the new atheism

Worth looking at if you are still interested in this material:

Logical Errors in in New Atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris)

From Bahai Philosophy Studies (of all places)

 New Atheism, The: A Bahá'í Perspective,

the new atheism

Check this out:
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_12_10.html

It's a book review about suicide bombers called "Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human"

It discusses Richard Dawkins's analysis of suicide bombing. As usual, Dawkins is wrong. From the review:

Something like Hobbes's analysis (though without his refreshing pessimism or his wonderfully terse prose style) has resurfaced today in regard to suicide bombing. If you read evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins, you will be told that suicide bombers are driven by their irrational religious beliefs. 'Suicide bombers do what they do', writes Dawkins in a passage cited by Scott Atran, 'because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools; that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.' What is striking about claims of this kind is that they are rarely accompanied by evidence. They are asserted as self-evident truths - in other words, articles of faith. In fact, as Atran writes, religion is not particularly prominent in the formation of jihadi groups:

Though there are few similarities in personality profiles, some general demographic and social tendencies exist: in age (usually early twenties), where they grew up (neighbourhood is often key), in schooling (mostly non-religious and often science-oriented), in socio-economic status (middle-class and married, though increasingly marginalized), in family relationships (friends tend to marry one another's sisters and cousins). If you want to track a group, look to where one of its members eats or hangs out, in the neighbourhood or on the Internet, and you'll likely find the other members.

Unlike Dawkins's assertions, Atran's account of violent jihadism is based on extensive empirical research. An anthropologist who has spent many years studying and talking to terrorists in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Gaza and Europe, Atran believes that what motivates them to go willingly to their deaths is not so much the cause they espouse - rationally or otherwise - but the relationships they form with each other. Terrorists kill and die 'for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers - their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem or tribe'. In this terrorists are no different from other human beings. They may justify their actions by reference to religion, but many do not. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group hostile to all religions, while suicide bombers in Lebanon in the 1980s included many secular leftists. The Japanese Aum cult, which recruited biologists and geneticists and experimented with anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction, cobbled together its grotesque system of beliefs from many sources, including science fiction. Terrorists have held to many views of the world, including some - like Marxism-Leninism - that claim to be grounded in 'scientific atheism'. If religion is a factor in terrorism, it is only one among many.

There will be some who question Atran's analysis of suicide bombing. Clearly the practice has a rational-strategic aspect along with the emotional and social dimensions on which he focuses. Suicide bombing is highly cost-effective compared with other types of terrorist assault; when volunteers are plentiful life is cheap, and a successful suicide bomber cannot be captured and interrogated. But Talking to the Enemy is about far more than violent extremism. One of the most penetrating works of social investigation to appear in many years, it offers a fresh and compelling perspective on human conflict. No one who reads and digests what Atran has to say will be able to take seriously the faith-based claims of the 'new atheists'. As he notes, some of his fellow scientists may 'believe that science is better able than religion to constitute or justify a moral system that regulates selfishness and makes social life possible ... [But] there doesn't seem to be the slightest bit of historical or experimental evidence to support such faith in science'. The picture of human beings that emerges from genuine inquiry is far richer than anything that can be gleaned from these myopic rationalists.

the new atheism

The Scientific American

Permanent Address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cosmic-clowning-stephen-hawkings-ne-2010-09-13
Cosmic Clowning: Stephen Hawking's "new" theory of everything is the same old CRAP

Editor's note (9/14/10): This post has been slightly modified.
I've always thought of Stephen Hawking—whose new book The Grand Design (Bantam 2010), co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, has become an instant bestseller—less as a scientist than as a cosmic, comic performance artist, who loves goofing on his fellow physicists and the rest of us.

This penchant was already apparent in 1980, when the University of Cambridge named Hawking Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair held three centuries earlier by Isaac Newton. Many would have been cowed into caution by such an honor. But in his inaugural lecture, "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?", Hawking predicted that physics was on the verge of a unified theory so potent and complete that it would bring the field to a close. The theory would not only unite relativity and quantum mechanics into one tidy package and "describe all possible observations." It would also tell us why the big bang banged and spawned our weird world rather than something entirely different.

At the end of his speech Hawking slyly suggested that, given the "rapid rate of development" of computers, they might soon become so smart that they "take over altogether" in physics. "So maybe the end is in sight for theoretical physicists," he said, "if not for theoretical physics." This line was clearly intended as a poke in his colleagues' ribs. Wouldn't it be ironic if our mindless machines usurped our place as discoverers of Cosmic Truth? Hilarious!

The famous last line of Hawking's monumental bestseller A Brief History of Time (Bantam 1988) was also a joke, although many people didn't get it at the time. A final theory of physics, Hawking declared, "would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." Hawking seemed to imply that physics was going to come full circle back to its spiritual roots, yielding a mystical revelation that tells us not just what the universe is but why it is. Science and religion are compatible after all! Yay!

But Hawking ain't one of these New Agey, feel-good physicist–deists like John Barrow, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson or other winners of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. Deep inside Brief History Hawking showed his true colors when he discussed the no-boundary proposal, which holds that the entire history of the universe, all of space and time, forms a kind of four-dimensional sphere. The proposal implies that speculation about the beginning or end of the universe is as meaningless as talking about the beginning or end of a sphere.

In the same way a unified theory of physics might be so seamless, perfect and complete that it even explains itself. "What place, then, for a creator?" Hawking asked. There is no place, he replied. Or rather, a final theory would eliminate the need for a God, a creator, a designer. Hawking's first wife, a devout Christian, knew what he was up to. After she and Hawking divorced in the early 1990s she revealed that one of the reasons was his scorn for religion.

