Yet another smug unthinking cliché-filled diatribe about zealous fundamentalist literalist evangelist atheism, this time from Reza Aslan. It’s as original as the other nine million.
The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies…
He says, in the very act of marginalizing them himself. Gee, why would we believe we have been marginalized, just because there’s a steady stream of mendacious vituperative horseshit directed at us by hacks like this?
This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).
Ah, well spotted; you’re not the first to think any of this, sport; you’re not the hundredth to think of it; you’re the latest of a long, long line. You’re recycling. You’re recycling and marginalizing at the same time. You should be embarrassed.
What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims–be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth–are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science.
Yes they do. They don’t stop there, they don’t treat that as a reason to believe all metaphysical claims, but they do admit exactly what you say they don’t. Nice job.
Well the Washington Post has a “faith” column, and it has to fill it somehow.
Comments
53 responses to “Naughty dog bites when attacked”
I’m still waiting for this one:
“The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the doctors murdered for performing operations that are entirely legal, the planes flown into buildings, the gays dangling from ropes or shamed into “therapy,” the women forced to hide their hair and flesh, the children scarred with acid for practicing ‘witchcraft’ or for trying to learn to read and write, the people being told who they must or must not marry, the parents allowed to murder their children through medical neglect, the daycare centers exempt from rules and regulations because they’re operated by churches and, perhaps most bizarrely, the fact that ANYTHING can be justified so long as it is mentioned in the Ancient Holy Atheist Rulebook or comes from an atheist leader who says he is in personal contact with the No God who must be obeyed.
Oh, wait. I think I’ve made a mistake. They’re really nothing alike. Pardon me.”
When am I going to see a rant about new atheists that looks more like that?
So here I was, kicking the shit out of this dog, and would you believe it… it <i>snarled</i> at me.
The nerve!
Why do writers feel the need to treat New Atheism as though it happened in a vacuum? As though peaceful nice moderate religion was taking a stroll along the sidewalk at night, and then suddenly, Dawkins jumps out of the bushes, wildly lashing at the face of religion with a copy of Darwin’s <i>Origin of Species</i>, followed by Ken Ham who gives religion the same treatment with the Bible.
Those fundies! We have to protect ourselves against this out of the blue, misguided menace!
Captain Ignorant and Corporal Equivocation strike again…
I love all the name-dropping. If he only said he was taught by or went to school with them, then he could change his name to Kwok.
His only justification for religion seems to be lots of people have been doing it for a long time – not that it is true or explains anything.
This classic Don Addis cartoon still summarizes the whole thing nicely:
http://c0116801.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/091203Comic.jpg
via
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4710-comic-referenced-by-ac-grayling
Because I don’t know how to do trackbacks…
How can he talk about transcendence if he hasn’t read every book on neuroscience? It is not like neuroscientists postulate that immaterial thoughts float around in the ether waiting for a meditating religious person to collide with them. Also he seems to think that new atheists could not have read any of these sophisticated theologian because if they had, they would believe like he does. Does he really think their arguments are that compelling?
Like I’ve said elsewhere, if cherry-picking cafeteria Christians want to do a side-by-side comparison of the parts of the bible that fundamentalists and atheists ‘agree’ should be read the same way, and the parts of the bible that the fundamentalists and they ‘agree’ should be read the same way, then they should go ahead – I’m fairly sure I know which list will be longer.
Not to mention they’re still yet to present the means by which they have ascertained which parts are meant to be literal and which aren’t – well, aside from the obligatory special pleading and confirmation bias, that is.
And it’s also conveniently ignoring the underlying reasons why both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Christians believe what they believe, which is because ‘faith’ rather than (and often in spite of) evidence or compelling argument. Delugionists believe in the Noachian flood for exactly the same reasons their accept-the-parts-of-science-that-don’t-make-me-look-like-a-complete-idiot equivalents believe in Jesus.
Or, in other words, which unsupported set of beliefs you hold isn’t as important to us as the fact that they’re unsupported.
Okay, Mr Aslan, what does the term “God” mean?
Ah yes, very enlightening.
We threaten his ideas
We threaten his plan to bring peace to the middle east due to the ‘inevitable’ reform and moderation of Islam. Note the last sentence.
html fail, </blockquote>
No, it isn’t. It’s not rarefied, it’s not restricted to academic-level discourse, it’s not something that’s whispered in faculty luncheons, it’s not a polite tea with the vicar, it’s not a shy wall flower that takes its coquettish place in the corner.
