Digg and YouTube Powering Atheism 2.0 discusses how the new militant atheism is using information sharing sites to further its agenda. I'm not sure how much cultural influence these sites are having, but I've certainly noticed an abundance of Dawkins and Harris promotion on sites like YouTube over the last few months. I find this disturbing, and not simply because it's
atheism, but because of the
type of atheism it is.
Well, what type of atheism is it? It's hard to define, and I haven't quite come up with a nifty catch-all name for it, but I explain it this way:
the militant atheism of Dawkins and Harris makes claims against theism that far outpace the quality of its actual arguments against theism. In other words, they and the legions of internet trolls who promote them loudly and vehemently proclaim that all religion is irrational, dangerous, superstitious, etc., and then as evidence of this they produce arguments that professional philosophers
do not find to be as devastating as their defenders make them out to be.
This is not surprising. By academic trade I am a philosophy student, and thus I am aware that any major argument I make in an area outside of my own discipline is likely to be specious, if not downright bad. Thus you will find no discussions on biology or economics on this site. Dawkins and Harris, however, seem strangely unaware of this basic principle. Hence they exit their own areas of expertise (biology and neuroscience, respectively) and brashly venture into the area of philosophy of religion and make
minor league arguments against religious belief or the existence of God. They then parade these average arguments around in their books and articles and thereby claim that religion is intellectually defeated and that all religious belief is irrational.
You can see how this irks someone like me. The worst part of it is that Dawkins and Harris both say that religious belief in general causes violence (or at least more violence than enlightened atheism) and that religious people are the cause of much conflict and misery in the world. This is typical of polemicists such as these, but consider another scenario. Imagine if someone like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell were to claim that
Islamic belief in general causes violence and that Muslims were the cause of most of the conflict and misery in the world. There would be no end of outrage in the land of the talking heads. Dawkins and Harris, however, cast an even wider net - on all religious people - and there is nary a cry of protest from the mainstream media.
Christians, for the most part, ignore Dawkins and Harris as wild-eyed atheist agitators (which they are) but they also fail to see the impact they and other antitheist polemicists are having on the culture. It's becoming vogue among a certain sector of young people to embrace Dawkinsian atheism. That Dawkins' and Harris' arguments do not merit the attention they receive is of no consequence. It's simply hip nowadays to bash religion as irrational, and two thousand years of theistic reasoning be damned! That these vitriolic Dawkinsians (the above mentioned legions of internet trolls being the most visible) ignore good arguments contrary to their own position is a moot point. They spread their message effectively, and I'm afraid Christian philosophers and apologists suffer from the same malady as the rest of Christendom: they do not take Dawkins and Harris seriously, and hence they ignore the spread of militant atheism right under their noses.
Because of all this I am considering changing the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. I had planned on doing something in the area of metaethics, but now I'm considering writing on the philosophical merits of Richard Dawkins' antitheist arguments. I'm also working on a long series of posts called "Letter to the Atheist Agitators" in which I show that the arguments of these atheist evangelists are not as strong as their supporters theink they are, and that they are - at some points - embarrassingly poor. I'm also considering taking Dawkins' latest arguments to task in a paper for one of my seminars this Spring, pending professor approval. So stay tuned. I have a lot more to say about the atheist agitators.
After four months of twiddling my thumbs, I finally got an Xbox 360 last night, and I have to admit that Microsoft's new console is an impressive piece of hardware. Setup was a snap, and I had it hooked into my HDTV and Surround Sound system in no time. Porting over my original Xbox Live account was simple, and I was up and downloading new content to the console within a few minutes of hooking it up.
