A two page spread in the National Post on Jan 7th ‘07, by Damon Linker criticizes the ‘New Atheists’ of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens. Here is the online version of the article. Linker is the author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege. Mark Twain said, “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” I am disregarding his advice and taking on a newspaper anyways.
Linker tries to discredit these recent atheist books, while trying not to upset anyone except for real atheists. In trying to keep the readers of the National Post happy, he attempts to shoot down some valid arguments that, although blunt, are true. As I have not read any of Linker’s books, I only know him from this article, which portrays him as an agnostic. Agnosticism is a fence sitting stance and is a huge cop out of atheism, based on flawed logic. Agnostics generally view the probability of there being a god and not being a god as in the same realm, where atheists view the probability of god existing to be unimaginably small.
Linker’s main arguments are that these “New Atheists” are not new, that they are not liberals, and their political goals are not clearly defined.
Central to Linker’s article is the idea that these ‘New Atheists” are not new. Advocation of atheism has been around for centuries. There is nothing wrong with regurgitating historic ideas with a modern twist. If old ideas were never revisited, they would fade away into history. In the past, true atheists as seen today were hard to come by; deists were more common than atheists. These deists of yesterday would almost definitely be atheists in today’s world.
It is also worth noting that none of these authors have given themselves the title of “New Atheists.” The term new atheist is just a term constructed by the media.
Linker claims that the new atheists are “brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith,[and] out to rack up conversions.” Obviously, they are out to get conversions. That is why they wrote their respective books. I fail to see the problem with trying to get converts. The world would be a better place if people removed faith from their lives. Also, Dawkins et. al. are not trying to convert people to their faith, because an atheist’s world view does not involve faith. They are simply trying to get people to rid their life of faith and to think. Having faith is a dangerous mindset that does not achieve predictable results in most areas of life. For example, imagine what would happen if plane manufacturers had faith that their planes were safe without actually testing them.
<off on tangent> Here is a quick exercise. Go back and read the previous paragraph and replace the word faith with blind faith. There is no difference between the meaning of these two phrases. Remember, every time you see the word faith, think blind faith. </tangent>
Linker finds these authors to be illiberal because traditionally, liberals should be tolerant of any faith and “take no position on theological issues.” Linker defines a liberal as someone who will “accept intellectual variety.” The problem is that religion does not have any intellectual merit. I do agree that these atheists do not fit nicely into the liberal category. This does not matter. It is a waste of time to plot these authors on an outdated, one-dimensional political scale.
On politics, Linker criticizes “the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims.” He is unclear whether these authors want to achieve secular politics or a completely secular society. I am quite confident that all of these authors would be happy with a completely secular society in which religion has been forgotten. In this case, religion would not have been abandoned because it was taken away by a secular, totalitarian government, but society as a whole would have replaced archaic religious dogma with science and reason.
In this article, Linker has missed the main point of these authors and clumsily tried to shoot down some of the trivial aspects of their books. The new atheists of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens are just trying to get people to think. If people actually thought things through instead of taking things on faith, these authors would be satisfied.
Adrian Corscadden
Entries (RSS)