11.04.06
The New Atheists?
The Wired article on the New Atheism leaves one to ask, what is new about it? Atheism went into a decline after Darwin because it turned into a false/fake metaphysics.
Dawkins is peddling the illusion that science can establish a post-metaphysical foundation for such questions, and naive and uneducated science specialists will believe him.
The studied ingnoramus quality of these promoters is difficult to deal with, because these ‘fanatics of a another kind’ refuse to learn and simply coast on the social prestige/domination of bad Darwinism. You could request that these people actually confront the history, cite a Buddhist sutra or some of the classics of religious history, deal with the facts of religious culture and history. To even mention such things creates an iron curtain effect of instant silence.
These people are trying to create a totally walled in mindset that plays ostrich to the actual facts of religion.
A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.
Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. “There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove,” he said. “You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”