People are doomed to repeat a traumatic event—be it the child flinging a toy from its cot or the armies of Europe slicing each other up decade after decade. The wisdom and sanity of any society is founded on an originary madness. Soren Kierkegaard, the great enemy of all pedants, offers a story that might shed considerable light. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript , he describes a psychiatric patient who escapes from the asylum, climbing out a window and running through the gardens to rejoin the world at large.
Village Atheists, Village Idiots
But the madman worries: Subjectivity, Kierkegaard claimed, is truth. His example was meant to be a commonsense demonstration of how essentially stupid the truth can be, one that anyone could instantly recognize. Our world has changed considerably, but most of the story can stay as it is. Cars bark unexpectedly around privet-hedged corners, people watch from their windows with suspicion and maybe even murderous intent. The fleshy and terrifying faces of political candidates stare from lawn signs; models seem to mock him from billboards. Everything in this noisy world seems arbitrary and unforgiving; its deep grammar is one of total sadism, and instead of feeling the mutual recognition of the insane, our lunatic almost wishes he were back in his asylum, among flat green and rounded edges—but he has his truth, and it comforts him, so he keeps on going.
The world is round, the world is round, the world is round. Eventually, the madman walks past a bar. But there are people inside: So when he leans one nonchalant arm on the counter and the bartender asks what he wants, he replies with that perfectly sane truth that nobody could ever have any problem with. One of the other customers starts getting annoyed: The customer, red and sweaty, with little specks of rage frosting the corners of his mouth: The world is round.
Instead, weeping with frustration, the angry customer punches the madman right in the face, and he falls to the ground, fluttering like a gently clipped blade of grass. The video is quickly shared all over the world, and everyone agrees: The battle lines are obvious: The audience screeches its appreciation: He gets a book deal. The World Is Round soon starts nudging its way up the bestseller list. This is a ridiculous, stupid, and unrealistic story. It also, with a few minor variations, actually happened. The madman in this story is Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the frustrated punter is the rapper B.
Near the start of this year—heralded by Tyson with the announcement that January 1 has no astronomical significance—B. Both men were wrong, but despite having the relevant facts at his command, Tyson managed to be more wrong than his interlocutor. The flat earth movement is very recent: In fact, the two writers had a lot in common. As far as I knew, The Baffler was a respectable literary journal, often sold in bookstores, but this one article has put me off it forever.
All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon.
And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates. Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies.
We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad. What we learn from this is that Mr. Hitchens falling into the Euphrates? One could use the same language about famous theists, but we refrain from that kind of ad hominem stuff.
We watched Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. Or the one who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a whole weary planet into new and different shapes?
When I read the part in bold, I thought that Kriss must be writing satire. Both of them will, inevitably, enter into some orgasmic rhapsody about how beautiful the universe is.
The Delusions of Atheists
Meanwhile, the atheist, glancing down at his own miraculous hands, will say something similarly soppy about mountains and rainbows and how incredible it is that all this came about by a happy accident of chance. When they encounter a poetic-humanist critique of cold scientific rationality, the atheists will often argue a similar line: Keats was wrong, science did not unweave the rainbow; the natural world is all the more beautiful if you know how it works.
Dawkins even published a book in called The Magic of Reality. This accordance ought to be very worrying. What it shows is that, for all their fiercely expectorated differences, these two people are actually on the same side. What if you wake up every morning in a tiny brick cell slotted into a lifeless city under a gray and miserable sky, and you think that the whole thing, as it stands, is utterly wretched?
For most of history, religions have tended to hold the natural world in various forms of contempt: Here Kriss is criticizing atheists for a brand-new reason: Why did The Baffler publish such a worthless pieces of pablum? I have no idea, but shame on them, and of course on Kriss as well! The only difference between the old atheists and the new atheists, is that the old atheists are dead. God is still imaginary.
Perhaps he is just a miserable git?! The whole piece looks like someone trying to be polemic and lacks nuance. Judging by the photograph he does like to strike a pose, and the prose supplies confirmation. He likes to play at being clever and having an audience. Looking at his website does reveal a certain desire to be an enfant terrible in its most literal definition. Kriss is amusing to read. Basically, he is a precocious child throwing a tantrum to get attention. His writing is phony as hell. I agree with your comment, all except the first sentence. That would only be true if he had more literary competence.
