More Than Half The Scientists Believe in God

pie charts from Pew study

In the late 90s atheists began making the argument that less than a majority of scientists believe in God. In addition to this they argued that National Academy of Sciences had only about 5% members who believed in God. All of this was due to the publication of a 1998 an article "Leading Scientists Still reject God." In that article got hold of a survey done in 1914 by a guy named James Henry Luba and Nature Magazine noticed that the stats had not changed. So the conclusion that scientists are such great priests of knowledge, if they don't bleieve in God there must not be one.

Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample ^[1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively ^[2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature ^[3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents. (Nature,ibid)

Atheists made the most of this since Luba echoed the fallacious conclusions they themselves drew from the data. "Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience" (ibid). Of course this is fallacious, scientists don't have any special knowledge that would tell them God doesn't exist, or that he does. It was Nature that polled the NAS. One of the things that I argued at the time was that the questions were rigged to slant the discussion toward the fundamentalist concept of God portrayed in a literal understanding of the Bible. I argued that if you factored in a more liberal concept of God belief among scientists would go way up.

There are now several studies or surveys that reflect this assumption and anew set of findings changes the ball game. Several studies:

(1) Trow, Martin and Associates. 1969. 35% of scientists do not believe God exists. This is a lot more than the general population but a lot less than the over 50% promised by Luba and Nature. It also raises the question if the Luba and/or nature weren't confusing the issue by assuming that "un-churched" or "non-affiliated, no religious affiliation" means the same as don't believe in God. It does not. Over and over again that distinction is made clear in the better studies.

(Carnegie Commission National Survey of Higher Education: Faculty Study [computer file]. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, Survey Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].

(2)Elaine Ecklund, and Christopher Scheitle:disbelief in the existence of God was not correlated with any particular area of expertise:

Disbelief in God by Academics⁴

Discipline	%
Physics	40.8
Chemistry	26.6
Biology	41.0
Overall	37.6
Sociology	34.0
Economics	31.7
Political Science	27.0
Psychology	33.0
Overall	31.2

(tabel is from GodandScience.org article)

That contradicts the findings of nature which had most unbelief in hard scineces (physics and biology) and more belief in 'soft' or social sciences. Elaine Ecklund, and Christopher Scheitle" questioned 2,198 faculty members in the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology from 21 elite U.S. research universities.⁴ Overall, 75% of professors contacted completed the survey."

Euklund and associates also found that in a sample of 21 major universities only 15% of scientists found that Science that religion were always at odds. Euklund's findings show that factors which lead scientists to be unbelieving are not usually related to scinece but to personal aspects of their lives, such as being emigrants, or being raised in atheist households. It's a cultural thing. Think about it, if a kid is bright he wants to excel in the things to which he is exposed, he going to be more likely to go into a religious vacation if he's exposed to religion and less likely if he's form an unbelieving background. The odds are a bright kid will go into scinece rather than business if his temperament doesn't lead him/her into liberal arts.

"Instead, particular demographic factors, such as age, marital status, and presence of children in the household, seem to explain some of the religious differences among academic scientists... Most important, respondents who were raised in religious homes, especially those raised in homes where religion was important are most likely to be religious at present."

3) Pew Forum on religion in pubic life: (2009) 51% of scientists believe in some form of diety

According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.

The finding here totally contradicts Luba and the atheist argument. They would have it that more than half don't believe. It's much less than the general public but much more than Luba thought.

A surprising finding is that medical doctors tend to be very religious. A new study finds 76% believe in God and 59% believe in after life.

The first study of physician religious beliefs has found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife. The survey, performed by researchers at the University and published in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults. Fifty-five percent of doctors say their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine.

These results were not anticipated. Religious belief tends to decrease as education and income levels increase, yet doctors are highly educated and, on average, well compensated. The finding also differs radically from 90 years of studies showing that only a minority of scientists (excluding physicians) believes in God or an afterlife.

“We did not think physicians were nearly this religious,” said study author Farr Curlin, Instructor in Medicine and a member of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University. “We suspect that people who combine an aptitude for science with an interest in religion and an affinity for public service are particularly attracted to medicine. The responsibility to care for those who are suffering and the rewards of helping those in need resonate throughout most religious traditions.”

In the general popularization belief my decline with increases in education but this is not so among the most educated. Professors across the board (all subjects) reflect belief in God similar to that of the General Population. My own explanation is that people who get degress and go into non acadmeic jobs know just enough to be dangerous, they don't continue the life of thought they know the old image of atheism was an intellectual image but they don't keep up with learning and thinking as professors do.

Tim Radford writes an article for the Guardian (sept 2003) on how science doesn't have all the answers, give several examples of scientists who have religious beliefs:

Colin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is professor of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of science to explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like all other living things - evolved through the action of natural selection upon random mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush, the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it.

"I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything," he says. "But I just think there is another world view as well."

Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds. Supermarket plastic bags are polymers, but so are spider's silk, sheep's wool, sinew and flesh and bone. His is the intricate world of what is, and how it works, down to the molecular level. He delights in the clarity and power of science, precisely because it is questioning rather than dogmatic. "But the questions that arise, and the methods we use to ask them, can be traced back to the religious tradition in which I find myself. Doing science is part of what it means in that tradition to be human. Because we find ourselves in this puzzling, extraordinary universe of pain and beauty, we will also find ourselves able to explore it, by adopting the very successful methods of science," he says.

Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open University. He is one of the atom-smashers, picking apart the properties of matter, energy, space and time, and the author of a delightful series of children's books about tough concepts such as relativity theory. He believes in the power of science. He not only believes in God, he believes in the Church of England. He, like Tom McLeish, is a lay reader. He has con tributed Thoughts for the Day to Radio 4, those morning homilies on the mysteries of existence. Does it worry him that science - his science - could be about to explain the whole story of space, time matter and energy without any need for a Creator? "No, because a starting point you can have is: why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a world? Now I cannot see how science could ever provide an answer," he says.

Radford expresses surprise that so many scientists believe in God, even with the old figures that gave atheists such solace. The figrue he uses is the outdated 4 in 10. We have to keep in mind atheism is not a rational choice made by thinking machines who feel nothing. It's an emotional choice made by people with low self esteem. They need to feel put themselves up by putting Christians down. They can't say they hate God, even though they hate themselves and thus they must hate at least the idea of a creator, so the next best thing is to hate those who believe in God. It's very important for them emotionally to believe that they are smarter and that all intelligent people validate their world view. The atheist ideology suggests that scinece is a priesthood of knowledge and scientists are the only people who know anything. These are not rational analysis based upon empirical data form studies, but articles of faith.

Atheists Think Ignorance is a Badge of Honor

What if I came up to you and said "everything you say it stupid." you said "such as" I said "I don't know, I don't' bother to listen to what you say because I know it's going to be stupid."

that's real impressive hu?

candidates are gathered to debate for the Presidency. One gets up and makes a fine speech about the state of the country the other sticks his fingers in his ears and goes "lalalalaalalal" real loud while his opponent is talking.

When he get's up and says "I didn't prepare becuase I know my opponent is stupid I don't have to listen to him. I didn't listen to him and I never have. I don't know anything he says and I will not debase myself by listening to him. I know everything he says is stupid. vote for me."

would you be impressed with that candidate? the press asks him "if you don't know anything he say how do you know it's stupid?" he says It's the kind of thing that would be stupid. you gonna vote for this guy?

this is the little gimmick that atheists are using on ever single message board. They get it from their moronic guru Dawkins who himself is an idiot.

They don't bother with logic, they violate logical norms in every argument they make then worm out by saying "logic doesn't tell us nothing about the world." It's beginning to look like the new atheist movement is based upon being stupid.

One of the worst, this atheist once asked me to tell him about my concept of God. "what god do you worship" he says. So put up a link, "these are my pages on my site where I describe my views." he said "I don't have to read that I know it will be stupid."

he asked man! he has me! the link is just a better way of answering. so he didn't' want an answer to begin with did he? they do this all the time. It's dumb.

by their fruits you shall know them. Jesus said. Their fruits are ignorance and laziness.

