For the record
It gets more and more tedious, but it can’t be helped – or it can be helped but it shouldn’t be. The relentless brainless dishonest denigration of “New” atheists has to be shown up for what it is every damn time it happens. It may be futile to say “That’s a lie, and that is, and that is, and that’s another”; it may just entrench the lies even deeper (depressingly, there is research that indicates this is what happens); but it has to be done, if only for the record. (What record? Oh shut up.)
Michael McGhee, Comment is Free (sugar and tea, rainbows at sea, la de da dee).
I am not a believer. I incline towards a secular humanism that leaves space for “spirituality” – conceived as the disciplined search for self-knowledge – and recognises that we can sometimes and beyond the exercise of our will transcend the narrow perspective of ego-centric self-enclosure.
That sets the scene. He’s not a believer, yet he chooses to call something entirely this-worldly and secular by the means-everything-and-nothing word “spirituality,” thus establishing himself as better and wiser than people who don’t call their thoughts by that elevated name. Then having done that, he moves right into the “New” atheist-bashing.
But my wariness of “belief” is matched by an equal wariness of the new atheists’ rejection of belief. It is not just that their popular polemic shows a juvenile comprehension of religion as altogether “a bad thing”, nor that they are silent about self-knowledge and transcendence.
There: that’s for the record. A stupidly sweeping and false generalization, closely followed by a stupidly sweeping and false generalization.
After that there’s a lot of guff which boils down to some this-world morality bolted clumsily onto hand-waving about spiritual transcendence and transcendent spirituality for the sake of…I don’t know, separating himself from the “New” atheists or something.
It is the popular pseudo-Wittgenstein move again, second only to the Fake Fermat move in popular theistic circles. Once can believe in X without having to assert that X exists. Its vacuity makes it hard to refute as it is more an empty assertion than an actual argument. Does anyone know a better response than giggling?
It seems a lot of people have some kind of need to think the ‘new atheists’ are incapable of any kind of subtlety in thought. It always has to be characterized with some kind of stupidly sweeping and false generalization. They need us to be the opposites of religious literalists – the atheist fundamentalists.
Quite. And that’s why it seems worthwhile to keep track of them all – to document the consistency.
There must be some Be Quieters who don’t do that, but my god they’re scarce.
As many tried to point out in the comments following David Hart’s diatribe, if Hart is to be believed, the problem lies with the majority of religious believers not understanding their own religions. Yet theists and, as this piece demonstrates, many atheists keep blaming atheists for pointing this out. That the fault lies with theists of all stripes seems to go right past them all without a reply, but they never fail to mention atheists failure to acknowledge the deity’s ineffable apophatism (is this a word?) or apophatic ineffability or the deity not being a being, but being. If the deity is being or existence, isn’t that a positive attribute….I come away from these things with less understanding than when I started.
I hate this drivel more than organised religion.
Give me an honest Christian, Jew or Muslim any day: at least you know what you’re dealing with.
Arguing against this kind of nebulous waffle is like throwing a punch at a cloud.
As I understand it, “being” isn’t an attribute, but a precondition of having any attributes at all. Kant made this clear in the process of demolishing the Ontological Argument. You would expect the Catholic Church to have got wise to this by now, but recently I had a discussion with a catholic on the subject: he said he worshipped “Being”. As far as I can see, “being” just means “there it is”. Talking about “existence” means pointing out that something is “there”. To say it has “no existence” or “no being” is just to say it isn’t “there”. If there were an independent “property” called “being”, it would have to exist! I think it exists only in words.As regards religious believers not understanding their own religions, my own assumption is that whatever religious people say they believe should be regarded as their “religion”. If this is correct, it would probably mean that there are as many religions as believers (even if most of them keep very quiet about the details), and I must admit that I find this easier to suppose than to deal with the idea that there is one supreme version. After all, believers are always anathematising and murdering one another on this very point, so they obviously don’t agree among themselves as to what their beliefs actually are, and if, on the other hand, we want to understand what a religion is, should we not consult the people who lay claim to it? I think it’s best to deal with whichever version turns up to annoy us and not worry about a hard-and-fast definition. Bugger the “official” versions. Heresy for ever! Human freedom and all that.Maybe what I am trying to say is that McGhee is an arrogant sod who thinks he has the right to tell believers what belief really is and to tell atheists that they are confused (excluding himself, obviously). Yet he is brilliant at confusing everybody else — and maybe that’s how he proves his point (— or whatever). It thoroughly annoys me that he can’t say anything in plain English. My best attempts at translation have failed ignominiously to elucidate some of his utterances. All this rubbish about “conversation” (what, not “dialogue”? or is that old hat now?) and “drama” (a theology/sociology of role-play then? Whatever happened to “authenticity”?) Well, perhaps he feels that his jargon suggests “importance”. But isn’t that a kind of dishonesty? But then again, perhaps he can’t help it, and I’m being unjust.
