09.06.07
Have the New Atheists shot their bolt?
Answer: I don’t know, but the surging news cycles for Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and then Hitchens, are clearly waning, as they must, which doesn’t necessarily prove anything.
I wish the New Atheists, or rather the Big Four authors, no ill will, but I certainly hope the public forgets them. With help like that secularism will sink without a trace, and not because of the aggressive atheist promo, but because of the dwarfed understanding of religion and culture created by the Darwin obsessed.
But, whatever the case, it is time to pause and reflect on some kind of new initiative. The moment of secularism can’t be frittered away in bad scientism.
First emergency tactic: sit down and study the Enlightenment, in its totality. The current debate is a sad parody.
Stop trying to cram Darwinism down the world’s throat. Check out the critics. You can’t succeed with a fake theory. It merely makes scientists look stupid (are they?) and is discrediting science.
Atheism is one thing, but the current arrogant concoction claiming Darwin’s theory somehow provides proof for all this is completely unfounded and amateurish thinking.
James said,
September 7, 2007 at 5:06 pm
comment upgraded to post:
http://darwiniana.com/2007/09/08/the-new-atheists-2/
nemo said,
September 7, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Good link, I will feature your comment tommorrow.
James said,
September 9, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Comment upgraded to post
http://darwiniana.com/2007/09/09/commentary-have-new-atheists-shot-their-bolt/
Luke Rondinaro said,
September 9, 2007 at 8:01 pm
And, there’s something quite odd about this positivism of the New Atheist, scientism bunch as well. On the one hand, they don’t want people belittling or diminishing Science’s carefully established positions and content; so one is told the field isn’t really accessible to anybody but the specialists who’ve been trained in its metholodical and theoretical ways. But, when presented either with an epistemology-philosophical position or comparable scientific view (like emergentist Complexity)(per contra reductionist science), these positivists do an about-face saying in effect: ‘science is about the hard, concrete, empirical actualities of the real world and anything from Kant, to String Theory, to “Chaos Theory” really has no place in (so-called) TRUE science … which in itself about the solid, substantive, practical implements of our physical environment and how we can manipulate/control for them in a techne-based, engineering-related respect.
So what’s it going to be: inaccessible theory or unyielding techne-praxis, with apparently no hint of theoria involved? It seems these positivistic types are as in the dark on this kind of a question, as anyone else is (if not more).
Luke Rondinaro
The Consilience Projects