Then that atheist goes "I read your stuff it's so standard it's the same old stuff they always say." It's not. I have a Masters degree from a major seminary I know what is standard. How many times do you find the average Christian apologist on a message board saying God is being itself? In 13 years of doing apologetic on the net the only one's ever seen talk about it are those who were influenced by me.

the allegation that my stuff is like all the others is obvious bunk. The refusal of atheists to read the martial presented is becoming epidemic. They don't even read more than two lines of a post. They wont read the arguments being arrayed against them and yet they pretend to know all it. It's ridiculously intolerable. They should be banned from every message board. I urge Christians to boycott. Have nothing to do with atheists. Don't talk to them on message boards.

This guy, Nemo (12/26/10) thinks Christianity will wither away but that it would be a calamity to go right from theism to new atheism

What would “victory” look like?

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/568825-what-would-victory-look-like

Complete victory of New Atheism would be a calamity, and the nature of the question suggests the (a)theocratic false ambitions of the New Atheists, who have been hyped into thinking atheism some kind of scientific proof to it.

The passing away of Xtianity is probably inevitable, over a very long time, but the next stage of consciousness should be a robust study of the history of religion, the development of self-consciousness, and a kind of Kantian wariness at the tendency of all groups, religious or atheists, to create dogamatic or totalitarian cults out of metaphysical beliefs.
The intolerance of the new atheists, even to agnostics or other types of atheists, is an important warning that they are the same idiots in a new disguise as the Christians.
Lest this seem exaggerated consider Michael Parenti’s ‘new atheist’ book in the wake of the others, with its diatribe against Tibet: there ‘atheism’ means looking the other way at the destruction of Buddhists through murder ethnicide, and indoctrination.
The only safe stance is an intelligent agnosticism, and the intolerance toward even that shows the new atheists in their cultic infatuation, a mood created by Dawkins and his clever promotions of pseudo-science.
So let us fear this victory, and not let it happen. There is no need for victory. All that is needed is a pluralistic society where opinion is not controlled.

It's doubtful Christianity will pass away and even if it does I'm not sure that prove what most atheists think it would prove.

true this is a ID source, so take it with a grian of salt, but it does document that New Atheism and old Atheism are fighting. Irrationality of new atheism vs rationality of old.

e g r e g o r e s

UK Guardian attacks Harris as Totalitarian
Posted by Apuleius Platonicus on August 2, 2009
http://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/embryonically-totalitarian/

I was beginning to wonder whether or not this issue of Francis Collins’ nomination to be NIH Director had played out, but then I just saw that Andrew Brown begins his August 2, 2009 column in the UK Guardian like this

Anyone tempted to believe that the abolition of religion would make the world a wiser and better place should study the works of Sam Harris. Shallow, narrow, and self-righteous, he defends and embodies all of the traits that have made organised religion repulsive; and he does so in the name of atheism and rationality. He has, for example, defended torture, (“restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place”) attacked religious toleration in ways that would make Pio Nono blush: “We can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene” ; he has claimed that there are some ideas so terrible that we may be justified in killing people just for believing them.

And he ends it like this:

But militant atheism, of the sort that would deny people jobs for their religions beliefs, doesn’t actually believe in real science at all, any more than it believes in reason. Rather, it uses “science” and “reason” as tribal labels, and “religion” as a term for witchcraft. Any serious defence of the real, hard-won and easily lost enlightenment must start by rejecting that style of atheism entirely. What use is it to be right about God and wrong about everything else?

Parenthetically I want to say that I feel especially indebted to Brown for drawing my attention to yet another example of just how incredibly godawful the writing of these New Atheists can be:
But, obviously, Brown’s critique of Harris has far more to do with substance than style. Brown correctly condemns Harris’ arguments (“To the extent that Harris has any argument at all”), as “fantastically illiberal”. But personally I believe that Brown gives too much credit when he also characterizes the posture that Harris has assumed as only “embryonically totalitarian”. That embryo hatched when Harris published his first book, if not before.

The Chronicle of Higher Eudcation
Jan 21, 2011,
The New Atheist's Narrow World view
By Stephen T. Asma

new atheists world view is narrow minded and has nothing to say to the 3d world and people struggling to survive in dire poverty. from the Chronicle of higher education

With tongues in cheeks, Rich­ard Daw­kins, Chris­to­pher Hitch­ens, Sam Har­ris, and Dan­iel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampoon­ing the anx­i­eties of evan­geli­cals, these best-sell­ing athe­ists are em­brac­ing their "dan­gerous" sta­tus and dar­ing be­liev­ers to match their for­mi­da­ble philo­soph­i­cal acu­men.

Ac­cord­ing to these sol­diers of rea­son, the time for re­li­gion is over. It clings like a bad gene rep­li­cat­ing in the pop­u­la­tion, but its use­ful­ness is played out. Sam Har­ris's most re­cent book, The Moral Land­scape (Free Press, 2010), is the lat­est in the continuing bat­tle. As an ag­nos­tic, I find much of the horse­men's cri­tiques to be healthy.

But most friends and even en­e­mies of the new athe­ism have not yet no­ticed the pro­vin­cial­ism of the cur­rent de­bate. If the horse­men left their world of books, con­fer­ences, classrooms, and com­put­ers to trav­el more in the de­vel­op­ing world for a year, they would find some un­fa­mil­iar religious arenas.

Hav­ing lived in Cam­bo­di­a and Chi­na, and trav­eled in Thai­land, Laos, Viet­nam, and Af­ri­ca, I have come to ap­pre­ci­ate how re­li­gion func­tions quite dif­fer­ent­ly in the de­vel­op­ing world—where the ma­jor­ity of be­liev­ers ac­tu­al­ly live. The Four Horse­men, their fans, and their en­e­mies all fail to fac­tor in their own pros­per­i­ty when they think a­bout the uses and a­buses of re­li­gion.

Enlarge Image

Peter Menzel

Boontham Khuenkaew places a food offering at the 'spirit house' in his yard in Thailand.

Peter Menzel

Boontham Khuenkaew places a food offering at the 'spirit house' in his yard in Thailand.

Enlarge Image

Jonas Gratzer, OnAsia.com

A sacred banyan tree outside a temple in Bangkok.

Jonas Gratzer, OnAsia.com

A sacred banyan tree outside a temple in Bangkok.

Har­ris and his colleagues think that re­li­gion is most­ly con­cerned with two jobs—explain­ing na­ture and guid­ing mo­ral­ity. Their sug­ges­tion that sci­ence does these jobs bet­ter is pret­ty con­vinc­ing. As Har­ris puts it, "I am ar­gu­ing that sci­ence can, in prin­ci­ple, help us un­der­stand what we should do and should want—and, there­fore, what oth­er people should do and should want in or­der to live the best lives pos­si­ble." I a­gree with Har­ris here and even spilled sig­nif­i­cant ink my­self, back in 2001, to show that Ste­phen Jay Gould's pop­u­lar sci­ence/re­li­gion di­plo­ma­cy of "nonoverlapping mag­is­te­ri­a" (what many call the fact/val­ue dis­tinc­tion) is in­co­her­ent. The horse­men's mis­take is not their claim that sci­ence can guide mo­ral­ity. Rather, they're wrong in imag­in­ing that the pri­ma­ry job of re­li­gion is mo­ral­ity. Like cos­mol­o­gy, eth­ics is bare­ly rel­e­vant in non-West­ern re­li­gions. It is cer­tain­ly not the main func­tion or lure of de­vo­tion­al life. Science could take over the "mo­ral­ity job" to­mor­row in the de­vel­op­ing world, and very few re­li­gious prac­ti­tioners would even no­tice.