Hawking's atheism is front and center in Grand Design. In an excerpt Hawking and Mlodinow declare, "There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no Gods required." But Hawking is, must be, kidding once again. The "sound scientific explanation" is M-theory, which Hawking calls (in a blurb for Amazon) "the only viable candidate for a complete 'theory of everything'."

Actually M-theory is just the latest iteration of string theory, with membranes (hence the M) substituted for strings. For more than two decades string theory has been the most popular candidate for the unified theory that Hawking envisioned 30 years ago. Yet this popularity stems not from the theory's actual merits but rather from the lack of decent alternatives and the stubborn refusal of enthusiasts to abandon their faith.

M-theory suffers from the same flaws that string theories did. First is the problem of empirical accessibility. Membranes, like strings, are supposedly very, very tiny—as small compared with a proton as a proton is compared with the solar system. This is the so-called Planck scale, 10^–33 centimeters. Gaining the kind of experimental confirmation of membranes or strings that we have for, say, quarks would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around, scaling up from our current technology. Our entire solar system is only one light-day around, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful accelerator, is 27 kilometers in circumference.

Hawking recognized long ago that a final theory—because it would probably involve particles at the Planck scale—might never be experimentally confirmable. "It is not likely that we shall have accelerators powerful enough" to test a unified theory "within the foreseeable future—or indeed, ever," he said in his 1980 speech at Cambridge. He nonetheless hoped that in lieu of empirical evidence physicists would discover a theory so logically inevitable that it excluded all alternatives.

Quite the opposite has happened. M-theory, theorists now realize, comes in an almost infinite number of versions, which "predict" an almost infinite number of possible universes. Critics call this the "Alice's restaurant problem," a reference to the refrain of the old Arlo Guthrie folk song: "You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant." Of course, a theory that predicts everything really doesn't predict anything, and hence isn't a theory at all. Proponents, including Hawking, have tried to turn this bug into a feature, proclaiming that all the universes "predicted" by M-theory actually exist. "Our universe seems to be one of many," Hawking and Mlodinow assert.

Why do we find ourselves in this particular universe rather than in one with, say, no gravity or only two dimensions, or a Bizarro world in which Glenn Beck is a left-wing rather than right-wing nut? To answer this question, Hawking invokes the anthropic principle, a phrase coined by physicist Brandon Carter in the 1970s. The anthropic principle comes in two versions. The weak anthropic principle, or WAP, holds merely that any cosmic observer will observe conditions, at least locally, that make the observer's existence possible. The strong version, SAP, says that the universe must be constructed so as to make observers possible.

The anthropic principle has always struck me as so dumb that I can't understand why anyone takes it seriously. It's cosmology's version of creationism. WAP is tautological and SAP is teleological. The physicist Tony Rothman, with whom I worked at Scientific American in the 1990s, liked to say that the anthropic principle in any form is completely ridiculous and hence should be called CRAP.

In his 1980 speech in Cambridge Hawking mentioned the anthropic principle—which he paraphrased as "Things are as they are because we are"—as a possible explanation for the fact that our cosmos seems to be fine-tuned for our existence. But he added that "one cannot help feeling that there is some deeper explanation."

Like millions of other people I admire Hawking's brilliance, wit, courage and imagination. His prophecy of the end of physics inspired me to write The End of Science (which he called "garbage"). Hawking also played a central role in one of the highlights of my career. It dates back to the summer of 1990, when I attended a symposium in a remote Swedish resort on "The Birth and Early Evolution of Our Universe." The meeting was attended by 30 of the world's most prominent cosmologists, including Hawking.

Toward the end of the meeting, everyone piled into a bus and drove to a nearby village to hear a concert in a Lutheran church. When the scientists entered the church, it was already packed. The orchestra, a motley assortment of blond-haired youths and wizened, bald elders clutching violins, clarinets and other instruments, was seated at the front of the church. Their neighbors jammed the balconies and seats at the rear of the building.

The scientists filed down the center aisle to pews reserved for them at the front of the church. Hawking led the way in his motorized wheelchair. The townspeople started to clap, tentatively at first, then passionately. These religious folk seemed to be encouraging the scientists, and especially Hawking, in their quest to solve the riddle of existence.

Now, Hawking is telling us that unconfirmable M-theory plus the anthropic tautology represents the end of that quest. If we believe him, the joke's on us.
Clarification (9/14/10): My original post referred to Stephen Hawking's "smirk." Apparently many readers assume that Hawking can't control his expression and that I was mocking him for this symptom of his paralysis. When I met Hawking, he could and did grin on purpose, and I assumed that's still the case. I apologize for any offense caused by my (now deleted) remark.
© 2010 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Economist Understanding the universe
Order of creation
Even Stephen Hawking doesn't quite manage to explain why we are here
Sep 9th 2010


