What did the Nazis believe about religion? Simply asking the question suggests some difficulties. “The Nazis” implies a homogenous group with clearly articulated and uniformly held positions. There were of course many different kinds of Nazis who held diverse and changing views on everything. The only common and consistent thread seems to have been racial [...]
Tags:atheism·Cardinal Pell·Coel Hellier·creationist·Darwinism·German Catholics·German Christians·Hitler·Nazi religion·neo-pagan·political religion·Richard Dawkins·Samuel Koehne
It’s been a good week for chastising evangelical atheism. First, there was the free-will symposium which allowed us to wonder about the obsessions of the atheists and religionists tempestuating this non-issue in their teapot. Second, we have a Columbia University philosopher gently taking down The Atheists Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions by Alex [...]
Tags:A Universe from Nothing·Alex Rosenberg·David Albert·Lawrence Krauss·New Atheism·Philip Kitcher·scientism·The Atheist's Guide to Reality·warranted beliefs
I’ve never quite understood why some New Atheists think it so important to resolve the issue of free will, or why they think it so important to deny free will. It seems like they are tilting at metaphysical windmills, using physics and neuroscience as determinist jousts. Even if there is a definitional or material sense [...]
Tags:determinism·free will·Jerry Coyne·materialism·New Atheism·Owen Jones·Paul Bloom·Sam Harris·Templeton Foundation
Thinking is a strange thing. So strange, in fact, that most people think that whatever is doing the thinking must have a life of its own. This idea, commonsense dualism, has been around a long time and is the default position for most people regardless of culture. It’s a hard habit or intuition to break, [...]
Tags:commonsense dualism·Descartes·Franz Joseph Gall·monism·neuroscience·phrenology·soul beliefs·strict materialism
If you haven’t been following 3:AM’s interview series, you should. The Brian Leiter interview was one of the most cogent assessments of philosophy I’ve read in years, and the recent Eric Schwitzgebel interview is on par. Both reward close reading and deserve extended comment, but I want to touch briefly on Schwitzgebel’s assessment of the [...]
Tags:Brian Leiter·commonsense·crazyism·Emerson·Eric Schwitzgebel·evolved mind·metaphysics·Nietzsche
Terry Eagleton has taken aim at Alain de Botton’s oxymoronic new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion. Eagleton is bulls-eye on the book, which basically argues that although religions are false they are still useful and we can learn from them. Eagleton correctly points out that this sort of [...]
Tags:Alain de Botton·American evangelicals·atheism·Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks·ethics·fundamentalists·funeral industry·Israel·Juliane von Mittelstaedt·Karen Armstrong golden rule·Max Rivlin-Nadler·morals·orthodox Jews·Philip Kitcher·secularization·Terry Eagleton·Thomas Jefferson bible
When I hear atheists proclaiming their good news that gods are well and truly dead, I get the uneasy feeling they haven’t seriously considered or fully comprehended the implications of this apparent fact. In his justly famous “Parable of the Madman” Nietzsche cautions against underestimating the seriousness of killing gods:
The madman jumped into their midst [...]
Tags:American Nietzsche·Brian Leiter·Friedrich Nietzsche·gnu atheism·God is Dead·Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen·new atheists·Ralph Waldo Emerson·Ross Posnock·The Madman
It is nice to see Lucretius finally getting his due. In The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt pays homage to the Roman poet (and his Greek predecessor Epicurus). A few years ago, I was thinking about the history of religious critiques and sketched these notes:
While it would be tempting to date the [...]
Tags:atheism·critiques of religion·David Hume·Epicurus·Greek gods·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·On the Nature of Things·skepticism·Stephen Greenblatt·teleology·The Swerve
Over at Spiegel, Markus Becker and Frank Patalong have posted an interview with Richard Dawkins, whose latest book — The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution — has just been published in German and given an awful title: “The Creation Lie: Why Darwin is Right.” Two things come immediately to mind.
First, it is [...]
Tags:biological evolution·cultural evolution·Darwin·Dean Hamer·Frank Patalong·group level selection·Markus Becker·meme·memetics·Neolithic Revolution·Richard Dawkins·Ronald Numbers·The Ancestor's Tale·The Creation Lie·The Creationists·The God Gene·The Greatest Show on Earth·The Selfish Gene·theory of mind
In my first post on Robert Rowthorn’s paper “Fertility, Religion and Genes,” I focused on its faulty premises and unrealistic assumptions; I also substituted the word “love” for “religion” in Rowthorn’s argument to show that nearly any beneficial and complex human behavioral trait could be explained using the same single gene model. In my second [...]
Tags:alleles·atheism·complex traits·confounding variable·culture·diabetes·fertility·genes·learning·religion·religion gene·religiosity·Richard Dawkins·Robert Rowthorn·Sam Harris·single-nucleotide polymorphisms·SNP·socialization
