Students might have been titillated by the recent writings of Dawkins and others who profess to give a biological, evolutionary explanation of why people believe in God. But they would have learned in our course that there is no good theological reason to object to any scientific attempts to understand religion, even in evolutionary terms. The course would have made it clear that religion can and indeed should be studied as a natural phenomenon. After all, this is the only way science can study anything, and its insights are completely compatible with any good theology. And my students would have rightly wondered whether evolutionary theory, or any natural or social science, can give a complete and adequate understanding of religion. During our one-semester course students would already have encountered in Freud's thought the claim that science alone is a reliable road to true understanding of anything. And they would have learned from other readings that this claim is a profession of faith known as scientism, a modern belief system that is self-contradictory. Why self-contradictory? Because scientism tells us to take nothing on faith, and yet faith is required to accept scientism. What is remarkable is that none of the new atheists seems remotely prepared to admit that his scientism is a self-sabotaging confession of faith. Listen to Hitchens: "If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished." But this statement invalidates itself since it too arises out of faith in things unseen. There is no set of tangible experiments or visible demonstrations that could ever scientifically prove the statement to be true.
What drew me to this article was the contrast it draws between a kind of weak atheism represented by Dawkins et al which is essentially parasitic on contemporary mores ultimately rooted in Christian morality (and which atheist philosopher John Grey castigates) and the keen unflinching purpose of 'classical atheists',
The classical atheists, by contrast, demanded a much more radical transformation of human culture and consciousness. This is most evident when we consider works by Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. To them atheism not only should make all the difference in the world; it would take a superhuman effort to embrace it. "Atheism," as Sartre remarked, "is a cruel and long-range affair." Like Nietzsche and Camus, Sartre thought that most people would be too weak to accept the terrifying consequences of the death of God.
Of course this is precisely where the new atheism doesn't want to go: it wants both to eat its cake and to keep it in front of them. Indeed, there are fighting words in this article:
new atheism is very much like the old secular humanism that was rebuked by the hard-core atheists for its mousiness in facing up to what the absence of God should really mean. If you're going to be an atheist, the most rugged version of godlessness demands complete consistency. Go all the way and think the business of atheism through to the bitter end. This means that before you get too comfortable with the godless world you long for, you will be required by the logic of any consistent skepticism to pass through the disorienting wilderness of nihilism. Do you have the courage to do that? You will have to adopt the tragic heroism of a Sisyphus, or realize that true freedom in the absence of God means that you are the creator of the values you live by. Don't you realize that this will be an intolerable burden from which most people will seek an escape? Are you ready to allow simple logic to lead you to the real truth about the death of God? Before settling into a truly atheistic worldview you will have to experience the Nietzschean madman's sensation of straying through "infinite nothingness." You will be required to summon up an unprecedented degree of courage if you plan to wipe away the whole horizon of transcendence. Are you willing to risk madness? If not, then you are not really an atheist.
The article towards the end mentions a point I also recall making in a different and more recent conversation about Dawkins' thinking.
Dawkins declares that the biblical God is a monster, Harris that God is evil, Hitchens that God is not great. But without some fixed sense of rightness how can one distinguish what is monstrous, evil or "not great" from its opposite? In order to make such value judgments one must assume, as the hard-core atheists are honest enough to acknowledge, that there exists somewhere, in some mode of being, a realm of rightness that does not owe its existence completely to human invention, Darwinian selection or social construction. And if we allow the hard-core atheists into our discussion, we can draw this conclusion: If absolute values exist, then God exists. But if God does not exist, then neither do absolute values, and one should not issue moral judgments as though they do.Quite so.
Link back to original article.
8 comments:
Please can you post a URL or provide another reference that will allow us to read the article for ourselves? TIA!
Sorry mate, the link had got transplanted and then lost. I shall replace it under the post-title asap. meantime here: http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4497
Many thanks!
Quite so indeed. I find Dawkin's fundamentalism quite trite and incredibly ironic.
