to her church and feel so much better about herself.

That is why non-religious charitable organizations have yet to surpass religious ones. It is a lack of funding and support from people like you who believe that non-religious charitible organizations aren't as good (for whatever reason) as the religious ones. I come from the buy-bull belt, and down here in Jesusland the prevailing wisdom is that it is impossible to be or to do good without the Christian God. How can a secular charity thrive in such a closed-minded environment?

You still can't tell me how the SA is better than the combination of tens of thousands of local small charities whose overhead is usually lower. All I've heard is that they are national and well-known, but neither of those makes them a better charity than the network of secular charities in different cities all around the nation. Bigger isn't necessarily better, especially when it comes to administrative cost. So let's hear it: Why is the SA that you keep harping about better than a large network of local charities?

I think she became a nun because she was a good person rather than the other way around. She was setting up a shelter for battered women, and as far as I can tell, there was no prompting or even material help from the Church in her efforts. She was relying on good people in the community to help her, some of whom were Catholic but many of whom were not.

The first time I volunteered there, I was there with two friends of mine: one is an atheist and the other is nominally a Christian but could not be less serious about it--I don't even know if she is Catholic or Protestant. I don't see how religious belief nor the infrastructure of any church was necessary to bring these caring people together to do good work. Certainly Catholic organizations were tangentially involved in the sense that many of the people involved in the project are associated with them. But the whole thing was organized with practically zero intervention from any of those organizations. I suspect the same is possible of many similar efforts around the country and the world.

If the overall suggestion of your post is that the good works often happen at the very fringe of the organised/central church then I would not only agree but go further and suggest it often occurs >in spite of and/or in opposition to< the central body.

But this ought come as no surprise as the most exciting, innovative and creative endeavours often occur at the fringe of any orthodoxy- science, music, art, welfare…

In welfare the ‘pattern’ of agency/service birth and evolution has long been studied and understood- In brief…An individual recognises a social need and seeks to address it, friends, family and interested supporters join in to lend a hand, the service grows to the point at which it requires a ‘Committee of Management’, much of the innovative work is stymied as the service becomes an Institution, the Institution ultimately requires radical reform, de institutionalization or disbanding.

Living things…….organic and evolutionary…sometimes revolutionary.

“. I don't see how religious belief nor the infrastructure of any church was necessary to bring these caring people together to do good work”

In the instance you describe it quite possibly wasn’t necessary…that does not negate the social reality outlined in 84#

“But the whole thing was organized with practically zero intervention from any of those organizations.”

Quite possible, quite likely.
The Nun you mentioned…was she the initiator/driving force of the project? I ask because in my experience it is individuals such as this that are the heart and soul and real fuel/power of the churches…not the central bureaucrats sitting on their fat arses, resisting change, protecting their power and privilege and fiddling with the choir boys.

“I suspect the same is possible of many similar efforts around the country and the world.”

Yes, indeed possible. But none of the above or that ‘possibility’ changes the reality of the formal organizational institutional effort required to provide service and assistance to 33 million Americans or the further millions who are provided with informal community support through the churches (outlined 84#)

I’m still open to suggestion as to how these social services provided by religion can be/are being/or will be met.

And, in line with Nietzsche's arguments, the contemporary philosopher John N Gray (see, for instance, Straw Dogs).

But I maintain that ... the "baby"--human society" can be maintained without any particular "bath."

I believe that is the gist of the problem. Nietzsche believed that man could not survive without God, and he believed that the death of the traditional God meant that man himself must become god in order to survive.

Gray's outlook is more stark. Gray is not defending religion, he is also an atheist. Gray's pessimism comes from looking closely at the world and asking what is human nature. Having asked that question he deals contemptuously with the optimism of the New Atheists that in the absence of religion, humanity will thrive. What is that claim based on? How does anyone look at the history of the 20th century and believe that science will lead to some rich human future? Human nature is extremely defensive and, therefore, prone to war. We have a taste of what science can make of warfare. The true need of humanity is to take a realistic look at ourselves and our prospects. The New Atheists, both naive and dangerous in their claims, work against that realistic look at ourselves.

Either it got it from revelation, or it didn't. If it didn't, people must have thought certain goals were really importants, like there not being rampant murder and theft. It was necessary to our needs as a society for there to be rules, and religion was just one way of trying to justify them to the (stupid) people who just wouldn't get it. But the fact of religious belief doesn't stop people from doing wrong--they do anyway. Take the extreme example of the pedophile priest. He believes in God presumably and that God watches and knows everything, but this doesn't stop him. The fact that he'd be causing emotional and physical harm to a child doesn't either.

Does he not "really" believe? He would probably assert that he does, but is blind to how that's relevant to his behavior. And people live with that sort of disconnect between belief and action all the time--they bathe in religion, but are still "unclean" because they don't have an impulse to view their lives through that "bath". Also, what of the "moral atheist" who doesn't believe, but still thinks rules are important to maintain both his health and that of the society he lives it?

Does it need to have a basis? What's the basis of mathematics? How does gravity work? Just because we don't have all the answers doesn't mean we can't figure out what the answeer isn't.

The point about the New Atheists is that they are not serious thinkers, at least not about religion and the state of the world, which is what they write about. The New Atheists are extremely naive in both the blame that they put on religion and the hope that they put in science and the future. Any one who takes an even cursory look at human history knows that humans are tribal, given to defend territory, most seriously against other people. Morality pertains to the tribe. That is our nature. Science has become universal in its effects. That is a tremendous threat to the survival of humanity. That is an issue that is of immediate, critical importance. The New Atheists waste our time with their sadly non-thought through attempts at analysis. The ignorance that they spread is the danger. Not an ignorance of god or religion, an ignorance of humanity.

I don't think your brush is quite broad enough there.

You say that human nature is prone to war... as if religion is in any way a barrier to war.

Whole regions of Asia lapsed into comparative peaceful co existence after adopting Buddhism.
The same pattern emerged in Europe with the adoption of Christianity.
And likewise Islam united previously warring tribes and regions.

A good basic measure of this assertion is to look at the buildings/civilization developed in these regions before and after these faiths.

It takes a good deal of prolonged peace and mercantile security to be able to produce a great cathedral or mosque or temple.

Where in Europe did that happen? The main reason for the "lapse" in war after the fall of the Western Empire was that the infrastructure collapsed and feudalism took the place of empire. You had people moving into communes of a kind and staying there for the duration of their lives, mostly, because they were too afraid to venture far on the roads between towns for all the robbers operating on them.

than religion itself.

And if one expands on that idea... well...

