Online encyclopedia article on New Atheism

Here's an article on "The New Atheists" in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's an interesting synthesis, though of course that has its dangers. It's not as if the people who are commonly labeled "New Atheists" form a philosophical school or even that any of them (even Dennett) necessarily has a comprehensive philosophical position. Once you take a hint here from one person, a hint there from another, an implication that one person says X so presumably his allies also think X ... then you'll present a composite picture that is not necessarily true to the beliefs of any one individual.

The criticisms of specific positions are interesting, and some may, I suppose, be fair. However, some are not. It's hardly fair charging someone with "scientism", which is then defined in a paradoxical way by you (not by them) and then claiming that they hold a view that is paradoxical. Someone somewhere may be guilty of a paradoxical epistemological position, such as scientism is supposed to be, but you'd better wait until they actually spell out the view that is supposed to be paradoxical before you accuse them of holding it.

The views from William Lane Craig that are relied on cannot really be used in the way that they are. It's no use saying that theologians see God as having a mind that is simple. The point is that if you start from a position of neutrality, moving in an incremental way from what we've discovered about the world, you will not end up drawing the inference that a simple mind designed something that, ex hypothesi, is incredibly complex. Human beings never see that sort of thing happening. We do, of course, see complexity evolve iteratively via simple mechanisms. However, any designing minds that we see are, in fact, incredibly complex things. If we were to draw the inference that the universe is a designed thing, the product of one or more designing minds, the natural inference to draw is that the designing mind(s) must be unimaginably complex. It may be logically possible that the universe somehow arose from a huge power source attached to a simple mind, but that is not something that we've ever seen, and it is not the sort of inference that we'd draw, based on our actual knowledge, from what we perceive of the universe and have learned about it.

In which case, we would want to know where that mind came from - the only complex designing minds that we've ever encountered are products of evolutionary development over vast tracts of time. So, given the knowledge we actually have, why wouldn't we then speculate that any designer of the universe is most likely also such a product? Either that, or if it was itself designed, why would we not assume that its designer was also unimaginably complex? The point is, William Lane Craig and the encyclopedia author are assuming what they need to demonstrate: that we have some reason to begin by favouring a theological notion of an essentially simple mind with complex contents - but why postulate something like that as the explanation of the universe when we've never encountered anything of the kind?

The discussion of how the New Atheists "must" be moral objectivists is obviously of interest. Perhaps they are. But if, in speaking to you, I criticise some social institution for having destructive consequences I don't thereby assume that having destructive consequences is an objectively bad thing. All I have to assume is that you and I both desire to avoid destructive consequence. If what we want from social institutions is that they not, for example, produce suffering, constrain human choice, and spread ignorance, but, rather, that they ameliorate suffering, empower individuals in various ways, and spread knowledge, then nothing stops us calling religion, or particular religions, "bad". If they are inefficient - indeed counter-productive - for ameliorating suffering, and so on, then we are entitled to make a negative evaluation. More generally, no one has to be committed to the idea of objective values or objective standards to make a negative evaluation of a social institution. We make evaluations against standards that reflect our actual values, goals, and purposes ... as we do all the time with other things.

Moral language may well often contain a claim of some sort of objective requirement or prohibition. That may well be part of the very meaning of some kinds of moral language. But no such claim necessarily lies in a judgment such as, "This is a bad social institution" or "This is a bad law" or "This is a bad political policy." All that's required is a sense of what counts, in the context concerned, as a good or bad social institution, etc., supported by some sharing of values, goals, and purposes.

(And even if someone says, "That was a morally wrong act," she may be using shorthand, or (rightly or wrongly) she may not accept that this means "an objectively forbidden act" ... or there may be other explanations other than that she is committed to moral objectivism.)

Again, it may turn out that the leading New Atheists really are all objectivists, but they needn't be. Even non-cognitivists make judgments of "good" and "bad", for Zeus's sake, and so do crude relativists, and they all offer stories about what it means when they do so. You really can't infer much about someone's metaethical position merely because he or she makes judgments of social institutions being good and bad.