It is perplexing to me in what sense these remarks about “new” atheists are even supposed to be helpful or relevant or meaningful even if they were true.
Suppose hypothetically that Douglas Elmendorf, the current head of the CBO, was an abrasive personality, even mean spirited. Is that supposed to entail something? What, exactly? Would it make his projections about the health care bill more or less correct? Would it suggest that his economic models for forecasting costs should be replaced with other models? If he said “Policy X will cost $56 billion” does it matter whether or not he says it with a sneering voice? No? Then what?
There’s this delusional idea that citing abrasive personality somehow counterbalances material, factual issues (the Catholic Church suppressed investigations of child rape … but the way Christopher Hitchens talks about the Church is disrespectful), as though the mixture of tangential gibberish with serious problems could result in anything more than an undifferentiated directionless slush of adjectives.
He, (McGhee), is but another Professional Philosopher doing what Professional Philosophers do best: intellectual masturbation in public.
I apologise if this offends your personal allegiances to a few professional philosopher-friends, but you are bound to arrive at the realisation, (one day, without my help), that the vast bulk of what most philosophers do is:
Discuss, with tedious altricial buttressing, the work of other philosophers, in an indelicate academic circle-jerk.
Spout plain absurdities dressed up in impenetrable contumelies.
Say the rare odd thing that prevents a particular philosophical retardation of science by demolishing a shibboleth of other philosophers*, that has forcefully shackled advancement**. (This is very, very rare. And it is not a discovery, but a removal of a previously erected philosophical barrier to science).
* Think: Dualism (eg: Descartes); Mechanism (eg: Mach), and so-on.Pro-Philosophers will have a list the length of an imaginary 2,030′ octopode’s cigarette-holder to add to those examples, much to their collective shame.
**I have references with which to back-up my assertions, should some Punk-Pro-Am Philosophers wish to jump in and employ the ad-hominem techniques that they attempted the last time that I was vaguely correct, in this very blog, about the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons.
This sort of new atheist bashing has ceased to be annoying to me and is now merely amusing to see the ever more ridiculous contortions the faitheists are forced into to try to make a point.
“We should take “belief that there is (or isn’t) a God” out of the equation.”
Right. So there is no difference between the idea of a Karen Armstrong type ‘God’ that simply exists in some incommunicable way and the other, traditional sort – the one that has specific likes and dislikes and tells us to do as He commands or He will burn us in hell for eternity. Believers in only one of these types of Gods try to run all our lives according to the supposed dictates of their deity. If it really was the case that the ineffable Armstrong God was the majority belief does he really think we’d have the same degree of religious campaigning against stem cell research, condoms, abortion, homosexuality, blasphemy and all the rest? McGhee’s argument doesn’t deserve serious debate, it deserves ridicule.
Michael – honestly – that’s just absurd!
It’s not a matter of “personal allegiances to a few professional philosopher-friends,” though I suppose I can claim to have a few such friends – it’s a matter of having read some philosophy that doesn’t match your description! A fair amount, actually, and I’m confident that that fair amount is a tiny fraction of what there is.
Now if you were talking about literary critics who call what they do Theory, then I would agree with you. But philosophers, all philosophers, philosophers as such? No.
I noticed First Things removed all of the comments attached to David Hart’s piece. I wonder why?
“But philosophers, all philosophers, philosophers as such?” – OB
If you re-read my submission, I specifically said “most philosophers”.
Once again, I understand your ‘touchy’ reaction but please, don’t put words into my keyboard that I nether typed, nor intended, nor implied.
I stand by my comments. I have a standing ‘challenge’ to which you may wish to quickly submit an answer:Describe an instance of where a philosopher has advanced science through philosophy, but exclude those instances where said philosopher has been merely removing a previous retardation of science imposed by a previous philosophy.
(I can provide examples of the latter, if required)
If anyone is able to provide a single valid example, I’d be glad to change my stance, and humbly apologise to those philosophers who may feel slighted.
Reading philosophers of science – especially biology – helped me better understand my research in population genetics, speciation and systematics. I can mention Elliot Sober, David Hull, Michael Ghiselin, Ronald Giere, Alex Rosenberg – I am sure I am leaving others out. Their discussions of species as individuals and cladistics helped me gain a much needed background. I would also single out nonphilosophers Joe Felsenstein, Olivier Rieppel and Dan Brooks for their insights.
I think philosophers are good at clarifying ideas put in practice by scientists. The interaction of species as individuals with cladistics was especially fruitful for me in studying speciation.
Crap, Michael G. This is what you said:
followed by a lot of plain silliness.
Don’t call my reaction “touchy,” not least because it wasn’t, but also because it’s a form of mind-reading, which is patronizing. Address the content, not the attributed emotion.