Most of the religions replaced held core values of-“You won’t get into Valhalla unless you die with a sword in your hand slaying the enemy”…which worked well when ‘business’ was corporate raiding conducted en mass on horseback.

The uniformity of “Put up thy sword” proved better for business...and family/community.

Like humanity, religion is not static, it evolves.

The only problem is what happened when that large group of internally peaceful Christians met a large group of internally peaceful Muslims.

Religion is based on in-group thinking. Of course people aren't going to fight with their in-group. That cohesiveness is part of the power of religion, but you need only look at history to see what happens when that power of in-group security meets the problem of out-group competition.

My point is that with the current state of weapons systems, and the current state of science, we don't have time to be worrying about religion. Sure, eliminate religion, and the only risks toward war left are: ethnicity, race, geography, population growth, resource shortages, etc, etc.

We probably can't eliminate war in the short term. But we may be able to control the deadliness of the weapons built by science - control both the creation of new weapons technologies and the implementation of current technologies. That way, if we continue to have wars, they may be survivable. We need to work on that control in the short term.

My point is that addressing religion as a cause of war is like moving the chairs on the deck of the titanic.

Because I've read a few of these guys, and while they mention war as a problem arising from religion, it's most certainly not the only reason they cite for addressing religion.

some strawmen have to be created. Nothing personal, of course!

That is a laughable claim. This is quite clearly a waste of time.

This is how God is described in the Holy Bible. Other interpretations, such as perfect love or flawed toaster, are actually an alternative deity.

I could say the Incredible Hulk is actually a tree with a snail on it, but then I would not really talking about the Incredible Hulk anymore, I would be talking about a tree with a snail on it.

These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself.

God of the gaps.

the biggest problem I have with what he's saying is that he's saying, "Oh these atheists, they don't understand what God really is." But while he's poo-pooing the specific version of God that they are taking a whack at, he isn't actually offering up any insight in to this really real, truly irrefutable solid God that great theologians have come up with. And since the average man-in-the street isn't a theologian, they just had the "grace" or random chance to be affiliated through community to a certain religious creed, they only have certain rudimentary concepts to base their ideas about what God is on.

And judging from the ideas about, say, creationism, I think the idea that God is a really immense being that made us all up is really high on the list. And I've seldom heard from God-apologists who stray too far from the ontological and cosmological arguments. So if this guy wants to say he's got something better than Stenger and Dennet from the God-provers, instead of talking shit he should bring it.

And I think his contention regarding Hitchens' God is Not Great intentionally misses the point about the need for religion as a provider or morality and explicator of our sources, in fact, I contend he explicitly knows he's got it wrong:

Major Premise:

Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a bastard, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.

Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.

The omitted over-arching premise is that if religion is supposed to be the tie that binds us culturally to the Divine and informs our morality, it is sadly lacking in those traits, as witnessed by the numerous flaws of various people and cultures who would have considered religion their salvation. Individuals and whole societies have believed that their believing made them good, instead of trying to construct an ethos based on what "good" actually was. And while there may be historical flaws in what Hitchens presents, those factual flaws don't take away from the larger support for his argument that the mere possession of religious belief actually seems to assist in one's necessarily leading a more moral or fulfilled life.

The counter-argument to that from religionists is often that atheist morality is also lacking--no shit, we don't have a revealed absolute truth. But at least we know we don't and have to work a bit to get the answer right and acknowledge it. I don't hold with Sam Harris that science can provide us with a better morality--it's just a tool, nor do I hold wih Chris Hedges that throwing out religion leaves us with nihilism because religion is also a tool--instead I hold that the best goal of any ethics should be based in justice and the preservation of life on this planet, and the simple idea to do no (or if you can't help it, less) harm. But I'm simple like that.

If we're going to criticize Hitchens, let's talk about Hitchens and not some nonsense Hart made up. Hitch clearly states his thesis at the beginning of God is Not Great, and makes repeated reference to that thesis throughout the book. He feels that religion ruins everything it touches, and the book is organized under the pretense that each chapter demonstrates a particular aspect of human life to which religion has been harmful.

If Hart wants to refute the points Hitch makes, that's one thing. Maybe Hitch fails utterly to make his case. But to claim that he never makes his thesis clear can only be an intentional mischaracterization of the book.

The omitted over-arching premise is that if religion is supposed to be the tie that binds us culturally to the Divine and informs our morality, it is sadly lacking in those traits, as witnessed by the numerous flaws of various people and cultures who would have considered religion their salvation. Individuals and whole societies have believed that their believing made them good, instead of trying to construct an ethos based on what "good" actually was. And while there may be historical flaws in what Hitchens presents, those factual flaws don't take away from the larger support for his argument that the mere possession of religious belief actually seems to assist in one's necessarily leading a more moral or fulfilled life.


:applause:

I also happened to help my daughter study for a Global History exam the night after I read Hart's critique of Hitchens (who's not one of my favorite people or atheists, but so what?), and I remembered Hart's mocking Hitch for getting wrong that John Wycliffe--one of the intellectual fathers of protestantism for saying the ultimate authority in Christianity was Christ, not the pope--was burned at the stake for heresy. I read that night in my daughter's textbook that, while Wycliffe escaped unscathed (he was in England, after all, pretty far from the power of the pope), one of his disciples, a Bavarian named Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for saying the same thing. So, yes, Hitch got his facts wrong, but he was essentially right in his point that the Church has a long history of torturing and killing dissenters. On this latter fact, Hart is mute.

May I gouge my eyes out if I ever write something so self-indulgently grandiloquent.

so much as shitting in a box and marking it GUARANTEED.

Mr. Hart obviously has no concept of linear causality, the breakdown of linear causality as you infinitesimally approach the Big Bang, or even of his own rampant hypocrisy. After spending an inordinate amount of time dragging old corpses into his dogpile and essentially claiming that there is nothing "new" about New Atheism, he goes on to repack shit in a new box. Then he has the audacity to claim that his new packaging is immune from the logic previously applied to the same old shit?

It's a "first mover" argument, and it is subject to all the problems thereof. Mr. Hart's argument is vacuous, intellectually dishonest, and laced with just a touch of logical fallacy in the form of a straw man. I also deduct points for his touching on the Non-overlapping Magisteria canard, his usage of the word "torpid" (f'in really?), and the incredible gall of using "turtles all the way down" while supporting a first mover hypothesis.

as "insouciance." I used to amuse myself by seeing how many vocabulary words from my freshman Honors English class I could cram into a paragraph, but I grew out of it. I realized that serious people aren't impressed by verbal dick-waving.