It’s vulgar, and it’s common (but it isn’t stupid). It’s loud and direct. It scoffs at the ridiculous. It enjoys puncturing high-class pretentions, because it recognizes a dog sniffing after its “betters” hoping to get a pat on the head. It finds intellectual dishonesty in the service of cozying up to people in power repugnant. It recognizes intellectual and ethical bankruptcy when it sees it, and it wants no part of that.
Shorter: it says fuck you.
Addendum to my #11 – please don’t think that was an anti-intellectual screed; it wasn’t. It was a rebuke to those who cloak fuzzy thinking and caricatures in “learned-sounding” language so as to disparage clear writing and criticism. That is vulgar. That is pretentious.
No, it’s the philosophical atheism of Bertrand Russell, pre-silliness Anthony Flew, Graham Oppy, J J C Smart, Dan Dennett, Schellenberg et al. You know, atheistic atheism. Disbelief in Gods type atheism.Good fucking Christ, do people like Reza Aslan think they are actaully saying something useful or original here? It’s like listening to a shitty stand-up act telling the same crap tales of mother-in-laws, Mexicans building the border wall jokes and cutting insights into the crapness of airline food, minor cultural differences between racial groups and the donut-eating habits of the local deputy sheriffs.Only, if you write this kind of wank, you get published in supposedly high-brow literary magazines and get to talk to Jon Stewart because you are an insightful scholar of religion and culture. Yawn.If you had Terry Eagleton, Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong in a room together and you had a gun with two bullets in it, what do you do? Leave them together for the rest of their natural lives to discuss the intricacies of post-Heidegger theology while the rest of the world breathes a sigh of relief at the effective loss of some of the most annoying and tediously pointless people alive.
Which might be an issue if the religious people of the world were required to have a thorough understanding of the equivalent religious philosophy in order to qualify for the religion they claim adherence to – but they don’t; as a result, the overwhelming majority of Christians wouldn’t know their Aquinas from their Augustine and are Christian for wholly ‘unsophisticated’ reasons.
The implication seems to be that atheist must have a philosophy degree in order to reject Christianity – yet a Christian need know nothing more than to answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘are you a Christian?’ in order to accept it.
The trouble with some of these pieces I’ve been looking at lately is that they are just so frakking ignorant and stupid and vapid and beside the point that there’s nothing much I can say other than that they are ignorant and stupid and vapid and beside the point.
No matter how considered and nuanced our writings may be, no matter how good a handle we get on biblical criticism and theological theories and religious apologetics, no matter how carefully we qualify our own arguments and conclusions, some of these people will take no notice. It’s damned annoying when you spend your time writing your own careful analyses of the issues, editing a book like 50 Voices of Disbelief (which has so many people in it who are not all clones of each other and have some novel and nuanced things to say), and in my case editing a journal that regularly publishes quite pro-religious articles, even though I personally don’t agree with them … and yet someone like this can come along and write simplistic, wrongheaded articles that basically just pour scorn on everything we’re doing, misrepresenting it without engaging with its substance. And it’s obviously easy to get such pieces published and distributed to a wide audience. There seems to be a hunger for it, at least among editors.
Aslan’s piece is so wrongheaded that it’s difficult even to know where to start in refuting such a “smug unthinking cliché-filled diatribe”, as Ophelia called it. So I won’t try. Not for now, anyway.
Did you notice that the fucking idiot Azlan doesn’t even know how to spell. To quote:
He can’t tell the difference between “principle”, which is a noun, and “principal”, which is the adjective that he should have used in his sentence.
To be frank, such a cavalier attitude towards accuracy is to be expected from a dedicated scumbag of this caliber.
And I forgot to put in a question mark in my message. Oh well…
What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims–be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth–are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science.
What atheists actually say is that all metaphysical claims are ultimately unknowable and beyond the purview of science and every other form of human knowledge. As a result, they also say that people have no right to use metaphysical claims as a justification for any behasviour that affetcs other people..
Shorter: it says fuck you.
I couldn’t help but think of Tim Minchin’s very appropriate homage to the Pope when I read that.
Yes, the “new” atheism just cuts through the candy shell to get to the tootsie roll center. Fuck Mr. Owl!