It's becoming rather common place to see people, not fundies, leftists and liberals and humanists recognizing the narrow mined totalitarian nature of new atheism.

what's the real differnce in "getting hard to tell the difference in new atheism and fascists" and "facists?"

I used Jeff Sparrow, a Marxist writer from Australia as an example of one who points out the totalitarian nature of new atheism. Hermit has been using his typical approach, get in your face and scream and sawqk about any and every trivial problem with the point utnil he scores a victory of any kid, however trivial, driving a wedge (however banal) bewteen the claim and the truth of the claim, the demanding that since he's scored a victory the whole thing is wrong. It doesnt' mattter to him that Sparrow said "it's getting hard to tell fascism from new atheism," he didn't say it was fascism so that must mean it's ok. Let's look at what he did say, understand his real argument is that New Atheism has a big totalitarian streak down it's back. That's not the way he puts it though. He uses the one issue of racism and Islamaphobia.

Sparrow:

In fact, the only accuracy in Myers’ sentence comes between the quote marks. I did, indeed, write that many of the main speakers in the two conferences scheduled for Melbourne in 2011 are very, very right wing. That’s because … um… they are...

I provided quotes from Christopher Hitchens about the need to kill the Taliban without pity and to wage the war in Afghanistan more ruthlessly to support what seemed to me a fairly uncontentious point – that Hitchens is today the most high-profile warmonger active in literary circles, essentially a traveling mouthpiece for that wing of the American elite still wedded to neoconservative foreign policies.his politics are so far to the right as to make genuinely mystifying the support he receives from self-identified progressives, but also because, in Australia, at least, he’s the most high-profile of the New Atheists.


He’s not some fringe hanger-on, the crazy old uncle in the atheist family, but a major draw card, a keynote speaker, who will no doubt be featured extensively (as was the case during his last tour) on television, radio and in the press, opining about the need to plunge further into Afghanistan or launch a new war in Yemen or whatever the current neocon talking point might bethough Hitchens is more overtly political and more unashamedly bloodthirsty than some of the other New Atheists,

the Islamophobia he promulgates is widespread in the movement.

That was why I quoted Sam Harris (again, not a fringe figure but another of the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’) on how the ‘people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists’, an argument with which Christopher Hitchens says he agrees (in, mind you, a largely approving review of a book by the far right demagogue Mark Steyn, which claims that Muslims are breeding their way to a takeover of Europe!)..



contrasted the rhetoric used by neofascist ideologues (as well as a conservative Australian politician) with that employed by major New Atheist speakers, not to prove that Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest were fascists (indeed, I explicitly said they were not) but rather to illustrate that they embrace an Islamophobia more usually associated with the far Right – which was, after all, the very point that Harris was making

This is typical of Hermit's hair splitting to ignore the meat of the matter and just go for the letter of law. The overall point Sparrow was making is that the New Atheist movement has a lot of modes of thought in place that are far right wing modes of thought. Hermit is content to feel ventilated that they are not out and out fascists but he's just missing the point about how totalitarian they are. He tries to make it sound like Sparrow was misquoted therefore he didn't say anything that would impune the New atheist and he sure as hell did.


Sparrow's views were attacked by those Dennison of limited mentality, the atheists who can't think, saying things like

Besides Sparrow’s obvious hypocrisy, he makes some rather puzzling assumptions about atheism. To Sparrow’s mind, an atheist should not oppose superstition and religious bigotry. It’s not the job of the atheist to challenge religion at all. It is, rather, the atheist’s job to embrace left-wing politics and “build the kind of society in which religion no longer seems necessary.” I won’t speculate here on whether that’s an effective strategy. Instead, let’s look at his conflation of atheism and leftism.

That's that guy's version of what it means to say atheist shouldn't rail against religion like fanatical clowns who can't allow people have their own views. It doesn't make any difference to Hermit that New Atheism is clearly totalitarian, clearly exist to vent hate against religious people. In other words Sparrow's bellweather against a racist position in New Atheism is met with so much Hermit like refusal to consider the meaning of what's really being said, so much typical atheist "them and us" kind of thinking, that they were pracitally accusing him of being an evangelist for Christian fundamentalism. That's why he was making clear his position, which was not without it's criticism of new atheism.

Like Hermit most new atheists can't take any sort of criticism and his tactics are typical, get in your face and cream about nit picking and hair splitting until you for once one little trivial difference between the claims of the the opponent and some little trivial mistake they made, then claim that you've destroyed their evil lies.

problem: Hermit is flaming, the site is not posting comments

I've lost a bunch of comments because they thing doesn't work right.

One of the main one's I want to talk about is where Hermit quotes Jeff Sparrow saying "I didn't day that New atheism is facist."

here's what he said:
Where have All the Progressive Atheists gone?
New Matilda.com

Melbourne is bracing for an influx of atheists next year - and that means oh so many right wing war-mongerers. It's getting hard to tell a New Atheist from a neo-fascist...

so he says it's hard to tell them apart from fascists. So Hermit can wipe the sweat from his brow feel good that he's not in a group that's labeled as fascist by a left wing journalist, he can ignore the fact that the journalist is obviously saying that New Atheism is stupid, totalitarian, narrow minded, has fascist-like tendencies. all of that is problem lost on Hermit, as long as his liberal conscience can do the typical atheist obfuscation of facts he doesn't have to feel tainted.

It is odd to me that it doesn't bother him that his group is clearly close to being like Facists but as long ass they are not called Fascist then that's ok.

Book Review of Fifty Voices of Disbelief

article in first things that new atheism is a passing fad.

David B. Hart
In First things:

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

first he points to the book Fifty Voices of Disbelief. It's trivial, the contributors are just the usual suspects, and what they have to say is said by atheists on message boards everyday on the net. There's nothing deep or new or hard to predict being said. It's all the same old ideological propaganda slogans. Of course it has to be the same old stuff because if it wasn't it would be off template. What do I mean by "off template?" Atheists on only think according to an ideolgoical template they learn form the echo chamber, constantly spitting back the same slogans on message boards. that's their standard of truth, on template is the definition of truth, off template is crazy wired stuff no matter how well supported it might be.

Yet the book that hails as the magnum opus of a movement is shallow and predicable.

Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientist in the book give the same indications of scientifically minded atheists on board who are unimaginative and totalitarian in their thinking, yet allow themselves to assume wild flights of fancy as proved fact while anything a believer thinks is just "unscientific and ridiculous."

Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

The great thinkers of their movement are no deeper than the rank and file. The author derides their constant triumphalist tone and their need to score cheap victories. Their conceptual understanding of theology remains childish and undeveloped. That would be because they think they don't need to read theology. It's enough to just insist that it's stupid and not learn about it.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

The problem is the criticisms are just as predictable and samie as are the things being criticized. This is actually a book review, not an article about the passing of New Atheism. I think Atheistwach has it all over this book review because we have gone past these obvious observations about the banality of the New Atheist. We have delved into their psychology, cracked the secret of the organizing and their funding (at least part way), and systematized thier ideology. I don't see how their movement can last in the long run except as a subculture that feeds off of the disillusionment of former fundies.

That Mat wont Hunt: Debating Fire in the Equasions Argument

This was my last debate about a God argument on CARM before I decided to leave the echo chamber. Notice the double talk from this guy who claimed to be a scientist!

23 posts, I was just daring responses. they would nto respond then: before he answers like this:

Vestpa:

So speaketh ye olde verbose Master baiter...

that's his brilliant comment. he's trying to make pun saying that I master bait. that's this guy's idea of being serious about arguments. Then they wonder why I insult them. They just can't figure out what they do to set me off.

Brain W:

You've received answers meta, and Matt is FAR out of your league when it comes to physics..though you may have an edge when it comes to constructing fairytales (theology) based on your rudimentary understanding of physics. You are just being childish as usual by moving the goalposts after receiving your answers, molding a completely unfalsifiable position for your invisible friend to occupy, and always insisting on having the last word. Grow up.

the answers he's talking about were " on the original thread. three 3 I don't know. One "I have a scinece degree and you don't. four "laws of physics are descriptive" no elaboration or answer the actually questions I posed.

this post is what emerged form about a six post exchange that took place after their 23 posts of crap:

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
why couldn't you do this on the 1x1 board?

