New Atheism: A Shipwreck of Fools
aquinas, Arc Digital, Asherah poles, Atheism, autopsy, bacteria, book deals, child sacrifice, Christopher Hitchens, computer program, creation myth, Edward Feser, evolutionary theory, Faith & Science, First Amendment, Five Ways, Gaia, genetic information, John Haldane, Lawrence Krauss, Ludwig Wittgenstein, meat machines, New Atheists, Nobel Prize, paganism, plagiarism, religion, Richard Dawkins, Valley of Hinnom
New Atheism is dead. It was conceptually dead from birth, but now it’s stopped twitching. Ben Sixsmith at Arc Digital has a good article with a lot of insight into its demise. From “New Atheism: An Autopsy”: To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to the latter. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand their terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”) There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying: “…the postulate of a designer…