I think this is why it has appealed to me so much over the last 15 years or so.
I have a few questions for Reza Aslan. Have you actually read Marx or Nietzsche? Does the phrase “Religion is the opiate of the masses” ring any bells? Have you read what Nietzsche has to say about Christianity in specific and religious faith in general? Let’s look at a few choice words:
Of course, those are just snippets. When Freddy really got on a roll, he was a bit more… well, if the soft-spoken and erudite Richard Dawkins is “zealous” and all that, what can we say of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist?
If it had been more relevant to his life in 19th century Germany, I’m sure Nietzsche would have had even less kind words for Islam, which shares many of Christianity’s moral grotesqueries and adds some of its own. Nietzsche’s least favorite Christian “virtue” was humility, so I can only imagine what he would have had to say about a religion whose most basic principle is submission.
Reza Aslan is a tiresome hack without a single original or clear thought in his head; I find it hard to believe someone who generates such repetitious drivel is a professor of creative writing! Worse than the sheer hackery of this essay is the ignorance he displays: Either he’s never known a damned thing about the actual views of the thinkers whose names he so casually drops, or he’s so giddy from the rarified atmosphere on his rhetorical high horse that he’s forgotten what he knew. Or, more likely, he’s just dishonest rather than ignorant: It seems like his rhetorical strategy was to drop big names lots of readers will recognize (Marx, Nietzsche) along with a few more obscure names (Feuerbach, Schopenhauer), thereby dazzling a largely ignorant audience with an air of erudition and authority. He borrows the prestige of philosophy and philosophers, such as it is, to advance an appalling pseudo-argument that would revolt not only the specific philosophers he mentions, but any honest participant in intellectual inquiry.
I suspect that what Dr. Aslan means by saying that the so-called “New Atheists” aren’t “philosophical” is that we aren’t politely limiting our arguments to academic circles; we have the bad taste to advance reasoned arguments against religious nonsense in public, right in front of people! The shock! The horror! Real philosophy happens in journals that no one but other philosophers read – or at least, that’s the way Dr. Aslan and the rest of the self-appointed polite discourse police would have it. I think the appropriate way to reject such pernicious nonsense is to quote another of the philosophers Aslan dishonestly cites, Marx. Specifically, I will cite Marx’s closing criticism of another of the philosophers Aslan name-dropped, the last sentence of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach:
In 1300 words of waffle, (yes, out of curiosity I ran a word count) nowhere does Reza Islan give any indication that he has actually read any of the books whose authors he so scathingly dismisses.
However, he probably did read the side of that London bus. He probably also did nearly get run down by it. (Though none of the bricks he chucked were aimed at the bus, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if they had been.)
Though he quoted from none of the authors he attacks, he did quote the side of the bus as saying: THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE. Perhaps he thinks the bus should have read: THERE’S PROBABLY A GOD. NOW START WORRYING AND DETEST YOUR LIFE.
But we’ll probably never know.
That’s what worries me.
Religion has had its grass-roots adherents and its high-flown theologians and it’s been very convenient having both. One gives it demographic clout, while the other is used any time some sophistication is needed. Not that the religious ever welcomed the kind of atheist they now claim to miss, but the fact that some real grass-roots support for atheism has developed is making them furious in a way only insecurity can.
“What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims–be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth–are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science. That may not be a slogan easily pasted on the side of a bus. But it is the hallmark of the scientific intellect.”
So those atheist scientists can’t prove that there isn’t a transcendental presence, they can’t prove that anything about the birth of the incarnate God. Just shows they’re incompetent. And how about proving the existence of the Great Pumpkin? You mean they can’t prove that either? Well, that just goes to show how limited those atheist scientists are. The Great Pumpkin exists, I have a cookery book with pictures of the Great Pumpkin and at Halloween we light a candle inside his body. There!
George Felis:
<i>we have the bad taste to advance reasoned arguments against religious nonsense in public, right in front of people! The shock! The horror! Real philosophy happens in journals that no one but other philosophers read – or at least, that’s the way Dr. Aslan and the rest of the self-appointed polite discourse police would have it.</i>
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, another unoriginal new atheist basher..