P.S. I remember that "indolent" was also one of Mr. Sheaffer's Honors vocab words, so Hart scores at least a three in that paragraph.

lack of fear. So-called "New Atheists" are quite clear about the fact that believers have yet to satisfactorily answer old arguments, but unlike atheists of previous generations, they don't hide. "New Atheist" by the way was a term that started circling with believers, and gained popularity when used by the likes of Dinesh DeSouza. Dawkins, Hitchens, and all the others who have this term applied to them never once chose to apply it to themselves, except in the occassional joking manner.

My point isn't that there is something new about "New Atheism" that Hart is missing, my point is that after making such a show about the lack of new in "New Atheism", Hart should actually have come up with something new himself.

I never would have thought it possible. Do they think this will help keep the sheep from straying towards reality? They can't be trying to convert Atheists. What is the point of all this bologna?

"I've also noticed that Hart's prose has gotten a bit less purple with practice, and that's a good thing."

Large swaths of Hart's earlier writings must be unreadable, if they are indeed more needlessly florid than this article.

He used the Asian Tsunami to address the problem of evil, and dumped this impenetrable thicket:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

For someone who disdains the unoriginality of his opponents, his solution is barnacled old-school: Creation has fallen away from God and not the other way around. God hates what is going on and made the Jesus injection to set things right. Glory will be restored, tears will be dried, and all will be revealed. Someday.

And for all the care he puts into his writing, he's apparently unaware how bloodlessly inhuman he can sound as he exults in his ideology. Remember, he's talking about horrors endured by innocents here:

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

It will all be wiped away. I wonder if he lets us all in on how he knows this. Maybe I'll give that article a read. Then again, I have stuff to do today, so maybe not.

The comment about the "courtiers reply" does not grapple with the true issues, but rather dismisses them.

Hart's claim about the state of argument in our current society certainly rings true:



Hart makes 2 serious challenges to the arguments of the New Atheists that have not been addressed. The first argument has, so far in this thread, been dismissed. The question of existence is indeed a difficult, perhaps unanswerable question. But, given that we have no answer, we certainly are not in the position to dismiss any of the possible answers:



The second challenge is to accept the fact that today's humanism is almost indiscernible from religion (in the west, from Christianity) - once again, see John N Gray's Straw Dogs. Before condemning religion, a true examination of this fact, and of the role of religion in society needs to be carried out:



We are all products of our time. And any attempt to change who we are must make a serious effort at understanding how that fact affects us. The New Atheists certainly make no such attempt. Nor do I see such an attempt in the facile answers offered in this thread.

As society has become more and more hostile to intellectuals, this result is kind of a no-brainer. Nothing at all to do with religion.

Point 2 has been addressed repeatedly in this very thread.

Point three is sheer arrogance and ignorance. What he calls "those tenuous vestiges of Christian morality" have little to nothing to do with Christianity, as he (and others) might realize if they bothered to view the world from anything other than an extremely limited perspective.

"Western" humanity... what utter crap.

My point is that this lack of serious argument is reflected in this thread.

Point 2 has been addressed repeatedly in this very thread.

Really? Where? Certainly not by posts that claim that the New Atheists were writing to a general rather than a scholarly audience. That is not an excuse for ignoring or dismissing a question. The question of existence is in no way resolved by ignoring it. Questions of contingent being and necessary being are certainly valid questions to ask when discussing the problems of existence. This is what Hart was speaking of in the piece I addressed as my second point. Where has that been addressed in this thread.

Point three is sheer arrogance and ignorance.

Ignorance of what? Of what Nietzsche said? Of what he meant?

The New Atheists optimism of some blossoming future of humanity after we rid ourselves of religion is very like the religious promise of a glorious after-life. Nothing suggests that we are moving toward some glorious future. This is not a standard belief throughout human history. Much of human history believed in a stability as to the way things were. Where does this optimism come from? Why do they believe in a glorious future? Again, it is necessary to understand what beliefs are a product of our times. Look to past thinkers and see how many of them could transcend their times. Knowing the matrix that our thoughts are part of, we can better analyze the changes that we can bring about. The New Atheists don't even make an attempt at serious analysis of religion's influence on our current society, on their current unanalyzed claims.

By the ones pointing out his meaningless as what they are.

Ignorance of the fact that Christianity and Western culture are not the be-all-end-all one-and-only source of morality.

Could you cite the posts where these arguments are made? Could you cite Hart's article as to where he claimed: Ignorance of the fact that Christianity and Western culture are not the be-all-end-all one-and-only source of morality.?

So... good luck to you.

Your first statement in post #83 refers to other posts: By the ones pointing out his meaningless as what they are. Citing the posts would, of course, be a clarification - unless you don't have any posts to cite.

Your second statement in that post is barely comprehesible: Ignorance of the fact that Christianity and Western culture are not the be-all-end-all one-and-only source of morality. To clarify this point you could, for instance, complete the thought of what you're trying to say about ignorance of this fact.

Here, let me kindly provide you with an example since you didn't bother to read the thread:

"3. Hart's placing fancy labels on the problems theism has faced for centuries proves only the extent of Hart's vocabulary; it does not solve the problems.

Take, for example, the infinite regress problem. Changing God's label from Aquinas' "uncaused First Cause" or "unmoved First Mover" to "an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such" doesn't help at all: it amounts to the same thing, an asserted exception to an assumed rule that everything is contingent, not necessary, but for which no evidence is offered. People's difficulty getting their minds around infinite regresses of contingent phenomena in conventional space-time provides no support for some "necessary being" existing in a state outside space and time, which, I respectfully submit, is equally -- if not more -- resistant to coherent definition and understanding than an infinite regress.

The same can be said for the response that's been made to the contention that explaining the complexity of the reality we observe around us by reference to an intelligent act of creation by God fails to account for the complexity that such a God must have possessed to have committed such an act of intelligence. Recognizing the obvious difficulty, Hart and others say that they're not talking about simplicity in terms of mere everyday matter and energy, they're talking about "divine simplicity ... logically follows from the very idea of transcendence" and that "God the transcendent fullness of actuality ... differ in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity." Is it unduly churlish of me to point out that TNA also argue that no one has offered a coherent, comprehensible definition or description of such a "divinely simple," "transcendent fullness of actuality," let alone offered any evidence or other good reason to believe that such a "qualitatively different" ontological substance actually exists -- and that Hart doesn't either? Nearly as I can tell, the definitional boundary of this "being," "thing," "stuff," or whatever is the rim of the logical hole that theists have to fill to account for reality's complexity without contradicting themselves or nakedly begging the question. As such, this concept of the "divinely simple" isn't so much a solution to the difficulty as it is just another empty relabeling of the problem. Invoking a gauzy, unobserved, and for all meaningful purposes undefined "transcendent" reality beyond human understanding to overcome a contradiction equally resistant to human comprehension is simply dressed-up misdirection, no matter how many six-bit words one uses to try to impress the rubes.