I am not a real shrink but can play one on the net. Sam appears to be so interested in his own look and opinion that he stands alone as the judge for many greater than he. A lesson on the difference between an atheist and a religious sort may be in order. He has it exactly backwards. Whenever you hear a rapturous defense of the natural world, you should be on your guard: Sam seeks to entertain. That is just the price to be paid. His piece on Dan Hodges is great, but will probably mean little to anyone outside the UK. That stuff has ruined the atheist and skepticism movement.
Not really very impressive.
- ;
- The Problems of Governments!
- Idiot compares atheists to village idiots?
The dilettantish, posh-boy rebels from daddy who ended up as irksomely iconoclastic 30s flirters with fascism: The man could bend any way, just like Milo, and nobody would believe, just like in the case of Yiannopoulos, that he really believed it. Yet maybe with a tinge of the proto-fascistic romanticists who reacted to the Enlightenment by burying themselves in blood-and-soil ravings and hardcore anti-rationalism.
In the end who gives a shit? Imagine if this idiot attacked professional musicians for enjoying music less than people who merely enjoy music without understanding it, or the same for artists, or for other such creative arts. I doubt that he could get published. I admire your fortitude in wading through this guff — I gave up after the second paragraph! Other than that, his criticism is in line with that faction, and e.
After a while it became obvious that many of the US corner have started to dislike each other e. And they largely hate New Atheists now. Look at the topics for Reason Rally , etc. This kind of anti-rational ideology has reduced my field literature to a chaotic mess of squalid scholars whose pretentious language masks a remarkable poverty of depth—and whose rejection of logic has justified deeply repressive ideologies. The entire article is a giant eye-rolling over virtually everything. Someone took a sullen teenager to a museum. To be fair, the article is at least baffling with a capital B.
Some rather tortuous sentences in there. There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there by chance. Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment. In addition, many of the pioneers of quantum physics rejected atheism: Ken Wilber's book Quantum Questions explores their religious writings.
Wilber argues that all these groundbreaking physicists believed that spirituality and physics were needed for a full understanding of reality. Wilber poses this question to modern atheists and scientists:. To those who bow to physics as a religion, I ask, what does it mean to you, that the founders of modern science, the theorists who pioneered the very concepts you now worship, were every one of them mystics. I have repeatedly pondered on the relationship of science and religion, for I have never been able to deny the reality to which they point.
Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognised and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect harmony. And indeed it is not an accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were also deeply religious souls.
Some sense a divine presence irradiating the soul as one of the most obvious things of experience. Is atheism harming individuals and society? One of the twentieth century's leading humanists and atheists, H. Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of the accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual beyond the grave; all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined for extinction in the vast death of the solar system.
- The Delusions of Richard Dawkins!
- Allysons First Day of School (I am a STAR Personalized Book Series 1)!
- You Might Also Enjoy.
The astrophysicist Paul Davies maintains atheism is not merely mistaken, but also damaging to society and individuals. Our secular age has led many people to feel demoralised and disillusioned, alienated from nature, regarding their existence as a pointless charade in an indifferent, even hostile and meaningless universe. Many of our social ills can be traced to the bleak worldview, that years of mechanistic thought have imposed; a worldview in which human beings are presented as irrelevant observers.
Yet among the general population there is a widespread belief that science and theology are forever at loggerheads.
The Delusions of Atheists - theranchhands.com
I regard the universe as a coherent, rational, elegant and harmonious expression of a deep and purposeful meaning. It is interesting that just as scientists became mystics, so within Christianity there has been a growing interest in mystical or contemplative Christianity and the rediscovery of the mystics of the past such as the desert fathers and mothers. Moreover there is a widespread harmony in the understanding of the divine across widely disparate cultures and times, according to Aldous Huxley.
His book, The Perennial Philosophy , is an exploration of mysticism across different religions, periods and civilisations. What is remarkable, he claims, is the degree of unanimity among them. His book contains an anthology of mystics from a wide variety of times and places. There are similar mystical utterances from widely differing races, religions, periods and places. What do philosophers make of all this? In the last century logical positivists used to attack religious belief on the grounds that it could not be verified; whereas scientific statements were true, because they could be verified.