<i>Not for him the philosophical ideal of Olympian detachment. When it comes to civil liberties and especially to religion, he is an unvarnished polemicist, full — as an Age reviewer once observed of him — of missionary zeal.</i>
http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-god-botherer-20100313-q4mb.html
I’m not a philosopher (as is plain) but since when did Plato (an idealist if ever there were one), for example, not wish to change the world and instead sit on top of some metaphorical Olympus? I thought the Republic was the opposite of detachment. It’s Spartan way of organising society seemed to suggest such.
You should make a template that can be used to just cut and paste responses to the most common of accomodationists whining. It must get boring having to write the same things repeatedly.
The real meat of Aslan’s attack — and it is an attack, brutal and uncompromising — lies mainly in the oft repeated claim that the “New Atheists” don’t know anything about Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, etc. etc., and therefore cannot be taken seriously. I was listening to a POI interview of Thomas Altizer the other day, and this is precisely what he said. He pays no attention to them, because they don’t even know anything about the sophisticated atheism of people like Nietzsche. As George Felis points out, Nietzsche is easily as uncompromising and completely dismissive as people like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al., could possibly hope to be. So what is the agenda of people like Aslan, Altizer, Eagleton, Armstrong, McGrath, etc. etc. etc. etc.? And what is the difference between 19th century atheists and agnostics and 21st century ones?
First, an obvious difference. 19th Century atheists were raised within the Christian tradition. They were deeply embedded in its social and political dimensions. All the relevant cultural traditions were deeply steeped in religious thought and imagery. They shared a canonical culture. Religious figures were everywhere at the centre of cultural life. By the 21st century religion (at least in European cultures and their offshoots in the Americas and the Antipodes) religion has been largely maginalised. Not only that, but the scientific study of religion has altered our whole perception of this cultural canon. In many respects we no longer think of religion as a form of thought, but as a cultural phenomenon in need of explanation, because religion’s self-explanation will no longer do. It can no longer be taken with the same seriousness. It no longer plays a central cultural role in shaping our lives. And where it does, it often takes the form of a know-nothing fundamentalism.
A little familiarity with the actual problems of existing religious institutions would show that Aslan’s criticisms apply, not just to atheists, but to contemporary religious people and the institutions they belong to. There is, on the one hand, the popular religion of the grass roots, which is (restricting ourselves to Christianity), basically biblical and literal, little isolated communities which have about as much real impact on the lives that those people live as belonging to the golf club. The continual complaint of clergy is that people, while they make all the right noises, do not in fact practice their faith. They blend in seamlessly with their surroundings. And if they were to practice their faith, it would be in terms of simplistic appeals to to their neighbours and coworkers to know Jesus and be saved.
At the other extreme are the ‘sophisticated’ Christians. They have taken on board all the complexities of biblical scholarship, and some have even managed to make it through Tillich’s ponderous Systematic Theology, and understand that, while, at the level of the pew, Christianity is a fairly simplistic business of mining the scriptures in a selective way for things to believe in and values and attitudes to adopt, at the sophisticated level it strives to blend in with the critical attitude towards things that is the noraml mark of the academy.
So, young people, or, nowadays, people no longer young, go to seminary or theological school, and learn all that they can about the critical understanding of religious belief, and then they are sent off into parishes where none of this can be understood, and very soon, without the depth of study to make explaining it all to people possible, their own faith reverts to the simplistic Sunday School beliefs with which they began. They may say, on the side, that this is not the way that they understand faith, but this is the only kind of faith that their parishioners understand. One priest said to me once, “If I told people what I really believe, they would think I am not a Christian.” This is an almost universal problem, until the transition is made between the sophisticated faith in which they have been trained, and the faith of the people which they ultimately adopt. Most clergy of my acquaintance no longer read books that conflict with that simple faith. The struggle to maintain faith at all in the face of the incongruity between sophisticated believing and grass roots believing is simply too destabilising. It is a constant challenge to the clergy’s sense of integrity. It’s a case of beat ’em or join ’em, and, since it takes a considerable degree of knowledge and confidence to hold out for a more reasonable faith, such as it may be understood to be, most of them join in the kind of simple faith that seems to be express where the people they serve are to be found.
