God and the New Atheism: Chapter 6
The question that Haught addresses in chapter six is, "Can we be good without God?" Dawkins and the other fundamentalist atheists want to make the case that for people who believe in God religion is necessary for their moral understanding and conduct. Then by demonstrating that moral behavior can be explained with purely naturalistic explanations, they disprove theism.
Because Dawkins and the others are so ignorant of religion and how it functions, they get it wrong from the get go. As Haught writes, "The main point is to have faith, trust, and hope in God. Morality is secondary, and the principle underlying biblical ethics is that our conduct should be shaped with respect to others by the trust that God's promise of ultimate liberation will eventually come to pass" (67). In some ways it is difficult to seriously address Dawkins' argument because he is both ignorant of even a rudimentary understanding of religion and theology, and he uses "foolish sarcasm." (As Alistar McGrath notes in another book on The God Delusion, Dawkins announces the fact that he was chosen in a survey conducted by Prospect magazine in November of 2005 as one of the world's three leading intellectuals. In a review of his book, this same magazine wrote that the book was "incurious, dogmatic, rambling, and self-contradictory.")
One of the main points of the chapter is that while promising to give a naturalistic account of religion as evolutionary, he basically abandons this approach because he can't raise a credible argument with it and bases his argument on speculation. Haught writes, "Dawkins's argument, natural selection has become about as explanatory of human virtue as the chemical laws that bond ink to paper explain what I am writing on this page" (71).
Because Dawkins and the others are so ignorant of religion and how it functions, they get it wrong from the get go. As Haught writes, "The main point is to have faith, trust, and hope in God. Morality is secondary, and the principle underlying biblical ethics is that our conduct should be shaped with respect to others by the trust that God's promise of ultimate liberation will eventually come to pass" (67). In some ways it is difficult to seriously address Dawkins' argument because he is both ignorant of even a rudimentary understanding of religion and theology, and he uses "foolish sarcasm." (As Alistar McGrath notes in another book on The God Delusion, Dawkins announces the fact that he was chosen in a survey conducted by Prospect magazine in November of 2005 as one of the world's three leading intellectuals. In a review of his book, this same magazine wrote that the book was "incurious, dogmatic, rambling, and self-contradictory.")
One of the main points of the chapter is that while promising to give a naturalistic account of religion as evolutionary, he basically abandons this approach because he can't raise a credible argument with it and bases his argument on speculation. Haught writes, "Dawkins's argument, natural selection has become about as explanatory of human virtue as the chemical laws that bond ink to paper explain what I am writing on this page" (71).
posted by UCC Medfield at 9:27 AM
1 Comments:
Trust requires existance. Existance requires evidence.
Wait... you use fith for that to- trust in God AND faith that God exists.
Dawkins is explaining how human virtue came to exist, not what is right and wrong.
Or, quite simply, you have no idea what you are talking about.
I mean "fundamentalist atheists"? What the heck does that mean? Isn't that just a straw man?
Other big blooper- the section isn't an attempt to disprove God- it is an attempt to deal with the constant "how do you explain morality without God?"
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