The Grand Design. By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam; 198 pages; $28 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN 1988, Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, ended his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time”, on a cliff hanger. If we find a physical theory that explains everything, he wrote—suggesting that this happy day was not too far off—“then we would know the mind of God.” But the professor didn’t mean it literally. God played no part in the book, which was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later, Professor Hawking tells a similar story, joined this time by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and writer at the California Institute of Technology.
In their “The Grand Design”, the authors discuss “M-theory”, a composite of various versions of cosmological “string” theory that was developed in the mid-1990s, and announce that, if it is confirmed by observation, “we will have found the grand design.” Yet this is another tease. Despite much talk of the universe appearing to be “fine-tuned” for human existence, the authors do not in fact think that it was in any sense designed. And once more we are told that we are on the brink of understanding everything.
The authors may be in this enviable state of enlightenment, but most readers will not have a clue what they are on about. Some physics fans will enjoy “The Grand Design” nonetheless. The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous—like “A Brief History of Time”, it has no formulae—but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion. Anyone who can follow their closing paragraphs on the relation between negative gravitational energy and the creation of the universe probably knows it all already. This is physics by sound-bite.
There are some useful colour diagrams and photographs, and the prose is jaunty. The book is peppered with quips, presumably to remind the reader that he is not studying for an exam but is supposed to be having fun. These attempted jokes usually fuse the weighty with the quotidian, in the manner of Woody Allen, only without the laughs. (“While perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop.”) There is a potted history of physics, which is adequate as far as it goes, though given what the authors have to say about Aristotle, one can only hope that they are more reliable about what happened billions of years ago at the birth of the universe than they are about what happened in Greece in the fourth century BC. Their account appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four).
The authors rather fancy themselves as philosophers, though they would presumably balk at the description, since they confidently assert on their first page that “philosophy is dead.” It is, allegedly, now the exclusive right of scientists to answer the three fundamental why-questions with which the authors purport to deal in their book. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? And why this particular set of laws and not some other?
It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because the only subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death, is, rather oddly, an approving reference to a philosopher’s analysis of the concept of a law of nature, which, they say, “is a more subtle question than one may at first think.” There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles.
The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to the universe as a whole. According to this way of thinking, “the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously.” The authors also assert that the world’s past did not unfold of its own accord, but that “we create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.” They say that these surprising ideas have passed every experimental test to which they have been put, but that is misleading in a way that is unfortunately typical of the authors. It is the bare bones of quantum mechanics that have proved to be consistent with what is presently known of the subatomic world. The authors’ interpretations and extrapolations of it have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be.
Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think.
Books and Arts

Stephen Hawking's big bang gaps
The laws that explain the universe's birth are less comprehensive than Stephen Hawking suggests
Paul Davies
The Guardian, Saturday 4 September 2010
Cosmologists are agreed that the universe began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. People naturally want to know what caused it. A simple answer is nothing: not because there was a mysterious state of nothing before the big bang, but because time itself began then – that is, there was no time "before" the big bang. The idea is by no means new. In the fifth century, St Augustine of Hippo wrote that "the universe was created with time and not in time".
Religious people often feel tricked by this logic. They envisage a miracle-working God dwelling within the stream of time for all eternity and then, for some inscrutable reason, making a universe (perhaps in a spectacular explosion) at a specific moment in history.
That was not Augustine's God, who transcended both space and time. Nor is it the God favoured by many contemporary theologians. In fact, they long ago coined a term for it – "god-of-the-gaps" – to deride the idea that when science leaves something out of account, then God should be invoked to plug the gap. The origin of life and the origin of consciousness are favourite loci for a god-of-the-gaps, but the origin of the universe is the perennial big gap.
In his new book, Stephen Hawking reiterates that there is no big gap in the scientific account of the big bang. The laws of physics can explain, he says, how a universe of space, time and matter could emerge spontaneously, without the need for God. And most cosmologists agree: we don't need a god-of-the-gaps to make the big bang go bang. It can happen as part of a natural process. A much tougher problem now looms, however. What is the source of those ingenious laws that enable a universe to pop into being from nothing?
Traditionally, scientists have supposed that the laws of physics were simply imprinted on the universe at its birth, like a maker's mark. As to their origin, well, that was left unexplained.
In recent years, cosmologists have shifted position somewhat. If the origin of the universe was a law rather than a supernatural event, then the same laws could presumably operate to bring other universes into being. The favoured view now, and the one that Hawking shares, is that there were in fact many bangs, scattered through space and time, and many universes emerging therefrom, all perfectly naturally. The entire assemblage goes by the name of the multiverse.
Our universe is just one infinitesimal component amid this vast – probably infinite – multiverse, that itself had no origin in time. So according to this new cosmological theory, there was something before the big bang after all – a region of the multiverse pregnant with universe-sprouting potential.
A refinement of the multiverse scenario is that each new universe comes complete with its very own laws – or bylaws, to use the apt description of the cosmologist Martin Rees. Go to another universe, and you would find different bylaws applying. An appealing feature of variegated bylaws is that they explain why our particular universe is uncannily bio-friendly; change our bylaws just a little bit and life would probably be impossible. The fact that we observe a universe "fine-tuned" for life is then no surprise: the more numerous bio-hostile universes are sterile and so go unseen.
So is that the end of the story? Can the multiverse provide a complete and closed account of all physical existence? Not quite. The multiverse comes with a lot of baggage, such as an overarching space and time to host all those bangs, a universe-generating mechanism to trigger them, physical fields to populate the universes with material stuff, and a selection of forces to make things happen. Cosmologists embrace these features by envisaging sweeping "meta-laws" that pervade the multiverse and spawn specific bylaws on a universe-by-universe basis. The meta-laws themselves remain unexplained – eternal, immutable transcendent entities that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given. In that respect the meta-laws have a similar status to an unexplained transcendent god.
According to folklore the French physicist Pierre Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his mathematical account of the universe, replied: "I had no need of that hypothesis." Although cosmology has advanced enormously since the time of Laplace, the situation remains the same: there is no compelling need for a supernatural being or prime mover to start the universe off. But when it comes to the laws that explain the big bang, we are in murkier waters.
Stephen Hawking's big bang gaps | Paul Davies
This article appeared on p30 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Saturday 4 September 2010. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 08.30 BST on Saturday 4 September 2010.
Editorial: Hawking's faith in M-theory
Craig Callender, contributor
Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is 2010, and Hawking has given up. But it is not his fault, he says: there may not be a final theory to discover after all. No matter; he can explain the riddles of existence without it.
The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow, is Hawking's first popular science book for adults in almost a decade. It duly covers the growth of modern physics (quantum mechanics, general relativity, modern cosmology) sprinkled with the wild speculation about multiple universes that seems mandatory in popular works these days. Short but engaging and packed with colourful illustrations, the book is a natural choice for someone wanting a quick introduction to mind-bending theoretical physics.
Early on, the authors claim that they will be answering the ultimate riddles of existence - and that their answer won't be "42". Their starting point for this bold claim is superstring theory.
In the early 1990s, string theory was struggling with a multiplicity of distinct theories. Instead of a single theory of everything, there seemed to be five. Beginning in 1994, though, physicists noticed that, at low energies, some of these theories were "dual" to others - that is, a mathematical transformation makes one theory look like another, suggesting that they may just be two descriptions of the same thing. Then a bigger surprise came: one string theory was shown to be dual to 11-dimensional supergravity, a theory describing not only strings but membranes, too. Many physicists believe that this supergravity theory is one piece of a hypothetical ultimate theory, dubbed M-theory, of which all the different string theories offer us mere glimpses.
This multiplicity of distinct theories prompts the authors to declare that the only way to understand reality is to employ a philosophy called "model-dependent realism". Having declared that "philosophy is dead", the authors unwittingly develop a theory familiar to philosophers since the 1980s, namely "perspectivalism". This radical theory holds that there doesn't exist, even in principle, a single comprehensive theory of the universe. Instead, science offers many incomplete windows onto a common reality, one no more "true" than another. In the authors' hands this position bleeds into an alarming anti-realism: not only does science fail to provide a single description of reality, they say, there is no theory-independent reality at all. If either stance is correct, one shouldn't expect to find a final unifying theory like M-theory - only a bunch of separate and sometimes overlapping windows.
So I was surprised when the authors began to advocate M-theory. But it turns out they were unconventionally referring to the patchwork of string theories as "M-theory" too, in addition to the hypothetical ultimate theory about which they remain agnostic.
M-theory in either sense is far from complete. But that doesn't stop the authors from asserting that it explains the mysteries of existence: why there is something rather than nothing, why this set of laws and not another, and why we exist at all. According to Hawking, enough is known about M-theory to see that God is not needed to answer these questions. Instead, string theory points to the existence of a multiverse, and this multiverse coupled with anthropic reasoning will suffice. Personally, I am doubtful.
Take life. We are lucky to be alive. Imagine all the ways physics might have precluded life: gravity could have been stronger, electrons could have been as big as basketballs and so on. Does this intuitive "luck" warrant the postulation of God? No. Does it warrant the postulation of an infinity of universes? The authors and many others think so. In the absence of theory, though, this is nothing more than a hunch doomed - until we start watching universes come into being - to remain untested. The lesson isn't that we face a dilemma between God and the multiverse, but that we shouldn't go off the rails at the first sign of coincidences.
Craig Callender is a philosopher of physics at the University of California, San Diego