Why does it have to be a debate?

you kept insisting you 'beat' my argument and came out swinging when I was busy and told I was. So you set up the idea that you wanted a contest, then you run away when time comes to for it.

Obviously there's some reality there because no scientist is ever willing to blow explaining causes. they don't say "we don't need a theory of orig because theres' no origin to explain we are just imposing order because that's what we do."

People are naturally curious.

that's not an answer to my argument. It doesn't answer what I said. It's a reason to think about it, not a reason to dismiss it.

actually it contradicts scinece itself. Why bother to make systemic observations about he way things work if there's no order, we are just imposing it from within ourselves? Not only that but it contradicts the idea of a descriptive law of phscis, why bother to describe if it's just us imposing order instead of a real description?

I see you are using the term order without actually defining it.

I see you are playing your tricks of language again.I did define it. don't you know an operational definition when you see one?

You are incorrectly making the assumption that the reason why scientists measure, they make observations and perform experiments and from their results they see that the universe consistently behaviours according to some fixed rules, so far we have not observed anything different.

the same observation Whtiehead made, the same one Newton made, the basis of kicking God out of Science that LaPlace made. you are using the ideological prlaform of the cop out period after atheism abandoned LaPLace because it could no longer justify observations without assumptino of physical laws, brought on QM theory.

As the laws of physics are just man made descriptions, the constancy of the way that nature are inbuilt into the equations.

which also means it's a cultural construct, it's relative, it's not truth and it can be argued with.

I think I do. I say why don't things fall up? why aren't thing repelled by mass? why don't universe pop into my tea cup. I think we get an idea what I mean.

Actually you don't. I want a precise definition from you on the matter. It wastes times if we are using different notions of the word. Matt Slick accused me of this, but he really didn't understand the importance of it.

those are very simple questions why don't you answer them. The way I'm using "order is obvious I've explained it two oar three times. I've explained it in terms of the very things I"m asking you to explain.

when we argue about the resurrection Hans say "we don't see people getting up from being dead." that's a from of order. why don't see that? because apparently it never happens. you want to just leave it there it's just a coincidence that it never happens, but there has to be some kind of principle that prevents it. Otherwise we would see it. Since you admitted that's a human observation it can also be wrong. there can be other observations that you are just ignoring where in rare cases some people do get up from being dead.

when it comes to what you don't want to happen you assert it never does, when it comes to what you don't want then you assert a rule of some implication of a rule.



no it doesn't. I can assuming without necessarily having an idea of deity. you are rather balking at the conclusion not at the premise.

It does but you just can't see it.

you didn't read very carefully. I was talking about early modern scinece when LaPlace used perspective laws to take God out of scinece.

I did read it as a matter of fact. Laplace never invoked the notion of a deity because he didn't need to. He modelled the observations as he saw them.

Of cousre Laplace didn't evoke a deity, to the contrary, he kicked one out! that's what he's infamous for! you don't get it? He's is my all time candidate for fink of the ages becasue he took God out merely for a stupid reason like "I have psychical laws instead." Of course he took out the reason for having them.

I never said he appealed to deity, try reading the words next time.

part 2

that contradicts above, why do that if it's imposed by us? you are also not answering what I said about descriptive is a framework to hide order.

Not too sure what you're saying here.

that is not applicable to my original argument. that's why your answer was irrelevant to begin with. It's also not right because it's not true nothing. but it was that area of nothing I was talking about. that was supposed to be an answer to my questions.

Okay, you brought up the argument in the first place.

I asked a question. you claimed you answered it but your answer didn't apply to what I was talking about. then wont listen to see what it is.



It contradicted your point. you were saying something from noting it says no nothing it is something anyway. it doesn't' really matter because your answer is about the wrong thing.

If you think it did that then a) you don't understand what I was saying and b) you didn't understand what the quote was saying and c) you are misrepresenting what I was saying. I said there was a possibility that the model that Krauss spoke about was an accurate description of the universe.

no stop blathering you are still answering the wrong thing.



Yes that's why it's a paradigm and it's going to shift. so it's not absolute it's not the fortress of facts. its' a description based upon a limited sample so you can't use to rule out God.

Science isn't going to "shift" to something else, it is going to keep using the same methodology as it always has, trying to describe the universe from their experiments and observations, refining the models with more data.

NO no no no no no np! stop pretending like you understand Kuhn, you don't know anything about him. He doesn't scinece becomes something other than scinece, he says scientific confusions are incommensurable becasue standards by which they are judged are based upon paradigms that shift when scientific revolutions happen.

that's what shifts, paradigm. we go from one to another. not to none scinece but to new paradigm.

operationally I have. these are common issues in arguments atheists I'm not using in any wired way that people done usually use them.

You haven't.

talking about defining order? I think it's pretty obvious when I explain by saying "why don't things flee the center of mass" what I"m calling "order." the regularity by which things happen over and over the same way everything we observe them.

are you going to answer it or are you going to pull another little track and say "you didn't define "mean," what do you mean by mean?"

that's just slough. because otherwise you have the gall and temerity to rule out belief in god yet you obviously haven't thought about it.

I rule out a deity because there is no evidence for one, moreover there is evidence that there is no such deity, evolution is a strong argument that there is no deity in my opinion

obviously there is. the order and regularity that you can't explain!

he takes out arguments he can't answer. name calling them rather than dealing with them logically.



but hat could just as easily be the mind of God. you have no empirical evidence.
you are just speculating but if a theist said that atheists would be chiming "there's no before the big bang."

you are obviously just speculating too becasue you agree there is no order, your observations and just man made and limited. You are to observing anything orderly you are just imposing an ideolgoical Meta narrative.


We have no definite answer to the question, "What was before the big bang", there may be some scant evidence around that there was (Penrose's cyclic universes)
you are basing your answer on ideological propaganda and speculation.

Speculation possibly, but science has a proven track record for solving problems and answering questions

only when it' limited to it's own domain. It has no tacking record in ruling out God or explaining the underlying order of things. you are doing a bait and switch.

your observations you admit are "man made" and you are not observing any kind of structure or ofer, you already said that. so you have no track record at all in terms of the larger picture beyond the purely physical workings of the world.

Not really. all you mean by that is that within tine narrow sub framework you use to mark what you are talking about you don't have a neat little A = B kind of causality. bu ti the larger framework it's not coming of total nothing. it's in the realm of physical aw and time, and vacuum flux.

No, there really is no cause for the radioactive decay of a nucleotide. Deal with it. Some things you can only do statistics and probability with, there is no deterministic model that we can apply.

(1) that's not an issue, there doesn't have to be because as I said that's just as much evidence of Mind in creation as causes are.

(2) you don't know that.. your observations are only man made and limited.

Now as a theist I'm not obligated to for causes necessarily it just depends upon what argument I want to push. my new reboot of FITE argument does not require that we disprove all a causal understanding.

So previously, you said that the cause/effect argument required a "mind" now you are throwing all that out?

you are not listening. I said C/e is evidence ordering principle. if QM events are not caused that is not evidence against God becuase the use of non causal and uncertainty principles also require mind, in the context of an ordered universe. Otherwise it would be a deterministic universe.

see? done this way where the mind knows just when to control and just when to let it ride it makes a free will universe. otherwise everything would be real determined.


my argument that the weirdness of a causal principles in the framework with the ordering principles are evidence of mind. Evidence because only a mind would know when to control and when to let it go random. in other words God might play dice with the universe but a non thinking set of deterministic causes could not pay dice.
It is just one description on the phenomena that we see, however it might not be the only way of describing the world that we see. Causality is only one possible way of describing the observed phenomena.
see the point? you need a mind to stop and say "hey this is the place to throw the dice."

