Someone Asked Me What "New Atheists" Are, And How They're Different From "Old Atheists"

Dawkins, Harris, PZ Myers and their fans are New Atheists. Hitchens and Victor Stenger were New Atheists. They combine a cluelessness about history and religion and the humanities with a propensity for making sweeping inaccurate statements about them, and don't seem interested in ideas concerning religion which are more complicated than sound bites. Some prominent examples:

Dawkins started the "Bronze Age goat herders" meme. (Coincidentally, he also coined the term "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene, back when he was doing something he did exceptionally well: writing about biology.) Point out to a typical New Atheist that the oldest parts of the Bible were written in the Iron Age, by town-dwellers, and that the Israelites' primary livestock animal was sheep, not goats, and the typical response is "So what?" So why do you keep repeating Dawkins' meme, that's what.

On p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins approvingly quoted GG Simpson's pronouncement that we should completely forget about all attempts made before 1859 to answer the question, "What is man?" That should have warned me that neither Simpson nor Dawkins knew very much at all about things written up to 1859, and led me to expect things like Dawkins' activity since 2004, when he's published very little work in biology.

More recently Dawkins tweeted the fact that there were more Nobel prize winners from Trinity College than from "the entire Muslim world." Immediately I and a whole bunch of other people pointed out cultural bias, duh! in the awarding of Nobels. Last I heard Dawkins hasn't felt the need to reply to any of us about that. It's getting more and more difficult to take him seriously except in a very negative way.

Hitchens created a very popular meme in the subtitle of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.



But of course it doesn't poison EVERYthing. Life's much more complicated than that, billions of people's lives over the course of tens of thousands of years, and yes, I'm saying that if you want to say something deep about religion, you have to have at least an inkling of all of those billions of people's lives, or at the very best you're only going to say something deep every now and then, completely by accident.

Michael Paulkovich is a New Atheist, and the editors of Free Inquiry demonstrated quintessential New Atheist behavior when they published an article because they liked the sound bite: "126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus but didn't," without seeming to care at all about checking into whether or not Paulkovich is making any sense. He's not.



Sam Harris is a peculiarly mid-19th-century sort of New Atheist: his moral philosophy is utilitarian, like that of John Suart Mill, as if he hadn't heard of how Mill had been thoroughly dismantled by the late 19th century by people like Nietzsche.



Dawkins has a lot of credibility in the filed of biology, richly deserved, but he's helped to give an undeserved credibility to New Atheism. It's very bad luck that these people are currently the public face of atheism, but we atheists who actually know something about history, philosophy, the arts and religion -- about the humanities -- just have to speak up louder and more persistently. That's the only way that an intelligent and informed public discussion of religion will get underway.

An Open Letter To Richard Dawkins

Hey, Dick!

I regret having stood up for you for some time in your capacity as a leader of New Atheism before having properly informed myself about your statements on various religions. Doubly so since I'm always chiding others for weighing in on topics about which they haven't first informed themselves. Which is pretty much what this post is about.

Let's concede for the sake of argument that you're correct in stating that science in the "Muslim world" is in a sorry state -- you've got a huge microphone and a towering podium, you've got some power: what are you going to DO about it? Beside repeating your mantra, "Religion is bad!"? Yes, Richard, religion is bad, but "Religion is bad!" is extremely oversimplistic, and extreme oversimplification is bad, if you will pardon my oversimplifying the case.

I'll tell you some things you can do:

Read the Koran, and until you're finished with that, enjoy a nice steaming hot mug of STFU about Islam.

But I see I'm far from the first to propose this to you. Oh well. Onward:

Visit some majority-Muslim countries, if you haven't already. If you have, pardon me, but it's hard to imagine that you have. In the course of researching whether or not you've ever been to a majority-Muslim country I came across someone posting on the Internet behind the anonymous safety of a handle, claiming to have been in the Middle East and to know that it amounted to suicide to be there and admit to being an atheist. I was immediately reminded of some other Internet pussies who claimed to live secretly as atheists in the US South, because coming out of the atheist closet there, they were certain, would be career suicide.

I lived in the middle of the Bible Belt for 10 years, during which time it never occurred to me to try to hide the fact that I was an atheist, and I knew people who were bolder than I, and we all were employed.

Admittedly, simply being an atheist, and being Richard Dawkins His Dangself, are two different propositions. But assuming that your personal security could somehow be arranged, would you consider going to Damascus University, say, or the University of Jordan, and meeting face to face with scientists working there, so you'd have a better idea of whom you're dissing? Visiting their labs, discussing their research?

If for no other reason, then to give yourself a shred of credibility on certain topics, as reading the Koran would?

I think your problem here is prejudice, Richard, and prejudice consists of assuming things about people rather than getting to know them as individuals. If "Muslim science" were represented in your mind by some people you'd met, whose labs you'd seen, maybe you'd be less inclined to say such stupid hurtful things about them. If those scientists in Jordan or Syria were not faceless to you, perhaps you'd be inclined to actually say, or even to do, things which could help them perform scientific work better. Of course, if you saw them for yourself, there's also the possibility that you'd see that you had been wrong about "Muslim science" being in such a sorry state, and instead begin wondering -- aloud, and in front of hot mikes, could one hope? -- about things such as why those scientists haven't received more attention from Western institutions such as those folks from Nobel.

Realistically, I don't see any reason to think that you'll do any of these this: read the Koran, go to the Middle East, meet "Muslim scientists" or tour "Muslim universities," or anything else which might open your mind a crack on the subject. (I'd be so glad if you'd prove me wrong.) And so instead, we atheists who are not as completely stupid about religion and culture and history as you -- have you met Salman Rushdie? If so it doesn't seem to have done you any good -- are just going to have to do a much better job of distancing ourselves from you. For so many reasons, including this one: it's true that not every atheist who is critical of Islam needs to have read the Koran, but the leader of a movement of millions of them should know it forward and backward, in Arabic. (Or at least for crying out loud be able to refer us to someone who does.) That's not very much to ask at all. There are plenty of atheists who fulfill that job requirement, including some you've probably never heard of because, you know, they live in the "Muslim world."

Dawkins' Tweet About Islam, Cambridge And Nobel Prizes

Richard Dawkins is a bit of a roller-coaster. I never know whether the next piece of his writing I'm going to read is going to be brilliant, stupid or somewhere in between. This recent tweet of his:

"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."

is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.

But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.

It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.

I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.

The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."

One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.