Accordingly, it's hardly a compelling criticism of TNA that it merely offers the same criticisms skeptics have offered for centuries using the same familiar terms theism's apologists have used since time out-of-mind. As noted, TNA address a popular audience likely more familiar with the older terms and, in any event, the newer more "sophisticated" terms theists now employ don't effectively advance the argument anyway. I liken it to a game of philosophical "Calvin Ball" where every time they're "tagged out," the apologists for the God hypothesis coin a batch of new words to paper over the same old contradictions and begged questions and declare, by fiat, that they're got yet another exception to the rule that should allow them to stay "on base.""



As to the second statement, I had my two kids trying to talk to me as I was posting, so mea culpa for depending on context to hopefully provide some clarity. I simply don't have the interest now to engage you further, so again, good luck.

Perhaps that is the real problem in a nutshell. Not that "New Atheists" are incapable of bothering with this sort of thing, but that after all these years, they are unwilling.

It is, after all, quite obvious that there really is no point, due to the "Calvin Ball" described above.

From post #20: Hart's produced another example of what biologist P.Z. Myers so memorably labeled "The Courtier's Reply" to what's come to be called "The New Atheists" ("TNA").

And, from my reply #60 at the top of this subthread: The comment about the "courtiers reply" does not grapple with the true issues, but rather dismisses them.

His claims about contingency and necessity fail to grapple with the problem. He says: Take, for example, the infinite regress problem. Changing God's label from Aquinas' "uncaused First Cause" or "unmoved First Mover" to "an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such" doesn't help at all: it amounts to the same thing, an asserted exception to an assumed rule that everything is contingent, not necessary, but for which no evidence is offered. People's difficulty getting their minds around infinite regresses of contingent phenomena in conventional space-time provides no support for some "necessary being" existing in a state outside space and time, which, I respectfully submit, is equally -- if not more -- resistant to coherent definition and understanding than an infinite regress.

The problem is that the human mind is unable to get around either resolution to the problem of existence: either it's all contingent or there is a necessary being. Hart's argument is not a changing of labels, it's a clear statement of the problem:




Notice that when Hume, probably the most famous skeptic in western history, advanced this argument he recognized that it only applies to the god of deism; specifically, it does not apply to the metaphysical god of most religions. No one knows how to explain existence. Since we are all on an equal footing here, no one really is qualified to mock an assumption that differs from theirs unless they can demonstrate a weakness in this different assumption. The New Atheists not only fail to cite any weakness in this other argument, they completely fail to address it.

This failure to address the issues is the essential point of Hart's article.

that some kind of supernatural being is somehow involved with existence. It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.

It cannot be tested. It is based on faith, just as the assumptions made by any other creation myth. As such, it is interesting as creative writing, or from an anthropological perspective - nothing more. It is otherwise useless.

He is talking about an essential question: How is it that there is existence. I've only ever seen 2 possible answers to that question: either all being is contingent (which leads to an infinite regress) or, there exists a non-contingent being that is the cause of existence. That is not an assumption. The question is not based on faith. The question is based on philosophical analysis. You really can't address the problem of existence without addressing that question. The NA ignore the question. That is a large part of what Hart is talking about.

That is the assumption. There is no way to test it, or to prove it.

Everything else is subject to experimentation. That is why it's called 'faith' when one subscribes to such a belief.

Is prayer sufficient to answer such a question? Seriously, I'm asking: What does Hart have in his stable of tools that the scientists, for example, among the atheists, don't have that makes him worth paying attention to on this question?

Hart, and now you, try to switch from "an absolute plenitude of actuality" to "the metaphysical god of most religions". And your excuse for this is that this is not the god of deism. It's true that the metaphysical gods of most religions are not the god of deism; there are far more concrete, supernatural, personal claims made for the gods of religions, that are far easier to show as absurd than the deist god is.

What you and Hart are arguing is like saying "you've come up with a good argument against intelligent design, but you have done nothing to address young earth creationism". If you want, we'll repeat the argument against a deist god, and tack "with knobs on" to the end of it.

I don't see why you think there is a 'problem of existence'. Existence is necessary for anything. Everyone's ideas about the universe include existence - even if they think the universe (as recognised by people) doesn't itself exist, but it some illusion, it's still an illusion experienced by something - which must exist. Pointing out that there must be such a thing as existence gets us all nowhere.

And how does Hart's dismissal of "the new atheism" based on their not coming up into the clouds to fight him on his own turf promote an alernative to that state? If he's not willing to come down out of the clouds, then how can he seriously blame the more grounded in material reality for having to shout up at him? It's a two-way gap, isn't it?

Point 2: The question is almost certainly not going to be answered by playing logic and word games and taking leaps of faith alone. There are ways to approach the question scientifically, for example, by studying the limits of regress in the composition of the atom, for example--how deep can we go toward discovering the atom's indivisibles, if they exist, and in discerning the events in the first nanosecond after the big bang. I don't know about you, but I'd put my money on the materialists to get closer to the truth on these questions than the divines in the Religion faculty. Do we dismiss the meditations of theologians on the nature of "absolute reality?" No. They can do all the meditating they want on whatever subject they want and even get paid handsomely for it. But how do we weigh bewtween these modes of investigation in our own personal lives? To me that would seem to depend on how tolerant one is for gas and bullshit in one's own quest for truth.

Point 3: Bull. Shit. Hart misses the influence of Christianity in modern society because he's a Christian who believes in the ultimate truth of the religion. The things that Christianity bestowed on the culture worth preserving--the works of art in inspired, even some of its ideas and institutions--will be preserved. The rest of its muck--including the absurd belief system at its heart--one should hope will dissolve and fade away. Not soon enough, alas, if the idiotic American scene is any indication.

into the clouds. And please provide an example where such a challenge to the new atheists is not a challenge that is critical to their claims. For instance, where Hart talks about traditional metaphysical arguments it is a direct challenge to their claims:



If the New Atheists are not interested in these arguments, that's fine. But to claim that the arguments fail without a clear demonstration that they actually fail, is disingenuous. Hart gives an example of this when he talks about Hume's recognition that the arguments of the New Atheists only really apply to the God of Deism:



Your assertions about point 2 fail to address the issues raised by point 2:



Point 2 is not about the first nanosecond after the Big Bang, nor is it about finding more elementary component parts of the atom. It is about existence itself. And when you try to look into questions of existence, one of the first questions that occur will be about contingent existence and necessary existence. If this is not of interest to you, or the New Atheists, that's fine. Just ignore it. But you can't then have claimed to resolved the issues.