I only see that you have stated your opinion, but provided a coherent argument for it.

Obviously I stated my opinion. that' not an answer. I base my onion upon the qaualia we discuss so avoiding a discussion of that qualia is not an answer.

I'm saying a science is fine and good but nature is not impressed. God is not impressed it doesn't mean you know. you may know better than I certainly sure that's true in many ways but you don't know the ultimate answers. you don't know what the framework is or how it got there. you don't know what is being described.

This just seems to be special pleading to me.

how could it be special pleading when I'm taking into account all the phenomena and you are trying to lose the phenomena that embarrassing for you?


I just did. Human attempts at knowledge. Its' a metaphor.

Actually you didn't define anything. I am using specific concepts of scales and you are using some ill-defined ideas and using that to your advantage.

would you know a definition if you saw one? why do you suppose every time you ask I say things like "the order and regularity we observe such as things don't' flee the center of mass." how is that not defining hat I mean by order?

"Center for Inquiry" Poll of religion is Atheist Propaganda.

Today an estimated sixteen percent of Americans—or about 49 million American men, women, and children—live without religious affiliation.^* As a group, religiously unaffiliated Americans are more numerous than any single religious denomination except Roman Catholics.

They are more numerous than Hispanic Americans or African Americans ... more numerous than the estimated gay and lesbian population … more than seven times as numerous as American Jews … more than fifteen times as numerous as religiously active American Jews.

Not all of the religiously unaffiliated would describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, but recent studies suggest that the actively nonreligious make up about two-thirds of this population, with spiritual seekers and persons between church affiliations making up the rest.

How do we know these things? Recent—and authoritative—data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and from surveys conducted in association with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. ARIS studies in 1990, 2001, and 2008 documented the doubling of “nones” (people declaring no religious affiliation). Studies by Pew and other researchers have confirmed this pattern and offered more detailed information on the makeup of this fast-growing group. For example, a 1994 Pew-University of Akron study gave us our most detailed portrait of the people who make up the unaffiliated 16 percent. It found that about a third of this group identifies itself using labels like atheist and agnostic. Another third does not use these labels, but when asked about their lifestyle (church attendance, beliefs about life, and the like) is otherwise almost identical with the first group; pollsters call these the hard seculars. Combined, self-identified atheists and agnostics and the hard seculars make up 10.7 percent of the total population, equivalent to two-thirds of the unaffiliated. Spiritual seekers and persons without current church affiliation make up the balance.

Many Americans imagine that they don’t know a single person who lives without religion. Yet if confirmed nonreligious people compose 10.7 percent of the population … and if one American in six has no religious affiliation … how likely does that seem? Or is it more likely that you already know neighbors, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or family members who live without religion?

* NOTE: According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Popclock, as of February 22, 2011, the U.S. population is 310,868,110. Sixteen percent of this = 49,738,898 religiously unaffiliated Americans of all ages.

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Today an estimated sixteen percent of Americans—or about 49 million American men, women, and children—live without religious affiliation.^* As a group, religiously unaffiliated Americans are more numerous than any single religious denomination except Roman Catholics.

They are more numerous than Hispanic Americans or African Americans ... more numerous than the estimated gay and lesbian population … more than seven times as numerous as American Jews … more than fifteen times as numerous as religiously active American Jews.

Not all of the religiously unaffiliated would describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, but recent studies suggest that the actively nonreligious make up about two-thirds of this population, with spiritual seekers and persons between church affiliations making up the rest.

How do we know these things? Recent—and authoritative—data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and from surveys conducted in association with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. ARIS studies in 1990, 2001, and 2008 documented the doubling of “nones” (people declaring no religious affiliation). Studies by Pew and other researchers have confirmed this pattern and offered more detailed information on the makeup of this fast-growing group. For example, a 1994 Pew-University of Akron study gave us our most detailed portrait of the people who make up the unaffiliated 16 percent. It found that about a third of this group identifies itself using labels like atheist and agnostic. Another third does not use these labels, but when asked about their lifestyle (church attendance, beliefs about life, and the like) is otherwise almost identical with the first group; pollsters call these the hard seculars. Combined, self-identified atheists and agnostics and the hard seculars make up 10.7 percent of the total population, equivalent to two-thirds of the unaffiliated. Spiritual seekers and persons without current church affiliation make up the balance.

Many Americans imagine that they don’t know a single person who lives without religion. Yet if confirmed nonreligious people compose 10.7 percent of the population … and if one American in six has no religious affiliation … how likely does that seem? Or is it more likely that you already know neighbors, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or family members who live without religion?

* NOTE: According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Popclock, as of February 22, 2011, the U.S. population is 310,868,110. Sixteen percent of this = 49,738,898 religiously unaffiliated Americans of all ages.

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New atheist study fudges data to create propaganda. This is a poll done by Center for Inquiry. CFI is nothing more than an atheist propaganda machine and their mission statement basically say so. I'll get to that in a minute. Their poll came up first on Google when I put in the question "what percentage of Americas are self defined atheists?"

The big head line of the study "one out of every Six Americans has no religious affiliation." Assuming that was true, (which it's not becuase it's assinign if you know the studies) it seems totally taken for granted that having no religious affiliation is a bad thing for religion. I'm not sure that's true. They are equating it with unbelief and that's not right. Here's their pie chart break down:

Unaffiliated 16%.
Evangelical Protestant 12%
Evangelical Baptist 11%
Other religions 37%
Catholic 24%

What's wrong with this picture? Do we really think that with the tea party blazing and right wing hysteria foaming that the largest religious group in America is "other religions?" This is totally ludicrous. I fyou study the Pew study, which is the major valid best study done in 2007 (to date the state of the art) on religious land scape in America one can see how they have fudged on this. for one thing all studies give Chrisiantiy at least 75% or more. This one gives it (adding all the Catholic, protestant, and Baptist(?) Christinty as a whole only has 44%.

It is inconceivable to me that just since 2007 things changes this drastically. Here's the Pew findings:


unaffiliated 16%
Evangelical protestant 26% *(not 12)
Catholic 23%
Mormon 1.7%
Historically Black chruches 6.9%
Mainline Protestants 18.1% (separate from Evangelical protestant)
Other Christian 0.3%
Other religions 0.3% (Pew also adds to "other" Jews 1.7%, Muslim 0.6% what it calls "other faiths" as distinct from major world religions, in that slot they put unitarians, new age, mind scinece and so = 1.2%). While CFI has a whopping 37% the better study by far, Pew, has abotu 2%. How

Breaking down the unaffiliated at the top, Pew lists atheists as 1.6%. not 16, but 1.6. If you see my page on Doxa about how atheists inflate their numbers, there are several studies that show atheists down around that figure. Pew figure is the most conservative. Adherent's.com gives them 4%. Gallop in May 2008 give 3% with 3% margin (so between 3-6%).


you see they split Baptist from Protestant for some absurd reason because Baptists are protestants of course. Makes both groups seem smaller. Then they just ignored half the Christian population.

The reason for these discrepancies is not far to seek. CFI is a propaganda wing of the Atheist movement and all do to know this is look at their mission statement. One might also take note they own Skeptical Inquirer Magazine.. Their mission statments pulls no punches in admitting they are out to destroy religion.



mission Statement of CFI.

The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

That's the head line on the mission statement. That's no atheist propaganda is it? It's even touting their rhetoric.

To oppose and supplant the mythological narratives of the past, and the dogmas of the present, the world needs an institution devoted to promoting science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. The Center for Inquiry is that institution.

