Atheism is in trouble and Richard Dawkins, its champion, is not helping, writes Alister McGrath
Is atheism losing its appeal? At first sight, this might seem an absurd question. After all, leading atheist Richard Dawkins recently topped Prospect magazine's poll of public intellectuals, while Jonathan Miller's heavily promoted BBC4 series A Brief History of Disbelief started its run last week, proclaiming that atheism is the wisdom of our age. Only fools and charlatans, it seems, would dare to disagree.
We have heard all this before, of course. For more than a century, leading sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists have declared that their children - or surely their grandchildren - would live to see the dawn of a new era in which the illusions of religion would be outgrown. Yet there are ominous straws in the wind suggesting that now it is atheism that is in trouble.
Atheism, once seen as Western culture's hot date with the future, is losing its appeal. Its confident predictions of the demise of religion seem hopelessly out of place.
Celebrity preoccupation with the kabbalah or New Age beliefs is easily dismissed as superficial - yet it is a telling sign of our times. It reflects a deep-seated conviction that there is more to life than what we see around us.
Surging interest in spirituality and growing impatience with the intellectual arrogance and intolerance of media atheists is leaving atheism stranded on a modernist sandbank.
Furthermore, its intellectual credentials are under fire. Dawkins, atheism's most articulate and influential proponent, argues that we will - or ought to - abandon religious ideas as children abandon their innocent and naive belief in Santa Claus.
It is time for us to grow up, he tells us, "leave the crybaby phase, and finally come of age".
Yet Dawkins' arguments simply do not lead to that conclusion. Nor do they stand up to critical examination. Dawkins' rhetoric implies that the natural sciences constitute an intellectual superhighway to atheism; but his logic fails to deliver on this promise.
He seems to have made the gradual transition from a scientific populariser to a dogmatic anti-religious propagandist more suited to the 19th than the 21st century.
In part, my reason for writing Dawkins' God - the first book-length study of how he moves from his scientific presuppositions to atheist conclusions - was concern about the quality of his engagement with religious issues.
For example, he ignores the awkward fact that the history and philosophy of science raise the most serious doubts about whether any worldview - atheist or religious - can be constructed on scientific grounds.
Dawkins' approach simply airbrushes away problems, such as the philosophical difficulties raised by moving from observation to theory or deciding on the "best explanation" of what is observed.
If the great debate about God is to be determined solely on scientific grounds, the outcome can only be agnosticism - a principled, scrupulous insistence that the evidence is insufficient to allow a safe verdict to be reached. Either a decision cannot be reached at all or it must be reached on other, non-scientific grounds.
As the late Stephen Jay Gould, America's leading evolutionary biologist, insisted, the natural sciences simply cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the sciences are used as the basis of either atheism or religious beliefs, they are misused. So need atheism worry about its future? Miller and Dawkins clearly think not. But I wonder.
Maybe it was once brave and intellectually sophisticated to dismiss those who believe in God as deluded, unthinking fools. Now it just seems outdated, arrogant and intolerant.
I hope we can move beyond shopworn rhetoric and have a serious discussion about the evidential basis for atheism and its future.
As a former atheist myself, though, I wonder how much longer it can rely on recycling the weary and increasingly unconvincing cliches of yesteryear while overlooking the shocking legacy of institutional atheism in the 20th century.
Alister McGrath is professor of historical theology at Oxford University and the author of Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell, £9.99).
If the great debate about God is to be determined solely on scientific grounds, the outcome can only be agnosticism - a principled, scrupulous insistence that the evidence is insufficient to allow a safe verdict to be reached. Either a decision cannot be reached at all or it must be reached on other, non-scientific grounds.
Science cannot lead to a safe verdict? Perhaps if your standards of safe are insanely high.
Science cannot lead to a safe verdict? Perhaps if your standards of safe are insanely high.
I've myself noticed that many people seem to use 'safe' in a way that it was not intended to be, namely, '100% safe', and then use at as a simple binary system of 'safe-not safe'. to me, it seems that a very large percentage of people I meet use this. So to me, it seems that a great percentage of society has 'insanely high' stadards of safe.
Then again, I might just be meeting really screwed up people.
