What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.
For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins's volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion.
The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza--let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith--the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history--is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness.
The new atheists remind me of other students from more "open-minded" homes--rigid, indifferent, puzzled by thought and incapable of sympathy.
Read the whole thing!
Adding to the thoughts in Schulman's article, Fey Accompli writes:
Little Bro told me that Jon Stewart recently said (paraphrasing from his paraphrase) that religion is a wonderful thing - it provides comfort and meaning in a world torn apart by…religion. That’s exactly what i was referring to when I said that it’s a naive view of humanity to think that doing away with religion will do away with the yuckiness of our human behavior.
I particularly love the attitude that New Atheists have that their own stunning brilliance and easy dismissal of religion (as opposed to the great minds that wrestled with such questions throughout history) is evidence that humanity has evolved beyond the need for it. They’re just waiting for everyone else to die out or catch up. Amazing.
It is amazing indeed. I was discussing atheism last Thursday with Professor Iannaccone. We had been discussing in class that there are various secular theories about why religion exists. These theories explain various reasons about why religion exists. If any of them have any validity, it brings up the important and unanswered question -- "Why does atheism exist?" Professor Iannaccone thinks this may be a question worth exploring...
5 comments:
Shulman's piece begins with three paragraphs that make it clear he believes atheism has made inroads. Isn't that in itself the obvious answer to his question regarding the reason (if it is true - I wouldn't know, I don't read these books) that today's atheists are more open and direct about what they really think? It's because there is strength in numbers and they no longer need be afraid. Back in ye olde days, they used to burn the nonbelievers. So now we're surprised that, when nonbelievers are freed from the threat of violent attack and when they gain in numbers, they speak up more forcefully?
And of course there are no "new arguments" to be made...there are no "new arguments" for Christianity either - certainly the "look at this list of smart Christians" angle that Shulman takes is nothing new. If you had to be a Christian to avoid being burnt, well, yes, we would expect that the smart people would profess faith (and then struggle with it).
Good thoughts, Jason. I should have clarified more what I meant by: “Why does atheism exist?” What I mean by the question is that many secular theories have recently been proposed to explain why people develop religious beliefs – it helps develop feeling of security, maintains social order, people are genetically hardwired to believe in the supernatural, evolutionary biology explanations, etc. Any of these, if true, could explain certain aspects of religion, but almost all of them make the existence of atheism seem to be a strange anomaly that lies outside the norm. If religion provides all of these benefits and if belief can be explained in these terms, it leads to a curious puzzle of why atheism would then emerge as a belief system that seems to carry very few of these benefits?
I was discussing this with Professor Iannaccone last week and we both believe that at least part of the reason is a public choice story. In the past, there was potential to gain power by going against certain establishments (at least in the US), which were typically controlled by various Christian groups. One way to try to try to gain power was to challenge the authority and reasonableness of people in power. A way to do this was to try to discredit Christianity. I think Sagan and Dawkins are two examples of academics who did make themselves financially better off by being public atheists. I’m not attributing this to their motivation, but am noting that they had significant financial incentives to be atheists.
If this explanation is partially correct, it would predict that there will probably be (and I think there already is) less of a hostility towards religious belief in academia than in the past. These were just some thoughts we were mulling over and I haven’t put a lot of time into thinking this through thoroughly. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on this.
By the way, thanks for passing on the NY Times article on Carl Sagan. It was an interesting read.
I was discussing this with Professor Iannaccone last week and we both believe that at least part of the reason is a public choice story. In the past, there was potential to gain power by going against certain establishments (at least in the US), which were typically controlled by various Christian groups. One way to try to try to gain power was to challenge the authority and reasonableness of people in power. A way to do this was to try to discredit Christianity. I think Sagan and Dawkins are two examples of academics who did make themselves financially better off by being public atheists. I’m not attributing this to their motivation, but am noting that they had significant financial incentives to be atheists.
It depends on the level of demand for public atheists, right? If there are zero private atheists in the population and no one wants to hear about it, there is no return to becoming a public atheist. Unless you had some incredible confidence in your persuasive ability, to go against the establishment in that environment is not financially lucrative - it is suicide. So I think your story would struggle to explain the emergence of atheism per se, but it might work for the emergence of public spokesmen for atheism once there is some extant atheist community.
Good point. Maybe a possible explanation is that there were sufficient numbers of people who were agnostic (I think agnosticism could be explained as emerging from a quasi-belief in the supernatural, but with a disbelief or low-level of belief in the dominant religion of an individual’s environment.) If there are enough people with either low-levels of belief and/or people who find themselves politically opposed to people in power, it might benefit someone with a sufficiently low level of belief to proclaim they had no belief whatsoever. You could look at this almost as “religious entrepreneurship” of sorts. This person would serve the function of emboldening other people with low levels of belief to oppose the dominant belief system. Even though it may have originally sprung from agnosticism, pure atheism could have emerged as a belief system in and of itself if enough people were proclaiming it and/or teaching it.
If true, what does this say about the role of atheism now that religious organizations hold little direct power in educational or political institutions today? It seems like the supply of atheism is now high, but the demand is low. I would expect to see a reduction in quantity, but am not sure if I’m missing anything critical in my analysis…
From an academic standpoint, it is curious that there is still a high rate of adherence to atheism in academia relative to the population. Interestingly, professors in the natural sciences report one of the highest levels of belief in academia and economists report the highest rates of belief amongst social scientists. Professors in the humanities and sociology report the lowest rates of belief. A cursory thought on this is that it seems that people who are the most rigorous in their research methodology are the ones least antagonistic to religion. This would support the conversation we had the other day about faith being “arational” or distinct from reason. The more rigorous an academic is in their reasoning, the more they realize that science and/or logic alone cannot answer questions of faith. This also supports the public choice story in that it seems the political/social benefits of atheism would be greatest in the humanities and social sciences which tend to be heavily left-leaning in their politics.
(Low levels of church attendance is statistically one of the best predictors of leftward political leanings. There is a very strong bimodal distribution with frequent attenders being very likely to be Republican and infrequent attenders being very likely to be Democrat. At first glance, African-Americans seem to run counter to this trend, with African-Americans being more likely to be Democrat. However, within the African-American demographic, this correlation still holds true.)
As a former atheist and an economist in training, I have some comments.
First, it is not hard to argue that atheism is a stage for many people. When considering all the possibilities, it is natural and/or to at the very least consider the possibility that there is nothing. Why does atheism exist? In some sense the essence of the idea is out there for us to latch onto. Furthermore, while we know absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is very difficult for people that are blind to any evidence suggesting a supernatural to not jump to the conclusion "God doesn't exist".
Also, I have a problem with your contention that "if religion religion confers these benefits, then it is a puzzle why atheism developed, which produces none of these". For me this highlights the tension between the "ignorance is bliss" attitude and the fact that we don't like being lied to. Ignorance is bliss only if we don't know that we are ignorant.
I'm not saying religion is a lie, just disagreeing that it is irrational to be an atheist since you don't get these benefits. I think we value (our own) truth so much that it is rational to push away these benefits if that truth doesn't come packaged with them.
That is all. I really enjoy your blog, btw.
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