Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - The "New Atheism," the vocal minority making the rest of us look bad, or more?

MSD · 10-24-2006, 09:22 PM

Quote:

My friends, I must ask you an important question today: Where do you stand on God?

It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three-and-a-half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.

This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.

Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith.

Oxford University is the capital of reason, its Jerusalem. The walls glint gold in the late afternoon, as waves or particles of light scatter off the ancient bricks. Logic Lane, a tiny road under a low, right-angled bridge, cuts sharply across to the place where Robert Boyle formulated his law on gases and Robert Hooke first used a microscope to see a living cell. A few steps away is the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here he lies, sculpted naked in stone, behind the walls of the university that expelled him almost 200 years ago -- for atheism.

Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion.

Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one -- that science could never disprove God -- provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-0.html
click for the other 7 pages

Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?[/quote]
I am an agnostic atheist. I honestly believe that religious belief and the intolerance inherent in the overwhelming majority of religious doctrine will be the downfall of mankind. Atheism is far from exempt in this list of intolerances.

I agree with Dawkins that the probability of a supreme being's existence is very low, but I understand that there's a possibility that I'm wrong. While I don't agree with belief in God (and especially belief in organized religion,) I agree with him that children shouldn't be indocctrinated (to the extent that I consider forcing a chiild to attend religious services abuse,) but I am equally uncomfortable with the practice of forcing my views on others. I am bothered by Dawkins' assertion that accepting evolution necessarily equates to accepting non-theism at some level. I feel that anyone who firmly believes that humans can answer the question of divinity either way is rejecting logical thought to almost the same extent that those who assert the "truth" of creationism reject it. At the same time, I disagree with firm belief in anything for which concrete empirical evidence cannot be produced, and I feel that while evolution has all of the evidence applicable to the theory standing behind it, neither religious belief nor atheism has any concrete evidence to support them and that the only valid argument is simply whether the burden of proof is on the believers or the non-believers (I think it's pretty clear where I stand on this issue.)

I suppose the whole basis of my cognitive dissonance is my knowledge that in the past I was devoutly religious and fully believed in the tenets of my religion, yet at this point in time I cannot associate myself with that mindset, even to the point that I can understand why I believed what I believed. The closest I can get is teh realization that the inability to prove the existance of God and the tendency to disbelieve based on lack of evidence is as intuitive to me now as the indusputable fact that God existed and that I was carrying out his will and divine commands.

I really don't know what to think about this.