Atheism

While I am busy locally, I think it is important to discuss the issue as just headlined here at UD. Let me clip from the “Materialism makes you stupid” thread: >>27 CLAVDIVSApril 18, 2016 at 7:52 pm Design as a cause is compatible with materialism. Where’s the beef?>> and >>28 kairosfocusApril 19, 2016 at 5:14 am C, design is compatible with embodied designers — we are embodied designers. Evolutionary materialism is inescapably self referentially incoherent and irretrievably self-falsifying as a worldview. Whether or no it is dressed up in a lab coat . . . threatening to take the credibility of science down with it in the ruins of its inevitable collapse. And that is some serious beef. KF>> So, Read More ›

From Feser’s blog: Now, what Parsons actually said is that the trouble with New Atheist writers is “their logical lacunae and sophomoric mistakes” when addressing philosophical matters, and their tendency to “tar everything with the same brush” rather than distinguishing more sophisticated religious arguments and claims from cruder ones. “[D]efeating your opponents’ arguments,” says Parsons, “requires (a) taking their best arguments seriously, and (b) doing your philosophical homework.” The “Old Atheists” were more likely to do that than the “New Atheists.” Hence Parsons’ preference. He simply prefers to address what the best arguments of the other side actually say, rather than attacking straw men, begging the question, and committing other fallacies. What could Loftus possibly object to in that? The Read More ›

From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, on new atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris’s Spirituality without Religion: There’s no “I” in “Me” (and no sense in Sam Harris) … As with nearly all of Harris’s work, the book can safely be discarded before exiting the first chapter. In Saganesque fashion (remember Cosmos, “the universe is all that is or was or ever will be”?), Harris gives us, “Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had.”(p 2) His main thesis is that the mystics of antiquity were right in denying even this. There is no self, and so there is no mind (quotes to this affect forthcoming). How does Read More ›

From Perry Marshall’s blog, Cosmic Fingerprints: Not only has Dawkins ruined science, he’s ruined atheism too. 20 years ago, an atheist was an intellectual with whom one could have a reasonable dialogue. Today, most people experience atheists as bellicose angry males who commonly suffer from depression, who post anonymous tirades all over the internet so they can share their misery with everyone else. We have the New Atheists to thank for this. And their four horsemen. Dawkins – Dennett – Harris – Hitchens. Wanna have an intelligent discussion about atheism? Read Voltaire, Nietzche or Bertrand Russell. Agree or disagree, they will force you to think. Wanna have a pointless shouting match with a bunch of mannerless name-callers who make up just-so Read More ›

Quite expectedly, the Krauss vs Meyer debate got off to a poor start. Krauss has a few go-to moves during a debate and most of them were on full display in his opening remarks (one can hardly call them arguments). He opened with an ill-informed and misrepresentative attack on the Discovery Institute and on the person, character and honesty of Stephen Meyer himself. During his diatribe, Krauss informed the audience that Meyer and his ideas are not worth debating and that Meyer himself is something of a dishonest marketing man for Intelligent Design. And what exactly is Krauss’ justification for this claim? Well, you see, several years ago, at a school board hearing in Ohio, Krauss, having failed to inform Read More ›

From Templeton: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize. … He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.More. Naturally, we wondered, so from our files, we found: Britain’s chief rabbi on the Brit riots: Restore civil Read More ›

Criminologist and former atheist Mike Adams summarizes the three foundational philosophical alternatives to the Cosmos:

First, we can say that it came into being spontaneously – in other words, that it came to be without a cause. Second, we can say that it has always been. Third, we can posit some cause outside the physical universe to explain its existence. The second option is no longer reasonable. Science has been leading inexorably to the conclusion that the universe is not infinite but instead had a beginning. . . . Reasonable people grasp intuitively that it makes far more sense to say that something came from something than to say that something came from nothing. Of course, admitting that the universe was caused by something rather than nothing comes with a price. Any cause predating the physical universe must therefore be non-physical in nature.

