Opinion of internet atheists

[DemPGH]

Many of them are just "making hay" and are kind of trite, IMO. But some of them are good, it's just that many figure that since we agnostics and atheists are like 20% of the population, we'll listen to them. Not always, no.

I don't know if you could call them Internet atheists or not, but I really like Penn & Teller. They are terrific. Penn going through the plagues of Egypt with Teller pulling all those tricks has me in stitches every time I see it.

[DemPGH]

I took "internet atheists" to be a slightly derogatory term aimed at defining the known and unknown quantities who "evangelize" atheism in pop culture. I think there are good ones and bad ones. Dawkins is a run-of-the-mill academic who has just greedily found a way to make hay, and he knows that isolated, lonely folks will flock to what he says as the words of a rock star. I read The God Delusion and was thoroughly unimpressed. In fact I don't remember much that he said. There were a few good things in there, but it was a large majority of straw men and ad hominem stuff.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is very good, a lesser known academic at FSU named Michael Ruse is very good, and in entertainment, I surely think Penn and Teller would give BRTD the entertainment that he so much desires. if you desire "original" atheism and can't get off on P&T, then you don't desire anything original. Those guys are good.

I've mentioned before that I was never really what you would call religious - church when I attended as a young fellow was more social for me as I think it is for most folks, but as my knowledge of ancient history, ancient humans, and the Bible's many, many multitude of contradictions and errors mounted, I realized that it no way was the Bible the word of God and that God had never advised any human beings on anything.

[DemPGH]

DemPGH, what's your opinion of the late Christopher Hitchens? A lot of his broadsides make for entertaining reading and hold up decently, but they also strike me as often argued in bad faith, in this case meaning from questionable historical and anthropological angles and at times in service of the awful geopolitical ideologies that he ended up in hock to.

The gentleman in your signature is Michael Shermer, right? I've always had a good deal of respect for him. Seems like a nice, honest guy who happens to devote his time to advocacy for a cause with which I disagree.

Yes, I'm a pretty big fan of Michael Shermer - both his message and his demeanor. He's low key and even when confronted with something outrageous he very calmly replies, "Well that's not likely because of Point A, B, and so on." What I've read about him suggests he's eclectic like I always was, that his religiosity, like mine, was always very moderate, and then later he became an entrenched agnostic whose beef is more with religion, New Age philosophy, the supernatural, and so forth. That's basically where I am as well. I don't seek out people to whom I will argue against the existence of God although I'm not shy about my agnosticism if someone asks or if chance to discuss the subject comes up. I know I've dropped my share of comments that have caused a few folks to say, "what?" - but otherwise I'm not in-your-face like a Dawkins or even a Hitchens.

Speaking of Hitchens, I've frankly not read a whole lot, but what I have read suggests to me that he's a perfectly fine voice to have in the mix. One of these summers when the days are longer and my workload a little lighter I will have to pick up one of his books just so I can say I read it. In the instances that I've seen him speak I thought he was fine. But I want to echo one or two other posters here and say that I as well seldom read an "atheist book." I read Dawkins' book mainly because of all the hoopla it generated.

Dawkins always seems to be sneering and carping, even during friendly exchanges, and of course I have seen him outright belittle people. I "learned at the feet" of Carl Sagan, so to me that's unacceptable. I could write a chapter on how much Sagan has meant to me over the years.

I took "internet atheists" to be a slightly derogatory term aimed at defining the known and unknown quantities who "evangelize" atheism in pop culture.

I think your intuition is in sync with most of what I looked up.  

I also think I might be tempted to quibble with some of the rest of your post--Dawkins is a typical academic??  I certainly hope not--but I also haven't voted in this poll and don't intend to, so I won't quibble.

Just nice to learn some newspeak now and again.

Oh, I should qualify and say that I think a lot of Dawkins' internal opinions are probably shared by a lot of academics, but his delivery and demeanor are not. Dawkins is a case-in-point where the how outshines the what that's being said.

[DemPGH]

Not that it really needs to be refuted, but I find the WMS stuff amusing, so I'll go. I've been called an off-the-charts, out-of-control egomaniac before, and now Afleitch (whose posts about religion are among the most insightful on the page), Dibble (who is among the most detached and logical posters), and Memphis (who is refreshingly direct, but IMO not disrespectful) are bigots. I suppose that comes with the terrain of daring to have the shocking audacity to talk about our non-belief. In WMS's handwringing and in Mikado's rant I see a breathtaking level of anxiety, angst, and uncertainty regarding faith - to a degree that their own fear of their own potential disbelief could be the source. But that's only speculation that to me makes sense. "Let us have our myths!" appears to be the cry. Well, no one wants to take anyone's myths. It's just that for the non-believer, casting doubt on "the sacred stories" is a significant part of the journey to non-belief that current knowledge demands. And for most atheists, the journey to non-belief is a rich, fulfilling cognitive awakening. You can't tell them to shut up about it or take insult when they do talk about it. Doubt is a way of life, not always a weapon.

So to say, for e.g., that it's not physically possible for someone to rise from the dead, or to work marvels, is 1) "eff you, dad!!XX111" or 2) breaking a taboo just for the thrill of it. Spare me. That displays a breathtaking lack of understanding of the atheist movement. I get no thrill out of saying it's not possible for a body to rise from the dead, e.g. It's more like if I had to give rational reasons for why Santa Claus does not exist to a group of adults who believed in Santa Claus. That would frankly not give me any pleasure. So there is not a thing wrong with expressing doubts over mythological story-telling, calling religion mythology, or embracing disbelief. People are not going to to simply shut up about their disbelief because someone dislikes having their sacred stories challenged.

[DemPGH]

There is one major difference between material/rational truth and metaphysical truth: the latter is inherently subjective and personal, the latter is universal. One's spiritual beliefs are true, but only to the person who holds them. Rationality, like it or not, is humanity's common language. It is the tool through which we can interact, and find the common ground to act as a collective. It is what we can all agree on, without relinquishing our individual metaphysical thought. The distinction isn't between truth and falsehood, but rather between objective and subjective truth. "Objective" is not an adjective that gives superior value to truth: it simply means "a truth that does not depend from the observer", a truth that is the same to all.

A major issue arises, however, when people attempt to impose their own metaphysical thought to others: there comes organized, institutional religion - religion as a tool of social control - which is, IMO, a perversion of spirituality. There is nothing wrong against people confronting and debating their respective metaphysical beliefs - to the contrary, this is a formidable experience for human intellect. However, as soon as one assumes that what is true to him must be true to all, terrible things start happening. Secularism, thus, simply means preventing this from happening, and preserving the liberty of all to find their own beliefs without being forced into some through socialization.

Well, we've happened onto a wonderful discussion now. This I agree with. I think in a warm and fuzzy, philosophical sense the arts have every right to construct the world as they see it. They have to. Because it's not about empiricism, it's about poetics and impressions and music and mood and so on. I've defended the arts elsewhere, because I think they are very useful and should not be relegated to third tier status. But the arts have limits. In the past the arts have not acknowledged those limits, of which I generally mean the Church, and the arts tend to be just as conformist as science, only along different lines. Science at the very least says, okay, let's see the evidence. If it can't be produced, then it doesn't make it. I don't even know that the arts are about that - the arts are more, I think, about conforming one's ideology to some thinker or philosopher or performer who is revered.

When investigating the cosmos, you don't just make up something because you feel it's right and that's it. It's why science is not a religion, and the leading thinkers in science are not popes. So if we want to know something about the subatomic world, do we ask a leading physicist, or Walt Whitman? I would hope the physicist. Because he or she has done the work with the proper technology and run the tests.

Understanding the universe empirically is not a fool's errand at all, I will add. Ask Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leeuwenhoeck (discovered microbes - "animalcules"), Mendel, Curie, Einstein, Sagan, Hawking, and there are, of course, many more, many of whom have built upon the previous generation's knowledge quite substantially. I mean, from Kepler's law of harmony Newton more or less invented the principles of calculus to explain what Kepler could not.

[DemPGH]

Yes, I suppose the arts do have limits. Didn't produce zyklon-b or thalidomide, for instance.

Nope, but you know what I'm going to say: to whom should we credit the Inquisition, the crusades, and the conquests, now?

It's trial and error. We discover the law of harmony, but we get Zyklon-B. Thank goodness Zyklon-B is the exception.

[DemPGH]

Thank goodness Zyklon-B is the exception.