Your assertion on point 3 is just a denial of reality.



Everything in Western Civilization, including the attitudes of the New Atheists toward Christianity and religion, is culturally saturated with Christian influences. Before trying to analyze religion, they have to understand the effects of this influence.

You did read it, didn't you? The thing about Nietszche--remember? Infinite regress?

The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement

Serious intellectual engagement with him, he means. They don't engage on his pet intellectual points.

are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments,

A respectable Divinity School understanding, he means, and by "understanding" he means using Divinity School jargon, demonstrating that they are up on the latest Divinity School journals. Why should anyone but a Divinity School faculty member try to nurture that kind of "understanding?" Why doesn't he try to nurture a physicist's or biologist's understanding? Because it's too fucking hard, for one thing, but also because he's not interested in a scientific understanding. We are at a standoff, apparently. It's his loss.

I'll be back.

As in:



Now, you seem to be claiming that arguing forcefully against a set of beliefs does not require that you actually know much about those beliefs. You seem to be accepting and confirming one of Hart's earlier points that argumentation today tends toward the simplistic.

So perhaps Hart is right to complain that atheists don't give much of a shit to grok it themselves, which would make his job even easier. But what is he doing to meet them on their turf? Why does he argue against their set of beliefs without actually knowing much about them? After all, it's not on religious grounds that atheists reject religion.

You ask: But what is he doing to meet them on their turf? Why does he argue against their set of beliefs without actually knowing much about them?

Which questions seem to contain 2 contradictory assumptions: he doesn't meet the NA on scientific turf; and, he argues against scientific beliefs.

My reading of his essay is the he never challenges any scientific claims. As close as he comes is:



But here, he is not challenging Stenger's scientific or physical claims but rather Stenger's failure to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (science and Stenger's turf) and the logical distinction between existence and non-existence (a philosopohical concept and not on Stenger's turf).

And why this is such an important concept to grasp. Try not to use Hart's words in your reply.

This quote from Stenger clearly shows his misunderstanding of the problem of existence:



Stenger claims: no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The clear implication here is that the laws of physics (i.e. some type of existence) transcend the existence of the universe; if they don't, then they are irrelevant to the coming into existence of the universe - if the laws of physics don't transcend the existence of the universe, then they came into existence with the universe.

Non-existence cannot be defined to be more or less stable than anything else. If we have non-existence, what is there to be less stable? Stenger has not looked outside of our current understanding of the laws of physics and thinks that they can explain existence. They may well explain the known universe, but, they cannot explain existence itself.

Why is that important? Because the real question is why does anything exist? Stenger is not addressing that question.

"The laws of physics themselves," he says, "are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing." Stenger is proposing to show quite the opposite of what you claim he implies--not that the laws transcend "existence" but, rather, that they *result from it.* Or in your friend Hart's terms, the laws are contingent upon the universe's existence. They can't exist without the universe, according to the evidence. Hart can sit on his fat ass and try to pick Stenger's assertions apart, but Stenger has material evidence and Hart has only logic and metaphysical speculation. (What do you have, by the way?)

the universe into existence." If the laws of physics did not already exist, why does that matter? How could they have been violated when the universe was brought into existence if they didn't exist? The remainder of his statement does not state that the laws of physics came into existence concurrent with the universe.

The remainder of his statement also implies that the laws of physics were already in existence: The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. Again, if they didn't exist at the time the universe came into existence, then they are irrelevant to the universe's coming into existence.

He states it explicitly. How could anyone discern if these laws would hold if there were no universe? What would they govern without a universe?

And please qualify how it relates to his statement: Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence.

"The laws of physics themselves," he says, "are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing."

I won't lie, I don't know what he meant by the phrase you're harping on. I believe he's being ironic, but I don't know. It's possible he simply means that the universe came into being and has proceeded and will continue to proceed until it can proceed no more according to a consistent set of laws. In other words, just as energy can neither be created nor destroyed in this universe, the laws governing the universe now have governed it at every moment of its existence. There was no special lawless moment of creation. Nor was there a law applicable then and only then. In other, other words, the universe operates under its own rules. It doesn't need rules imposed on it from without. It's perfectly self-contained. To be completely blunt: it doesn't need a law-giver.

existence of the universe.

Leave the other one aside for the moment.

Context is everything.

I tried to find more context for that statement; but I couldn't.

But this sentence: The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing, doesn't explicitly state whether the laws of physics came into existence with the universe, or are as they would have to be if the universe were to come into existence under these laws. It's somewhat ambiguous.

However, that statement, in the same paragraph as: Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence clearly says to me that the laws of physics were already in existence when the universe came into existence.

And, add to that, the statement: There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable and the only conclusion I can come to is that this stability is defined under the current laws of physics and could have nothing to do with there being something rather than nothing unless those laws existed when there was the "nothing" that Stenger is referring to.

Are you taking that statement of Stenger's that you're running with to be true?

You haven't considered the meaning of the statement in light of the context. So far, all you've done is looked at that statement in isolation and claimed that it makes an explicit statement.

But, there are othe arguments anyway. while checking for more context for that quote, I came across statements that in the same book Stenger accounts for the cosmological constants by an appeal to the multiverse. I haven't read this particular book but if he does appeal to the multiverse in the same book; then his claims are inconsistent - if we account for the cosmological constants by appealing to a multiverse, that's a direct contradiction of his claim that the universe could have come from nothing.

implied a priori laws of the uiniverse into which the universe was fitted. You seemed to be taking this one little statement of from one little paragraph of Stenger's, borrowed from an atheist Web site, out of context to support your view that Hart is correct when he says the new atheists don't give the metaphysical implications of their arguments their due. Now you want me to go follow you in search of Stenger's thought patterns? No. I've gone far enough down this dead end with you. Now I really AM not interested in where you're going. It looks like a wild goose chase to me.

I think we've also gone about as far as we can go with Hart. Let's leave it at this: you agree with Hart. I don't. Fair enough?

Hart's favorite atheist is Nietzsche. We get it! We can't all be Nietzsche. It's ludicrous to expect it.

We've read his arguments. Taken them under advisement. Don't find them compelling. What more can we do for him? If he doesn't like what he reads from the "New Atheists," he can always console himself with his Nietzsche. What more does he want? He's got God and Nietzsche and he's still bitching? Can't help him.

They fail to address the real issue - existence.

Clearly you must either be convinced by at least one argument for atheism, or you remain unconvinced by all the arguments for theism, right?

I do know that you consider yourself a member of the "religion may not be true, but we need it to keep the ignorant peasants in line" club. Just wondering why you yourself reject theism.