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It’s no surprise that Coyne’s book is getting hostile reviews outside the new atheist community.  Closing off our religion coverage for the week, we note that prominent Darwinian evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible is, unsurprisingly, receiving hostile reviews outside the new atheist community. But what’s curious is their focus. From Austin L. Hughes at New Atlantis: Coyne’s basic strategy is to contrast two monolithic entities that he calls “religion” and “science.” But he constructs his two monoliths in diametrically opposite ways. The “religion” monolith consists of everything that has ever been said by any person belonging to any religion whatever, lumping together official dogma, theological speculation, and popular belief… Coyne’s procedure for describing Read More ›

From UCambridge: The claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since. As a result, the study challenges two assumptions that prop up current debates between atheists and believers: Firstly, the idea that atheism is a modern point of view, and second, the idea of “religious universalism” – that humans are naturally predisposed, or “wired”, to believe in gods. The book argues that disbelief is Read More ›

From “This is how science lost God: Atheism, evolution and the long road to Richard Dawkins’ latest Twitter controversy,” a book excerpt from A Brief History of Creation at Salon: Voltaire’s views on religion, like his views on nearly everything else, were sometimes arbitrary and often contradictory. They were united in their hatred of superstition, and beyond that, little else. At times, his argument for God could appear utilitarian. He worried about whether morality could exist in a world devoid of a supreme being, a world in which good and evil were all relative. “If God did not exist,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire had a habit of quoting himself, a backhanded way of elevating Read More ›

It seems atheist Dan Barker has built on a notorious remark by Mr Dawkins and has published a book bearing the title as headlined. The question immediately arises: is he right, or is he holding a responsibly justified belief even were it in error? A glance at the Amazon page for the book gives the following summary: >>What words come to mind when we think of God? Merciful? Just? Compassionate? In fact, the Bible lays out God’s primary qualities clearly: jealous, petty, unforgiving, bloodthirsty, vindictive—and worse! Originally conceived as a joint presentation between influential thinker and bestselling author Richard Dawkins and former evangelical preacher Dan Barker, this unique book provides an investigation into what may be the most unpleasant character Read More ›

From the Guardian: Richard Dawkins stroke forces delay of Australia and New Zealand tour … Management for the 74-year-old author of The God Delusion said he had suffered a “minor stroke” in the UK last Saturday but had already returned home from hospital. The health scare has caused him to postpone his tour, his management said in a message passed on to ticket holders on Friday. … The events were to be centred around his recently published second memoir and 13th book, Brief Candle in the Dark. His first book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, has sold more than 1m copies. The God Delusion, the 2006 book for which he is best known, has sold more than 3m copies. Read More ›

From Emma C. Williams at at Quillette: An increasing number of high-profile academics are finding themselves barred from various establishments that are supposedly in the business of thought. Jamie Palmer has addressed the issue in this very magazine, and my first article here was about the attempted no-platforming of Professor Germaine Greer by students at Cardiff. The latest to join the list of fine academics declared unfit to speak at a supposedly learned venue is Professor Richard Dawkins. The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, a forum that prides itself on being “a celebration of science and critical thinking” and with a declared goal of “fostering a more rational world” has decided that Dawkins’ sharing of a satirical video in Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the weekend (now that the weekend is leftover cold burnt toast), here’s a leftist attack on new atheism – and like we said of a previous instance (2014), “If they’ve lost The Nation, they’ve lost everyone.” In a roundup review of various books on the subject by David Hoelscher at Counterpunch: New Atheism, Worse Than You Think there is a frank discussion of the authoritarian scientism it embodies: What is not in doubt is that the New Atheists are, as the philosopher Michael Ruse has lamented “a bloody disaster.” As the scholar Jeffrey Nall asserts “Thinkers such as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens create a religion that amounts to a monstrous straw-man which they then Read More ›