Yes this blog rarely gets any views but it’s 2023 and the internet atheists STILL are bashing religion (well, Christianity and Islam, being contrarians they would bash on the 2 biggest ones constantly and ignore the rest) so yes, here I do go again criticising their worldview. There’s crummy worldviews, awful worldviews and worldviews so awful their failures prevent each other from being fixed and the New Atheism is certainly one of them.
Disregard of Philosophy
It’s a bad habit of the New Atheists to start by deciding that religion is a load of nonsense so it’s not worth knowing about but because they don’t know much about it they can’t criticise it effectively. Dawkins doesn’t value philosophy (and consequently neither do his internet fanboys) so he doesn’t know much about it (here’s only one example) and since he doesn’t know much about it he can’t see the value of it. In true polemicist fashion the fanboys don’t bother to fix either problem since ”ah whatever because we’re right anyway”.
Materialism/Verificationism/Scientism
For all the New Atheists’ caring about evidence when (they claim) theists don’t have any these people buy into the aforementioned trio even though there’s no material evidence for materialism, the verification principle can’t be verified and there’s no scientific evidence that science is the only form of knowledge and they would recognise that materialism, verificationism and scientism are actually philosophical claims if they valued philosophy which they don’t because it isn’t science because they think science is the only form of knowledge (because science has achieved a lot in the last few hundred years which causes its admirers to sometimes get starryeyed about it, I guess, although perhaps I’m being too charitable in assuming there is some actual decent reason and it’s not just their usual overconfidence.) These people use religion as a byword for anything they unilaterally decide lacks evidence but yet people believe in passionately (a lot of other things would make an equally good byword by that token, like insert name of political ideology you don’t like) but m/v/s themselves have no evidence supporting them; inspite of gerrymandering God out of existence these worldviews would be religions by the New Atheists’ standards.
Science can’t get them out of the m/v/s hole but the m/v/s followers don’t think there is any other form of knowledge so nothing will get them out.
M/V/S, Chronological Snobbery and Supposed Support of The Enlightenment
On the one hand they say time and again that the Bible is from the bronze age (the New Testament is from the classical age but this is the new atheism we’re talking about, facts can’t get in the way of making an argument that sounds convinicing to themselves but actually isn’t convincing) but on the other they say they’re for The Englightenment. If something older is automatically worse then that means The Englightenment is worse than what we have now but if The Enlightenment is a good thing then things are not automatically worse just because they’re older and all this doesn’t mention the fact that The Enlightenment ended in the 1800s. For a bunch of people who dismiss Christ as being a necromancer they sure are trying to engage in necromancy with this.
Another problem is that The Enlightenment involved a lot of philosophy but these people are materialists, verificationists and supporters of scientism and so of course they think science is the only form of knowledge and so philosophy is useless. Yet again they leave me wondering which it is; if philosophy is useless then a lot of The Enlightenment was a waste of time so they’d be wrong to support it but if The Enlightenment was as great as they claim to think it was then philosophy is indeed useful.
Third up is that if newer is better and verificationism was buried in the early 20th century then they’re again contradicting themselves. If newer is better they should have left verificationism in the grave where it belongs and if verificationism is a good thing then newer isn’t better. The new atheists’ claims that religion is fiction is rich considering that calling their claims fiction would be an insult to fiction; at least with fiction someone bothers to put time and effort into making a good story and not throwing out the first thing that comes to one’s head and then submitting it ot the internet thinking it’ll be a slam dunk against whatever he (they are overwhelmingly male for some reason) doesn’t like (never mind that his hundreds of other efforts didn’t succeed so he’s wasting the time of anyone unfortunate enough to read it).
Counterproductive Air War
On the one hand these people feel some desparate need to persuade people of atheism (instead of sitting back and letting the opposition self-destruct which unfortunately it often does) yet on the other exhibit an insufferably smug attitude to anyone disagreeing with them in the slightest. On Quora they pull the baldfaced gaslighting of saying that they’ll only be rough with someone if you were rough with an atheist but I’ve seen it with my own eyes plenty of times that they’ll go ape on someone just for not agreeing with them and they’ve been called on their toxicity even by fellow atheists, even by Steve Shives, himself very much an internet atheist. Being crummy to people will just annoy them but the New Atheists operate under the Nietzschean morality namely that the superior man does as he pleases. As far as these people are concerned it’s OK to treat us like scum because as far as they’re concerned that’s what we are. There’s a lot of them, they’ve had plenty of time and if they’re so smart like they claim to be they would have either given up on trying to convince theists or would have stopped calling us sheep, cultists, religiots and whatever. It’s high time the New Atheists realise that their advertising is so poor it’s actually making their (already very unattractive) product even less appealing; the more content they put out the worse the New Atheism looks. The awful and fanatical behaviour of its defenders are one of the main reasons why I’m a devout theist and not simply a standard issue one. Their ground game, also, poor, just reinforces how pointless the New Atheism is; even with different ideologies people will act the same; the atheist street epistemologist acts like the Protestant street preacher.
Their nastiness is majorly counterproductive to winning people over but it’s inevitable they would treat other people like they’re inferior to them because on their nietzschean morality anyone not agreeing with them is inferior to them.
Firehose of Falsity
The firehose of falsity involves throwing out a lot of arguments and repeating them constantly even if some contradict others and the new atheists seem to be the masters at this; few other groups have churned out content on an industrial scale for so long. Perhaps they think that if they throw enough stuff at the wall then something will stick but the problem is their arguments are so bad that the more they make and the more they repeat them the worse things get. They could slow down and try to think of better arguments but it’s a political movement in democratic countries so of course they’ll be in a mad rush to constantly get more members but by being in a mad rush they trip themselves up.
Making Defectors Look Bad
The new atheism could have won more people to its cause by looking better but because of how poor the arguments are and how badly its adherents behave it makes anybody switching to the new atheism look like either a wimp who will accept being bullied or somebody who isn’t all that bright. By going about winning people over in such crummy ways they get more people but they’re more people who make the movement look even worse. Yet again in trying to get the quantity they royally shot themselves in the foot when it comes to quality which in fact reduces the quantity.
European Qoheleth's Thoughts 