To oppose and supplant. Supplant means to replace, to destroy. Like all good little dawkies they confuse scinece with hating religion. Their aim they state clearly to destroy religion. why should we believe they are above lying to achieve that end? We know they don't believe in truth. Their little solider have fabricated data before. I have no evidence on CFI but I have shown atheist websites that just out and out fabricate the statistics. If this is guilt by assocaition one might look at the wildly off target statistics above. Giving 34% to "other religions" when the valid study gives 2%. This survey wasn't done yesterday. Things couldn't change that much since 2007.

more of the mission statement:

At the Center for Inquiry, we believe that evidence-based reasoning, in which humans work together to address common concerns, is critical for modern world civilization. Moreover, unlike many other institutions, we maintain that scientific methods and reasoning should be utilized in examining the claims of both pseudoscience and religion. We reject mysticism and blind faith. No topic should be placed off limits to scrutiny—certainly not fringe science and religion, which have an enormous influence on beliefs and conduct.

If they knew anything about mysticism they would know that it's backed with empirical scientific evidence. They are using that as a pejorative catch phrase that means any and all religion.

We also maintain that values are properly the subject of study and discussion as much as empirical claims. The Center for Inquiry studies and promotes human values based on a naturalistic outlook. Ideological doctrine and religious dogma have no more right to dictate our moral norms than they do to influence scientific research.

That's exactly what their rhetoric has spelled out, ideological doctrine. Look at the obvious philosophical contradiction: "values are properly the subject of study and discussion as much as empirical claims" that means we will teach you to hate religion too. then they ahve the gall to say "Ideological doctrine and religious dogma have no more right to dictate our moral norms than they do to influence scientific research." That statement is ideolgoical in and of itself. To make good on that they have to argue for a philosophical ethical position that has to be justified by argument. They are merely presenting their own ideology and dogma. When they talk about values they stepping beyond the limits of science. Science is not about teaching values.When religious believes talk about values they holding up the progress of science.

The Center for Inquiry supports research, but our mission activities go far beyond sound scholarship.

they sure do! there you have it folks a frank admission of what I'm saying. Going beyond includes lying and fabricating numbers!

The Center for Inquiry, and its affiliates, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism, also carry out their work through education, publishing, advocacy, and social services. The Center for Inquiry has established dozens of regional centers and communities, which provide a means of delivering educational programs and services on a local level and provide a venue for like-minded individuals to meet and share experiences. In addition, the Center for Inquiry has affiliates and sponsors programs in many different countries. A secular society ultimately should embrace all of humanity, not just selected countries.

what they are describing is the actives of a political campaign. I think this violates their 501c(3)

that statement tells us they are a propaganda machine. I am not trying to accuse all "humanist" of being in a conspiracy, but it's obvious there is an organized group making war on Christianity. We have to oppose them by spreading truth.

ABC Poll = 38% of Americans are Christian, 48% of world.

Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Most of the rest, 13 percent, have no religion. That leaves just 4 percent as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions.

That's quite different from the world at large: Fifty-two percent of the world's population is non-Christian, compared to 4 percent in the United States; and one-third is Christian, compared to 83 percent in the United States. (These are rough comparisons, because the world figures, reported by the Encyclopedia Britannica, are for the full population, while the U.S. figures are among adults only.)

Non Christian religions given 4% no Religion in America 13% (somewhere in that 13% is the atheists).

CNN (not the best)= 75% say Christian in America (2009)

Seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was 86 percent.

Newswek Poll = 81% self identified Christian in America (2009)

By Audrey Barrick

Christian Post Reporter

Wed, Apr. 08 2009 11:50 AM EDT

A new Newsweek poll reveals that although most Americans are still holding on to their faith and describing themselves as Christians, fewer believe religion can answer today’s problems.

According to the poll of 1,003 adults, released Tuesday, 60 percent of American adults say religion is very important in their lives and 78 percent say prayer is an important part of their daily lives.However, less than half (48 percent) believe religion can answer all or most of today’s problems. The percentage is the lowest number Newsweek has recorded since it began polling Americans on that issue in 1957 (when 82 percent believed religion could answer the problems of that time).

Washington Post reports on poll in 2009 that finds the group that says it has no religion is at 15% That doesn't mean atheits are at 15%. 12% of the "no religion group" doesn't' mean they don't believe in some kind of God it means they have organized religion. Most polls don't bother to make that distinction but the better one's do.

Gallop = self id Chrsitians in America at 77%. this is probably the same survey all those above are keyed to, it was actually done in 2008, just a year after the Pew study came out.

New Atheist Ideology Disected and Disproved

Andrew Brown, Marxist critic who works for the Guardian, major left wing newspaper.

New atheism is a political movement and not an Intellectual one:

Brown's blog on the Guardian site

In part this is difficult because the new atheism is largely a political and social rather than an intellectual movement. In some ways it can be understood as the canary in the coalmine of American power and exceptionalism.

this guy is an expert in ideology. This guy knows ideology when he sees it. He distills an idea for New Atheism (which proves one of my major assertions). His method for piecing together the ideology is to find the communality in the works of the major leaders of their movement, the major New Atheist writers.

The ideas I claim are distinctive of the new atheists have been collected from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Jerry Coyne, the American physicist Robert L. Park, and a couple of blogging biologists, P Z Myers and Larry Moran. They have two things in common. They are none of them philosophers and, though most are scientists, none study psychology, history, the sociology of religion, or any other discipline which might cast light on the objects of their execration. All of them make claims about religion and about believers which go far beyond the mere disbelief in God which I take to be the distinguishing mark of an atheist.

These are the ideas:

❄ There is something called "Faith" which can be defined as unjustified belief held in the teeth of the evidence. Faith is primarily a matter of false propositional belief.

❄ The cure for faith is science: The existence of God is a scientific question: either he exists or he doesn't. "Science is the only way of knowing – everything else is just superstition" [Robert L. Park]

❄ Science is the opposite of religion, and will lead people into the clear sunlit uplands of reason. "The real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition" [Jerry Coyne] "I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." [Dawkins]

❄ In this great struggle, religion is doomed. Enlightened common sense is gradually triumphing and at the end of the process, humanity will assume a new and better character, free from the shackles of religion. Without faith, we would be better as well as wiser. Conflict is primarily a result of misunderstanding, of which Faith is the paradigm. (Looking for links, I just came across a lovely example of this in the endnotes to the Selfish Gene, where lawyers are dismissed as "solving man-made problems that should never have existed in the first place".)

❄ Religion exists. It is essentially something like American fundamentalist protestantism, or Islam. More moderate forms are false and treacherous: if anything even more dangerous, because they conceal the raging, homicidal lunacy that is religion's true nature. [Sam Harris]

❄ Faith, as defined above, is the most dangerous and wicked force on earth today and the struggle against it and especially against Islam will define the future of humanity. [Everyone]

All of these propositions will be found in the authors I have cited as well as in the comments to religious articles here. I sometimes think that only the last two are unique to the new atheists: you can certainly find the others in earlier authors. But those are the six doctrines which I would reject when saying rude things about the new atheists.

let's take them one at a time:

❄ There is something called "Faith" which can be defined as unjustified belief held in the teeth of the evidence. Faith is primarily a matter of false propositional belief.

This is nothing more than the message board atheist fallacy about the nature of faith. The Faith article in Westminster Dictionary of Theology is like two huge pages of small type. It's much too complex to just pack into this loaded self serving ideological propaganda slogan. "unjustified bleief" no believer accepts that faith is unjustified and thus this is not a definition but a slogan. The Westminster article show that faith means as much "faithfulness" or commitment as it does placing confidence in an hypothesis. Faith is placing confidence in a hypothesis toward the end of making a commitment and remaining faithful to the placing of such confidence.

❄ The cure for faith is science: The existence of God is a scientific question: either he exists or he doesn't. "Science is the only way of knowing – everything else is just superstition" [Robert L. Park]

Of course we only need a cure if there's an illness. There is no such illness because faith is not a negative. Of course the existence of God is not a scientific question. I've disproved this and written about why it's not many times.

the phrase in that point science is the only way of knowing is the atheist fortress of facts concept that I've talked about many times. Everytime I've brought it up on CARM they deny it then go on to prove I'm right by embracing it. So they deny it with one breath and embrace it with the next. Anyone who really knows much about history and Philosophy of scinece knows this is BS.

