Tasteless Atheists

Apart from the usual bromides about religion causing wars, and religious people hopelessly missing the point about evolution, they proudly parade their "rational ethics" as a substitute for belief.

As Sam Schulman writes:

They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it.

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion complains about people accusing him of being very "nineteenth century."

Actually, it is probably more accurate to call him "eighteenth century." He seems to think that we are still arguing about the proofs of God's existence. But I thought that Kant had put that one away two hundred years ago and more when he showed that you couldn't prove or disprove God's existence.

But Kant did something more. He claimed that we couldn't know reality, things-in-themselves, but only appearances. He must have been onto something because a century later a young German kid completely upset the assumptions about space and time by saying that space and time were relative, not absolute as Newton had assumed.

Atheists like Dawkins and Sam Harris of The End of Faith don't engage with Kant, and that's a shame. They delight their followers by beating up on the small fry like fundamentalists and the religious right instead of dealing with the big beast.

Kant is generally thought to be the most important philosopher since Aristotle, so what he wrote about God would have to be important, you would think.

By the way, Sam Harris writes a lot about in The End of Faith about "rational ethics," but when it comes to the point he just presents his idea of the end of ethics as increasing happiness and decreasing suffering as given. How rational is that?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.