« Last Edit: 2005-01-01 17:16:59 by David Lucifer »
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #3 on: 2004-12-13 03:25:53 »
Are rationality and faith compatible? – reply to McGrath
McGrath ignores that most people who call themselves atheists (especially those who, like Dawkins, have a scientific background) use the ‘weak’ definition of atheism, which refers to ‘a lack of belief in any deity’. ‘Weak’ atheism is a strictly rational view, whereas ‘strong’ atheism (the definite assertion that no deity exists) is itself an unprovable belief.
Superficially, the difference between the two definitions of atheism appears to be large, so that use of the term agnosticism for the ‘weak’ form of atheism might seem preferable. However, the term agnosticism is misleading insofar as it implies a neutral attitude towards religion, which is by no means a logical consequence of this view.
A hypothesis can be impossible to disprove but may nevertheless be rejected on rational grounds: For example, science cannot disprove the existence of mermaids, but few people would call themselves mermaid- agnostics and take a neutral position as to their existence. Again, rational thought leads to a ‘weak’ form of disbelief (weak a-mermaid-ism, so to speak), because the definite assertion that no mermaids exist remains unprovable. The practical difference between a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ disbeliever is merely that the former is prepared to revise his opinion when faced with evidence to the contrary. Note that this is quite different from respecting the belief in mermaids as a tenable position in the absence of such evidence.
Consider the question: ‘Does God exist?’. It demands a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. In the absence of conclusive evidence in either direction, one might intuitively assign a probability of 50 % to either alternative. In this perspective, a theist appears no less rational that an atheist, not to mention heavenly rewards etc.
But what God are we talking about? Thousands of candidates are worshipped around the world (see http://www.thebestlinks.com/List_of_deities.html), and an infinite number of equally plausible alternatives could be imagined. In the face of this infinite set of possibilities, any particular belief that is not founded on evidence has a near-zero probability of being true.
And what if the world is ruled by any of those other deities, for whom worship of a wrong God might actually be a greater sin than rationality?
I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. Bertrand Russell
Is it possible for something that has never lived to die? Only in our minds, where delusions of living deities were inserted after being born in the minds of our ancestors.
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #5 on: 2005-01-30 20:25:59 »
Agnostic means no knowledge, and how easy to put yourself in a position of utter laziness in knowledge. A question whether god exist or not is merely to be debated by us in this manner. Analyze the social implications of most religions on human life, I defend atheism because free of that which ties to a life predetermined to suffer can not help you make a better world, and those that have the strenght to accept death as an end, as uncertain as it is supposed to be because I haven't had the pleasure of speaking with anyone dead, i can look at the world and see that it can be better than suffering. Although we cannot disprove god in a scientific affair, logically it can be achieved, the human mind holds all the keys to prove why people need to believe in something otherwise unprovable by the greatest of minds, I feel the answer is right there, some of us can even withhold theories of our own. I refuse to believe in something that cannot be proven to exist, and i have proven to myself as a former catholic as well, i do not need it!
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #6 on: 2005-02-02 11:14:27 »
I think it is interesting that the first poster here refers to the recent surge of interest in the Kabbalah and New Age religions as evidence that the construct of God which abides in the minds of the human race is not "dead" yet. I would like to point out that many of the sociological experst who have been predicting this "death of God" have been talking of religion rather than spiritual belief. As such the spiritual belief will take far longer to disappear, or even to begin to disappear from humankind.
The fragmentation of the major world religions may well telegraph the beginning of the end of Spirituality, but the memetic mechanisms employed by religions are different to the memeplex that "spiritual" people hold within themselves.
Perhaps we should be interested that many of these celebrities are joining the Kabbalah or splinter religions rather than proclaiming themselves a mamber of the larger religions. This may simply be a sign of times when the politics of fundamental Christians make being associated with them unpleasant, or may be the beginning of a more widespread trend, beginning to take spirituality more personally.
As fewer and fewer Christians attend church on a regular basis, more and more of them are beginning to feel the lack of a weekly reinforcing of the Christian memeplex which used to be given by the Sunday service, their children are not being brought up with this memeplex as part of their core, and as a result their spiritual allegiances may be weaker and more likely to lapse.
This may be conjecture, and surely any "predictions" made in the past must be seen to be such, but it is difficult to deny that as a whole, the population seems to be moving away from widespread religious adherence in a lifestyle sense and further towards pockets of fundamentalists raging away at all the "unbelievers." This is likely to be a less stable social dynamic and seems more likely to isolate those groups who place themselves apart on the basis of their religion. As those groups grow smaller they will grow more isolated until they reach a dead end in their particular branch of memetic evolution.
