19th January 2011
“There has long been a stigma against atheism. The recent attacks on so called 'New Atheism' are just a pitiful extension.”
Anon.
“There has long been a stigma against atheism. The recent attacks on so called 'New Atheism' are just a pitiful extension.”
Anon.
January 19th, 2011 at 7:03
No different than any other form of xenophobia.
January 19th, 2011 at 12:00
The arguments against theism are old (for example Epicurus ca. 341-270 BCE) and I have never heard a convincing refutation of them. For this reason, I don’t understand the term “new atheist”.
January 19th, 2011 at 12:22
Archaeopteryx,
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s also why I could never understand Dawkins when he claims that it was Darwin that made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist. Dawkins it seems to me is forgetting ~2500 years of philosophy.
January 19th, 2011 at 13:39
Because prior to Darwin there was no theory to explain how evolution would generate the complexity of life. True it was already accepted by many that evolution happened but the mechanism was missing. Darwin’s theory was the seminal moment which put paid to Paleys “watchmaker” and made it possible to defend atheism scientifically rather than philosophically. We could do with a few more nails for God’s coffin though. A falsifiable theory of Abiogenesis would help plus a few cosmological questions answered.
January 19th, 2011 at 13:50
Because prior to Darwin there was no theory to explain how evolution would generate the complexity of life.
But that’s just Atomism applied to biology with modern knowledge, which is credited to Democritis and later Epicurus who was mentioned by Archaeopteryx. From a philosophical perspective, Darwin was just filling in the blanks, not breaking new ground as Dawkins implies.
I just don’t get Dawkins on this particular issue. Listening to him, you’d think Atomism was only proposed in the 19th Century!
January 19th, 2011 at 14:48
It’s a big leap from Atomism to the TOE. Besides, nothing in Atomism supports atheism as far as I can see. Plato had his own pet atomic theory based on tetrahedrons, but he still invoked a creator for their existence.
January 19th, 2011 at 15:47
Hardly.
Atomism was originally the philosophical expression of the reducibility of the Universe to realm of the discrete and understandable. The Epicureans believed in Gods, true, but they believed that Gods were made of the same stuff as everything else (i.e. atoms). We might call this concept Pantheism today, which is just an argument that Gods=Nature, and is just one step away from the idea of “why call them Gods when you can just call them Nature.”
Moreover, Atomism lead to the realization that if everything in the Universe was made of discrete and simple units – atoms – then it follows that everything, including complex things, are simply assemblages of atoms formed and held together by discrete and understandable forces and processes. All Darwin did was to define discrete and understandable forces and processes by which complex assemblages of things emerge from simpler assemblages of things. Philosophically, that’s Atomism.
And as I’m sure you know Plato objected to the mechanistic purposelessness of Democritus’ Atomism.
January 19th, 2011 at 17:42
I guess. It just seems a philosophical stretch to me. I suppose you could argue against Dawkins by pointing out that Dembski and Behe et al are essentially doing to Darwin what Plato did to Democritus. i.e putting the ghost back into the machine.
January 19th, 2011 at 18:51
Also… Have you heard of or read Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht? That’s a good book for finding a well-researched history of intellectual doubt. Hecht covers the gamut of doubt, from the still-religious-but-doubting to the hardcore-atheist, and shows that history is replete with intellectually-fulfilled atheists long, long before Darwin.
January 19th, 2011 at 21:25
No I haven’t but now you’ve said it I will 🙂