Engaging the New Atheism

So I’ll start with this question and Doug, I’ll start with you. It’s called the new Atheism. Now, Atheism has been around for a little bit of time, so what makes the new Atheism new in your judgment?

So Nietzsche sees this as a liberating fact, something to be happy about, something to celebrate and I think you see that with the new Atheist, I think there’s a joy in their perspective and from their point of view, recognizing that God doesn’t exist. I think you also have a level of vitriol and anger and criticism from the new Atheist directed toward people of faith particularly Christians that has seldom been seen in the past.

So I think there’s a difference in the way he performs depending upon the context and what he is trying to accomplish, but that’s not in any way to deny the extreme confidence with which he performs in public about his views.

So I mean you‘ve got something of a real disconnect between what he says in some contexts and how he responds to some others.

His follow up book then- The Greatest Show on Earth- is a defense of evolution which is… those two books fit together. What drives Dawkins is his conviction that science potentially answers all the questions that evolution is the explanation which makes God not even in this, [not even] possible.

But if I remember right, it’s in that context that he made the point that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied or intellectually fulfilled Atheist, that what Darwin provided was the explanation for us which had been lacking prior to his work and that, I take it from Dawkins’ point of view is what really seals the faith for belief in God.

Now, Daniel Dennett is the exception here. Dennett is a well- respected and very fine philosopher. And I should say my comment about the other three, I mean take Dawkins for instance, he’s obviously very well-respected and well-regarded biologist. But that does not a philosopher make and when you’re dealing with issues that go beyond the empirical, some training is helpful to put it well…

Sam Harris is the name that we mentioned a couple of times now, but we haven’t described who he is.

He’s a lot easier to listen to, but every bit as dismissive and cruel in his dismissal of religion.

Well, those are the four… Let’s build a list first, maybe the best way and then we can proceed through. There’s certain issues that consistently come up.

Well, let me make one observation before we leave this. It does strike me that three of these writers are deep in the sciences in terms of their orientation which brings up the issue that you sometimes see when we walk into these conversations about how faith and science are often — and this is true in our culture as well, pitted against one another is as opposite, you can’t have foot in the sciences and a foot in faith, that seems non-sequitur to a lot of people and they seem to collide with one another and certainly these writers push that element of their description, that because they are scientist and deal with evidence in the material world and what they can show all those kinds of claims, the person of faith is casting their hope on things that they can’t show and demonstrate, that kind of thing. And this contrast between science and faith, or science and metaphysics almost, comes up in these conversations.

I think I want to start by addressing that first, that that is an important framing of the entire conversation that we have. And I’m not sure who wants to take that first.

Craig Keener’s just written a book on miracles in which he has gone through and the whole gist of his book, it’s two volumes is to document how deeply seeded the belief in the transcendent is across our societies. And his claim is he said it is particularly western… segment of a western view to cut the transcendent out of conversations when it comes to humanity.

And the interesting thing is it’s basically the form of the argument you just gave to me that Dawkins is so — if I can say it, the western elitist scientific bubble that the views of masses of humanity all around the world who live in variety of different context, all affirming of some sense of there’s something else is ignored and it’s labeled as superstition when in fact, in might be evidence of something that we internally as human beings sense about who we are as creatures.

If science is going to operate in a rational manner, presumably even the most hard-headed committed scientist is going to grant that they’ve got to operate by way of laws of logic but these are not amenable to scientific investigation. The beautiful –aesthetics is an area that really beyond scientific inquiry. There are all kinds of areas of human inquiry and human interest that are recognized as you say, or as Keener perhaps says and I’m looking forward to reading that book, I wasn’t aware of it. There are all sorts of areas of human interest that have been recognized all across the globe as being legitimate that are simply outside the scope of scientific inquiry.

And for science to dismiss the legitimacy of those areas of interest just simply on the grounds that we don’t deal with them, strikes one as arrogant to say the least. I mean really, what seems to me to be operating underneath this kind of imperialistic scientific perspective is the old philosophy of logical positivism. And it goes logical positivists are famous for having put a criterion of meaning on the table and the criterion of meaning they put on the table was this. A statement is meaningful only if either it can be investigated by the methods of science or it’s true by definition. Well, the problem with that very criterion of meaning is that it doesn’t need its own criteria, its own standard. So by its own light, it’s meaningless.

Well, this is a view that surprisingly enough, held great sway in professional philosophical circles for at least two and a half decades, maybe longer but it’s long since died in philosophical circles for precisely the reason I mentioned, it’s self-defeating. And philosophers came to see this but it’s a view of meaning that is particularly adaptable to a scientific perspective on the world. And I think you have, in some scientific circles, a commitment to something like that very understanding of meaning still at work. Well then without a realization that as a matter of fact that perspective has been undermined fairly decisively.

On the other hand, by their own lights, if all there is, is the material, then really in the end all our beliefs about morality end up being a are frankly brain states and those brain states are by their own lights what they are by way of evolutionary processes. And those processes if selected simply for survivability. So there’s disconnect here because on the one hand, we want to maintain an objective morality, on the other hand are beliefs about morality are nothing but artifacts in our brain that helped us survive? I mean, there’s fairly obviously this continuity with respect to that.

Sometimes it’s necessary just to make that obvious point but knowing that everybody in this room recognizes that but to talk about brain states, etcetera. It identifies the problem with a scientific perspective but it doesn’t help or hurt our cause one way or the other. We believe there’s a God who revealed himself by what he has made.