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #7 on: 2005-02-05 22:51:04 »
I like this interpretation. Let me add this.
Memes with pure intent spread. As they hit the distant echoes of their original incarnation, a new being groks the fundamental intent, takes in the meme, transmogrifies it into local language, and kicks out a new version.
So let's take Jesus as an example. His pure intent is demonstrated in two ways.
1) He let himself be nailed to a tree - recanting could have got him out, I believe, and he chose to speak in actions to his beliefs.
2) His meme spread, because the fundamental meme had pure intent, even if spinoff memes were negative. Enough priests who sailed with vicious Spaniards had enough understanding of the 'God is Love and Helping' meme that they convinced people to spread the meme.
To take that, I think you'd have to agree that 'memes with pure intent spread' - since that might not yet make sense, how about some examples.
Martin Luther takes in the Jesus message, compares it to the enactment (vis-a-vis the Catholic Church) and translates the Bible into German. He brings the message closer. Other people also coalesce a pure message and kick out a new version. The founders of the Jehovah's Witnesses. The people who founded the Baptists, the Mormons, etc, etc, etc. Each one took the original meme, translated it into local understanding, and spread it.
Now, if the fundamental meme is 'organized religion' in general, I would posit that it spread because, at it's heart, organized religion has the pure intent to be a working social system. It desires to exist.
Similar to any system, it cascades towards complexity, and in so doing, begins a new synthesis.
What if everyone in the world had their own religion, and that was okay?
Is there a way we could be said to be practicing one religion? The DIY religion?
Memes with pure intent spread. As they hit the distant echoes of their original incarnation, a new being groks the fundamental intent, takes in the meme, transmogrifies it into local language, and kicks out a new version.
This raises an interesting sub-question: How do memes with pure intent become corrupted? How does a religious structure such as Christianity become tainted with the blood of non-believers or alternate practitioners, people who are killed or silenced simply because they do not choose to follow the doctrine in question?
My theory is that it has to do with power structures. When an individual achieves a position of wide-reaching influence and control, either by the memetic spread of the individual's ideas by like-minded followers or by installation from authorities in a higher position, history has shown there is a tendency for corruption to occur. This corruption occurs either as a result of the inability to temper power with responsibility, or the pre-existing psychological makeup of the individual.
Agnostic means no knowledge, and how easy to put yourself in a position of utter laziness in knowledge. A question whether god exist or not is merely to be debated by us in this manner. Analyze the social implications of most religions on human life, I defend atheism because free of that which ties to a life predetermined to suffer can not help you make a better world, and those that have the strenght to accept death as an end, as uncertain as it is supposed to be because I haven't had the pleasure of speaking with anyone dead, i can look at the world and see that it can be better than suffering. Although we cannot disprove god in a scientific affair, logically it can be achieved, the human mind holds all the keys to prove why people need to believe in something otherwise unprovable by the greatest of minds, I feel the answer is right there, some of us can even withhold theories of our own. I refuse to believe in something that cannot be proven to exist, and i have proven to myself as a former catholic as well, i do not need it!
I think it is unfair to attribute agnosticism to laziness. It is actively concerned with epistemology. It suggests that science reigns and it does so because of ideas such as Occam's Razor or the idea of a "line of best fit" in terms of statistics and probability. As a matter of fact, an agnostic such as myself would argue that to be an atheist one would necessarily suspend the logic that science itself is dependant upon.
Another plus is that I can still consider myself a symbolic Satanist and express my hatred of religion whenever it suits me.
hello ppl (interesting site), either I have stumbled upon a rare grain of human sanity or possibly the opposite as I sometimes wonder of myself.
The term Agnostic is always taken by the others as literal, when in fact all Agnostic ppl I have ever came into contact with are actively looking for knowledge, and are reserving judgment until there is some. Maybe its time for a new name for this rare condition of clarity. I have always considered Atheists as rightwing agnostics with an agenda .
And until there are some plausable pre-bigbang theorys, then God is certainly not dead.
Here's a little bit I posted on this board a while ago:
The classical attributes of a deity are singularity ("there can only be one") omnicience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence ('(S)He's everywhere!"), omnibeneficence (all-good), and omnisoothience (all-true). One can immediately see that the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence cannot simultaneously inhere in a single universe. If a deity were omniscient (knew everything), then it would know the future and thus be powerless to change it, but if it were omnipotent (all-powerful), then it could change the future, and therefore could not know it for certain. It's like the simultaneous impossibility of an irresistable force and an immoveable object; if one of these two deific properties exists (and they are considered to be the most important two),then the other logically cannot.
