How I see the "New Atheism" - Part 2 of 2

I was saying yesterday that something has changed. There's a sense of many people being fed up with religion, and large publishers are interested in books that relate to the public mood. But why the widespread hostility to religion at this particular point of history?

Part of it, of course, is a reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, and it's notable that The End of Faith, the first of the very popular New Atheist books was largely focused on Islam. But surely that's not the whole story. Every day there are terrible actions carried out in the name of one religion or another, and many people now see religion as having a dark side.

Unfortunately, there's plenty of evidence that even traditional forms of Christianity, which pride themselves on their love and compassion, have this kind of dark side. Much of the behaviour of religious leaders and organisations in Western countries fuels the perception that they'd rather use force than try to persuade people. In many cases, we see Christians, doubtless well-intentioned, wanting to get governments to impose their ideas on others who may not be Christians. You may say that it's your democratic right to do this, and I'd agree with you up to a point. Only "up to a point", because I think that might show a simplistic view of how democracy is supposed to work. In my forthcoming book on freedom of religion I'll have a lot to say about this.

Meanwhile, even if it's somebody's democratic right to ask governments to endorse, promote, or impose, Christian viewpoints, there will inevitably, and quite rightly, be a response from people like me who strongly disagree with those viewpoints. We're going to ask whether those viewpoints are soundly based, whether they really have the divine authority that is claimed for them, and so on.

If any of us involved in public debates claim to have some kind of special moral authority that comes from God or a holy text or a body of theological teaching ... then there will, quite rightly, be others asking whether we really possess that sort of authority, whether God really says what we claim (or even exists), whether our holy texts are really divinely inspired, whether our theological doctrines are credible, and so on.

On the face of it, after all, the sorts of claims that are made by Christian and other religious leaders sound extraordinary and even arrogant. No one should assume, anymore, that people will simply accept that these religious leaders have a special insight into reality or that they hold the high moral ground in public debate. Many of us disagree, and of course we also have rights, notably the right to express our disagreement strongly and publicly.

That is what the New Atheists are doing, and even if you disagree with their views (in part or in total), what they are doing is legitimate.

We've seen many attempts to demonise forthright atheists as unreasonable or extreme or dogmatic, or as "fundamentalist" in their own way. If you look at it like that, you're engaging in wishful thinking. The reality is that many people who are thoughtful, moderate, rather tolerant, not at all extreme in their thinking, are now suspicious of religion - not only of its claims to offer transcendent truths, but also about whether it's even socially beneficial. That's the message we should all take from the New Atheist phenomenon. The New Atheist books are successful for the simple reason that people want to buy them. And that's because there's a perfectly reasonable suspicion of religion's dark side out there in the community.

I made some of these points when I spoke  last September at the Crossway Conference - a conference of evangelical Baptists here in Australia - and they seemed to gain a lot of acceptance. The irony is that some religious people seem more willing to accept the legitimacy of strong criticism of religion than some atheists. I am amazed by the continuing attempts by many atheists and secularists to demonise the New Atheist writers and their intellectual allies.

There's been a great deal of discussion of this phenomenon on other blogs just lately. In a sense, my thunder has been stolen. But I do find it extraordinary that we have so many atheist thinkers expressing what seems to go beyond disagreement with certain New Atheists on certain points (the kind of disagreement that you get from me all the time if I disagree with some specific thing that Sam Harris said or that Richard Dawkins said), and conduct themselves in a way that seems resentful and spiteful.

Surely those of us who wish to engage critically with religion are all better off as a result of the New Atheist publishing phenomenon. It has opened up opportunities for us, and all of the publishers that we might approach are now working in an environment where criticism of religion sells. That benefits academic presses and smaller trade presses that are publishing critiques of religion. The rising tide really is floating a lot of boats here.

I’d don't know, but I suspect that Prometheus Books now sells more copies of its publications than ever as a result of the synergies that Dawkins and company have created. If they don't, they must be doing something wrong, because this is now a very favourable market for them. And Christopher Hitchens even helped out with an intro to one of Victor Stenger's books published by Prometheus. This is not a zero-sum game (and I certainly don't see Stenger complaining).