the new atheism

August 11, 2010, 3:05 pm
On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response
By GARY GUTTING

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Tags:
atheism, Philosophy, religion, Richard Dawkins



My August 1 essay, “Philosophy and Faith,” was primarily addressed to religious believers. It argued that faith should go hand-in-hand with rational reflection, even though such reflection might well require serious questioning of their faith. I very much appreciated the many and diverse comments and the honesty and passion with which so many expressed their views. Interestingly, many of the most passionate responses came from non-believers who objected to my claim that popular atheistic arguments (like popular theistic arguments) do not establish their conclusions. There was particular dismay over my passing comment that the atheistic arguments of Richard Dawkins are “demonstrably faulty.” This follow-up provides support for my negative assessment. I will focus on Dawkins’ arguments in his 2006 book, “The God Delusion.”

‘The God Delusion’ does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires.
Dawkins’s writing gives the impression of clarity, but his readable style can cover over major conceptual confusions. For example, the core of his case against God’s existence, as he summarizes it on pages 188-189, seems to go like this:

1. There is need for an explanation of the apparent design of the universe.

2. The universe is highly complex.

3. An intelligent designer of the universe would be even more highly complex.

4. A complex designer would itself require an explanation.

5. Therefore, an intelligent designer will not provide an explanation of the universe’s complexity.

6. On the other hand, the (individually) simple processes of natural selection can explain the apparent design of the universe.

7. Therefore, an intelligent designer (God) almost certainly does not exist.

(Here I’ve formulated Dawkins’ argument a bit more schematically than he does and omitted his comments on parallels in physics to the explanations natural selection provides for apparent design in biology.)

As formulated, this argument is an obvious non-sequitur. The premises (1-6), if true, show only that God cannot be posited as the explanation for the apparent design of the universe, which can rather be explained by natural selection. They do nothing to show that “God almost certainly does not exist” (189).

But the ideas behind premises 3 and 4 suggest a more cogent line of argument, which Dawkins seems to have in mind in other passages:

1. If God exists, he must be both the intelligent designer of the universe and a being that explains the universe but is not itself in need of explanation.

2. An intelligent designer of the universe would be a highly complex being.

3. A highly complex being would itself require explanation.

4. Therefore, God cannot be both the intelligent designer of the universe and the ultimate explanation of the universe.

5. Therefore, God does not exist.

Here the premises do support the conclusion, but premise 2, at least, is problematic. In what sense does Dawkins think God is complex and why does this complexity require an explanation? He does not discuss this in any detail, but his basic idea seems to be that the enormous knowledge and power God would have to possess would require a very complex being and such complexity of itself requires explanation. He says for example: “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple” (p. 178). And, a bit more fully, “a God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be . . . simple. Such bandwidth! . . . If [God] has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know” (p. 184).

Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers.
Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God. Apart from a few superficial swipes at Richard Swinburne’s treatment in “Is There a God?”, Dawkins ignores these discussions. (see Swinburne’s response to Dawkins, paragraph 3.) Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Further, Dawkins’ argument ignores the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation, contrary to Dawkins’ premise 3. His ignoring this point also undermines his effort at a quick refutation of the cosmological argument for God as the cause of the existence of all contingent beings (that is, all beings that, given different conditions, would not have existed). Dawkins might, like some philosophers, argue that the idea of a necessary being is incoherent, but to make this case, he would have to engage with the formidable complexities of recent philosophical treatments of the question (see, for example, Timothy O’Connor’s “Theism and Ultimate Explanation” and Bruce Reichenbach’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Religious believers often accuse argumentative atheists such as Dawkins of being excessively rationalistic, demanding standards of logical and evidential rigor that aren’t appropriate in matters of faith. My criticism is just the opposite. Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires.

The basic problem is that meeting such standards requires coming to terms with the best available analyses and arguments. This need not mean being capable of contributing to the cutting-edge discussions of contemporary philosophers, but it does require following these discussions and applying them to one’s own intellectual problems. Dawkins simply does not do this. He rightly criticizes religious critics of evolution for not being adequately informed about the science they are calling into question. But the same criticism applies to his own treatment of philosophical issues.

There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence.
Friends of Dawkins might object: “Why pay attention to what philosophers have to say when, notoriously, they continue to disagree regarding the ‘big questions’, particularly, the existence of God?” Because, successful or not, philosophers offer the best rational thinking about such questions. Believers who think religion begins where reason falters may be able to make a case for the irrelevance of high-level philosophical treatments of religion — although, as I argued in “Philosophy and Faith,” this move itself raises unavoidable philosophical questions that challenge religious faith. But those, like Dawkins, committed to believing only what they can rationally justify, have no alternative to engaging with the most rigorous rational discussions available. Dawkins’ distinctly amateur philosophizing simply isn’t enough.

Of course, philosophical discussions have not resolved the question of God’s existence. Even the best theistic and atheistic arguments remain controversial. Given this, atheists may appeal (as many of the comments on my blog did) to what we might call the “no-arguments argument.” To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable atheism.

To this, Dawkins might respond that there are other reasons that make the idea of God’s existence so improbable that nothing short of decisive arguments can override a denial of that existence. It’s as if, they might say, we had strong scientific evidence that nothing shaped like a teapot could remain in an orbit around the sun. We could then rightly deny the existence of an orbiting teapot, despite eye-witness reports and scientific arguments supporting its existence.

What could be a reason for thinking that God’s existence is, of itself, highly improbable? There is, of course, Dawkins’ claim that God is highly complex, but, as we’ve seen, this is an assumption he has not justified. Another reason, which seems implicit in many of Dawkins’ comments, is that materialism (the view that everything is material) is highly probable. If so, the existence of an immaterial being such as God would be highly improbable.

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But what is the evidence for materialism? Presumably, that scientific investigation reveals the existence of nothing except material things. But religious believers will plausibly reply that science is suited to discover only what is material (indeed, the best definition of “material” may be just “the sort of thing that science can discover”). They will also cite our experiences of our own conscious life (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.) as excellent evidence for the existence of immaterial realities that cannot be fully understood by science.

At this point, the dispute between theists and atheists morphs into one of the most lively (and difficult) of current philosophical debates—that between those who think consciousness is somehow reducible to material brain-states and those who think it is not. This debate is far from settled and at least shows that materialism is not something atheists can simply assert as an established fact. It follows that they have no good basis for treating the existence of God as so improbable that it should be denied unless there is decisive proof for it. This in turn shows that atheists are at best entitled to be agnostics, seriously doubting but not denying the existence of God.

I find Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” stimulating, informative, and often right on target. But it does not make a strong case for atheism. His case is weak because it does not take adequate account of the philosophical discussions that have raised the level of reflection about God’s existence far above that at which he operates. It may be possible to make a decisive case against theism through a penetrating philosophical treatment of necessity, complexity, explanation, and other relevant concepts. Because his arguments fail to do this, Dawkins falls far short of establishing his claim.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Gutting teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and co-edits Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an on-line book review journal. His most recent book is “What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy.”

the new atheism

A wonderful assessment of the "new atheism":



Believe It or Not
David B. Hart
May 2010
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.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

So it goes. In the end the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing—as, frankly, do all the books in this new genre—and I have to say I find this all somewhat depressing. For one thing, it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. In part, of course, this is because the modern media encourage only fragmentary, sloganeering, and emotive debates, but it is also because centuries of the incremental secularization of society have left us with a shared grammar that is perhaps no longer adequate to the kinds of claims that either reflective faith or reflective faithlessness makes.

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. 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).

But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?

I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds
of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism.” Hume, for instance, never traded one dogmatism for another, or one facile certitude for another. He understood how radical were the implications of the skepticism he recommended, and how they struck at the foundations not only of unthinking faith, but of proud rationality as well.

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.

What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments, as well as an ability to refute them. Curiously enough, however, not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this. And this is, as far as I can tell, as much a result of indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian. He scarcely bothers even to get the traditional “theistic” arguments right, and the few ripostes he ventures are often the ones most easily discredited.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). 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. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

It is immaterial whether one is wholly convinced by such reasoning. Even its most ardent proponents would have to acknowledge that it is an almost entirely negative deduction, obedient only to something like Sherlock Holmes’ maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It certainly says nearly nothing about who or what God is.

But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress. It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew. And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.

But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?

Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.

To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely. He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.