Second belief, accepting something as true even though there is no proof, is clearly not rational. The question of why we believe things that we cannot actually justify is complex and probably more related to psychology than rationality - i.e. I can't ultimately say why I am an atheist; it's just "right" for me.

Then why do you demand others justify their position to your satisfaction when you don't even hold yourself to the same standard?

Rational arguments however carry certain obligations with them. If the NA were arguing that they just wish everyone would stop believing in religion, that's their right. However, when they attempt rational argument and they fail, that should be pointed out. For example, in Dawkins books he claims to be reaching conclusions based on rational argument; but the conclusions he reaches are not supported by his arguments.

You claimed: "accepting something as true even though there is no proof, is clearly not rational."

You didn't support this statement. Why do you hold others to different standards than you hold for yourself?

The definition of rational is accepting things based on evidence. Belief without evidence is, by definition, not rational. And, I am not getting into some silly, childish, sidebar discussion with you. If you don't have anything relevant to say, don't say anything.

You are asserting it without any proof. I don't think it's rational to believe you.

If you don't have anything relevant to say, don't say anything.

Many here might wonder why you don't heed your own advice.

It's good to know these distinctions.

If we solve the issue of existence, you and Hart are implying, then we will be able to know if there is or isn't a God? How do we know we are any more capable of solving that issue than we are any of the other god-related issues we disagree about? Do you think logic alone is capable of solving the existence issue? If logic is all that's needed, why can't Hart show us the logic that solves it. If it isn't all that's needed, why is Hart so insistent on fighting the battle in terms of logic alone? And why are you so insistent that Hart is right to insist on fighting the battle in those terms?

As pointed out in Hart's article, the "proofs" that are offered up by the NA only apply to the god of deism. They do not apply to the metaphysical god of religion. The NA are claiming to reach conclusions about the metaphysical god. They haven't begun to address the question.

To me the "real" issue is what do I do, given my life and the world as I find it? The rest is luxury, as far as I'm concerned.

The metaphysical god? Do you mean God the "father/son/holy ghost"? That god? You mean the supernatural god? The Christian god? The Hindu gods? I think Hart believes the only god worth discussing is the Christian one. Is that the one you're talking about?

Your statement: To me the "real" issue is what do I do, given my life and the world as I find it? The rest is luxury, as far as I'm concerned. merely states that you are not interested in questions about the nature of existence. That's fine. But, then, why are you arguing about the NA books which are concerned with these issues.

Most people I know, don't care. I never argue with them about these things. But you opened a thread about Hart's column about the NA claims. Now you say you're not interested in thes issues. The NA really won't tell you: what do I do, given my life and the world as I find it. I'd say, if that is your concern, don't concern yourself with this issue.

I merely said everything beyond the essential question for me, which you quoted, is luxury.

:hi:

They are about whether gods exist, religious claims about gods, and how religion influences people's behaviour (they do tend to concentrate on monotheistic religions). Look at the titles:

The God Delusion
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

And the book that Hart was criticising is "50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists". So, again, the subject is disbelief in gods. It's perfectly reasonable to not follow Hart's red herring about arguments on existence. Part of his review complains that the book doesn't go into any arguments about existence, but since that isn't atheism, it seems to show his reviewing skills aren't very good - he's tryign to introduce his own pet topic.

The question of god entails the question of contingency. If you're trying to fully address the question of god, and if you're claiming god does not exist, you need to fully address the question of god. Not addressing this question is a failure of the NA books.

Atheism is concerned with questions of belief. They need to explain why they don't believe, and I believe for most, the issue always comes down to a question of the necessity of making the leap of faith required to believe in gods. For moy money, Dawkins and Dennet, especially, do the necessary work to demonstrate why God is superfluous to an understanding of the universe, and why religion is essentially an empty gesture at best and harmful to reason at worst.

They can't say that without fully addressing the question. And, in Hart's article he explicitly talks about Stenger's arguments about "nothing" and why they don't apply. Quite valid to note these things.

What does "fully addressing the question" mean anyway? You want them to go to Divinity School and write a thesis on it?

Swallow the entire premise hook, line, and sinker, THEN tell me what's wrong with it. If you don't do it exactly that way, I won't consider your argument valid within my frame of reference.

I'm astounded at how many people say that with an apparently straight face.

We are not only in a position to dismiss possible answers, it is required by a sane and rational approach to investigating the world around you.

Do you have any idea what the search space of "possible" answers to any given question is? Let's say we've just discovered a body, and we want to figure out how this happened. We do not at this time know the real answer.... so let's start listing possible answers...

1. Heart attack
2. Abruptly developped allergic reaction to oxygen
3. Accidentally massively irradiated by malfunctioning microwave oven
4. Buffalo stampede
5. Spontaneous human combustion
6. Smote by vengeful diety for working on a Sunday
7. Stabbed by mugger
8. Died laughing after hearing world's funniest joke
9. Died in agony after hearing Vogon poetry
10. Hit by car
11. Brain tumor
12. Opened the Ark, flesh melted from bones
13. Shook hands with grim reaper when introduced at ice cream social
14. Medication overdose
15. Assasinated by the CIA

etc...

That list is effectively endless. And since we don't know that the real answer is, we just CAN'T eliminate any of the possible answers? Ridiculous. I don't have to know what the answer is to definitively eliminate half those as so implausible and lacking evidential support that it would be insane to even consider them. And then I can knock a bunch more off with only a cursory knowledge of a few basic facts whether I know the final answer or not... body found in 10th floor bathroom of office building in Manhattan? Let's take Buffalo stampede off that list shall we? Etc...

And at no point in this process are we required to know what the actual real final answer is while we're dismissing possible explanations left and right.

(Of course, doing it this way is stupid too... you don't start with possible answers unless you like wasting monumental amounts of time, you start with evidence and follow that TO the answer... but insisting possible answers cannot be dismissed until the final answer is known? Insane. There is no other word for it.)

they're just ignoring some "possible" answers in the search space, and so, their arguments are perfectly legitimate. I mean, while there are existing examples of how their claims about "irreducible complexity" both can and have happened, no one has actually witnessed any of these occurences, so there is no real need to consider them.

:eyes:

Questions of existence have been intimately bound up with attempts to prove the existence of god since, at least, Aquinas. And his arguments were based on Aristotle. So, it's not like Hart is raising some obscure argument here. He's raising one of the predominant arguments. For the NA, by and large, to ignore this (with the exception of Stenger, who at least tries to address it) is a major flaw in their claims.

They use calculation and observaton. Not prayer. Aquinas and Nietzsche are probably not much use.

