Thursday, November 02, 2006

The Old Atheism

Wired's lead article is about the growing anti-religious movement. I found the article is a bit too antagonistic, but it is representative of two of those profiled: Dawkins and Harris. Dennett is also profiled but his view that religion isn't necessarily a bad thing is quite different from theirs.
Read it here.

An excerpt:
That's because when secular investigations take the lead, sacred doctrines collapse. There's barely a field of modern research -- cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology -- in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed. Even the lowly humanities, which began the demolition job more than 200 years ago with textual criticism of the Bible, continue to make things difficult for believers through careful analysis of the historical origins of religious texts. While Collins and his fellow reconcilers can defend the notion of faith in the abstract, as soon as they get down to doctrine, the secular professors show up with their corrosive arguments. When it comes to concrete examples of exactly what we should believe, reason is a slippery slope, and at the bottom -- well, at the bottom is atheism.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i'm not going to get into this here now (i hope you don't find me too tiresome) but let me suggest one historical point: the issue of Galieleo's martyrdom. this 'episode' is too often pegged as Reason (Galileo) vs. faith (Roman Catholic Church). but this is only a half-truth. that particular episode is more accurately translated as a debate within science and an example of Khun's thesis concerning the difficulty for science to accept paradigm shifts. the copernican revolution was a challenge to the aristotelean model not, not, not God! the issue was scientific not theological. yes, there were some theological, worldview implications but the issue was Rational, scientific.

9:09 AM  
Blogger mush said...

"I'm going to find it and I'm going to destroy it. Possibly with dynamite."
-Steve Zissou

10:47 AM  

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