What is puzzling now, is to find scientists claiming that their theories are true, not because they can be verified, but because they are beautiful; as if science had become a subset of aesthetics. And Karl Popper 's criterion for science was that it must be possible to falsify a theory. Hawking's theory can be neither falsified, nor proved, and so, according to Popper, is not science. Wittgenstein maintained there are truths besides those of science, writing: They make themselves manifest.
They are what is called mystical. I know that this world exists. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. The meaning does not lie in it, but outside it. The meaning of life, i.
The claim that there is a fundamental disagreement between science and religion is known to historians of science as 'The Conflict Myth'. Einstein recognised no such conflict, indeed he thought the opposite, writing:. After the God of fear, then the God of morality, there is a third stage of religious experience.
I call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate to anyone who is entirely without it. The beginning of this cosmic religious feeling can be found in the Psalms and in the Prophets [of the Old Testament]. Religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God image conceived in man's image. John Lennox explains that the conflict myth has become embedded in the popular mind: The common belief that the relations between religion and science over the last four centuries have been marked by a deep and enduring hostility … is historically inaccurate, a caricature so grotesque that it needs explaining, how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.
Professor David Bentley Hart states: John Hedley Brooke, Professor of the History of Science at Oxford, comments on the myth of the victory of science over religion: He calls Huxley a brilliant self-publicist, who made it all up. Overwhelmingly science and religion have been in harmony.
The conflict myth has been debunked. Of course none of this is to deny, that some forms of religion have in the past constricted the human spirit, rather than enlightened and inspired it; and some today still do. So we need to distinguish those forms of religion and faith that are life-giving, from those that are life-denying. Our greedy and selfish society thinks buying goods on credit, to impress people we don't care for, is the road to happiness.
We need the message of the great spiritual leaders of the past, who pointed to a life founded on love and the service of others, as the keys to a fulfilled life. So a religious outlook can still provide a valuable yardstick and make it easier to resist the powerful pressures of living in our consumerist societies, driven by social media. Richard Dawkins maintains science and religion are in conflict, and so he has to misrepresent Einstein and claim Newton was a fake. Did he misunderstand Max Jammer's book, or set out to mislead?
Dawkins also thinks evolution and God are incompatible; Charles Darwin thought the opposite. Do we believe the organ grinder or his monkey? Hawking proposes M-theory to explain the origins of the universe. Roger Penrose, Paul Davies and John Lennox and others dismiss this as groundless speculation, for which there is not a shred of evidence. Lennox claims it amounts to a triple self-contradiction. The facts of science point to the existence of God: The greatest scientific minds, Newton, Darwin and Einstein, all believed that the evidence points to an intelligent mind behind the universe.
The suggestion that there are other universes, is, as Paul Davies says, the last refuge of the atheist. It is mere metaphysical speculation: Large parts of physics have become a fact-free zone of mathematical speculation. In some ways it is like a cult, with pressure to conform and become a devotee. It may come as a surprise to some folk, that the case for God is so strong, and the case for atheism so weak.
It is a great shame that the media in general do not give both sides of the argument. Because the overwhelming majority of great scientists have concluded that the most elegant answer to the riddle of this finely tuned universe is God. Also one can't help wondering whether atheists are shrill, aggressive and abusive because their arguments are so weak? We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how The child dimly suspects a mysterious order That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.
Darwin Correspondence Project, 'Letter no. Victor Gollancz, , p. Princeton University Press, , p. Shambhala, , p. Atlantic Books, , p. Transworld Publishers, , p. Crown, , , p. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great New York: Macauley, , quoted in Jammer, p.
The Delusions of Christopher Hitchens
Einstein Archive, reel , quoted in Jammer, p. Rosenkranz, Albert through the Looking-Glass Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, , pp. Branden Press, , p. Strauss, 'Assistent bei Albert Einstein', in C. Europa Verlag, , p. Kessler, The Diary of a Cosmopolitan London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, , p.
Alice Calaprice Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, , pp. Dover Publications, , p. Einstein archive reel , quoted in Jammer, p. Oxford University Press, , p. Reported in Daily Telegraph 5th December Edmunds, Arena Books, Penguin, , p. Lion Hudson, , p. Penguin , p. The quote is from page Harper One, , p.
Templeton Foundation Press, , p. Shambhala, , pp. Blackham in Objections to Humanism London: In the book leading humanists criticise their own beliefs. Blackham in Objections to Humanism , p. Routledge and Keegan Paul, , sections 6. Bloomsbury, , p. Lion, , p.