There is a difference between IGNORING and DISMISSING. You dismiss with reason. Creationists ignore reality because they wanna. We do not dismiss the Buffalo Stampede possiblity because we are refusing to acknowledge the presence of the herd of Buffalo right over there, and the hoofprints all over the corpse... we are dismissing the Buffalo Stampede possiblity because neither of those things are there and it is beyond ridiculous to consider it as a cause of death in a 10th floor bathroom in Manhattan.

Creationists are IGNORING the very REAL existence of explanations which negate their irredudible complexity claims.

Your attempt to pretend the two are equivalent so you can claim we're not supposed to do either one is entertaining, but nonsensical.

One of Hart's main points is that Dawkins refuses to address the issue. I called that dismissing it; I can just as easily call it ignoring it. If Dawkins has a reason for dismissing the argument about contingency and non-contingency, he should give it. He doesn't. Neither do Hitchens, Harris, or Dennett.

Your "argument" amount to, "When we do it, it's OK. When they do it it's wrong." Talk about nonsense.

as demonstrated in another subthread.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x247772#248010
Read down through, and recognize that you admitted there very recently that there is no necessity for a non-contingent being. (To be absolutely clear, there is no non-contingent being required in a multiverse theory like the one you referenced.)

Quite a different thing. My claim has been, and remains, that one or the other is required. The difficulty is that, at the present time, we have no understanding of how either could work.

and my point was that the contingency/non-contingency debate isn't required, because no one can show any necessity for a non-contingent being.

at this time. That being the case, no one can claim to know the answer.

Only theists do. Saying that someone else's "God did it!" answer doesn't solve the contingency conundrum is not claiming to have an answer yourself.

Too certian for my taste, but still, uncertain:

Apologists are fond of using so-called cosmological arguments to make the case for God. The Kalam Cosmological Argument is especially popular right now: everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. God.

Cyclic Universe alternatives are dismissed because they're subject to infinite regress.

Since apologists get away with fantastic conjecture, I'm going to make one of my own. The Big Bang was not the universe's beginning, it was part of a continuum in a cyclic universe. In other words, what "was before" the Big Bang is also the universe. I'll call it Potential Universe (PU).

PU becoming space, time, and material, then returning to potentiality, is one cycle (ignore for a moment models that show a Big Crunch will never happen).

As long as the universe has a spaceless, timeless interlude, infinite regress is not a problem. PU "exists" in eternity, a NOW moment without duration. Its return from materiality occurs at the same instant as its departure. It can become an infinity of temporal universes "at once" and simultaneously remain in its eternal state.

Returning to scenarios without a Big Crunch -- can an eternal entity like PU become stuck in a material state of endless duration? I dunno, something about it niggles at me, it feels like a conundrum.

Even if it can, even if the cycle only plays out once, the universe itself is still eternal, timeless on one hand, existing in time everlasting on the other.

This of course, invokes a non-contingent entity. But definitely not the one favored by Christian apologists. It's more like a 'roided pantheism.

Plausible?

The use of the word "may" shows a little allowance for uncertainty, but let's put this in context: It's an apparently devout Eastern Orthodox theologian saying this, and he treats "an absolute plenitude of actuality" as if whatever the hell that is is a God of some sort.

That's a pretty far cry from an atheist just saying the best answer is "I don't know", and leaving it at that. Even if I were to entertain this "absolute plenitude of actuality" as having some meaning or reality, it's a "so what?" kind of God, one that neither inspires nor specifically recommends any particular change of behavior or approach to one's life.

but it hasn't always been your point. You accused Dawkins of avoiding the subject of non-contingency completely, and here and in other threads you have spent an inordinate amount of time making the case for a necessary non-contingent being or existence. In light of the fact that you have been making these arguments, that you have been harping on this necessity of non-contingency, how can you now claim that non-contingency/contingency cannot be understood? Wouldn't that make all of your past argumentation on this topic utterly pointless?

In #60, you requote Hart's assertion about the need for a non-contingent first mover, and state plainly that we are not in a position to dismiss his argument because we don't know the actual answers regarding the origin of the universe.

Then, in 147, 134, 148, 176, and in another thread, you spend time attempting to defend Hart's assertion that a non-contingent being must be considered, accusing "new atheists" of ignoring this necessary question of contingency and attempting to 'splain to all of us here exactly why non-contingency must be considered. If your point is simply that it is impossible to understand the true meaning behind the concepts of contingency and non-contingency, as you are now attempting to claim, that's a lot of pointless posts.

Hart has made an assertion about the need for a non-contingent first mover, and you have spent an inordinate amount of time defending it. The problem is, neither Hart nor you have been able to show that a non-contingent first mover is required in every model of the universe, and even YOU have put forward universal theories elsewhere that eliminate the necessity of such a non-contingent being. You're trying to talk all of us in circles long enough for us to give up and let you claim victory, but you forgot one crucial problem: First mover arguments ALWAYS fail.

From my post #60: The question of existence is indeed a difficult, perhaps unanswerable question. But, given that we have no answer, we certainly are not in the position to dismiss any of the possible answers: ...

And from my post #185: And my point is that neither contingency not non-contingency can be understood
at this time. That being the case, no one can claim to know the answer.

And, from your post #188, claiming that my post #185 was a change of my position: That may be the point you want to make now, but it hasn't always been your point. ...

Now, have we argued about various other aspects of this topic in this and other threads? Certainly. But Post #60 was my first post on this topic in this thread. Based on the record, my claims in post #60 with respect to this topic are essentially the same as my statement in post #185.

Your claims here do nothing to answer what I've said there.

You just completely changed the subject we were discussing. You originally made this ridiculous statement:



My response was addressing that statement and explaining why it was completely incorrect. We were not discussing whether or not Dawkins addressed one of the points in Hart's article in any way, shape, or form. We were discussing the absurdity of claiming that you cannot dismiss any possible explanation unless you know the final answer to a question.

For fuck's sake, man... why?!

This kind of bullshittery is offensive in the extreme.

I appreciate good writing. I abhor masturbatory word salads intended to obscure meaning. Unless we're talking about poetry or lyrics. That's different.

This? This is fucking pathetic.

;-)

I didn't say he was a great writer. He does have a way with an insult. A constipated, nineteenth century priggish kind of way, but a way nevertheless.

He is quite adept at displaying constipated, nineteenth-century priggishness. :)

Atheists respond to arguments 1-100, so these theists just come up with argument number 101

This "state-of-the-art" theism often retreats into apophatic nonsense that basically says, "yeah, the god of the Bible doesn't necessarily exist as described, but that's just because it's impossible to understand God and say anything about him" which is a fancy way of saying, "I believe, but I just don't know what it is I believe, so you can't tell me it's wrong." Add some semantic nonsense that dilutes the meaning of "god" into a 100C solution and you have the most advanced theistic argument around.

