New Atheists
My dad sent me this article in Wired about what it calls the New Atheists (represented by Dawkins, Dennett, and others) a while ago, and I finally managed to direct my procrastination to it.
It only lightly touches the actual arguments employed by Dennett and others, but paints a picture that agrees with my experience: small and seemingly necessary intellectual concessions to secularism being the foundation of an inexorable chain of logic that ends up defeating almost any religious hypothesis; the ability of some to defend religion in the abstract but unable to defend any particular doctrine; intellectually honest theologians fighting a losing battle, playing the game of trying to find what's left after you've removed everything that comes under criticism.
This is old stuff. Neverminding the ancient skeptical and atheistic traditions, we can point back just a hundred years or so to see William James struggling with the same stuff. Religion, which in most of its manifestations makes some concrete predictions about the way the world works, gets chased back into an unfalsifiable position and relegated to "another realm." James sees religion as collapsing into a belief in the Absolute, with this belief being essentially constituted by a optimism--the faith that the best of things will come, or already are, or whatever. (James seems to ultimately adopt a "meliorist" position on grounds that the intellectual consensus appears to deem insufficient)
I feel like I've been through all of this, personally. That lands me in a camp similar to the author of the article: fascinated and tempted, but with reservations. One of my private passions which I don't let air out very often is learning about odd cults and religious sects. (I do this partly to help reinforce the acknowledgment of the failure of naive religious pluralism) Just the other day, sorting through links that have been stored on my computer from years ago, I rediscovered the Religious Movements Homepage Project, and was thrilled. It's worth a looksee.
As I read about these groups, I pass mental judgment on them based on crude heuristics of whether I like their message or pluck. I put aside concerns about whether they are being careful in their embrace of their position (the answer is always "no," anyway) and think about the aesthetic of their rebellion, or the themes they are trying to get across.
And on that standard, I have to say I really like the so-called New Atheists. I mean, damn. What gall. And what a cause. After a century and a half of have Enlightenment thought being beaten, slowly but surely, out of the public consciousness (despite its success in the sciences), I'm happy to see it shaking off the religious fanatics, the quacks, the intellectually lazy, the postmodernists, and others to fight its way back into the mainstream. People do need to be reminded that there is such a thing as the truth and certain ways that have proven to reliably get us there, despite how uncomfortable the truth may be. The New Atheist message that allowing or even encouraging people to strategically avoid putting the beliefs that guide them most under scrutiny is recipe for social and, albeit in a much less tangible way, personal disaster is one I can really get behind. Thank god (ironic...) somebody is throwing those punches.
But like the author, I would always put fallibilism first (although I don't think that that should prevent anyone from making their crusade as long as they are listening to the opposition). And I'm squeamish about internalizing their message.
There were two tangents in the article that I found fascinating. The first was the vision, shared by Harris and Dennet, or a "religion of reason." In my utopian moods I think about just such a thing and how it would work. I think it could do a lot of good.
The other point, related to this, was Dennett's call for a lack of inquiry into the (biological, I presume he believes) "defaults" of morality. He envisions investigation of these most sacred instincts being the special province of philosophers--"mental risk-takers and scouts."
I have mixed feelings about this conclusion. I wonder where applied ethicists, like my friend Asher (whose position I have much more respect for since last summer), would fall in that system. And inquiry into those "sacred" instincts should be regarded as natural and important. The idea of taboo inquiry is appalling to me.
But where I agree is with something that appears to be a kind of epistemological consensus that I've gotten after surveying a number of people, many of whom on-line (ranging from the Kantians-turned-Hegelians to jeffrock to i_am_lane, observing people in action, and doing my own reading (epistemology, pragmatism, even Nietzschean perspectivalism.) It seems like everybody is agreeing that the way to make progress is to start from wherever you are--Hegelian Notions, strong intuitions, whatever, they all seem like the same thing to me--and work out from there.
What I've been trying to articulate for a while now is a kind of formal system of modeling this sort of thing. The topology of the epistemic space, if you're willing to make that analogical leap with me, is one of great importance if we're really serious about this approach.
Suppose we talk about a set of possible...I'm not sure what to call these. I'm thinking something like "cognitive state" or the totality of one's beliefs, memories, percepts, etc. An entire perspective, or one's complete set of current intuitions. We seem to want to establish a relation between them such that one is justified in transitioning between one and another of them. So we would say something like:
J(x,y) iff one is justified in transitioning from cognitive state x to cognitive state y
('m thinking this move of making justification depend entirely on the contents of cognitive states is justified due to a vaguely internalist constraint on justification. That's controversial, of course...)
This is kind of cool--we can now represent the set of all possible cognitive states as a directed graph of justification.
But this raises a whole shitload of questions! Convergence theories of truth like Peirce's (and Hegel's?) seem to depend on there being a node that is "most justified"--the end-state of all justified transitions. But this isn't guaranteed to exist, right? Don't we need an existence proof? There could be cycles, there could be multiple maxima, etc. What would be the consequences of multiple maxima? Skepticism? Pluralism?
