{"id":8560,"date":"2010-05-12T21:47:36","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T01:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=8560"},"modified":"2010-05-12T21:47:36","modified_gmt":"2010-05-13T01:47:36","slug":"atheists-are-drab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/atheists-are-drab\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheists are drab"},"content":{"rendered":"

And according to David Hart<\/a>, whose book Atheist Delusions<\/a> I highly recommend, there is not \u201cone logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God\u201d <\/em>between them. <\/em><\/p>\n

Characteristically brilliant David Bentley Hart; a must <\/em>read here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole \u201cNew Atheism\u201d movement is only a passing fad\u2014not 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<\/em>. This is not because I necessarily think the current \u201cmarketplace of ideas\u201d particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in \u00e0 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.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists<\/em>. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers\u2014who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form\u2014tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors.<\/p>\n

Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God\u2019s 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-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a pr\u00e9cis 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. Ad\u00e8le Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument\u2014that believers do not really believe what they think they believe\u2014but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And according to David Hart, whose book Atheist Delusions I highly recommend, there is not \u201cone logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God\u201d between them. Characteristically brilliant David Bentley Hart; a must … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[440,650],"class_list":["post-8560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheisism","tag-david-bentley-hart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}