Lots of folks on both sides of the ID divide have strong feelings about prominent New Atheists, particularly the “Four Horsemen” – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens – and Jerry Coyne.
Here’s a thread in which to air your criticisms of them, or defend them, or a bit of both, as the spirit moves you.
Dawkins: I have never been a fan of Dawkins. His “The Extended Phenotype” was pretty good, but I never liked “The Selfish Gene”. I have not read any of his anti-religion books, though I have seen some of what he says in public and in speeches. The are part of the reason I prefer to say that I am non-religious, and avoid calling myself an atheist.
Dennett: I often disagree. But his positions are well thought out and he supports them well. I sided with Gould in the Gould-Dennett argument. But I don’t have any serious criticism of Dennett.
Harris: I’m underwhelmed.
Hitchens: Excellent at rhetoric, but his arguments are often not well thought through. And he is on the wrong side of some issues, such as his support for the Iraq invasion.
Coyne: Perhaps better than Harris or Hitchens. But he criticizes fundamentalist Christianity while insisting that he is criticizing all of Christianity. He spends too much time telling Christians what they are supposed to believe (according to Coyne) and them criticizing them for those putative beliefs.
I think my best self-description is non-believer.
That’s my default stance toward the world. It covers more than religion.
Full disclosure – fanboy KeithS has a personally signed book from JC.
Jesus Christ himself?
Oh, maybe that other guy.
Glen Davidson
Correction:
And by the way, a book signed by Jesus Christ is worth a lot of money.
ETA: Oops. I see Glen beat me to it.
Neil,
For your criticisms, could you give some specific examples? For example, what did you dislike about The Selfish Gene?
Dawkins .. on the decline sadly. Someone remove his social media.
Dennett .. high calibre thinker
Harris … inflammatory but read what he actually said not some angry preconception. Low number on the Jihadi death list so has the courage of his convictions.
Hitchens .. Charming, brilliant, polarizing. Disagree with some of his politics. Champion of freedom of speech.
Jerry Coyne .. immensely likeable, great mind.
I agree with Coyne that belief is always disfunctional. It supports tribalism, which at one time had survival value, but which now threatens humans with extiction. I do not like lying to children.
My kids. never asked me about Santa. I suspect because they figured out at an early age that I wouldn’t tell a positive lie. We had an unspoken treaty that I wouldn’t actively puncture fantasies, but wouldn’t initiate them. My daughter spent most of her fifth year as Daniel Striped Tiger, but that was her doing. I never spoke for or against religion. I am not a preacher of skepticism.
For me it’s really been about 1 1/2 horsemen, contrary to the expectations of theists who presume we’re all parroting these guys.
Dawkins – I haven’t read that much Dawkins – I think limited to the Blind Watchmaker. Haven’t read the God Delusion.
Dennett – obviously has been working very hard on some difficult topics in the philosophy of cognitive science, AI, etc., with considerable intellectual force and integrity. I’ve been reading him since The Intentional Stance essays. Also Kinds of Minds, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (a hodgepodge of a book, as I recall), the Brainchildren essays, Freedom Evolves and Breaking the Spell. My interest wanes as he moves away from problems of intentionality, etc. And I HATED the whole “Brights” thing – what could be more pretentious than identifying oneself as a “Bright.” Yuck.
Hitchens – loved his frankness. Found his drinking, smoking and sweating a little repulsive – I’m sorry, but I find something deficient in the intelligence of anyone who treats their body thusly, regardless of how otherwise brilliant they appear to be. Haven’t read his books.
Harris – haven’t read Harris.
I guess that makes me an apatheist – I just don’t care enough about the topic of theism/atheism to actually read about it.
I wouldn’t call them criticisms. They were just opinions.
It is a long time since I read “The Selfish Gene”. But, basically, I don’t much care for that metaphor.
One small point in favor of Coyne. I grew up in and among churchgoers. For me the accommodation has always been made by me. I am the one who keeps his mouth shut. I am the one who attends religious ceremonies rather than be offended.
It’s not a big deal, but it’s a wedge between people. It blocks honest communication. There are always important things unsaid or lied about.
Not addressed to me, but I’ll answer anyway.
I found The Selfish Gene rather annoying. From memory, he ignored the effects of pleiotropy and linkage; he failed to take into account that the “environment” that any allele experiences is heavily influenced by the other genes with which it shares its “vector”. I viewed The Extended Phenotype as his attempt to correct the more egregious errors in the first book.
OTOH, I don’t have a problem with the metaphor. But let’s not reify it. I’m a multi-level-selection kinda guy.
DNA_Jock:
I thought he addressed those issues, but I don’t have my copy handy to check. Perhaps it was in a later book. They all sort of blur together in my mind.
Now there’s a thread we need to have.
Did you see the Edge.org conversation on group selection?
I hope multi-level selection isn’t the same thing as group selection.
It’s a superset.
Reciprocating Bill:
Yeah, that was pretty tone-deaf. I also disliked Dennett’s unnecessary condescension toward Sam Harris in their free will discussion.
In general, though, I’m a fan.
Dawkins: I’m enough of a fan to follow him on Twitter. As popular science, I think several of his books are hard to beat. I’d already heard everything in The God Delusion, but evidently that opened some people’s eyes. I do think his social media presence is better than the popular narrative makes it out to be. Try reading him charitably and recognizing the limitations of 140 characters.
Dennett: On my reading list.
Harris: Very impressive writing and not afraid of the Islamist extremists or the noisy leftists who think criticism of a vile theology is somehow racist.