As a Christian I'm saddened by this kind of thing. If atheist have truly developed this kind of hostility towards us is because of how we constantly demonize them over the last two millennia. After all, we constantly say things like "People are incapable of being good and moral without God". But Mark 19:17 says there is no one good, not one, save God and God alone. Chew on that for a while. Constant demonization of people only breeds resentment and hostility and is a lack of respect itself.

The thing to remember is this. Jesus did not hate anybody, and he would often be friends with those who were often social Pariahs. For example, he would walk with prostitutes and tax collectors. That's compassion. But he did hate hypocrisy to no end.

I often hear and get disheartened when Christians say these mean and nasty things about atheists and say things like how all atheists should be gotten rid of. That's not what God is all about. And if they are gotten rid of, then they will simply not hear God's message and their souls will not be saved.

And that is the real shame of this way of thinking.

among religionists, including many who frequent, or used to frequent this board. Morph their "god" into whatever version they think will place questions of its existence outside of the realm of rational inquiry, and their belief in in immune from criticism. No matter that it no longer resembles anything that the vast majority of believers would recognize, or that any of the sacred texts that would give you a reason to need a god in the first place describe.

Stop lumping atheists together as if we are one giant religious group!!! AAARGH. Just cause someone is on TV, doesn't mean he speaks for me....:banghead:

to describe a recent movement in atheism. The term has been used repeatedly in that sense in this forum, as you can determine by searching. The movement appears to be associated with certain sweeping beliefs, such as "Religion is the major sourece of evil of in the world." You, of course, are free to define yourself and your own beliefs as you see fit

http://newatheists.org/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism

I always considered myself an agnostic until I read Richard Dawkins' book. Helped convince me that I shouldn't be so shy about identifying as an atheist (one who simply disbelieves in God). We'll have to see if "new atheism" becomes a force to be reckoned with in the coming decades, hopefully we've learned from past mistakes and abuses of power would be avoided should "new atheists" ever find themselves in a position of power. Persuading people to abandon religion is all fine and good, so long as its not done at gun-point.

But it seems to me that many "New Atheists" completely miss the mark by assuming that "religious moderates" are somehow enabling "religious fundamentalists"

While "New Atheists" seem to want to regard my views as essentially (if covertly) identical to the views of the fundamentalists, the religious fundamentalists I meet always regard me as essentially (if covertly) an atheist, since I really rather like evolution as both a scientific theory and an as aesthetic, since I'm in favor of a secular humanist approach to the public political sphere, since I dislike authoritarian biblical literalism, and since they are outraged by the Marxian flavor added to traditional Catholic social teachings in the "liberation theology" that brought me back to Christianity after a long indifference

The religious fundamentalists and New Atheists like (say) Dawkins seem to share this in common: they both think that religious questions and scientific questions are somehow the same. I do not share this view. I do not think that putting aside evolution in favor of the early chapters of Genesis benefits my reading of Genesis, nor do I think that accepting evolution as the best currently available scientific theory requires me to dismiss Genesis as pure garbage: I do not propose some idiotic averaging of a religious text and a scientific theory; I simply think the topics addressed are entirely different. I am not much interested in the shouting match between the religious fundamentalists and (say) Dawkins

The invention of rationality was, in my mind, an astonishing and lasting gift to humanity from the ancient Greeks, but it is by no means the whole story of the nature of our species. The fusion of rationality with the experimental method in late medieval Europe was another astonishing and lasting gift to humanity, but no means the whole story the species. We breathe and eat and sweat, self-contradictory bundles of instinct and social conditioning trying to find our freedom within the constraints of our short lives -- and not always doing so well. Humans may sometimes strive for an informed and self-controlled rationality, but daily life prevents realization of that. I don't know: you might, one day, succeed in eliminating all the standard religions of the world, but in reality I think you will simply have taught people to say "We are not religious anymore; we do not bow down to false idols." They will, in my view, still be religious without knowing that they are; they will still bow down to false idols without knowing that they do. For there are all manner of phenomena that might properly be called religion, but are not called that: one can, for example, regard Jim Crow as a religion that hanged people or burned them alive while chanting slogans about "pure white Southern maidenhood" -- and it is not so difficult to find hundreds of other similar examples

It is not impossible that a humane atheism might make certain moral claims that deserve serious attention and force people to think productively about their actions or attitudes. But Dawkins and his cohort do not challenge me in that way

One only needs to browse this very forum to see moderate believers such as yourself leaping to the defense of religious morons - like the recent example of the Brazilian cardinal claiming kids would grow up to be homosexuals.

Speaking for myself, I would prefer the world to have a greater tolerance for atheism and freethought. I would prefer being able to point out the ridiculous ideas and practices of religions without having to worry if I was offending someone. In other words, I would be more comfortable in a world in which there were many millions more who were atheists or freethinkers, because it's clear the religious have no sense of humor about their beliefs. I also do believe a world with fewer religious believers would probably be a better world--and I'm not talking about a program to rid this one of believers. But I think religious belief is, as Dawkins calls it, a delusion, beginning with the primary tenet that there is a supreme supernatural being interested in what we humans do--and you can put imaginary scare quotes around any word in that description if you object to too literal a reading of it--and a world with fewer delusions is, in my opinion, an improved world.

And yet, I do not think atheism per se can replace religion because atheism per se is not religious. I think there's something inseparable from religion that makes it religion, call it quality R. I think one reason religion can be so very dangerous is that it is accorded a respect in society at large that it doesn't deserve but that it has inherited from a previous age of human development when it served as the primary social organizer. For religious fundamentalists, it's as though it still acts on them at that level, which is why they get so dangerous to everyone else's freedom when they get involved in politics.

But "organized" atheism doesn't have any program to remake society. It can only act on one individual at a time, giving them the courage to draw those conclusions they've been working toward on their own anyway.

If the religious moderates actually did more to try to convert the religious fundamentalists away from their rigid line of thinking, instead of apologizing for them and making excuses and advocating blanket tolerance of religion in general, then I'd be less cynical about the role religious moderates play in legitimizing fundamentalist beliefs.

But it just seems like most religious moderates spend more time criticizing those who don't believe at all than they do criticizing religious fundamentalists, so naturally it makes me wonder where their priorities lie.

to make the simple distinction between atheism and anti-theism. But don't feel bad...lots of your ilk are guilty of the same lack of understanding.

This fucking peon thinks that he's smarter than Mill, Hume, or Russell? I've had some brilliant professors, and not a one of them would make such a ludicrous claim.