Again, I can understand people wanting to disagree with specific New Atheist thinkers about specific points - such as my disagreement with Sam Harris about certain issues in moral theory. What I don't understand is all the resentment. Apart from the unattractive emotions of envy, jealousy, and spite, the only explanation is that some of these folk who had established philosophical and historical theories are disappointed that what they see as incorrect theories are gaining greater popularity with the public.

Well, fine. But there is now a greater opportunity than ever to disseminate the "correct" historical and philosophical analyses, whatever they are. That can be done in a positive way - through actual books and articles - rather than through the unedifying spectacle of a long-running campaign of sledging on the Internet.

I haven't descended to naming names here - the specific names are pretty obvious, but not all that relevant to the point I want to make. He (and it usually is a "he") that hath an ear, let him hear.

Craig versus Harris (more)

The full video, along with comments by Sam Harris, can be found here. Harris has some interesting comments about his tactics for dealing with Craig - comments that don't surprise me in the light of my own discussion of his tactics a few days ago. Interesting, though, to see what was on his mind when he made certain choices.

Edit: I should say that I thought the debating rules were fair to Harris - I'd be happy to be the opposing speaker to a topic under those rules.

The one other rule that I think should apply to all such debates is: "No notes or overheads (or any other such crutches) to be used." Make it a real contest of the speakers as speakers. I'm talking generally, not about this specific debate.

How I see the "New Atheism" - Part 1 of 2

Perhaps the first thing I need to say on this topic is that there's really no such thing as the New Atheism - at least in a sense. The authors who have come to be known as "New Atheists" are not necessarily saying anything terribly new. To the extent that there is something new in their books, articles, speeches, media appearances, and so on, it builds in an incremental way on what came before. What's really new is that people who criticise religion in a forthright way now have a large audience interested in their thoughts. Prior to the last few years that was far less the case.

In Western countries, there's a long tradition of intellectual critique of religious teachings going far back into antiquity with the writings of Epicurus in ancient Greece and Lucretius in ancient Rome. The intellectual classes of Europe and the West increasingly turned away from Christianity in recent centuries, or at least from the orthodox traditions of the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestantism. Obviously, much happened in between.

Throughout our lifetimes, there has always been a strong body of thought according to which holy books such as the Bible are not divinely inspired but are merely human constructions, traditional religious concepts of God are highly implausible, and key Christian doctrines such as those of the Trinity, sin against God, eternal punishment, and Christ's sacrificial atonement seem unlikely or even incoherent.

Consider the 1980s and 1990s, however - the rather recent past. During those decades, you could have found plenty of material that criticises traditional religion, denying its truth claims and seriously contesting its moral authority. The sorts of secular thinkers I have in mind were likely not only to think that the claims about the world made by Christianity and other religions are false, they were also likely to deny that the Christian churches and their leaders held the high moral ground in social debates or that there was any reason to consider Christian priests, presbyters, pastors, or even the pope - perhaps especially the pope - to be moral experts.

However, during the 1980s these criticisms were seldom expressed in highly visible, highly public ways. You were most likely to see them in academic books and journals, in material published by what we can think of broadly as the rationalist movement, or, related to this, in monographs from relatively small publishers such as Prometheus Books.

The material was there for those that wanted it, but it was tucked away in the corners of the culture. That is what changed, and you can pinpoint the exact year when it changed: 2004.

Let's start by looking at what actually constitutes the phenomenon of "the New Atheism". It's mainly that the sort of material that had existed for a very long time is suddenly popular. Large publishers are now prepared to accept books that criticise religion; powerful literary agents are willing to represent such books; in some cases, very high-profile writers are writing them; and the public is buying them in rather large numbers. Some of the most prominent books have sold millions of copies.

Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry magazine, has suggested that the first cab off the rank - the first of these recent books by a forthright, unashamed atheist to issue from a major publisher - was actually Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004 by an imprint of the giant publisher Macmillan. But the really dramatic breakthrough was later that same year, 2004, with The End of Faith by Sam Harris, published by W.W. Norton. This was a more fiercely anti-religious book, aimed especially at Islam and emphasising that religious ideas actually matter because religious adherents are motivated one way or the other to act in accordance with the teachings that they accept. Harris followed up a couple of years later with another book, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is very short and provides an easy introduction to how he and many others like him think about religion (particularly Christianity), and its role in modern society (particularly the United States of America).

