Tuesday, May 28, 2013

"Atheist-buts" need to understand atheism

Andrew Brown:
Last week I interviewed the philosopher Daniel Dennett about new atheism, (the interview will be up on this site soon). I haven't got the tape myself, so I can't swear to the verbatim accuracy of the quotes I remember, but at one stage I said something to the effect that new atheism seems to me to reproduce all the habits that made religion obnoxious, like heresy hunting. He asked what I meant, and I gave the example of "atheists but", a species of which he is particularly disdainful. They are the people who will say to him and his fellow zealots "I am an atheist, but I don't go along with your campaign." I'm one of them.

He accused me of a kind of intellectual snobbery – of believing that I am clever and brave and strong enough to understand that there is no God, but that this is a discovery too shattering for the common people who should be left in the comfort of their ignorance...
But that's not in fact my position at all. The reason that I don't go around trying to deconvert all my Christian friends is that they know the arguments against a belief in God so very much better than I do. I can entertain the possibility that Christianity is true. They have to take it seriously.

Brown understands at least this: Christians understand atheist arguments better than atheists do.

Christians understand a lot of things better than atheists do. You might expect that people who believe that wisdom is the source of existence would know more about stuff than people who believe that existence has no explanation.

But Brown, handicapped by his atheism, doesn't realize this: there is no "atheism-but", in the final analysis. Atheism is inherently intolerant and even totalitarian in power, and ultimately leaves no room for "but".

Challenge: name a free nation ruled by state atheism.

1 comment:

  1. "Brown understands at least this: Christians understand atheist arguments better than atheists do."

    Indeed.

    "But Brown, handicapped by his atheism, doesn't realize this: there is no "atheism-but", in the final analysis. Atheism is inherently intolerant and even totalitarian in power, and ultimately leaves no room for "but"."

    Again: indeed.

    Any tolerance toward "the religious" demonstrated by the typical "atheist, but" is generally due to apathy, not to any principled stance. Corner any of them logically, and you'll always find the snarl. The only question with any "civil" atheist is how small a logical corner he can tolerate before his true attitude toward you must reveal itself.

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