However, those who no longer share the cultural premises of yesteryear when religious faith was an important part of the cultural canon, will generally not have the time or commitment to immerse themselves in the ‘sophisticated’ religious faith of people like Tillich and Rahner, Schubert Ogden and Altizer, Kung and Ranke-Heinemann, or in the biblical scholarship which pours off the presses every year which, as Hector Avalos says, has become so separated from the whole question of scripture’s religious use, that it no longer serves the purpose of religion. Indeed, the divorce between sophisticated academic religion, which most religious people see as a kind of betrayal of faith, and grass roots religion, is now almost total. And it is only by pretending that sophisticated religion has some kind of traction amongst religious people that allows people like Aslan to use it as a stick to beat the “New Atheists” with. This is simply dishonest. Aslan must know that the academic religion in which he has been trained has practically nothing to do with ordinary religion at the grass roots. And if he doesn’t know this then he really doesn’t know as much about religion has he purports to.
I will add one footnote to this. The bus slogan, “There is probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy life,” is, in my view, shallow and irrelevant. The slogans on German buses, as I recall, are very different, and speak about enlightenment, human values, and our responsibility for the world and each other. This would have made more sense, and would have shown, at least, that atheists were not simply shallow hedonists, but were fully aware of the complexity of life and of our need to take responsibility for it.
For me that’s really worrying. Reza Aslan is among the most progressive, western Muslims, who actively works to modernize it. And he is highly educated. If someone like him does not understand how to deal with pluralism of opinions and open criticism things look very grim.
Wowbagger, it can’t be that one needs a philosophy degree to reject religions, as I have a few of those and I get the same inane comments from time to time – that I haven’t thought about it enough, etc. (I know you know this, but I wanted to mention that it isn’t at all clear what they are saying we have to know or be aware of, etc.) Of course, my speciality is philosophy of science and technology (notably philosophy of computing) so I get an even more focused version of the claim, like “you should have studied more philosophy of religion”. Inane. “Tell me what I am missing. Be specific.” And they never do. This is almost exactly parallel to when pseudotechnologists or pseudoscientists (or those adopting beliefs which are sort of almost there, or are touched by a lot of pseudo- in the midst of some legit stuff) who tell me simply “if you do it, you’ll realize it works”. Of course, Polanyi and other (Socrates?) philosophers have told us, correctly, there is a tacit component that perhaps we’re missing but at least tacit components can be described … they aren’t ineffable.
Roger: “What atheists actually say is that all metaphysical claims are ultimately unknowable”. This atheist thinks a lot of metaphysical claims are knowable, or at least can be unjustified enough to be ruled out, or justified enough to summarize and discuss and refine. Of course, that requires one have something like a scientific attitude towards metaphysics, in the lines of Descartes (of Le Monde, not the philosophy 101 Meditations etc. stuff), Leibniz, Peirce, Bunge, Armstrong and others. Of course, some of the earlier folks have had their metaphysics largely discredited, but that’s part of the point!
—-
Dr. Aslan also should think carefully about what Feuerbach says, too (and to a lesser extent, Marx). Maybe he’d see that some of us oppose the claims of religion because they mirror the unjust claims of aspects of many societies.
Well, of course, this is the completely ridiculous implication: you can accept religion without a philosophy degree, you just can’t reject it without one. How many people believe in religion worldwide? And how many have studied philosophy? Our side is probably doing a lot better, percentage-wise. Can’t we somehow promote this as a headline-grabbing scandal: “Most believers don’t understand their beliefs” (shock/horror, etc)!
I see: new atheists are really just another kind of fundamentalist evangelical who misunderstand that religion is actually the means to sophisticated metaphysical enlightenment through the transcendent experience, so when we criticize the lack of intellectual merit of arriving at a religious belief, we are failing to account for the enlightenment value of the transcendent experience.
Of course! How unsophisticated we must be to miss that obvious connection. And we couldn’t be unsophisticated jumping-from-behind-the-bush atheists ready to distribute our simplistic atheistic pamphlets and multi-coloured secular tracts upon the metaphysically enlightened if only we had read what Aslan has interpreted to be the necessary foundation of sophisticated theology (the fact that I and many other atheists have read these works can be safely ignored… because it doesn’t fit with his reasoning and his reasoning must be right because he believes it to be true – not because he deduced this truth based on evidence but because he transcended to it). I mean, there has to be a way to better divert any attention from the kind of pointed criticism atheists offer to the metaphysically enlightened so very busy in their transcending why misogynistic religious doctrine and the theocratic inspired bigotry it produces is the kind of problem that just keeps on giving.