On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).

In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?

As best I can tell, Hitchens’ case against faith consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it turns out to be the major premise that is missing, so it is hard to guess what links the minor premise to the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out some of his arguments in traditional syllogistic style to see the difficulty:



Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a bastard, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.

Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.


Or:




Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: There are many bad men who are Buddhists.

Conclusion: All religious claims are false.


Or:




Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed
smallpox vaccinations.

Conclusion: There is no God.


One could, I imagine, counter with a series of contrary enthymemes. Perhaps:




Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Early Christians built hospitals.

Conclusion: “Religion” is a good thing.


Or:




Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Medieval scriptoria saved much of the literature of classical antiquity from total eclipse.

Conclusion: All religious claims are true.


Or:



Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: George Bernard Shaw opposed smallpox vaccinations.

Conclusion: There is a God.


But this appears to get us nowhere. And, in the end, I doubt it matters.

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

Perhaps; perhaps not. Where Nietzsche was almost certainly correct, however, was in recognizing that mere formal atheism was not yet the same thing as true unbelief. As he writes in The Gay Science, “Once the Buddha was dead, people displayed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense and dreadful shadow. God is dead: —but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millennia yet where people will display his shadow. And we—we have yet to overcome his shadow!” It may appear that Nietzsche is here referring to “persons of faith”—those poor souls who continue to make their placid, bovine trek to church every week to worship a God who passed away long ago—but that is not his meaning.

He is referring principally to those who think they have eluded God simply by ceasing to believe in his existence. For Nietzsche, “scientism”—the belief that the modern scientific method is the only avenue of truth, one capable of providing moral truth or moral meaning—is the worst dogmatism yet, and the most pathetic of all metaphysical nostalgias. And it is, in his view, precisely men like the New Atheists, clinging as they do to those tenuous vestiges of Christian morality that they have absurdly denominated “humanism,” who shelter themselves in caves and venerate shadows. As they do not understand the past, or the nature of the spiritual revolution that has come and now gone for Western humanity, so they cannot begin to understand the peril of the future.

If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche’s unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling. For a short time I entertained the misguided hope that he might produce an atheist manifesto somewhat richer than the others currently on offer. Unfortunately, all his efforts in that direction suffer from the same defects as those of his fellows: the historical errors, the sententious moralism, the glib sophistry. Their great virtue, however, is that they are mercifully short. One essay of his in particular, called “Religion and Reason,” can be read in a matter of minutes and provides an almost perfect distillation of the whole New Atheist project.

The essay is even, at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that “an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.” Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

David Hart’s most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

© Copyright First Things 2010 | Visit www.FirstThings.com for more information.

Nagel on Dawkins

I feel I must post the beautiful article below. Thomas Nagel is of the best contemporary philosophers and, while an atheist, is unafraid to take independent positions on sensitive subjects. His words below deserve to be read carefully for he chooses his words carefully, and they have implications beyond the immediate subject under discussion.


Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

The Fear of Religion


* October 23, 2006 | 12:00 am

Thomas Nagel teaches philosophy at New York University. His books include The
View from Nowhere and The Last Word (Oxford University Press).

The God Delusion

By Richard Dawkins

(Houghton Mifflin, 352 pp.,$26)

Richard Dawkins, the most prominent and accomplished scientific
writer of our time, is convinced that religion is the enemy of
science. Not just fundamentalist or fanatical or extremist
religion, but all religion that admits faith as a ground of belief
and asserts the existence of God. In his new book, he attacks
religion with all the weapons at his disposal, and as a result the
book is a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur
philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories,
anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument.
Dawkins wants both to dissuade believers and to embolden atheists.

Since Dawkins is operating mostly outside the range of his
scientific expertise, it is not surprising that The God Delusion
lacks the superb instructive lucidity of his books on evolutionary
theory, such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and
Climbing Mount Improbable. In this new book I found that kind of
pleasure only in the brief explanation of why the moth flies into
the candle flame--an example introduced to illustrate how a useful
trait can have disastrous side effects. (Dawkins believes the
prevalence of religion among human beings is a side effect of the
useful trust of childhood.)

One of Dawkins's aims is to overturn the convention of respect
toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern
civilization. He does this by persistently violating the
convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with
gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and
practices. This kind of thing was done more entertainingly by H.L.
Mencken (whom Dawkins quotes with admiration), but the taboo
against open atheistic scorn seems to have become even more
powerful since Mencken's day. Dawkins's unmitigated hostility and
quotable insults--"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the
most unpleasant character in all fiction"--will certainly serve to
attract attention, but they are not what make the book interesting.

The important message is a theoretical one, about the reach of a
certain kind of scientific explanation. At the core of the book, in
a chapter titled "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," Dawkins
sets out with care his position on a question of which the
importance cannot be exaggerated: the question of what explains the
existence and character of the astounding natural order we can
observe in the universe we inhabit. On one side is what he calls
"the God Hypothesis," namely that "there exists a superhuman,
supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the
universe and everything in it, including us." On the other side is
Dawkins's alternative view: "any creative intelligence, of
sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only
as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.
Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in
the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing
it." In Dawkins's view, the ultimate explanation of everything,
including evolution, may be found in the laws of physics, which
explain the laws of chemistry, which explain the existence and the
functioning of the self-replicating molecules that underlie the
biological process of genetic mutation and natural selection.

This pair of stark alternatives may not exhaust the possibilities,
but it poses the fundamental question clearly. In this central
argument of Dawkins's book, the topic is not institutional religion
or revealed religion, based on scripture, miracles, or the personal
experience of God's presence. It is what used to be called "natural
religion," or reflection on the question of the existence and
nature of God using only the resources of ordinary human reasoning.
This is not the source of most religious belief, but it is
important nonetheless.

