John Gray: New Atheists don’t acknowledge their myths and beliefs
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
British political philosopher John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism (2018) and also of Straw Dogs, comments in an interview:
Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly against those who debunk the beliefs of others in a way I find bullying and shallow.
The New Atheists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others — attack religions in the sublime confidence that these religions are myths and that they themselves harbor no myths, but that’s not true.
In many cases, the New Atheists are animated by 19th-century myths of various kinds: myths of human advancement, myths of what science can and cannot do, and all kinds of other myths. So yeah, I’m compelled to attack anyone who is debunking others for their reliance on myths when the debunkers themselves can’t see how their own thinking is shaped by myths.
Something as ancient, as profound, as inexhaustibly rich as religion or religions can’t really be written off as an intellectual error by clever people. Most of these clever people are not that clever when compared with really clever people like Wittgenstein or Saint Augustine or Pascal — all philosophers of the past who seriously engaged the religious perspective.
These New Atheists are mostly ignorant of religion, and only really concerned with a particular kind of monotheism, which is a narrow segment of the broader religious world.
But then he adds,
The human mind is like every other animal mind. If Darwinism is right, and I think it’s the best approximation we have to the truth about how humans came into the world, then all aspects of the human animal are shaped by the imperatives of survival.
That includes the human mind, so there’s a deep-seated tendency in the human mind to see the world in ways which promote human survival. And the tendency to obsess over reason and rationality overlooks this fact. Sean Illing, “Why science can’t replace religion” at Vox
One hardly need ask: If, as he says, the deep-seated tendency in the human mind is simply to see the world in ways that enable humans to survive, how does his own argument escape the charge? For example, he goes on to say, “ I don’t mean to imply that people can’t be moral without God, which is one of the stupidest claims I’ve ever heard.” But if his account is true, there is no “moral” for us to be anyway.
Darwin does that to people. A pity.
Hat tip: Heather Zeiger
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See also: John Gray offers harsh words for Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: therapy for liberals
and
John Gray: No general theory of evolution
7 Responses to John Gray: New Atheists don’t acknowledge their myths and beliefs
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If Atheistic Materialism were actually true, then atheists themselves would not actually exist as real people but would merely be a neuronal illusions of the brain and thus atheists themselves would therefore be mythical creatures: 🙂
While it is certainly quite embarrassing to publicly admit to believing that you are an illusion, none-the-less, apparently completely oblivious to the insanity inherent in the claim, many atheists do indeed publicly confess to believing that their very existence is illusory.
I have thinking lately of the number of miracles that atheists implicitly accept. Some atheists claim not to be religious because of miracles, but there are many cases in the history of life that have no plausible materialistic explanation. There is probably an infinite number so the top ten miracles would be interesting. It would be fun pointing out to athiests that they actually believe in more miracles than you can find in one of the gospels. I can think of a few: creation of the universe from nothing, the emergence of dna as soon as life was possible, the one tuned constants and the folding of amino acids to create functional proteins. Maybe a moderator can start a post to get some feedback.
Gray isn’t even starting to make his own point.
Interviewer said:
“Look, specific religious ideas like the notion that life begins at the moment of conception or that homosexuality is sinful are causing real harm in the world, and so we’re morally obliged to attack those ideas.”
Gray could have used DARWIN, could have said that life at conception is scientific fact, and homosexuality is not a good survival tactic. Instead he derailed the point by saying that Soviets were against homosexuality and Romania was against abortion. So what? The real set of attitudes in the Soviet bloc was much more complex, and it’s irrelevant anyway.
Unless morality helps enable humans to survive, of course.
Plenty of savagely immoral persons have had their physical survival extended by their immorality. All you have to do is look at history. Josef Stalin, Kim Jung Il, the list is very long. Some for whom it didn’t work that well, like Hitler, sickened in the last couple of years by his own evil, and suicidal in the end.
B’oh,
So human survival is a goal established by what/who/when and why and how?
Andrew
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” – St. Paul
Even if I was not a theist or a Christian, the above certainly rings true when I read these sorts of accounts.