In early 2006, the large trade imprint Viking published Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, which calls for religion to be studied as a natural phenomenon. Dennett goes out of his way to be conciliatory to Christian believers, and his tone is far from vitriolic, but he has often been dismissed in vitriolic fashion, which tends to create the feeling on my side of the current debates that, no matter how considerately and courteously you may express yourself, you are likely, if you're a critic of religion, to be demonised.

Then, later in 2006, Richard Dawkins published the best known of the so-called New Atheist books, The God Delusion, which was supported by large publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2007, high-profile journalist Christopher Hitchens added a much more aggressive book than Dawkins' (The God Delusion has a provocative title and forthright passages, but is generally more moderate in tone than you might think). Hitchens' book is called, provocatively, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was published by a new imprint, Twelve, which has considerable marketing power, and it became a best-seller.

In November 2006, prior to the publication of Hitchens' book, a journalist called Gary Wolf published a piece in Wired magazine under the title "The Church of the Non-Believers". In this piece he dubbed Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins "the New Atheists" and hyped up their hostility to religion, as opposed to mere disagreement with religious doctrines. Since Hitchens joined the group, the colourful epithet, "the Four Horsemen" has also been applied to Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens.

You can add in Michel Onfray, A.C. Grayling, Victor Stenger ... and I should mention my own anthology, co-edited with Udo Schuklenk, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, which offers quite a spectrum of thinking from outspoken non-believers. It should be pointed out, however, that whatever books you count as "New Atheist" books ... there are already far more books written to try to answer them (often sporting titles like The Dawkins Delusion, The God Solution, Beyond the God Delusion, Letter from a Christian Citizen and so on). Apart from these opportunistic or reactive works, many other books are published every year advocating one or another form of traditional religious belief. These far outnumber books by the New Atheist writers and some of them outsell even Richard Dawkins.

So the publishing phenomenon of the New Atheism needs to be kept in perspective.

Still, something has changed. Large publishers are interested in the New Atheist books and some of these books are, as I said, selling in very large numbers. There's a hunger in the population for these kinds of books and there's also a vibe of people organising under the banner of atheism. These people are not extremists - they are not going to blow things up, take hostages, or conduct violent revolutions - but there's a sense of many people being, frankly, fed up with religion.

Tomorrow, I want to begin by asking why that might that be so.

Currently reading: Beyond Humanity? (Oxford, 2011) by Allen Buchanan

This is the new book by Allen Buchanan - of Buchanan, et al, From Chance to Choice (2001), widely regarded as the most sophisticated philosophical study of the ethical and political questions relating to genetic engineering and related technologies.

Beyond Humanity? is a much shorter work, but it contains more than its share of detailed philosophical analysis. I didn't quite know what to expect, thinking this might contain a lot of the same old arguments back and forth that I've read many times by now. But it surprised me - pleasantly. It seems very fresh throughout, even when Buchanan is giving well-deserved stick to the usual bioconservative suspects (Leon Kass, Michael Sandel, Frances Fukuyama, and so on).

In particular, Buchanan rolls out a lot of expertise in genetics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of biology to attack science-based bioconservative arguments. He also tries a new take on the distributive justice issues relating to biotechnology, which have been done to death in the past with no one ever managing to say something even remotely conclusive. He asks how the problem looks if we avoid getting tied up in highly abstract debate about theories of justice and look at the distribution of new technologies as a practical issue in much the same way as we might look at getting drugs and vaccines to people who need them (e.g. in the developing world).

Buchanan ends with a set of practical proposals for regulation of biomedical enhancement technologies. Would his proposals work? To be honest, I need to read those pages again just to get a better sense of how it's all supposed to operate. It involves a new international regulatory agency and new developments in international intellectual property law. You need to know more than I do about international regulation of intellectual property research, and much else, before the final chapter is really transparent. I know something about this, but nowhere near enough to take in, from one reading, exactly what Buchanan is proposing ... let alone whether it would work or what problems it would have. I'm happy to learn from any commenters who have also read the book and have a better understanding than mine.

