The Atheist Priesthood

And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse puts good for evil being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about “the shadow of an ass,” which he confounds with a horse, but about good which he confounds with evil – what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?

Plato, Phaedrus
 

The modern secular worldview currently in vogue shares many similarities with religion.  Like religion, it has something to say about the ultimate nature of the world and the people in it.  It has an opinion about morality and the meaning of life, and about how we can know the most important facts about existence.   It provides its adherents with a framework with which to interpret the world, and affords them with a sense of identity and community.  There are new atheist and ‘sceptic’ groups forming every day, with weekly meetings that function much like Sunday morning Church, during which adherents talk about the central tenets of their faith, and bemoan the misguidance of others.

Given this resemblance, it is perhaps not surprising that modern atheism shares another similarity with many religions – it has its own clergy.  These are a group of elite atheists that are influential within the community that followers look up to and take as role models.  The atheist clergy are the idols and celebrities of modern atheism.  They are the defenders of the faith, and the leading voices against ‘superstition’ and organised religion.  They are regarded – even by many outside the fold of atheism – as the leading intellectuals of our time.  In this chapter I examine some of their writings to see if they are worthy of the respect that is afforded to them.

 

Introducing the Clergy

 
Lawrence Krauss is a professor of physics based at Arizona State University who has been lauded as a ‘public intellectual’ by Scientific American.  He travels widely lecturing against religion, and has engaged in a number of high profile debates with theist academics.  He is perhaps most well known for his book A Universe from Nothing in which he argues that science has shown that the universe came from nothing.  In making this argument, he attempts to do away with the need to posit a Creator of the Universe and answer the age old question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’  Given that the book appeared on the New York Times best sellers list and was praised in the prestigious New Scientist, and given Krauss’ academic credentials, one would think the book worthy of serious consideration.  So, what is Krauss’ argument?  In a nutshell – he redefines ‘something’ as ‘nothing’ and then misleadingly proceeds to show that the Universe could have come from this falsely defined ‘nothing’!  Along the way he treats us to a farcical attempt to analyse ‘nothing’; he talks about how a definition of nothing should be ‘based on empirical evidence’, and discusses ‘possible candidates for nothingness’, wondering ‘what ‘nothing’ might actually compromise’.  (How could nothing compromise anything?  It’s nothing after all!) Most of the book is about how energy in empty space plus the laws of physics could give rise to the Universe.  Of course, energy is not ‘nothing’ and neither are the laws of physics ‘nothing’, so this discussion (forming the bulk of the book) is completely irrelevant to the purported aim of the book.  What Krauss should have done is correctly define nothing as the absence of any existence, and then proceeded to show how the Universe came from that.  Instead he performs a semantic sleight of hand, fooling the gullible and unsophisticated reader, and argues for something completely irrelevant.

One of Krauss’ fans is the notorious Richard Dawkins’, the evolutionist and author of The God Delusion.  Dawkins didn’t just like Krauss’ book, he wrote an afterword to it.  ‘Not only does physics tell us how something could have come from nothing’, writes Dawkins, ‘it goes further, by Krauss’s account, and shows us that nothingness is unstable’.  Nothingness is unstable!  Nothingness is the absence of anything at all, and so cannot have any properties or characteristics.  If it did have properties and characteristics then it wouldn’t be ‘nothing’ – it would be something.  It’s amazing how highly respected ‘intellectuals’ can make such silly mistakes.  The believer is reassured in the rationality of his faith when he sees that the leading intellectuals of the opposition embracing such absurdities in their desperation to do away with the need for a creator.  And indeed that is a major reason why their works are full of such absurdities.  Thomas Nagel, a famous atheist philosopher is not afraid to put things bluntly.  He speaks of the effect of the ‘fear of religion’ in academia, and even admits to having a ‘cosmic authority problem’ himself.  Here is a telling passage:

‘I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that’

 The Last Word, Nagel

It goes without saying that such strong and deeply ingrained anti-theistic inclinations will bias anyone against accepting reasonable arguments for the existence of God, and make them be much more inclined to latch on to anything that seems to justify their disbelief, no matter how unlikely or absurd.

I will say more to say about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in a later chapter, a book which made the eminent atheist philosophy Professor Michael Ruse be ‘embarrassed to be an atheist’.  For now I want to explore another explanation for some of the absurdities atheist intellectuals come out with – ignorance; they simply have no idea what they are talking about.  What is perplexing is that many of them openly acknowledge this ignorance, but carry on regardless.  A great example is the professor of evolutionary biology Jerry Coyne, who has made a name for himself in his best seller Why Evolution is True.  He maintains a blog that goes by the same title, and has become in recent times a very influential lobbyist for the secular crowd, and a vocal proponent of the claim that science and religion are incompatible.  In a blog post dated 31/10/12, he admits of not knowing the difference between basic philosophical terms like  ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’ and that he has spends a ‘fair time ‘Googling’’ such things.  Of course, he doesn’t let his ignorance get in the way of regularly writing about these same subjects, including articles for major outlets like USA Today and The Chronicle of Higher Education.  One such topic that Coyne is fond of is free will, persistently and confidently assuring the public that it doesn’t exist.  Another is that of the rationality of scientism, which was discussed earlier, and yet a third is the supposed incompatibility of science and religion.  In a later chapter I will deal with the objections to free will and religion, but suffice to say, all three of these favourite topics of his either fall squarely within the philosophical sub-discipline of epistemology or else are closely related to it, a discipline that is concerned with broad questions relating to knowledge and rationality.  Can you imagine the outcry that would ensue if a major outlet published a critique of evolution by a self-professed ignorant individual, who admits to not knowing the difference between terms like ‘genetics’ and ‘palaeontology’, and is candid about his frequent need to ‘Google’ them?  What does this double standard say about the knowledge (or lack thereof) of the editors who publish such articles, and about the public who are content with them?  I guess that if things are that bad amongst the intellectuals and academics, then the lay public aren’t going to be much better.