In a previous chapter, Dawkins dismisses, with contemptuous
flippancy the traditional a priori arguments for the existence of
God offered by Aquinas and Anselm. I found these attempts at
philosophy, along with those in a later chapter on religion and
ethics, particularly weak; Dawkins seems to have felt obliged to
include them for the sake of completeness. But his real concern is
with the argument from design, because there the conflict between
religious belief and atheism takes the form of a scientific
disagreement--a disagreement over the most plausible explanation of
the observable evidence. He argues that contemporary science gives
us decisive reason to reject the argument from design, and to
regard the existence of God as overwhelmingly improbable.

The argument from design is deceptively simple. If we found a watch
lying on a deserted heath (William Paley's famous example from the
eighteenth century), we would conclude that such an intricate
mechanism, whose parts fit together to carry out a specific
function, did not come into existence by chance, but that it was
created by a designer with that function in mind. Similarly, if we
observe any living organism, or one of its parts, such as the eye or
the wing or the red blood cell, we have reason to conclude that its
much greater physical complexity, precisely suited to carry out
specific functions, could not have come into existence by chance,
but must have been created by a designer.

The two inferences seem analogous, but they are very different.
First, we know how watches are manufactured, and we can go to a
watch factory and see it done. But the inference to creation by God
is an inference to something that we have not observed and
presumably never could observe. Second, the designer and the
manufacturer of a watch are human beings with bodies, using physical
tools to mold and put together its parts. The supernatural being
whose work is inferred by the argument from design for the
existence of God is not supposed to be a physical organism inside
the world, but someone who creates or acts on the natural world
while not being a part of it.

The first difference is not an objection to the argument. Scientific
inference to the best explanation of what we can observe often leads
to the discovery of things that are themselves unobservable by
perception and detectable only by their effects. In this sense, God
might be no more and no less observable than an electron or the Big
Bang. But the second difference is more troubling, since it is not
clear that we can understand the idea of purposive causation--of
design--by a non-physical being on analogy with our understanding
of purposive causation by a physical being such as a watchmaker.
Somehow the observation of the remarkable structure and function of
organisms is supposed to lead us to infer as their cause a
disembodied intentional agency of a kind totally unlike any that we
have ever seen in operation.

Still, even this difference need not be fatal to the theistic
argument, since science often concludes that what we observe is to
be explained by causes that are not only unobservable, but totally
different from anything that has ever been observed, and very
difficult to grasp intuitively. To be sure, the hypothesis of a
divine creator is not yet a scientific theory with testable
consequences independent of the observations on which it is based.
And the purposes of such a creator remain obscure, given what we
know about the world. But a defender of the argument from design
could say that the evidence supports an intentional cause, and that
it is hardly surprising that God, the bodiless designer, while to
some extent describable theoretically and detectable by his
effects, is resistant to full intuitive understanding.

Dawkins's reply to the argument has two parts, one positive and one
negative. The positive part consists in describing a third
alternative, different from both chance and design, as the
explanation of biological complexity. He agrees that the eye, for
example, could not have come into existence by chance, but the
theory of evolution by natural selection is capable of explaining
its existence as due neither to chance nor to design. The negative
part of the argument asserts that the hypothesis of design by God
is useless as an alternative to the hypothesis of chance, because
it just pushes the problem back one step. In other words: who made
God? "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity
because any God capable of designing anything would have to be
complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own
right."

Let me first say something about this negative argument. It depends,
I believe, on a misunderstanding of the conclusion of the argument
from design, in its traditional sense as an argument for the
existence of God. If the argument is supposed to show that a
supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body
and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and the creation
of life on earth, then of course this "explanation" is no advance
on the phenomenon to be explained: if the existence of plants,
animals, and people requires explanation, then the existence of
such a super-being would require explanation for exactly the same
reason. But if we consider what that reason is, we will see that it
does not apply to the God hypothesis.

The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by
considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex
physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we
cannot see how they could have come into existence out of
unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of
physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come
together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of
physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke
that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of
chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a
complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation
of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a
possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is
not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at
all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of
physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body,
capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical
world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all
explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or
intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of
physics, because it explains even them.

All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition
between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is
a disagreement over whether this end point is physical,
extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and
purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself
explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God,
and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.

This entire dialectic leaves out another possibility, namely that
there are teleological principles in nature that are explained
neither by intentional design nor by purposeless physical
causation--principles that therefore provide an independent end
point of explanation for the existence and form of living things.
That, more or less, is the Aristotelian view that was displaced by
the scientific revolution. Law-governed causation by antecedent
conditions became the only acceptable form of scientific
explanation, and natural tendencies toward certain ends were
discredited. The question then became whether non- teleological
physical law can explain everything, including the biological
order.

Darwin's theory of natural selection offered a way of accounting for
the exquisite functional organization of organisms through physical
causation, an explanation that revealed it to be the product
neither of design nor of hopelessly improbable chance. This is the
positive part of Dawkins's argument. The physical improbability of
such complexity's arising can be radically reduced if it is seen as
the result of an enormous number of very small developmental steps,
in each of which chance plays a part, together with a selective
force that favors the survival of some of those forms over others.
This is accomplished by the theory of heritable variation, due to
repeated small mutations in the genetic material, together with
natural selection, due to the differential adaptation of these
biological variations to the environments in which they emerge. The
result is the appearance of design without design, purely on the
basis of a combination of physical causes operating over billions
of years.

