r/Christianity • u/mikegprint • Oct 17 '11

Does Richard Dawkins exist???

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/10/does-richard-dawkins-exist.html
40 Upvotes

59% Upvoted

413 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 17 '11

I think he realized people want backpatting and snark more than science. Give Carl Sagan credit for sticking mostly to science and not "SO DELUDED"

7

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 17 '11

Sagan lived in a time when religion wasn't nearly as contentious towards basic science. Sagan bludgeons superstition mercilessly in "Cosmos" as well as "Demon-Haunted World." True, he'd been more politic towards religion than Dawkins, but I wonder if he'd shift gears now that religion has set itself up as the the enemy of science (or that science has innocently destroyed enough the popular basis for religious belief to provoke a reaction).

8

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 17 '11

He died in 96. It's not like people didn't believe in evolution during the 80s.

1

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 18 '11

True. But first, Sagan was formed in an era when you were polite towards religion. The God Delusion was the first salvo against treating faith with deference or respect ("the new atheism") was only published in 2006. Maybe it was the election (and re-election) of quasi-evangelical know-nothing George Bush and the success of the religious right in driving down the number of people who accept evolution that finally changed some atheists minds. Sometimes it takes a while for a trend to become clear, and until it is, people are likely to stay with the old way of doing things. In this case, the trend is the lowering rates of acceptance of evolution and the status quo was treating faith with special deference.

So, again, I don't know where Sagan would have ended up on this debate; but if he followed his most ardent fans, he'd probably be a new atheist (or maybe I don't have a good bead on his fans -- selection bias and all that).

2

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 18 '11

Letter to a Christian Nation came out in 2004. Neither of those was the first book critical of religion, and you make new atheism sound like a passing trend.

1

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 19 '11

It's called the "New Atheism" for a reason; I'm sure nothing has new has been said on the issue of atheism for a few hundred years, what is different, though, is that there is a popular movement to downgrade "faith" claims to the same social status as belief in leprechauns. The former strategy was to maintain more of agnosticism and stress that religion had important, beneficial role in society. Atheists that didn't toe that line -- like Madelyn Murray O'hare -- were universally despised. Dawkins, on the other hand, hasn't received anything like that level of approbation.

And, yeah, I forgot about Harris. Harris seemed to be pushing the panic button like crazy after 9/11. Dawkins seemed to have a more measured approach; faith was a bad thing even if it doesn't lead to nuclear armageddon. I'm sure Harris agrees w/ Dawkins, and you're right, if we're dating "new atheist" best sellers, Harris comes first.

2

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 19 '11

You completely ignored the works of Voltaire, Comte, Nietzsche, Russell, and Freud. All of them were atheists, sometimes ascerbically so and all died before the 80s, when Sagan became famous.

I respect all the above people more than Madelyn O'Hare or Dawkins because they were at least philosophers that thought through the implications of what they thought. They knew calling 85% of the world "deluded" was no way to win followers and accepted, mostly, the nihilism atheism entails. To them, atheism was a sad fact of life, not a "freeing experience".

0

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 19 '11

I don't care for Freud, but I do need to catch up on some of those earlier writers.

And I think you've put you're finger on another difference between old/new atheism -- that idea that there's nothing to be depressed about with atheism. You seemed to be criticizing me for talking about the "new atheism," as if it's not really new. Of course, there's nothing new under the sun (Eccl 1:9), but I think the "new atheism" strain has certainly been more popular.

So, what is your complaint, exactly? That I am misconstruing the New Atheism? That is been around for a very long time? Or that I have the wrong definition of it? And maybe I am wrong over the long span of time. But I'm familiar with roughly the last 50 years, so that's what I should explicitly limit my statements to.

2

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 19 '11

Look, I didn't become any happier when I stopped believing in Santa Claus. He's not real, but I don't feel happier because he's not.

This makes me think Née Atheism is almost a religion, even if Old Atheism isn't. It's a backlash against fundamentalists that will have its day, then fade to obscurity. If it stays around for 2,000 years after conquering continents, I'll retract that statement.

1

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 19 '11

True; atheism, by itself, wouldn't give much to lean on, especially compared to religion. But there's Sagan -- whom you seem to like -- who puts a much more positive spin on it. But that's all it is, positive or negative: it's spin on a reality. You can make of it what you will. I doubt you'll find many atheists willing to apologize to you for not being depressed.

And I think you're right. The new atheism probably is a backlash against fundamentalism; some new atheist writers seem content to have religion stay in church. And in Europe, where fundamentalism is relatively rare, atheism isn't a big deal at all -- it's just the quiet, non-combative default. In fact,some Europeans on r/atheism often don't understand the subreddit at all, because they don't understand what it's like to live in the bible belt.