The New Atheism
Dean Hardy
Charlotte Christian School
www.YouthApologetics.com
Old Vs. New Atheists
Old
New
Old Vs. New Atheists
Old
New
1)
Focused on rational arguments
against the TRUTH of Christianity
1)
Focuses on the pragmatic effects of
Christianity
2)
Christianity did have some
beneficial effects in history.
2)
There are no benefits to religion, it has
poisoned everything.
3)
Christianity has had some positive
effects on science.
3)
Christianity has and will be an
impediment to science.
4)
Books written by/for scholars; very
academic; never bestsellers.
4)
5)
Generally respectful of their
opponents.
Books written by laymen for the masses.
Written simply and easy to read.
Bestsellers!
5)
Has brought a harsh tone to the debate
between atheist/Christian.
6)
Seeks to eradicate any faith based belief.
7)
Seem almost ignorant of the basic
philosophical arguments for God.
6)
Somewhat tolerant of Christianity.
7)
Directly took on the classical
arguments for God.
Irony of New Atheists:
Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett boast about how
reasonable they are and how much their views are
grounded in the evidence.
They continuously make fun of Christians who don’t have
any evidence, but they themselves rarely (if ever)
engage the actual classical arguments for God and
Christianity.
In fact, Dawkins and Harris rarely ever engage in open
debates and they never debate Christian philosophers.
Dawkins emphatically says, “I won’t debate creationists.”
Only Hitchens does debates (see Frank Turek’s website
for those).
SES professor Richard Howe writes, “Dawkins, Harris, and
Hitchens seemingly hope that the hysterical pitch of their
own rants will distract the readers from noticing that they
seldom refute the standard arguments or put forth
substantive ones of their own.”
I am a happy
man.
Richard Dawkins
• Charles Simonyi Professor of Public
Understanding of Science, Oxford
University
"If this book works as
I intend, religious
Author of
readers who open it
will be atheists when
The Ancestor's Tale
they put it down."
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
The God
Delusion, p. 5.
The Blind Watchmaker
Climbing Mount Improbable
Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain
and The God Delusion
Reviews of God Delusion:
Alvin Plantinga, The Dawkins Confusion
- Naturalism ad Absurdum:
“Now despite the fact that this book [The
God Delusion] is mainly philosophy,
Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a
biologist). Even taking this into
account, however, much of the
philosophy he purveys is at best
jejune. You might say that some of
his forays into philosophy are at best
sophomoric, but that would be unfair
to sophomores; the fact is (grade
inflation aside), many of his
arguments would receive a failing
grade in a sophomore philosophy
class. This, combined with the
arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of
the book, can be annoying. I shall put
irritation aside, however and do my
best to take Dawkins' main argument
seriously.”
Reviews of God Delusion:
“The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard
Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for
having achieved some sort of record by
selling over a million copies. But what is
much more remarkable than that economic
achievement is that the contents – or rather
lack of contents – of this book show
Dawkins himself to have become what he
and his fellow secularists typically believe to
be an impossibility: namely, a secularist
bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford
Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or
intolerant adherent of a point of view’).
The fault of Dawkins as an academic was his
scandalous and apparently deliberate
refusal to present the doctrine which he
appears to think he has refuted in its
strongest form.”
-Antony Flew
What is Dawkins’ main argument???
Evolution is true,
therefore God
cannot exist.
And yes, I am
wearing tights.
Christopher Hitchens
Contributing editor to Vanity Fair
and visiting professor of liberal
studies at the New School
Author of
Thomas Jefferson: A Biography
Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man"
Letters to a Young
Contrarian
Why Orwell Matters
and
God is Not Great: How
Religion Poisons Everything
"As I write these words, and
as you read them, people of
faith are in their different ways
planning your and my
destruction, and the
destruction of all the hard-won
human attainments that I have
touched upon. Religion
poisons everything.”
Christopher Hitchens, p13.
Sam Harris
A graduate in philosophy from
Stanford University who has
studied both Eastern and
Western religious traditions,
along with a variety of
contemplative disciplines. He is
completing a doctorate in
neuroscience, studying the
neural basis of belief with
functional magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI). He is also the
Founder and Chairman of The
Reason Project.
Let’s challenge Sam:
“A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper,
reveals that ideas which divide one group of human
beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter,
generally have their roots in religion.” P. 12
(What has divided people in history more than anything else?)
“Religious faith represents so uncompromising a
misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind
of perverse, cultural singularity —a vanishing point
beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”
P. 25
Is rational discourse possible? Can we even talk about religion? Or Atheism? Then
why write a book to a Christian Nation?