Furthermore, If deity were everywhere, it could perceive nothing, for perception requires a point of view, that is, a spatiotemporal perspective other than that of the perceived object from which to perceive that object. Deity being omnipresent (everywhere), there is nowhere that deity would not be, thus nothing it could perceive. It gets even worse. Deity must be perfect; in fact, perfection is what is broken down into all those 'omni' subcategories. thus, a perfect deity could not even think. Thought is dynamic, that is, to think, one's thought must move between conceptions. Now, thought could conceiveably move in three directions; from perfect to imperfect, from imperfect to perfect, and from imperfect to imperfect (from perfect to perfect is not an alternative, perfection being singular and movement requiring distinguishable prior and posterior). But all of the three possible alternatives contain either prior or posterior imperfection or both, which are not allowably entertained in the mind of a perfect deity.
There's much, much more that I could add, but this should more than suffice to demonstrate that asserting the existence of a deity possessing the attributes that most consider essential to it deserving the deific appelation mires one in a miasmic quagmire of irretrieveable contradiction, once one journeys beyond emotion-driven faith and uses one's noggin to divine (Luvzda pun!) the nonsensical and absurd consequences necessarily entailed.
[Sal in the present again] And I just LOVE this quote:
"To me God does not yet exist; but there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike knowledge and power: that is, to achieve omnipotence and omniscience; and every man and woman born is a fresh attempt to achieve this object.
"The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself when He might just as easily have created something equally perfect. That is a horrible belief: it could only have arisen among people whose notion of greatness is to be surrounded by inferior beings -- like a Russian nobleman -- and to enjoy the sense of superiority to them.
"To my mind, unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle to surpass Himself -- as striving at every birth to make a better man than before, we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.
"Also we are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existence of evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.
"Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being. But if you believe, as I do... that the croup bacillus was an early attempt to create a higher being than anything achieved before that time, and that the only way to remedy the mistake was to create a still higher being, part of whose work must be the destruction of that bacillus, the existence of evil ceases to present any problem; and we come to understand that we are here to help God, to do His work, to remedy His old errors, to strive towards Godhead ourselves.
"I put this very roughly and hastily; but you will have no trouble in making out my meaning. It is all in Man and Superman; but expressed in another way -- not in the way that an uneducated man can understand. You said that my manner in that book was not serious enough -- that I made people laugh in my most earnest moments. But why should I not? Why should humour and laughter be excommunicated? Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?"
George Bernard Shaw (in a letter to Leo Tolstoy, circa 1919)
[Me again] Here's my puerile little interpretation of Shaw's main objection. Sing this little ditty to the melody of "What God Wants" from the Roger Waters album "Amused To Death" (late of Pink Floyd):
God wants Aspirin God wants AIDS God wants bullets God wants Band-Aids God wants youth Old age and death God wants sickness As much as health Balmy weather, halcyon days Earthquakes, hurricanes and tidal waves God wants some folks to believe And others to prove that they're deceived God wants churches God wants states God wants love And fear and hate
God wants every goddamn thing Ain't that friggin' great
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #13 on: 2010-08-11 13:53:56 »
Yes I agree that god is not yet dead. However, contrary to the originally quoted author at the beginning of this thread "who used to be an atheist" in 2004, I think in America, atheism is growing faster and more out of the closet than ever. And I don't think it has anything to do directly with Richard Dawkins - I think he's really more a reflection of it rather than any significant cause. I think the causes of this American atheist explosion mostly have to do with the "war on terror" and its religious politics especially post 9/11. I think the 9/11 Al Qeda squad and GWB/Cheney administration 2000-2008 have done far more to fuel atheism in America in such a short time than any memetic engineer could ever imagine to have achieved on purpose. I don't think any of those most responsible for those events and activities even knew what they were causing, and they definitely did not intend such a consequence.
Re:God is not dead yet
« Reply #14 on: 2010-08-11 14:24:09 »
I think God is alive in a memetic sense, essentially the greatest anthropomorphism. As social metaphor machines our brains come prewired for anthropomorphism - more than any of the philosophically or existentially trivial characteristics we give them (omniscience, omnipotence, etc. etc.), we mostly make gods in our own image.
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