Posted on 04/21/2010 8:55:04 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.
Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor...
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
SOLID tail-whipping.
Great find. I just read it in the paper edition of First Things, but didn’t know it was available on-line yet.
Agreed. A great read. Very amusing, philosophically and logically sound, and very much to the point.
I especially liked the point about all these postmodernists who do syllogisms but leave out Aristotle’s major premise. Oops.
"...for believing there is no God"
It is a belief system. Agnosticism would say "don't know, can't know". Atheism declares "there is no" resolutely.
I’m admittedly agnostic, but I refer to the so-called New Atheism as Celebrity Atheism.
The regular folks who are atheists are not out there pounding their fists for anything, they are just living their lives like you and I.
The New Atheism is about book sales.
>> 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. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).
One of the funnier passages on athiesm I’ve read in a while.
SnakeDoc
David Hart kicks so much ass here, he must have worn his shoes out.
It's possible to believe that God does not exist and to also believe it isn't possible to prove it.
Agnosticism and Atheism are answers to two different questions.
bttt
I very much enjoyed this article.
I am not a theist, though I do not call myself and atheist, because I think it is silly to identify oneself in terms of what one does not believe. There are many things I do not belive. I identify myself only in terms of what I do believe.
I agree almost totally with David Hart’s criticism of the, “new atheists,” although I should call them, “atheistic crusaders,” which I’ve never totally understood. As one who does not believe in God, it only means I do not need to believe in God to understand the world, which understanding for me leaves no unanswered questions. I do not care that others believe in God, and would be somewhat alarmed if they didn’t, because it is apparent to me, that belief is necessary to their understanding of things, and the basis for their values and principles, and I do not want to live with people who do not have values and principles.
I was amused at his description of the ignorance of these, “must bring my atheism to the world,” fools as, “their childishly Manichean view of history,” which is how I’ve always described Augustine’s views of Christianity. Augustine really was a Manichean. (Not criticizing those who admire Augustine, which I don’t, only pointing our an irony.)
I even enjoyed those parts of the article I much disagree with, because of its intelligence, which is rare these days.
“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.”
Except for living creatures, nothing is “contingent.” The argument that what exists must have a “cause” because it is contingent is called begging the question; that is, it assumes what needs to be proved. If what exists, simply exists, there is no need of a cause. There is no basis for the assumption that what exists is contingent.
I’ll forgive him that assumption, however, because he has been deceived by Hume, as so many have.
http://theautonomist.com/iindv/articles_stand/revo_west/revolution7_1.php
Thanks for posting the article.
Hank
“A far more incisive writer could have gotten those “pithy objections” across, in detail, in under a third of the length.”
No doubt, but I rather enjoyed some of the subtlety and humor that would not have been possible without the rhetoric. There is more to good writing than brevity.
Hank
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