Oakes: Nietzsche, the Only Honest Atheist

Ed Oakes has a fabulous essay over at FT.  A taste: Today, one can hardly find more puffed-up braggarts than those noisy New Atheists currently mounting their soapboxes in Hyde Park, and who seem to labor under the assumption that they are doing the human race a favor by attacking belief in God. In fact, as Nietzsche saw, in his own inimitably ironic way, these atheist frat boys are really attacking science. This is because for Nietzsche—who was perhaps the only truly honest atheist in the history of philosophy—science was ultimately a moral, not an epistemological problem, a point he drove home with special force in The Gay Science (all italics are his): The question “Why science?” leads back to the moral … Continue reading Oakes: Nietzsche, the Only Honest Atheist