I really ought to get back to studying.
EDIT:
It only lightly touches the actual arguments employed by Dennett and others, but paints a picture that agrees with my experience: small and seemingly necessary intellectual concessions to secularism being the foundation of an inexorable chain of logic that ends up defeating almost any religious hypothesis; the ability of some to defend religion in the abstract but unable to defend any particular doctrine; intellectually honest theologians fighting a losing battle, playing the game of trying to find what's left after you've removed everything that comes under criticism.
This is old stuff. Neverminding the ancient skeptical and atheistic traditions, we can point back just a hundred years or so to see William James struggling with the same stuff. Religion, which in most of its manifestations makes some concrete predictions about the way the world works, gets chased back into an unfalsifiable position and relegated to "another realm." James sees religion as collapsing into a belief in the Absolute, with this belief being essentially constituted by a optimism--the faith that the best of things will come, or already are, or whatever. (James seems to ultimately adopt a "meliorist" position on grounds that the intellectual consensus appears to deem insufficient)
I feel like I've been through all of this, personally. That lands me in a camp similar to the author of the article: fascinated and tempted, but with reservations. One of my private passions which I don't let air out very often is learning about odd cults and religious sects. (I do this partly to help reinforce the acknowledgment of the failure of naive religious pluralism) Just the other day, sorting through links that have been stored on my computer from years ago, I rediscovered the Religious Movements Homepage Project, and was thrilled. It's worth a looksee.
As I read about these groups, I pass mental judgment on them based on crude heuristics of whether I like their message or pluck. I put aside concerns about whether they are being careful in their embrace of their position (the answer is always "no," anyway) and think about the aesthetic of their rebellion, or the themes they are trying to get across.
And on that standard, I have to say I really like the so-called New Atheists. I mean, damn. What gall. And what a cause. After a century and a half of have Enlightenment thought being beaten, slowly but surely, out of the public consciousness (despite its success in the sciences), I'm happy to see it shaking off the religious fanatics, the quacks, the intellectually lazy, the postmodernists, and others to fight its way back into the mainstream. People do need to be reminded that there is such a thing as the truth and certain ways that have proven to reliably get us there, despite how uncomfortable the truth may be. The New Atheist message that allowing or even encouraging people to strategically avoid putting the beliefs that guide them most under scrutiny is recipe for social and, albeit in a much less tangible way, personal disaster is one I can really get behind. Thank god (ironic...) somebody is throwing those punches.
But like the author, I would always put fallibilism first (although I don't think that that should prevent anyone from making their crusade as long as they are listening to the opposition). And I'm squeamish about internalizing their message.
There were two tangents in the article that I found fascinating. The first was the vision, shared by Harris and Dennet, or a "religion of reason." In my utopian moods I think about just such a thing and how it would work. I think it could do a lot of good.
The other point, related to this, was Dennett's call for a lack of inquiry into the (biological, I presume he believes) "defaults" of morality. He envisions investigation of these most sacred instincts being the special province of philosophers--"mental risk-takers and scouts."
I have mixed feelings about this conclusion. I wonder where applied ethicists, like my friend Asher (whose position I have much more respect for since last summer), would fall in that system. And inquiry into those "sacred" instincts should be regarded as natural and important. The idea of taboo inquiry is appalling to me.
But where I agree is with something that appears to be a kind of epistemological consensus that I've gotten after surveying a number of people, many of whom on-line (ranging from the Kantians-turned-Hegelians to jeffrock to i_am_lane, observing people in action, and doing my own reading (epistemology, pragmatism, even Nietzschean perspectivalism.) It seems like everybody is agreeing that the way to make progress is to start from wherever you are--Hegelian Notions, strong intuitions, whatever, they all seem like the same thing to me--and work out from there.
What I've been trying to articulate for a while now is a kind of formal system of modeling this sort of thing. The topology of the epistemic space, if you're willing to make that analogical leap with me, is one of great importance if we're really serious about this approach.
Suppose we talk about a set of possible...I'm not sure what to call these. I'm thinking something like "cognitive state" or the totality of one's beliefs, memories, percepts, etc. An entire perspective, or one's complete set of current intuitions. We seem to want to establish a relation between them such that one is justified in transitioning between one and another of them. So we would say something like:
J(x,y) iff one is justified in transitioning from cognitive state x to cognitive state y
('m thinking this move of making justification depend entirely on the contents of cognitive states is justified due to a vaguely internalist constraint on justification. That's controversial, of course...)
This is kind of cool--we can now represent the set of all possible cognitive states as a directed graph of justification.
But this raises a whole shitload of questions! Convergence theories of truth like Peirce's (and Hegel's?) seem to depend on there being a node that is "most justified"--the end-state of all justified transitions. But this isn't guaranteed to exist, right? Don't we need an existence proof? There could be cycles, there could be multiple maxima, etc. What would be the consequences of multiple maxima? Skepticism? Pluralism?
I really ought to get back to studying.
EDIT: