Humanism // Current TV

Is Richard Dawkins an atheist?

So, is Richard Dawkins an atheist? He seems more like a God-hater than a genuine atheist. That’s why my colleague, Jonathan Sarfati, invented the word ‘misotheist’ (hater of God), which he has applied to Professor Dawkins and other fanatical opponents of the God of the Bible.

George Orwell identified this sort of ‘atheist’ in the character of Bozo, in Down and Out in Paris and London: ‘He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)’. Interestingly, in The God Delusion, Dawkins carries on about what he doesn’t like about the God he doesn’t believe in.

Dawkins likened himself to ‘the Devil’s Chaplain’, the title of a compilation of his essays. However, the Devil does not disbelieve in God; he knows only too well that God is real (cf. James 2:19). The Bible indentifies him as ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44); so what of ‘the Devil’s chaplain’? Perhaps Dawkins did not think very carefully about this biblical allusion!

If Dawkins really believed what atheists supposedly believe, he should just put his feet up with a bottle of scotch and just enjoy himself as he waits for his death and his consumption by worms so he can fertilize the grass. Getting his blood pressure up over people believing in God all seems rather futile, if atheism is true. But perhaps it isn’t? Ah, there’s the rub.

The fool says in his heart, ‘No God’. (Psalm 14:1).

[But] Dawkins’ proselytizing ways remind me of my pimply youthful days at boarding school where those into smoking cigarettes and boozing (worse was yet to come) seemed to be really keen to get others to follow their destructive and illicit behaviour. Why did they try to coerce their fellow students into doing such things? Was it ‘safety in numbers’, that they felt a little guilty for their behaviour and would feel more secure if they could get more to join in their little rebellion?

Professor Dawkins’ obsessive campaign to try to convince others to be atheists reminds me of those days. Perhaps it is not that Dawkins really believes that there is no Creator-God, but that he wishes there were not and if he could just convince enough others to agree with him, then he will feel more secure. Has he confused his wishful thinking for reality? Perhaps ironically, the Humanist Manfesto III says, ‘We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be.’ Dawkins’ wishful thinking comes out in his definition of biology, where he wishes away the evidence for design (a Creator): ‘Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.’

Another self-professed atheist, Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, put it rather candidly:

‘I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.’

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and grandson of T.H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, was even more explicit:

‘I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.’

...it's a good article, making some important distinctions in "atheist" affront.So, is Richard Dawkins an atheist? He seems more like a God-hater than a genuine... more

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How to Fake Science, History and Religion

"One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false". Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and cosmic catastrophes – which, as he argues, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and are still with us. "The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudoscientists of all stripes", Fritze writes, "now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of film, television, radio, magazines, and the net." Fritze, a committed positivist, finds them at times dangerous and always a threat to the standards of "objective" history.

Recognizing how "tricky" it is to define pseudo-history, Fritze suggests we begin by asking, What is history? – "a vexed question for people living in a postmodernist age". But apparently not for Fritze. "A simple and elegant definition for history is a true story about the human past", he tells us, ignoring the epistemological anguish that has troubled historians from well before the arrival of the postmodernists. So, pseudo-history can easily be defined as an untrue story about the past. But, how do we reckon with the fact that pseudo-historians also insist on their stories’ truth? Through evidence and "objective" empirical methods, Fritze tells us, again without raising any questions of method and evidence. While objective historians look at all the facts, guarding themselves against presuppositions, pseudo-historians choose only those that support their case.

Plainly, Fritze is no epistemologist, though he is a careful scholar with a gift for summarizing theories, however crackpot. He takes a historian’s delight in uncovering connections between the various pseudo-histories he describes. His approach is textual, quite literal, and while, at least implicitly, he recognizes the importance of contextual influences, he underplays them or treats them in too general and often banal terms; for example, he attributes the rise of pseudo-histories to "the conditions of modern society", citing, as one might expect, the shattering effect of Darwinian evolution – and, more generally and less specifically, modern science – on "the Christian worldview of a 6000-year-old-history with its six-day creation of a fixed natural world and humanity". Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Fritze lives and teaches in the American South.

Though Fritze mentions other pseudohistories, he focuses on six: Atlantis, the oldest of such "historical" confabulations; preColumbian exploration and colonization of the Americas; the role of false history among such racist religious groups as Christian Identity and the Nation of Islam; "histories" of cosmic catastrophes and interplanetary visitations; and, finally, the scholarly brouhaha over Martin Bernal’s Black Venus.""One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It... more

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Do Pagans Have More Sex?

"Wouldn't it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the human spiritual quest had been corrupted by the "relentless onslaught of Western scientific materialism" and "dogmatic male-dominated religion"? Back when there were shamans—spiritual leaders—who could plug us into "the realm of the magical," show us "the reality behind apparent reality," and thus lead us to understand "how the universe really works"?

The quotes come from Leo Rutherford, a leading advocate of neo-shamanism, which is a subset of neo-paganism, which is a subset of New Age spirituality. But the basic idea—that there was a golden age of spiritual purity which we fallen moderns need to recover—goes beyond New Age circles. You see traces of it even in such serious scholars as Karen Armstrong, who wrote in A History of God that early Abrahamic religion had created a gulf "between humanity and the divine, rupturing the holistic vision of paganism."

As the author of the just-published book The Evolution of God, about the history of religion, I'm primed to do some debunking. But before I start, I want to stress two points: 1) I think it's great for people to find spiritual peace and sound moral orientation wherever they can, including neo-paganism; 2) I don't doubt that back before Western monotheism took shape there were earnest seekers of a "holistic vision" who selflessly sought to share that vision.

What I do doubt is that these earnest, selfless spiritual leaders were any more common in the heyday of shamanism than today, or that the spiritual quest was any less corrupted by manipulation and outright charlatanism than today, or that there was a coherent philosophy of shamanism that makes more sense than the average religion of today.

if shamanism is so crude, how did it get glamorized? In 1951, the esteemed scholar Mircia Eliade published a book called Shamanism. While he didn't whitewash shamanism, he did his best to see its more refined side. He wrote that Eskimo shamanism and Buddhist mysticism share as their goal "deliverance from the illusions of the flesh." And shamanism, he said, features "the will to transcend the profane, individual condition" in order to recover "the very source of spiritual existence, which is at once 'truth' and 'life.' "

f you try neo-shamanism, don't be under the illusion that you're helping to recover a lost age of authentic spirituality. Religion has always been a product of human beings, for better and worse.""Wouldn't it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the... more

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