Philosophy professor Quentin Smith, who is certainly not a believer in God, laments this ignorance amongst his contemporaries.  In his paper The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism he says,

‘The vast majority of naturalist [materialist] philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism [materialism]. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism.’

I said that admitting ignorance yet carrying on regardless is perplexing; lack of any awareness that you are ignorant and the false belief that you have knowledge is surely much worse.  The Ulema have an apt description for this state –جهل مركب  or ‘compound ignorance’.  The physicist Stephen Hawking put it eloquently when he said ‘the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge’.  What sad irony then, that a perfect embodiment of this compound ignorance is Stephen Hawking himself.  He begins his 2010 book The Grand Design by telling us that ‘philosophy is dead’ and that it is scientists rather than philosophers who are now the torchbearers of knowledge.  He then spends the first third of the book unwittingly doing philosophy, and making pronouncements on topics such as free will, determinism, scientific realism and philosophy of religion.  Unfortunately it is really bad philosophy, because he has no awareness of the vast philosophical literature on these subjects, thinking that philosophy is ‘dead’ and confusing it with science.  One of his bad attempts at philosophy is his defence of what he calls ‘model-dependent realism’ which is his preferred view of scientific theories.  He tells us our theories are just models of the world, and there can be many different models of the same thing and that we cannot say which one is truer than the other if they make the same predictions.  His view is essentially a denial that scientific theories are true, i.e. a denial of ‘realism’ about science; scientific theories are simply convenient models.  He gives us a few examples that serve to show how extreme this view is.  Take Young Earth Creationism, the Evangelical theory that God created the Earth 6 thousand years ago, and contrast it with the Big Bang Theory.  Hawking tells us that ‘neither model can be said to be more real than the other’, it’s just that the latter is ‘more useful’!  Brian Cox, another famous physicist expresses similarly confused ideas about Science in his book Why does E=mc2? :

‘In Science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that are yet to be shown to be false.’

Saying that a scientific theory hasn’t been shown to be false does not mean that it has been shown to be true, so if our attitude to scientific theories is merely that they haven’t been shown to be false, then we simply aren’t justified in taking them to be true. And this means that we would be wrong to say that any of our best theories from physics to chemistry to biology are true; they are simply yet to be proven false.  We do not know that Big Bang theory is true and we don’t know that quantum theory is true; nor do we know that E=mc2 is true.  It’s ironic that those who champion science as the only source of knowledge end up denying that we can have any scientific knowledge whatsoever.

∞

Large volumes can be written on the confusions and absurdities of the atheist clergy; I have only taken a handful of examples from a small portion of their ranks.  Much more can be said, but at this point I want to raise the question of why these ignorant individuals are so widely respected, and why they are taken as reliable sources of knowledge on philosophy and religion when they know little about these subjects.  One reason is the lack of knowledge of the general public.  If the public don’t have much familiarity with the works of theistic philosophers and theologians, then they are much less likely to be able to differentiate the garbage from the good stuff.  A second reason is that modern society rightly has much respect for science, and this respect translates to scientists themselves.  This isn’t intrinsically a bad thing if it’s respect for scientists as scientists, i.e. respect for them as experts in their field of expertise.  The problem arises when they are also assumed to be experts in fields outside their expertise, either because the public don’t realise that they have strayed outside their expertise, or else they suffer from a subconscious scientism that makes them think that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge that exists.  A third factor is the social taboo that surrounds religion, to the extent that religion is taken by default to be matter of ‘faith’ rather than ‘reason’, thus biasing any discussion about religion in the atheist’s favour, and setting the bar for serious discussion about the subject very low.  It is my conviction that all three of these ailments can be cured with clear minded analysis, and rational argument of the sort not found in the works of the ‘intellectuals’ of modern atheism.

I hope that this brief discussion has shed some light on the level of understanding of the atheist clergy, and gone some way to exposing their level of sheer ignorance and the lack of sophistication of their works.  More will follow in due course.  Dawkins and his ilk assure us that they have proven our belief in God to be a delusion; in fact what they have actually proven is a delusion of their own – that they have anything interesting, insightful or profound to say about religion and philosophy.

tbc