Sunday, 2 June 2013
The Trouble With Atheism from llamalamp on Vimeo.
Couldn't of said it better myself.
But if i was going to try..
i love being human,
i have faith in humans,
warts and all...
Science may be the only way of answering questions of reason but it is not the only way of asking questions of meaning....
Idea space belongs not only to scientists but the writers, artists, film-makers, lovers, philosophers, poets, magicians and prophets. To question the madness of belief as only a nocebo or a parasitic 'meme', is to ignore the placebo of faith, love or hope as unmeasurably questionable.
Any ethical foundation of human law would be dangerously bigoted to exclude the history of our specie's exploration of the meaning of what it is to be alive and aware.
"If you subtract God, and you subtract the notion of an afterlife, then there is a real risk, particularly in the political utopianisms, which were so deadly in the 20th Century, that you will attempt to create heaven on earth, go for a quick fix in the here and now, to have the arrogant illusion that you can sort of remake man and woman into some sort of new being, and that invariably results in hell for ordinary people.”-Michael Burleigh
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
This documentary is totally disingenuous! At least I hope so. Here's why. The host spends a lot of time trying to show how there are a lot atheists that are steadfast in their belief that there is no possible way that a god could exist. But what is really going on here is that most of these atheists are rejecting a very specific type of god - usually the one of the three largest monotheisms, but more generally one that intervenes in the world causing events to happen which appear to violate what is understood to be the natural laws of the universe. They also reject the type of god that reveals "truths" to particular people that others in principle can only have access to second hand (e.g., through holy texts). That means, the "truths" cannot be perceived in the physical world again a second time around, but rather can only be held as true by believing them without evidence. The discipline of history, for instance, may seem to work the same way, however physical evidence must be brought to bear on any given question, otherwise it is speculation; and if it is written evidence, there has got to be more than an assertion in a text that for instance what we understand to be the laws of the universe were violated. Something that leaves more than a written record as a trace.
The host's words make it appear as though these people are rejecting the possibility of any kind of god whatsoever (incl. a deist god, a pantheist god, etc.). He makes the point that many atheists think that "scientists who believe in god are guilty of dualism. That is, they understand the world in two contradictory ways" (18:15). But no atheist I have ever met, whose books I have read, or whose talks I've listened to on the subject believes this about a pantheist or a deist. They just say that there's no positive reason to believe in such a god, because nothing is different except that we have added to the formula: +X. That is, we have said the following: "and by the way, it's not impossible that there is also a thing that we basically don't know anything about, can't experience in any way, have no physical evidence for, and by the way it doesn't even have to be a 'thing' at all... i.e., it can be totally 'transcendent'". Now, this could be the case. But it's no different that Carl Sagan's invisible dragon, or Bertrand Russell's teapot (if you don't get the references, look them up in google). It is not the case that many atheists believe this. What most rational atheists do believe is that scientists who believe in god are playing by two different sets of rules: they require physical evidence to believe in anything... but a god. Let's put it this way to you, the reader: why don't you believe in fairies? Why don't you believe that dinosaurs live in your backyard? Well, the obvious answer is that there is no evidence for these things. In every other aspect of your life, when the existence of something is posited, you require evidence for it. Many will bring up love as a counter example. Well, this is also disingenuous: if I were walking down the street with you, the reader, and we walked past a beautiful woman who didn't acknowledge my existence, and I said to you: "that woman loves me!". Well, you would think I was crazy of course. There's no reason for you to believe it, but there's no reason for me to believe it either! Why? Because even an affection for someone comes along with certain actions that are minimally more than acknowledgment, even if we can play around with what evidence can be brought to bear. It may be complex evidence, but it's certainly not no evidence. If there's no evidence, then it is in practice the same as no existence, not just with love but with everything.
The host spends a lot of time trying to convince us that atheism is turning into tomorrow's new religion if we don't do something to stop it, but how this is so is not quite clear. What is clear is that the host puts forth a great deal of effort to play with words in such a way as to conflate respected institutions or people amongst many atheists with revered sacred objects and holy people. The Kaaba and the Fermi lab are not the same thing, and atheists do not understand the Fermi lab to be anything like the Kaaba or a church. The Fermi lab is not a center where scientists interpret texts from 2,000+ years ago which are said to contain "truths"; it is not an object that atheists touch, throw stones at, or gather around to feel the transcendent god within them. As I write this, I even have difficulties using the right language to compare them because a religious person sees the world and specifically sacred objects in just a totally different way. Now, playing with language is a non-obvious circular argument: the conclusion is being drawn simply by using the same language in one domain in the other domain such that it becomes obvious that they are the same domain. But the argument is yet to be made, because I don't hear atheists using this type of language about the Fermi lab, for instance, or any other institution other than when they talk about sacred objects in relation to religious people themselves.
Now, the host also plays on the same playing field as the scientists, buying the conclusions they make from empirical evidence. He also doesn't seem to buy the argument that there is a god that is anything like a Christian god. So, to me this whole documentary seems to be a kind of straw man argument. If it isn't, I'm sorry that these atheists are so closed-minded. But I'm willing to bet that the clips were strategically chosen, or if not mis-portrayed, then certainly misunderstood.
I disagree with your assessment of the documentary. Atheists, by definition, do not believe in any form of supreme being, not a specific god such as that found in the modern monotheistic religions. And atheism is not just a belief in the absense of a god, but a belief that a god principle is totally unnecessary to add to scientific explanations of what is going on in the world. So atheism in practice is equivalent to a scientific materialistic view of the world the specifically excludes the existence of a god (in any form). Ask any atheist and they tend to believe that science offers a complete explanation (or as complete as possible), and that god is just a superfluous addition to such an explanation.
This is atheism in practice. The belief in science is very strong, and Occam's Razor is used to dismiss "transcendent" philosophies. I do not know any atheists who believe in a patheist or deist god... they invariably remove any concept of god from the equation.
With regards to belief, there are many things we believe but have no evidence ourselves for. In fact, science itself is so enormous, that most scientists have to take on faith the assumptions they base their research on as they do not have the time, resources or inclination to check everything themselves. Just because science has effectively proved something today, does not mean that we can assume it is correct for tomorrow. After all, science itself goes through revolutions where old theories are disgarded for new ones.
It is not atheism per se that is turning into tomorrow's new religion, but scientism (which is effectively atheism in practice today). And it is becoming a religion because belief in it exceeds its actual remit, so that you get people like these scientists dismissing "transcendent" philosophies when in actual fact they cannot dismiss them or confirm them. The actual position of a science is one of agnosticism, not atheism. So any scientist that is either an atheist or a believer in God is actually operating outside of the scientific paradigm. Nothing wrong with this -- its personal choice -- but there is no way that atheism itself is backed by science, nor religion dismissed by science.
Joe Agnostic
Post a Comment