Let’s challenge
Sam’s epistemology:
"The moment we admit that our beliefs are
attempts to represent states of the world, we
see that they must stand in the right relation
to the world to be valid.”- Sam Harris End of Faith, 63
"We saw in Chapter 2 that for our beliefs to
function logically—indeed, for them to be
beliefs at all—we must also believe that they
faithfully represent states of the world.” Sam Harris 168.
So, we can be sure that what we see, touch, and smell are the actual real world. Right?
Wrong.
"The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute.
No human being has ever experienced an
objective world, or even a world at all. …The world
that you see and hear is nothing more than a
modification of your consciousness, the physical
status of which remains a mystery.” End of Faith,
41.
"The sights and sounds and pulsings that you
experience at this moment are like different spectra
of light thrown forth by the prism of the brain. We
really are such stuff as dreams are made of. Our
waking and dreaming brains are engaged in
substantially the same activity …” End of Faith,
41.
So, to Sum up Sam’s view.
See this Tree? I can see it too! But I can’t know whether it’s
REALLY real or not. It’s likely just impulses of my brain.
But you know, I decided to write a book stating that faith in God is
foolish; but I don’t know that for sure, because humans can’t know
if ANYTHING is REALLY REAL.
I mean, I believe my dreams are just as real as this tree. So, wait,
then if I have a dream about God, then He must be real too. Um….
There I go again, I’ve confused myself.
Wait, why do I have a Christmas tree?
Ok. Now let’s look at Dawkins:
"The presence or absence of
a creative superintelligence
is unequivocally a scientific
question, even if it is not in
practice—or not yet—a
decided one." [Dawkins in
The God Delusion, 59-59]
So, is the existence of God a
scientific question?
Can we use science to
prove God’s existence?
• Can we prove by scientific induction?
– NO! no one can “produce” God unless he
wants to be his own witness.
• So, can we use science at all?
– YES! Forensic science….it can be used
to…
• Prove a criminal guilty
• Prove a worm was once in my apple
• Prove that God exists
Inductive Vs. Forensic
Science
Inductive argues from Cause to Effect:
Ex. What happens if you mix ethyl
alcohol with concentrated hydrogen
peroxide?
Forensic argues from Effect to Cause:
Ex. How did this chemistry room
explode?
Evolutionists use the SAME
Science and logic as theists!
• MOYERS: Is evolution a theory, not a fact?
• DAWKINS: Evolution has been observed.
It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's
happening.
• MOYERS: What do you mean it's been
observed.
• DAWKINS: It is rather like a detective
coming on a murder after the scene. And
you… the detective hasn't actually seen the
murder take place, of course. But what you
do see is a massive clue.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript349_full.html#dawkins
Dawkins and The
Cosmological
Argument
Um, yeah.
I am a stud.
First- a quick reminder about the
Cosmo argument…
What does “Infinite” mean?
1. An unending chain of events or line
of “things.” Only a “potential infinite”
(like infinite regress).
OR
2. A thing that is unlimited. “Unlimited
Perfection” (God)
The Cosmological Argument in a nutshell:
•If an infinite regress is not possible,
then there must be an infinite thing
that grounds all existence.
•An infinite regress is not possible
•Therefore something infinite must exist.
OK, What is an Infinite Regress (of Causes)?
The idea that the cause/effect scenario has been
happening forever and never had a given starting point.
An easy way to present this argument:
There are only 3 options:
The cosmos has
always existed
The cosmos
“popped” into being
An infinite being
created it
Two of these options are completely illogical and
scientifically impossible.
Critique of the Cosmological Argument
“All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of an infinite regress and invoke
God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God
himself is immune to the regress. *Even if we allow the dubious luxury of
arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name,
simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that
terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God; omnipotence,
omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human
attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost
thoughts.
Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets invites us to
"Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible
pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times." Some
regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would
happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why
shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even smaller
smidgin of gold? The regress in this case is decisively terminated by the atom.
The smallest possible piece of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly 79
protons and a slightly larger number of neutrons, surrounded by a swarm of
79 electrons. If you "cut" gold any further than the level of the single atom,
whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a natural terminator to
the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It is by no means clear that God
provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas.
-Richard Dawkins
www.RichardDawkins.net
I am not designed! I just
randomly evolved this
way.
Dawkins
and
Design
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” - Dawkins
A quick note on design:
Irreducible Complexity
• “An irreducibly complex system is one
composed of several well-matched,
interacting parts that contribute to the
basic function, wherein the removal of
any one of the parts causes the
system to effectively cease
functioning.”