❄ Science is the opposite of religion, and will lead people into the clear sunlit uplands of reason. "The real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition" [Jerry Coyne] "I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." [Dawkins]

The identification of reilgion with superstition belies all the talk about reason. When we actaully get around to apply some reason we see their argument is merely circular reasoning. They will say "theology is stupidity" but demand that they quote some theologian to prove its' superstition they say "I have not read theology, I don't to read it because I know it's stupid." That sort of anti-intellectual clap trap is a higher crime against reason. Reason is the last these jokers really believe in. The Dawkins statment at the end is the most anti-intellectual piece of crap ever uttered.

They are making the assumption that scienc eis reason but it's actually oppossed to reason because that concept contradicts what is said above about scinece being the only from of knowledge. Atheist disparage logic as a means of understanding the world. They deny that there is any other form of knowledge. Logic is a from of reason. Reason is not empircal observation. So therefore they are actually contradicting because reason is a competeing form of knowledge to empirical science.

❄ In this great struggle, religion is doomed. Enlightened common sense is gradually triumphing and at the end of the process, humanity will assume a new and better character, free from the shackles of religion. Without faith, we would be better as well as wiser. Conflict is primarily a result of misunderstanding, of which Faith is the paradigm. (Looking for links, I just came across a lovely example of this in the endnotes to the Selfish Gene, where lawyers are dismissed as "solving man-made problems that should never have existed in the first place".)

Here we have one of the most interesting. It's not only working from the myth of progress that modernity loves define itself by (thus demonstrated that it's an outmoded way of thinking--disproved by Postmodernism) but it also reads like an eschatology. This marks it as a true aspect of ideology. All ideologies have an eschatology, an end times, a end point toward which the great struggle of the ideological vanguard resolves itself in their victory. Check out past versions:

Christianity: Return of Christ in the end times

Marxism: Worker's paradise

Black Muslims: Black Supremacy

Feminism: Gynarchy (matriarchy)

there the new atheists have the scientific post religious society. this more than anything proves it's an ideology. The rest of the points are just rehashes. They have all the aspects of an ideology:

a exigence, a villain, a vanguard, a audience, a great struggle, an eschatology


Marxism:

exigence: exploitation of the working class.
villain: Capitalism
Vanguard: communist party
audience: workers
great struggle: class warfare
eschatology: worker's paradise.

Works with any ideology one cares to name.

Nation of Islam:

exigence: exploitation of the black race
Villain: White race
Vanguard: Fruit of Islam (black Muslims)
Audience: Black people
great struggle: racism
eschatology: Black society becomes dominate society.

new Atheism:

existence: faith prominent in society
Villain: religion
Vanguard: new atheists
Audience. people who hate religion
great struggle: to destroy religion
eschatology: scientific society post religious.

Having an ideology doesn't' necessary make people wrong. Both Marxists and Black Muslims have their salient points. New atheists, however, are totally afraid to admit they have an ideology. They will never admit it. Even the loyal opponent Hermit is still avidly denying that there is one. Which is odd becuase they seem to think they are the only valid view point there is.

New Atheism is a Passing Fad

article in first things that new atheism is a passing fad.

David B. Hart
In First things:

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

first he points to the book Fifty Voices of Disbelief. It's trivial, the contributors are just the usual suspects, and what they have to say is said by atheists on message boards everyday on the net. There's nothing deep or new or hard to predict being said. It's all the same old ideological propaganda slogans. Of course it has to be the same old stuff because if it wasn't it would be off template. What do I mean by "off template?" Atheists on only think according to an ideolgoical template they learn form the echo chamber, constantly spitting back the same slogans on message boards. that's their standard of truth, on template is the definition of truth, off template is crazy wired stuff no matter how well supported it might be.

Yet the book that hails as the magnum opus of a movement is shallow and predicable.

Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientist in the book give the same indications of scientifically minded atheists on board who are unimaginative and totalitarian in their thinking, yet allow themselves to assume wild flights of fancy as proved fact while anything a believer thinks is just "unscientific and ridiculous."

Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

The great thinkers of their movement are no deeper than the rank and file. The author derides their constant triumphalist tone and their need to score cheap victories. Their conceptual understanding of theology remains childish and undeveloped. That would be because they think they don't need to read theology. It's enough to just insist that it's stupid and not learn about it.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

The problem is the criticisms are just as predictable and samie as are the things being criticized. This is actually a book review, not an article about the passing of New Atheism. I think Atheistwach has it all over this book review because we have gone past these obvious observations about the banality of the New Atheist. We have delved into their psychology, cracked the secret of the organizing and their funding (at least part way), and systematized thier ideology. I don't see how their movement can last in the long run except as a subculture that feeds off of the disillusionment of former fundies.

New Athesim is a Fasicsitc Movment.

Andrew Brown



When I first started doing atheist watch I would never have dreamed of saying directly that New atheism is fascism. I think it's been not well proved that it is, but also is becoming commonplace to find people saying so. In the old days when I would not say it but vegly hint in that direction by using graphics of Nazis or soemthing, which wasn't even meant to convey a literal idea that they are fascist but just a metaphorical association, Hermit would throw a fit. For a long time the only people who had the guts to really take on the totalitarian ideas of the new atheist were fundamentalists. This made it very easy for Hermit and other atheists to ignore it. They were able to just write it off as the insults of stupid "fundies." They can't write it off now becasue of who is saying it. I find a lot of people alluding to it, not all of them funides. Here are two of them are card carrying leftists. One is a reporter for the Guardian. They are atheists themselves and clearly well known as left wing journalists and writers. By "left" I don't mean liberal I mean it in the commonly used political connotation, Marxist or quasi Marxist or some form of socialism. The Guardian is clear unarguably at the center of America's left wing Socialist journalism. The third one, Robert Write, is described as "agnostic" is not a leftist but can't be identified with the right either. more of a neo-liberal. Some might argue that Ne0-liberal is right wing. It's not capitalistic in it's thinking, it's a sales job for one-dimensional man. Not anywhere near the Fascist/fundie tea party wing. He describes himself as "secular humanist."



Andrew Brown (writes for the Guardian, Orwell prize winner--he's politically astute) says that New Atheism is a movement. More than just not believing in God.

What would be interesting in comments is if people would score themselves out of six. I expect that one of the most common forms of disagreement would be to claim that you are a three or a four, but none the less the believers are so repulsive and dangerous that the other two points just don't matter. That's how politics works, after all, and the new atheism is interesting as a political or social movement, not an intellectual one.

New atheism is still at the stage where it's trying to deny that it is a movement. We are making progress just to establish that it is. Brown sees it is a political movement, but says it's not an intellectual one. As though we need an expert to tell us that. Yet he does tell us that. He tells some more interesting things that we will be observing. He basically lays out an ideology that he extracts from the major writers of the New Atheism. While their members are busy having hissy fits denying that they have an ideology, here's a guy who makes his living studying ideology telling us that they have one. We will be looking at it more in depth latter in the week.

Brown sees new atheism as a political movement that scape goats religion for all the evils of the world, and conducts a witch hunt to eradicate it.

In part this is difficult because the new atheism is largely a political and social rather than an intellectual movement. In some ways it can be understood as the canary in the coalmine of American power and exceptionalism. Before the crash, when it was possible to believe that globalised capitalism would go on making us richer and more liberal forever (at least if you didn't read John Gray) the new atheism was one of the few ways to express disbelief and fear and loathing in the way the world was going. "Religion" became a synecdoche for everything that might go wrong, so that belief in the evil qualities of Faith was not so very different from belief in the evils of witchcraft.

Why not think of New Atheism as a religion? Brown quips that he doesn't think of religion as a religion.

Note, this is not a claim that the new atheism is a religion. I don't actually believe that even religion is a religion in the sense that there is one thing or mode of thought which the word describes. But one of the ways to examine religion is as a set of shared stories and characters which explain what is happening in the world, and the new atheists, with their urgent, apocalyptic message about the dangers of faith, certainly offer that.