It is rather unsophisticated to point out that a girl who experiences acid thrown in her face – for the religiously justified crime of going to school to learn how to read – isn’t really undertaking the kind of transcendent experience Aslan is talking about. And we must stay on topic. His topic. To do otherwise is too shrill, too militant, too strident, too unpleasant, too evangelical, too… unsophisticated and unenlightened to be worthy of serious consideration. And we must remember that religious belief that inspires any kind of real world unpleasantness cannot be criticized by the likes of the metaphysically unsophisticated. And one must be unsophisticated if one criticizes religious belief… metaphysically speaking.
How very sophisticated this framing is, Reza. We stand corrected for the paucity of our transcendent-less fundamentalism. Now which bush-dotted street corner should I attend today?
I encountered an individual a few years ago at a school board meeting discussing a opt-out policy for learning evolution. She was an elementary school teacher and had been on our local school board. Every sentence out of her mouth (and there were many) began with a memorized bible verse with a very tangential relationship to her point. She also singled out every board member by name, telling them that if he or she did not allow students to opt-out, then she would no longer consider that person a brother or sister in christ.
This is the kind of person, to which Aslan is comparing new atheists? Really? He does need to get out more.
This atheist thinks a lot of metaphysical claims are knowable, or at least can be unjustified enough to be ruled out, or justified enough to summarize and discuss and refine.
Sorry. Philosopher-animal. I got carried away with my exuberance. I should have made it plain that all metaphysical claims are ultimately unknowable, but we would only know they are metaphysical claims if they remain ultimately unknown. The fact that something appears to be a metaphysical claim doea not mean that it is or will always be a metaphysical claim. Any actual metaphysical claims are unjustified enough and unjustifiable enough to be ruled out, and if they are justified enough to summarize and discuss and refine then they are not metaphysical.
I take it the Armstrong you cite as having a scientific attitude to metaphysics is notKaren Armstrong.
The ironic thing about that is he’s certain that these things “are ultimately unknowable.” Note, “are” ultimately unknowable, not “might be” ultimately unknowable. Surely that makes Aslan the one lacking in scientific intellect?
Of course, one could also ask, if metaphysical claims are ultimately unknowable, how does Reza Aslan know about them? But that’s just me being an atheist fundamentalist.
“Of course, one could also ask, if metaphysical claims are ultimately unknowable, how does Reza Aslan know about them? But that’s just me being an atheist fundamentalist.”
Yeah! That’s a point which really bothered me. He’s stating that we cannot know something to be false because it is a metaphysical claim and unknowable, but he doesn’t seem to apply the same restrictions to those that state that the claim is true! That’s dishonest. Thatz’s selectively applying the rules to one side because you don’t agree with their conclusions, but coming up with different rules for those whose conclusions you share! Wtf, Reza? Not cool, buddy!
Well you see it’s metaphysically asymmetrical. This is a prestigious technical term that I just made up. Metaphysical asymmetry entails that theism is permitted to float free of evidence and logic while atheism is required to provide extensive documentation for every word it utters. This applies even to questions, in the technique pioneered by “TB” (Tim Broderick) in July 2009; merely asking “how do you know that?” or “why should I believe that?” or “what is your evidence for that?” is lying if you fail to provide extensive documentation of what your interlocutor doesn’t know.
The Polkinghorne shuffle:
Hypothetical? Since when has a religiously inspired individual, be they officiating at a christening or flying a plane into a skyscraper, ever been acting on a hypothesis?
If the claims of religion were merely hypothetical there’d be little need for criticism by atheists (new or otherwise) and plenty of freedom for high minded investigation for whomsoever thought the hypotheses were worth consideration.
Metaphysical asymmetry, my dear chap. What looks like hypocrisy or a shuffle to the uninitiated is merely standard metaphysical asymmetry.
Oh yeah, Ophelia? Well I’ll top your ‘metaphysical assymetry’ with… uhm, let’s see here… the ontological imbalance principle. Yeah, that’s it.
Ontology, of course, is about the division of being and categorization of beings. The ‘ontological imbalance principle’ states that anyone who makes any claim whatsoever about the properties and/or character of a being is responsible for providing evidence for the actual existence of a being with those properties, and ought to cease making such claims until the required evidence is provided. In contrast, a person who merely recognizes the lack of evidence for the existence of a being is perfectly justified in concluding that no such being exists, unless and until adequate evidence is provided.