~ Michael Behe
Irreducible Complexity
“Professor of biochemistry, Michael Behe formalized the
concept of irreducible complexity with the publication of
his book Darwin's Black Box. Surprisingly, it was Darwin
himself who actually introduced the concept of
irreducible complexity in his book The Origin Of Species
when he stated: "if it could be demonstrated that any
complex organ existed which could not possibly have
been formed by numerous successive slight
modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown."
Darwin did not use the term irreducible complexity; but
that is what he was talking about.” –
www.irreduciblecomplexity.com
Clip from Expelled
• Ben Stein takes on Richard
Dawkins in the conclusion of
expelled on the issue of
irreducible complexity and
the explanation of “apparent
design”
I have lots of
books on a wall
behind me…so I
am really smart.
Interesting
Dawkins
Quotes
Interesting Dawkins Quotes:
“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the
hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that
things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind,
but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all
purpose.
Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it
has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a
nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in
a slaughterhouse.)…if late-aborted embryos with nervous
systems suffer – though all suffering is deplorable – it is not
because they are human that they suffer. There is no general
reason to suppose that human embryos at any stage suffer
more than cow or sheep embryos at the same developmental
stage.”
Notice:
The equality of man in animal in his quote…
Notice the Contradiction? (On Good/Evil/Morality)
Interesting Dawkins Quotes:
On our Purpose:
“We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more
copies of the same DNA…It is every living object's sole
reason for living…that the purpose of all life is to pass on their
DNA means that all living things are descended from a long
line of successful ancestors…which can best be understood
as fulfilling a purpose of propagating DNA…There is no
purpose other than that.” (On Marriage and Sexuality…)
Dawkins’ Anthropology:
“What is a human? What is a human self, a human individual?
That's more difficult. It's not a question I can answer - it's not a
question any scientist can answer at present, though I think
they will. I believe it will turn out that what a human is, is some
manifestation of brain stuff and its workings…I'm certainly
happy that we are a product of brains and that when our
brains die, we disappear.”
Interesting Dawkins Quotes:
Ethics:
“What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a
genuinely difficult question.”
“If somebody used my views to justify a completely self - centered
lifestyle, which involved trampling all over other people in any way
they chose roughly what, I suppose, at a sociological level as social
Darwinists do - I think I would be fairly hard put to argue against it on
purely intellectual grounds. I think it would be more: “This is not a
society in which I wish to live. Without having a rational reason for it
necessarily, I'm going to do whatever I can to stop you doing this.”
I couldn't, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did
something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, “Well, in
this society you can't get away with it’ and call the police.”
I realize this is very weak, and I've said I don't feel equipped to
produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce
arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it's a
separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths.”
“I see absolutely no reason why, understanding the way the world is, you
therefore have to promote it. The darwinian world is a very nasty
place: the weakest go to the wall. There's no pity, no compassion. All
those things I abhor, and I will work in my own life in the interests of
thoroughly unDarwinian things like compassion.”
I am not James
Dean, but man
I am trying…
Hitchens
and
Morality
But first,
What is the Moral Argument?
C.S. Lewis’ argument:
Lewis’s Premise (1): Everyone knows, and so
believes, that there are objective moral truths.
Lewis’s Premise (2): Objective moral laws are very
peculiar in that they are quite unlike Laws of Nature
and “natural” facts.
Lewis’s Premise (3): The hypothesis that there is an
intelligence behind, or beyond, the natural facts that
implants the knowledge of right and wrong in us
and serves as the foundation for good judgments
and the best explanation of objective moral facts.
Does Clive use any Bible Verses or even argue from Christianity here?
The Moral Argument
continued
Conclusion: The existence
and nature of objective
moral facts supports the
existence of an
intelligence behind them
serving as their basis and
foundation.
The Moral Argument
for the Existence of God
1. Every law has a lawgiver
2. There is an absolute Moral law
3. Therefore, there is an absolute Moral
Lawgiver
Michael Ruse – agnostic professor
of philosophy and zoology at
Florida State University
"It is not that the atheists are having a field day
because of the brilliance and novelty of their
thinking. Frankly - and I speak here as a
nonbeliever myself, pretty atheistic about
Christianity and skeptical about all theological
claims - the [atheistic] material being churned out is
second rate. And that is a euphemism for
"downright awful."
It is simply that it (and the other works) is not very
good. For a start, Dawkins is brazen in his
ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to
mention the history of science).
Dawkins misunderstands the place of the proofs, but
this is nothing to his treatment of the proofs
themselves. This is a man truly out of his depth."