Jeff Sparrow is an Australian leftwing writer, editor and former socialist activist based in Melbourne, Victoria.^[1] He is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History^[2] and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within^[3] (both with sister, Jill Sparrow). He is also the author of Communism: A Love Story^[4] and Killing: Misadventures in Violence.^[5]

Where have All the Progressive Atheists gone?
New Matilda.com

Melbourne is bracing for an influx of atheists next year - and that means oh so many right wing war-mongerers. It's getting hard to tell a New Atheist from a neo-fascist...

Example, Sparrow turned to Hitchens:

Consider the headline act for both events, Christopher Hitchens, a man who, without undue hyperbole, might be described as the preeminent war-monger in the intellectual world today.

Let us recall how Hitchens wrote about the war in Afghanistan back in 2002:

"It is … impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they could do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they get started."

Impossible to compromise … kill them without pity: the phrases read like a parody of a militarist demagogue or some ultra rightist general. But they are, alas, characteristic of Hitchens, who has championed — enthused over, even — every military conflict launched in the war on terror, as well as several (Iran, North Korea, Somalia) that have yet to get off the ground.

For Hitchens, the achievements of the American agnostic community in spreading secularism are nothing compared to those of George Bush and the US armed forces.

Ah, comes the response, don’t worry about Hitchens’ lust for blood. He’s coming to Australia to discuss atheism, and atheism is, we all know, inherently progressive. But that’s precisely the problem.

The so-called New Atheist movement, in which Hitchens is a key figure, is not progressive in the slightest. On the contrary, it represents a rightwing appropriation of a once-radical tradition — and it’s well past time that so-called left-wingers, both in Australia and elsewhere, stepped up and said so.

Yes, it’s true that the New Atheists do polemicise against the Christian establishment. You can find any number of YouTube clips of the various superstars of non-belief befuddling some hillbilly preacher or pompous cardinal with facts about evolution or knotty contradictions in the Bible.

And for those of us who don’t believe in God, there’s a certain visceral satisfaction in reading a witty takedown of this or that Christian conservative. But, in reality, the Christian Right is increasingly irrelevant to real power in Australia in the 21st century.

Most of Sparrow's article is about Islam. The atheist attitude toward Islam and terrorism is racist and pathetic. PZ Myers made an answer to Sparrow and Sparrow responded. I find it telling that article has now been taken off the net, or it's timed out but for some reason it's not available.

http://web.overland.org.au/2011/06/the-left-the-right-and-the-new-atheism-a-response-to-pj-myers/


Robert right

American journalist, scholar, and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including The Evolution of God, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv. He is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.<sup>[1]


In Why the "New Athesits are Right Wing on Foreign Policy"
Huffington Post

He attacks Hitchens and Dawkins as right wing.</sup>

It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?

Actually, the chances were pretty good. When it comes to foreign policy, a right-wing bias afflicts not just Hitchens's world view, but the whole ideology of "new atheism," especially as seen in the work of Hitchens allies Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins....

The Israeli and American right join Dawkins in stressing religious motivation in the Middle East, and there's a reason for that. The people there whose political grievances are most conspicuously caught up with religion are Muslims. If the problem is that Muslims are possessed by this irrational, quasi-autonomous force known as religion, then there's no point in trying to reason with them, or to look at any facts on the ground that might drive their discontent. And there are facts on the ground in the West Bank that the Israeli and American right don't want to talk about. They're called settlements.

He extends the analysis to Harris.

Sam Harris has been explicit in rejecting material explanations of Islamic radicalism. In The End of Faith, while discussing terrorism, he pondered such roots causes as "the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships...the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world." He concluded: "We can ignore all of these things, or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf, because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism."

He follows that up with "The trouble with New Atheists part II."

1. Is religion at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Richard Dawkins had said yes, and I said no; the conflict between Arabs and Jews started as a basically secular dispute over land and only later got wrapped up in religious fervor. Blogger Paul Fidalgo replied that the reason the Israelis thought they deserved the land was because "it says so in their holy book," and John Snider at americanfreethought.com also emhasized the power of the Bible's "cosmic claims about the Promised Land." I think the words "holy" and "cosmic" are misleading here. The leaders of the Zionist movement were secular (as Snider acknowledges). To the extent that they cited the Bible, they cited it not as a religious text, but as an historical text--to establish that their people had been on the land before the Arabs were. (Just as native Americans might point to evidence that they were in America before Europeans.) Whereas the American Declaration of Independence invokes God, the closest the Israeli Declaration of Independence comes to a religious appeal is the phrase "with trust in the rock of Israel." (That's what it says in Hebrew, though it's often translated into English as "trust in the Almighty".)

I'm not denying that the conflict has become religious, both for some Jews and some Muslims. And I'm not denying that this complicates the solution. My point is just that the prime mover is the conflict over land, and if that conflict is resolved, religious zealotry will start to subside--because, in my view, ever since ancient times [http://evolutionofgod.net/time] , it's been material circumstances, not religion, that has driven "religious" conflict. Richard Dawkins, in asserting that there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict whatsoever if it weren't for religion, is not just wrong but dangerously wrong, because such claims discourage us from working hard to change those circumstances.

Speaking of Dawkins:

2. Is Richard Dawkins right wing on foreign policy? Here is where I'm at fault--not for asserting that Dawkins has right-wing views on foreign policy, but for failing to make clear that I wasn't asserting this. My point was that the new atheists' depiction of religion as the root of evil, by discouraging attention to deeper root causes, furthers a right-wing agenda whether these atheists subscribe to that agenda or not. What I should have said is that they are objectively right-wing (after Orwell's famous assertion that pacificists were objectively pro-fascist regardless of their views about fascism). And I should have thought twice before titling the piece "Why the New Atheists are Right Wing on Foreign Policy"--a title that PZ Myers at Pharyngula amusingly used as an excuse to reject my thesis without reading my defense of it. (My sloppiness of expression notwithstanding, it wasn't quite impossible to grasp my meaning, as my new friend Bonzai showed over at richarddawkins.net.)

Still, of the three people I discussed--Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens--Dawkins is the only one I would say doesn't have specifically right-wing views that I know of. (Harris, as I noted, explicitly discourages looking for non-religious root causes of terrorism.)

3. And, by the way, what of Daniel Dennett? He's the only one of the "four horsemen" I didn't mention. Like Dawkins, he's never struck me as right-wing on foreign policy, but as for the question of whether he's "objectively" right wing: Though he doesn't go around attributing evils to religion as recklessly as Hitchens and Harris, he does something that is the rough generic equivalent: Like Dawkins, he refers to religious beliefs as "viruses" of the mind.

Now, viruses, generally speaking, are parasites; when they have a discernible effect on their host it is almost always negative. And, more to the point, the popular understanding of the word virus is that it implies parasitism. Would Dawkins and Dennett say that religious belief is always, or even usually, parasitic in the Darwinian sense--bad for the reproductive prospects of the host? If so, how do you explain the number of Catholics in the world? In light of the fact that sometimes religious belief (however mistaken it may be) manifestly helps people flourish (and even helps them preserve their mental health), while other times it gets them killed or makes them crazy, the proper term for the God meme isn't "virus" or "parasite" but the neutral "symbiont." (When a symbiotic relationship is good for the host, it is "mutualistic" and if it's bad for the host, then it deserves the label "parasitic".) That Dawkins and Dennett have so casually used the term "virus" would seem to reflect an intellectual sloppiness that neither of them practices very often. It's almost enough to make you wonder whether the new atheism, like religion, might sometimes be parasitic on the reasoning power of its hosts.

These are not the only people who are not right wingers who call New Atheist "fascist." None of them really think that New Atheism is identical to the movement of Benito Mussolini, it's just that they seem reflect a totalitarian bent.

Next time I'll go into depth upon the Totalitarian Nature of their ideology.