But anyway, I think it's a good thing to see a philosophical bioethicist rolling his sleeves and trying to develop practical governance proposals, working with other people who have expertise (he worked on the last chapter and related research with a political scientist and an international lawyer).

My own approach to philosophical bioethics tends to be more abstract and markedly, well, "philosophical" than this, although it's also backed up by some solid knowledge of legal principles. I doubt that I can get as nitty-gritty in making recommendations as Buchanan does, but I'm very glad to see someone of his calibre doing it. We do need to move on to the detail of what regulatory regime we want, on the assumption that it's not one of the draconian ones that have tended to proliferate in Western Countries over the past 15 or so years. Buchanan is opening up possibilities for discussion here, and Beyond Humanity? is a book that I can recommend to anyone who is interested in the subject.

The Science of Religion

Gregory S. Paul has a wonderful website, The Science of Religion, which may well be worth putting in your bookmarks. Do check it out. It's a very thorough resource if you're looking for information about how more religious societies compare to less religious ones on what are usually thought of as indicators of social well-being. (Yes, "well-being" is a vague concept, and no single indicator is going to be perfect or even uncontroversial. All the same, the relatively religious USA does poorly against a raft of indicators that even evangelical Christians are likely to regard as highly relevant to social health. The relatively irreligious countries of Western Europe do far better.)

As you dig deeper into the site, there is plentiful information as well as clearly argued opinion pieces.

It's often been claimed that religion is necessary for social stability and harmony, but the data don't bear that out at all. It may not be possible to come to a clear conclusion, but, putting it mildly, there is no indication at all that a decline in traditional religious belief causes social dysfunction. There are always extraneous variables that can't be controlled, so some epistemic modesty is called for here ... but, superficially, the data seem to point in precisely the opposite direction.

This is not a surprise - I think the overall trend is pretty familiar by now - but it's fascinating to see a site devoted to the question, with many links and citations that you can follow up. At the level of whole societies, it's pretty clearly time to leave God behind.

Scientism - Jerry Coyne nails it

I don't report as often as I could on goings on over at Why Evolution Is True, since I expect that most of my readers are also among Jerry Coyne's readers. But I do particularly want to point out this great post on scientism. It's not that I necessarily agree with every word: in particular, I suspect that there are motivations for blathering on about "scientism" that don't have much to do with religion (fear of encroachments on the turf of the humanities, post-colonial shame and anxiety about Western power, and Zeus knows what else).

But Jerry has been on a roll of late - really, he usually is - and this post is a gem. He nails it when talking about the absurd double standards that are applied to scientists, who are often called "arrogant" despite showing considerable epistemic humility, as opposed to religious leaders, who are allowed to get away with the most breathtaking (and dogmatic) claims to extraordinary knowledge.

Religionists’ claim that scientists are arrogant always amuses me.  Really, who are the arrogant ones?  Scientists are nearly always tentative in their conclusions. Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on evolution, and was struck by how often conclusions are qualified by words like “this suggests that” or “this conclusion should be regarded as provisional”.  Many papers suggest additional lines of research that could support or falsify their conclusions. In the end, it is religious people who are the certain ones, the overbearing ones.  How often do you hear, in religious discourse, that “my conclusion that there is god should, of course, be seen as provisional, subject to refutation by findings of unjustifiable evil,” or “maybe there’s a heaven, but maybe not; I don’t have much evidence.”  If they relied at all on evidence, the faithful wouldn’t be able to say anything.

Currently reading - Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe by Erik J. Wielenberg

Thanks to one of my beloved commenters for recommending this book. I'm glad to be reading it, and there is certainly some interesting stuff in it - including a very transhumanist sort of approach to the idea of morally enhancing ourselves (see Chapter 4).

The book is really just too Kantian for my taste. I've never found much of Kant's philosophy to be at all convincing or even plausible, so I'm inevitably going to be out of sympathy with someone who wants to help himself, without a lot of argument, to a broadly Kantian way of looking at the world. More particularly, the book relies on a naive objectivism about values and moral obligations that it never really earns. E.g., Wielenberg's approach to divine command theories of ethics is to reject them based on their alleged incompatibility with such claims as that pain is intrinsically bad and falling in love is intrinsically good.