To be sure, this is only the schema for an explanation. Most of the
details of the story can never be recovered, and there are many
issues among evolutionary biologists over how the process works.
There are also skeptics about whether such a process is capable,
even over billions of years, of generating the complexity of life
as it is. But I will leave those topics aside, because the biggest
question about this alternative to design takes us outside the
theory of evolution.

It is a question that Dawkins recognizes and tries to address, and
it is directly analogous to his question for the God hypothesis:
who made God? The problem is this. The theory of evolution through
heritable variation and natural selection reduces the improbability
of organizational complexity by breaking the process down into a
very long series of small steps, each of which is not all that
improbable. But each of the steps involves a mutation in a carrier
of genetic information--an enormously complex molecule capable both
of self-replication and of generating out of surrounding matter a
functioning organism that can house it. The molecule is moreover
capable sometimes of surviving a slight mutation in its structure
to generate a slightly different organism that can also survive.
Without such a replicating system there could not be heritable
variation, and without heritable variation there could not be
natural selection favoring those organisms, and their underlying
genes, that are best adapted to the environment.

The entire apparatus of evolutionary explanation therefore depends
on the prior existence of genetic material with these remarkable
properties. Since 1953 we have known what that material is, and
scientists are continually learning more about how DNA does what it
does. But since the existence of this material or something like it
is a precondition of the possibility of evolution, evolutionary
theory cannot explain its existence. We are therefore faced with a
problem analogous to that which Dawkins thinks faces the argument
from design: we have explained the complexity of organic life in
terms of something that is itself just as functionally complex as
what we originally set out to explain. So the problem is just
pushed back one step: how did such a thing come into existence?

Of course there is a huge difference between this explanation and
the God hypothesis. We can observe DNA and see how it works. But
the problem that originally prompted the argument from design--the
overwhelming improbability of such a thing coming into existence by
chance, simply through the purposeless laws of physics-- remains
just as real for this case. Yet this time we cannot replace chance
with natural selection.

Dawkins recognizes the problem, but his response to it is pure
hand-waving. First, he says it only had to happen once. Next, he
says that there are, at a conservative estimate, a billion billion
planets in the universe with life- friendly physical and chemical
environments like ours. So all we have to suppose is that the
probability of something like DNA forming under such conditions,
given the laws of physics, is not much less than one in a billion
billion. And he points out, invoking the so-called anthropic
principle, that even if it happened on only one planet, it is no
accident that we are able to observe it, since the appearance of
life is a condition of our existence.

Dawkins is not a chemist or a physicist. Neither am I, but general
expositions of research on the origin of life indicate that no one
has a theory that would support anything remotely near such a high
probability as one in a billion billion. Naturally there is
speculation about possible non-biological chemical precursors of
DNA or RNA. But at this point the origin of life remains, in light
of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and
the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a
mystery--an event that could not have occurred by chance and to
which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of
what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry.

Yet we know that it happened. That is why the argument from design
is still alive, and why scientists who find the conclusion of that
argument unacceptable feel there must be a purely physical
explanation of why the origin of life is not as physically
improbable as it seems. Dawkins invokes the possibility that there
are vastly many universes besides this one, thus giving chance many
more opportunities to create life; but this is just a desperate
device to avoid the demand for a real explanation.

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical
causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen
Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping
magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an
outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult
to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are
other possibilities besides these two that have not even been
thought of yet. The fear of religion leads too many scientifically
minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening
reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled
by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to
insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in
particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional
laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of
the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent
application to the understanding of life through molecular biology.
It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as
far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of
everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of
control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special,
and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us.
It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory
appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What
remains is the mathematically describable order of things and
events in space and time.

That conceptual purification launched the extraordinary development
of physics and chemistry that has taken place since the seventeenth
century. But reductive physicalism turns this description into an
exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to
reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by
analyzing them in physical--that is, behavioral or
neurophysiological--terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be
so reduced. I believe the project is doomed--that conscious
experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even
though they cannot be identified with physical facts.

I also think that there is no reason to undertake the project in the
first place. We have more than one form of understanding. Different
forms of understanding are needed for different kinds of subject
matter. The great achievements of physical science do not make it
capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to
the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss
moral reasoning, introspection, or conceptual analysis as ways of
discovering the truth just because they are not physics.

Any anti-reductionist view leaves us with very serious problems
about how the mutually irreducible types of truths about the world
are related. At least part of the truth about us is that we are
physical organisms composed of ordinary chemical elements. If
thinking, feeling, and valuing aren't merely complicated physical
states of the organism, what are they? What is their relation to
the brain processes on which they seem to depend? More: if
evolution is a purely physical causal process, how can it have
brought into existence conscious beings?

A religious worldview is only one response to the conviction that
the physical description of the world is incomplete. Dawkins says
with some justice that the will of God provides a too easy
explanation of anything we cannot otherwise understand, and
therefore brings inquiry to a stop. Religion need not have this
effect, but it can. It would be more reasonable, in my estimation,
to admit that we do not now have the understanding or the knowledge
on which to base a comprehensive theory of reality.

Dawkins seems to believe that if people could be persuaded to give
up the God Hypothesis on scientific grounds, the world would be a
better place-- not just intellectually, but also morally and
politically. He is horrified--as who cannot be?--by the dreadful
things that continue to be done in the name of religion, and he
argues that the sort of religious conviction that includes a
built-in resistance to reason is the true motive behind many of
them. But there is no connection between the fascinating
philosophical and scientific questions posed by the argument from
design and the attacks of September 11. Blind faith and the
authority of dogma are dangerous; the view that we can make
ultimate sense of the world only by understanding it as the
expression of mind or purpose is not. It is unreasonable to think
that one must refute the second in order to resist the first.

By Thomas Nagel
Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-fear-religion