Lets see...
trandsendental argument
moral argument
science is faith
"true" atheism
atheism demands sacrifice
ignorance=god
atheism is fundamentalist
Wow... I haven't heard an origional argument in months. You can find the rebutels to these on the web. It isn't hard.
You see, the amazing thing about the internet is that it puts the whole world at our finger tips. Ignorance is no excuse- only a declaration of intellectual dishonesty or laziness. Which one is it?
Back at you Samuel: it's unnecessarily provocative to go in with such accusations of dishonesty or laziness when you either haven't read what was said or for some reason have misunderstood or mischaracterised the point (I hope that it was not dishonesty or intellectual laziness on your part, but you could understand why some less charitably inclined might conclude it that way).
In any case your own caricature of what is being said does not give much hope of a helpful discussion leading to mutual understanding. And, if it is the article that is your true target, it actually suggests your argument may be with atheist philosophers; so you have already missed the nuancing necessary to engage with the issue at an appropriate level.
Yes, there are further responses and engagements to this particular issue from atheist points of view and further discussions from both. The point here is with the inadequacy of the particular presentations of atheism by Dawkins, Hitchens et al which do not deal with the real issues, tilt at straw men and ironically reproduce what they say they hate. That's not to say that they are the last word in atheist argument. In my posting I mention John Grey's atheism positively because he actually does wrestle with those issues (and you can see his book on my recommended list at the side too). So I am not ignorant of the wider issue, nor is Matt, I think; it's merely that we take issue with the idea that Dawkins et al actually have something substantial or new to say and to observe the paradox they find themselves in as a result.
... the keen unflinching purpose of 'classical atheists'.
"The nausea of a Jean-Paul Sartre or the tragic defiance of an Albert Camus, when confronted with a supposedly meaningless world, is really part of the problem to which it is a response. You are only likely to feel that the world is sickeningly pointless, as opposed to just plain old pointless, if you had inflated expectations of it in the first place. Camus and Sartre are, so to speak, old enough to recall a time when the world seemed meaningful; but if they believe that this was an illusion even then, what exactly has been lost by its disappearance? ... It is only because you falsely imagined that the world cold be somehow inherently meaningful - an idea that postmodernism finds senseless - that you are so devastated to find that it is not." p101
"The idea that the world is either given meaning by God, or is utterly random and absurd, is a false antithesis. Even those who do happen to believe that God is the ultimate meaning of life do not have to hold that without this divine bedrock there would be no coherent meaning at all." p76
Terry Eagleton "The Meaning of Life" OUP 2007
'But without some fixed sense of rightness how can one distinguish what is monstrous, evil or "not great" from its opposite?'
Could it be that John Haught is confusing a literary device, a manner of speaking, with taking a philosophical stance?
Could it even be that we can and do make those value judgements within our realm of social construction, without reference to absolute values in some speculative metaphysics?
That's interesting stuff Isaac. Thank you. I wonder whether Terry Eagleton really understands what atheist Existentialism was trying to do. As I understood it when I studied Sartre (though it is some years since I studied La Nausee, Les Mains Sales Huis Clos etc), the point was what to do given that the world could not be inherently meaningful; only the imposition of ones own meaning which was the beginning of authenicity. Maybe I'm missing your point, though?
The key word is probably 'inherent'. Without inherent meaning of some kind, what we are left with is values within a socially-constructed realm, or -if you do go for the existentialist sortie- a 'brave' creation (or conscious acceptance from society or others) of our individual values.
Of course the problem with only relative values is the problem of what to do about a Hitler or a Stalin or a Pol Pot. According to their values and cultural milieu they acted, arguably, rightly. Is there any way to appeal outside of a cultural milieu in order to 'correct' it?
I'm not quite sure whether that touches on what you meant by the possibility of Haught miscategorising arguments; I wasn't quite sure of your referents there.
Of course, the 300kg gorilla in the corner, is the issue of the fact that whether or not we have absolute values or not, not everyone agrees with them anyway and so we are still at the starting point with regard to shared values and how we negotiate them. But that's a different debate, perhaps. Though maybe that's what you were getting at?
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