Is it? I'd like to agree with you, because I'd like to agree that Zyklon-B is the exception to anything, but how exactly is this to be determined? (I ask primarily in the interest of clarifying the terms of discussion, not because I don't understand what you're saying.)

Well, against the overall good that scientific progress has wrought, I think it's a little asinine to bring up Zyklon-B as a reason why scientific methodology and progress are not beneficial, but then again I am considering what is surely a lockstep, conformist humanities perspective in bringing up something like that, and in Mikado's jaw-dropping preference for lack of knowledge over knowledge. You know, there are people who like to know how things work, and how things are ordered, and it's not enough to just make up something out of the fantasy world to explain it.

Truthfully, to cite an example that affects us on a tangible, everyday level, I don't particularly find it very inviting to go back to a time when the life expectancy was 30, there were plagues, people lived amidst animal dung, and we used torches and fires in the middle of our dwellings to keep warm, and of course breathed in all that smoke all day and night. Science has benefitted humans from cooking to medicine to building tools to both explore and to make our lives easier. I don't see any further need for justification or rationale at this point in time. It's in Francis Bacon's The New Organon. And I see it as an extreme expression of ARROGANCE to demand any philosophic rationale beyond that.

Frankly, and I do not want to be overly presumptuous, but if Al and Mikado represent the humanities perspective, I am finished defending the humanities. That's it for that, and in that attitude I have been educated, but I surely don't think that kind of view is uniform. If it is, the folks in the humanities hide it reasonably well.

The point isn't "science can do bad things," it's that "scientific 'progress' is not inherently good, but its advocates take it to be as such and make little effort to philosophically justify that contention."  There's an arrogance involved in people attempting to bring order to chaos or whatnot and neglecting to realize that a substantial amount of humanity finds refuge, beauty, and grandeur in that chaos that they're beating back and don't want it to vanish.

Put simply, in the battle between trying to further understand the universe and accepting life, nature, and the universe itself as chaotic, beautiful, and terrible unknowable mysteries.  I side with the chaos over the order, with celebrating the unknown over the efforts to "know," and I resent the idea that "science" is ideologically championed as "a good thing" that should be blindly furthered without questioning.


EDIT: I should clarify.  I keep seeing goals like "furthering human knowledge" given without seeing even an attempt to justify why "furthering human knowledge" is in any way a desirable goal using any sort of moral philosophy.  Science's advocates have become arrogant enough that they neglect to use any sort of philosophic framework to justify the pursuit of more "truth," which, like all information, is quite possible of having drastic, lethal results.  Astronomy improved trajectories for rockets and ballistic missiles, aeronautics allowed for the deaths of millions in aerial bombing raids, chemistry allowed (and allows) for mass poisoning, biology for the intentional cultivation of illness, and physics tampers with the fundamental building blocks of the universe and unimaginable power.  Why is this allowed?  How can scientists justify their "right" to further research in these fields?  Where is the philosophic justification for why the furthering of knowledge in these fields is at all desirable?  Science used to be a subdiscipline of philosophy, which was as it should be.  Its divorcing from morality and its complementary status to metaphysics has produced a field allowed to tamper with the very foundational building blocks of life without any sort of extensive soul searching as to why this quest to further humanity's understanding of the universe is even a desirable goal to begin with.

Francis Bacon's Novum Organum - The New Organon. Read that. It's the ultimate expression of humility. It's overwhelmingly arrogant to simply make things up to explain the workings of the universe. I could turn your reasoning right around and say, what justification can you provide for wishing to do that in era of electron microscopes, atom smashers, and the Hubble telescope?

[DemPGH]

DemPGH, you are aware of Francis Bacon's attitude towards Imperialism, right? And no you can't properly separate that from his 'scientific' opinions as he didn't.

Bacon's empire, as I always understood it, was one of knowledge. Otherwise, imperialism as we understand it was the order of the day at that time, and no one - no one practiced it with more vigor than the Holy Church.

But let's say Bacon doesn't do it for you still. There is Isaac Newton's "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" from his Principia that lay out beautifully and succinctly the same thing. And I wouldn't call Newton a militant atheist or aggressive atheist or anything of that sort.

I find these sorts of things liberating, though, because they keep us from fooling ourselves with knowledge that's simply not real or will eventually be found to be erroneous.