Now, pain certainly seems bad to me. I avoid it, as almost all of us do. I do, in fact, think that there is a point in the vicinity of the one that Wielenberg makes about pain, so I have some sympathy for what he says, and this would be worth some deeper exploration. After all, a powerful being that commanded us to inflict otherwise-gratuitous pain on each other would be regarded (by us, as we are) as evil. In fact, this would be pretty much a paradigm case of what we mean by an "evil" being. This suggests that our notion of evil - whatever exactly it turns out to be - is not infinitely flexible, and that it certainly does not amount to an idea of disobedience to a god's commands. It actually has something more to do with the malicious infliction of pain and suffering.

We'd be inclined to regard disobedience to a powerful being that commanded the infliction of gratuitous pain as good.

All the same, Wielenberg is very quick to insist that we just know that pain is intrinsically bad. Do we really know that? I know that I want to avoid pain for myself. I know that I am sympathetic to others, and therefore want to avoid pain for them as well. I know that I'll therefore make an unfavourable evaluation of anyone who is disposed to inflict pain avoidably and gratuitously, or who commands that this be done. What I don't know is that any other rational being, irrespective of its own desires and values, must make the same evaluations as I do or else be simply and factually wrong (or caught out by an error of reasoning of some sort).

That's a very difficult thing to demonstrate; seems quite counter-intuitive if we start working through the detail (what exactly is a sadistic Martian's mistake when it says "What is that to me?" at the prospect of causing pain to Earthlings?); and has never been satisfactorily demonstrated. The idea that it must be like that looks very like projection of our values onto the external universe and/or a product of socialisation.

Wielenberg provides an interesting manifesto for the possibility of value and virtue in a god-free world. I could, however, have done with something a bit more rigorous at key points in the argument.

Jason Rosenhouse on Giberson and Collins

I missed this review at the time - but thanks to Michael Ruse (who quoted it in a bad-tempered shot at Rosenhouse) and to Ophelia Benson (who then commented on Ruse) I've become aware of it. I think that Rosenhouse's discussion of the issues is of interest in itself, whether or not you want to read the book.

Rosenhouse is always worth reading on questions relating to accommodationism, evolution, the science-religion relationship and the like. If you don't read his blog (and I should read it more regularly myself) and you are interested in these sorts of issues ... well, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Sunday super, um, stuff - Thor released in Australia at end of April

The new Thor movie will be released in Australia on 28 April - a week ahead of the US. The full schedule of release dates shows that some countries even get it on the 27th (though they are in later time zones than Australia, so in practice you'll only be able to see it a matter of hours earlier in Cairo than in Sydney).

Thor has a lot of potential: what's not to like about an Asgardian god, with a whole mythological back story, being exiled to Earth in the twenty-first century, and being forced to do heroic stuff against incredibly powerful villains such as the construct known as the Destroyer?

This will be a great opportunity to cheer for the heroes (or the bad guys, if you prefer) while munching popcorn.

William Lane Craig vs Sam Harris

As some of y'all know, William Lane Craig debated Sam Harris in the last day or two on a topic relating to the source of morality - the precise proposition that was to be debated is still not clear to me even after listening to it, though it was doubtless stated at some point in the longish introduction. It was something to the effect of, "Are the foundations of morality best explained as natural or supernatural?" though it seemed, in practice, to be more like, "Given that morality is objective, can it come only from God?"

Damion has a review of it here ... and there is another review here (this one by John Loftus). I can't judge who would be seen as having won the debate from the point of view of a reasonable person actually in the audience, as you lose a great deal from having only an audio recording. From my viewpoint, merely listening to the audio, both speakers were fluent, sounded confident, and probably put the strongest arguments they reasonably could have in the timeframe available.

All in all, I'd score it as a draw. No knock-out blows were delivered. Neither speaker struggled at any point. Either speaker could have sounded plausible to someone predisposed to be sympathetic.

Sam Harris conspicuously failed to engage with one of Craig's points - that he (Harris) rejects both libertarian and compatibilist free will, so one might ask whether this must force him into something like an error theorist position. After all, if you reject even compatibilist free will, is there any sense in which any of us can ever act otherwise than as we do? And if not, doesn't this remove the presupposition that we are responsible for our actions And is that presupposition, Craig can ask, not inherent in ordinary moral discourse?

