Must read article of the day

There have been several excellent short critiques penned about of the recent spate of books by the "new atheists," but Theodore Dalrymple's "What the New Atheists Don’t See," (subtitled, "To regret religion is to regret Western civilization"), freshly posted on the City Journal website, is my favorite. Part of it is that Dalrymple is himself an atheist. But Dalrymple is not the sort of angry (Dawkins), pseudo-intellectual (Harris), posturing, blustering (Hitchens) atheist who blithely ignores argument, philosophy, and history in order to score cheap polemical points. He is an excellent thinker and a superb writer (his book Our Culture: What's Left Of It, is also a must read) who isn't satisfied with rhetorical sucker punches, whether from theists or atheists. A few excerpts:

Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

<snip>

The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

<snip>

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?

Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still, at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps, of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.

As regular readers of this blog know, I've taken Harris's book to task more than once for its laughable "logic". Dalrymple's essay is an elegant exposure of the inconsistent, intolerant beliefs of Harris and Co., all of the more intriguing because of Dalrymple's own rejection of belief in God.

Read Dalrymple's entire piece.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

Atheists are, as a class, boring. I don't read them anymore, not because I am adverse to reading the writings of the damned or anything, or because they might frighten me into doubt, or any other cliched reason, but because they are just so brain-dead boring.

[Dan]

I appreciate it when atheists like Dalrymple and Habermas recognize the cultural fruits of Christianity. But I cannot understand how they can contend that good fruit can come from a bad stem.

[RJ]

If Rip Van Winkle woke after 20 years and read The God Delusion he would have gone back to sleep for another 20 years!

[Jackson]

Dalrymple is one today's greatest essayists. I can't recommend strongly enough to read his work.

[Rich Leonardi]

Pray for his conversion; odder things have happened.