02.27.07
Some thoughts on Kurz essay
The last post by Kurz on religion in conflict asks if ‘evangelical atheists’ are too outspoken.
As far as I am concerned they can shout themselves hoarse and it won’t matter: their position is flawed and actually does a disservice to their own cause. I have been critical of the authors/books Kurz cites, those by Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, not because I am a theist shocked by atheist loudmouths, far from it, but because having verged on atheism myself I find their position one that I wouldn’t defend. This is the oddity of these New Atheists. A real atheist feels forced to disown them. I think atheism is simply a dialectical whiplash with little content beyond its denunciations of infantile religious beliefs. Its own content is as weak. And quite as metaphysical.
Part of the problem is the fallacious attempt to base this on scientism and the grossly inadequate views of Darwinists grafted onto that scientism. The result is embraced by humanists naive enough to think this is a real challenge to religion. The question of morality won’t go away, and to cite E.O. Wilson in Consilience is pretty thin soup. Granted, religion has no monopoly on morality, but Darwinism has also produced a complete muddle on the question. It is simply unreasonable to expect the public to adopt reductionist views on these issues. Do we really have to drag the public through the Rand corporation hotshot nonsense about altruism, population genetics, and natural selection, with the Prisoner’s dilemma thrown in?
It is just not going to happen, and culture swings backward to traditionalism unable to tune into this narrow view created by science.
Scientists have failed to grasp their social context and have done nothing to address the issues of a true public philosophy. Their training makes that unlikely. And scientists fail to sense the way many perceive them, half-educated specialists with a technical expertise, proud of their ignorance it seems. As soon as they address religion they show their refusal to even examine the issues with any objective method of study. It is simply boilerplate inherited from Bertrand Russell.
They can’t even handle modern philosophy, that which generated our secularism, let alone the complexities of religion.
Kurz cites professor Broad’s criticism of this ‘evangelical atheism’. But surely his viewpoint is not unreasonable. The challenge from someone like Broad ought to be a wake up call.
A writer like Dennett is so ignorant on the subject of religion as to be a laughing stock. Small wonder atheists have turned into a minority.
Meanwhile, the position of this group is incoherent, and denounces all religion, then seems at a loss with respect to Buddhism. Harris, one should note, is harboring a Buddhist something up his sleeve, with an opening on occultism and reincarnation. More power to him. But how will Kurz’ skeptic org handle that? So we will oppose religion but make an exception for occultism and reincarnation. I can think of a few more exceptions, in a ‘me too’ list of things the Dawkins/Dennett gang forgot.
Harris is at least aware of some complexity here, although the tone of his books appears to reflect 9/11 concerns, an understandable, but inadequate basis to denounce all religion.
The false brand of secular humanism has lived in a cocoon so long that it is wildly naive about what religion is and how to propose a true secular challenge. It wasn’t always so. Look at the Enlightenment in its full complexity, with its attempt, especially in Kant, to complete the project of modernity with a challenge to and complement to Newtonian thinking. This has disappeared as if it never existed and we live in a false modernity run by technologists serving economic ideology.
Small wonder the public goes into retrograde motion in the resurgence of religion. Science has offered them nothing.