It's a bit surprising that Harris didn't address this, but perhaps he thought it best to avoid opening up a can of worms relating to free will and determinism ... and he was arguably within his rights to ignore it because atheism does not directly entail that there is no free will. At worst, Harris might be forced to adopt at least some deflationary concept of free will and/or moral responsibility, and he actually does this to a point in The Moral Landscape - he gives an account of how we can be held morally responsible for our actions in many or most circumstances. Perhaps it was better to do what Harris actually did, and let Craig waste time on this issue while concentrating on making a positive case for a naturalised objective morality.

Harris failed to attack Craig strongly where Craig was weakest - in showing just how God delivers an objective morality. Craig kept saying saying that he was not, for example, making a moral semantic claim that "morally good" means "in conformity with God's commands" ... but this left it rather confusing just what he does think it means. He kept insisting that he was making an ontological claim about the source of morality, not a moral semantic claim, but the actual content of the ontological claim ended up being very vague. To someone who was not already sympathetic, it might have sounded like no more than rhetorical gobbledegook.

Which leaves a question as to whether Harris was tactically correct to let it go save for the briefest mention. Enough was said to at least raise the point, while leaving the detailed criticism unargued - anyone who was sympathetic to Craig on this would, perhaps, have been beyond the reach of any more elaborate argument that Harris could have put. Conversely, it's doubtful that Craig's woolly explanation convinced anyone who was initially sceptical. That left Craig's main argument rather inconclusive, to say the least.

Still, someone scoring the debate formally might have deducted points from Harris for failing to engage more over this.

Let's take this slightly further than Harris did. It seems clear enough that commands from a powerful being such as God could have something like the status of weak categorical imperatives, like the norms of law, etiquette, professional practice, and positive morality. The point is: all of these can be ignored by someone who can get away with ignoring them and who doesn't care about their authority. "What is etiquette to me?"

The commands of a powerful and omniscient being such as God could not be ignored in practice - if we ignored them God could punish us. But that gives us only a subjective reason to obey, based on fear. If someone says, "What is that to me?" there will be an answer, but it will appeal to the person's desire not to be harmed. In that sense, it's still subjective.

Craig needs a reason to obey that is not based on such things as desires or fears. He might, of course, have it if the commands (or their content) were good in an objective sense even prior to being issued by God. But that's mysterious, and besides it's a line that Craig can't take. If he admits that that scenario is even possible, he is back to saying that God's issuing of commands is not the ultimate source of objective morality after all.

Perhaps he would have said more about this conundrum if Harris had pressed him harder on the issue, but Harris never did. Again, leaving aside someone formally keeping score, that may have been a smart move on Harris's part, leaving Craig stuck with a claim that sounded weak and unconvincing to anyone who was even mildly sceptical, while allowing Harris time to develop his positive account. Perhaps how we score it depends on who Harris was really trying to persuade to his viewpoint.

Though he seemed rather weak on showing just how God's commands are objectively binding in any interesting and plausible sense, Craig was effective in attacking other possible sources of objectively binding moral authority. Conversely, I thought that Harris was very strong when it came to developing his positive case for objective morality based on purely naturalistic considerations. In the end, I was not convinced - surprise! surprise! - and Craig made the telling point that the argument seemed to rely on something like faith: Harris presupposes the controversial claim that we ought to do whatever maximises well-being. Craig has a point when he says that this is not the sort of thing that can simply be stipulated as an axiom.

Still, it's a point that many people (including some of my regular readers) would grant Harris ... and once you let him that far he is very cogent and eloquent in developing the implications.

In all, this was an impressive performance by both speakers with some tactical (I assume) decisions by Harris that may have cost him points in some people's eyes ... but may not have been bad choices, all things considered. I'd be interested to listen to, or preferably watch, another debate between these two.

Edit: Thanks to the commenter who pointed to a YouTube video.It looks like there are actually nine of them if you want to follow the whole debate. To be honest, I'm not likely to do this soon, having spent a couple of hours yesterday listening to the audio version ... though I'll try to get to it at some stage in the future.