Oh, wait. My ‘ontological imbalance principle’ isn’t anything new at all: It’s just a fancy way of stating the basic rational requirement of satisfying the burden of proof as it applies to the matter at hand. I think there’s a more general and standard terminology for ‘metaphysical asymmetry,’ too. Something special? Special something? I’m pleading with my own memory to come up with it, but it’s just out of reach…
G, well I was thinking the colloquial term for it is “keeping two sets of books.”
There’s also “heads I win tails you lose,” of course.
Metaphysical asymmetry. I like it. I was talking to an Aunt the other day, whom I quite like, who thinks that homoeopathy works. I tried to point out that if she’s right, and water has memory, then most of our basic physics is wrong. She countered that we were measuring on the wrong ‘level’ for the phenomenon. I asked what was the right ‘level’. She said she couldn’t prove it, but she knew someone who, without believing in homoeopathy, was sickly and mentally struggling. This person apparently took some homoeopathic ‘remedy’ and was soon chiper and fit. I countered that just because the rooster crowed and then the sun rose, didn’t mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. And so one for a while. She was a serious Catholic who’s dropped that for a hodgepodge of woo. The same underlying metaphysical asymmetry was there. It was up to me to show it is impossible (which I thought science did, but apparently she felt confident to reject physics with a hand wave) because it might just be logically possible. Until I did such a thing, she was entitled to continue telling the world she knew that homoeopathy was true. I couldn’t get her to see that to make a knowledge claim about the world (which homoeopathy certainly claims), then you sort of, you know, had to have a method that showed it worked, and that method would be science. Oh well.
There’s also “heads I win tails you lose,” of course.
…or the religious version: “Heads I win, tails I burn you alive for heresy.”
There’s also “heads I win tails you lose,” of course.
…or the religious version: “Heads I win, tails I burn you alive for heresy.”
…or the Catholic Church version: “Heads I win, tails I burn you alive for heresy and then steal all of your shit.”
Or the Intersection version: heads I win tails I ban you from the Intersection.
Woah, way too sophisticated for Intersection. More like” heads I wi–ooh, sparkley.”
Perhaps the trait which atheists and fundamentalists share — the one that apparently drives some people up the wall — is a frustrating unwillingness to consider all religious beliefs as being “true.”
As for atheitstic inabilities to deal with all those deep metaphysical claims, I’ll go with david Hume:
If we take into our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (XII)
MikeN, as celebrated (I’m sure there’s at least one person who celebrates him, himself) apologist Norman Geisler will tell you Hume’s statement is self-refuting. He reckons that it’s not abstract reasoning concerning quantity or numbers (relation of ideas) nor does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence. Thus, according to him, it should be cast into the flames. Where I disagree with Geisler is that Hume was an empiricist, so his principle would be based on observation (gleened up and all that) and would not be asserted as <i>a priori</i> true. Not asserted as abstract reasoning. Therefore, I reckon it does contain experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence. If that’s correct it follows that Hume’s fork is not self-refuting or meaningless. If any philosophers or smart types who are around could critique my take on it, that’d be helpful.
Now, about the logical positivists verification theory……
Hume’s remark may be self-defeating, and it only has to do with “school” metaphysics. I take it this to be scholasticism, which I agree is largely worthless these days. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for studies of the most general features of reality, informed by the best more narrowly scientific investigations.
And yes, I meant D. M. Armstrong, not K.
But don’t you think that as an empiricist, Hume formulated his principles from observation? Thus they do work under his fork? I remember in the introduction of the Treatise that he said he was starting a science of Man, modelled after the success of natural science, gleaning up information by introspection. I’m not suggesting his foundations (ideas/impressions) and principles built upon them stand up when compared to todays knowledge about perception and cognition, just that they aren’t automatically self-defeating.
This is a great shame. His book “How to win a cosmic war” was a good read.
In another context, Paul Krugman has coined the term ‘invincible ignorance.’ The term is particularly apt when applied to this gem:
” . . . the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists”).
In a 2003 Fox News poll 78% of Americans answered ‘yes’ when asked if they believed in Angels. Not metaphorical Angels, not Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Angels but actual literal Angels.
Anyone who has ever been to any church of any denomination and has heard even one sermon or overhead even one Bible-related conversation knows that many if not most of the faithful take their Bible literally. But perhaps Reza Aslan has been influenced by Irish comic Dara O’ Briain who notes that “the Bible is only scripture; it’s not gospel.”