Hitchens: I miss him. Nobody could throw down verbally like that man.
Jerry Coyne: “Why Evolution is True” is one of my favorite books in the genre. I’m looking forward to the upcoming work. A bit hard on dogs, for my taste.
I have much the same opinions of these people as everyone else. But I wish they wouldn’t make atheism a cause. It turns a lack of belief into some kind of group identity.
Me too. Also turns lack of belief into an implied belief in a lack.
I don’t “believe there is no god”. I just no longer believe that there is.
Or not in the sense that most theists would recognise. I don’t think believing in a good God is a bad thing, necessarily, and may even be justifiable, but I do think that a prominent current flavour of Christian theism is potentially dangerous, namely the belief that goodness is defined by what God is perceived to want, as opposed to God being perceived as the author of what is good.
Dawkins has turned into an angry old man. But The Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype gave us a different way to look at evolution. I still haven’t decided whether it has improved the science or been detrimental to it.
I’ve enjoyed all of Dawkins’s science books. It’s a useful perspective. Not read anything else, apart from the odd rather regrettable tweet or opinion piece. Dennett, I like his writing. Hitchens – appeared genial, good for a bon mot, saddled with an odious brother but you can’t blame him for that!
But I tend to steer clear of ‘professional atheists’ generally.
Briefly:
Sam Harris is not on my radar. May have read something of his in a quote but didn’t register.
Hitch was a very entertaining raconteur. Read God is not Great which was a polemic. I share his view of Mother Teresa but not that of the Dalai Lama.
Dan Dennett I only really took account of in the last couple of years due to this site. What I’ve read, I’ve liked. That he dismisses qualia and zombies is a big plus! I haven’t missed what Lizzie had to say about him and pennies dropping.
I’ve read all of Dawkins up to The God Delusion which I haven’t read and doesn’t interest me. He’s a great science advocate and popularizer. I agree with him that The Extended Phenotype is his best work. He seems to have fallen into a new niche as poster-boy for new atheism; a role that seemed to need filling in the US and which of course got him thoroughly demonized. I haven’t really followed the politics of elevator-gate etc. I note Lizzie is not a fan and I still might write an OP hoping to persuade her to take a broader view. He’s, what, 75 now so yes he’s more grumpy old man than enfant terrible these days. I have a good friend who lives round the corner from Dawkins and is a nodding acquaintance. She tells me he is perfectly charming and self-effacing in real life.
PS
I keep meaning to buy WEIT as I enjoy Jerry Coynes “web-site” writing and he makes a fair fist of keeping the comments civilized. Has it dated or is it still worth a read? I doubt I’d bother to read Faith vs. Fact, though unless someone happened to lend a copy.. What would be the point?
Where’s hotshoe? I know she has strong opinions on all of these guys.
One of the elementary errors made by critics of Dawkins is in thinking that his ‘gene’ is the same as a geneticist’s, a developmental biologist’s or a molecular biologist’s. It isn’t; it’s an evolutionary unit. He spells this out clearly enough, but still it doesn’t get through. Noble’s critique, for one, is an extended symphony on this error.
Hey, cool that you noticed, keiths.
But I don’t think anyone could entice me into taking on Atheist Thought Leaders as a topic right now.
Maybe I’m not bourgeois enough to have a valid opinion. Or maybe I’m too bourgeois, so …
Sorry, not sorry.
hotshoe:
🙂
hotshoe,
Here’s the comment of yours that I was thinking of:
I find the New Atheists to be, generally speaking, condescending, obnoxious, Islamophobic, bourgeois apologists for neo-imperialism. I think that Eagleton’s criticism of Dawkins and Hitchens is spot-on.
I haven’t read Breaking the Spell, but I have read a good bit of Dennett and intend to read more. I have some profound disagreements with some of his views — in particular, I think that the distinction between experience and judgment is necessary and defensible — but I think his distinction between personal-level and subpersonal-level descriptions is incredibly helpful in avoiding a lot of nonsense in how we do and don’t talk about neuroscience.
I also think that his distinction between stances and patterns — taking his essay “Real Patterns” in conjunction with The Intentional Stance — is precisely the right way of taking up what Kant should have meant in distinguishing between phenomena and noumena. I’d go so far as to say that the stance/pattern distinction is basically the right way to think through the tangled thicket of issues surrounding realism and anti-realism.
Yep, I suggested that I might/would/should flesh out my 1-of-4-is-a-hero on “another thread”, and now here we are with that other thread and here I am, deciding that “none at all” is going be my choice.
I waste enough days of my life pointing out ingrained sexism as it is. Not gonna today.
You can have Peezus if you want 😉
QFMFT.
Except that Eagleton is also the sort of asshole who thinks it clever to coin “Ditchkins” for the two atheists.
And Eagleton is that gawdawful kind of Catholic who mocks atheists for what, he says, is their attack on the unrefined notion of Big-Daddy God (as opposed to his own, presumably-sophisticated ground-of-being god) while being completely unable to explain why, then, he choses to pledge allegiance to such a literally-embodied religion as Catholicism. The incarnate Son of God the Father, the literal resurrection of Christ’s body, the actual, physical transubstantiation of bread and wine … his Catholic dogma screams “I believe in Big-Daddy-God”.
Eagleston says “The whole question of faith and knowledge, in short, is a good deal more complex than the rationalist suspects.” But he goes on to say, “If Jesus’s body is mingled with the dust of Palestine, Christian faith is in vain.” and “The resurrection for Christians is not just a metaphor”.
So, which is it, Terry?
Are we unfairly pretending that the faithful believe in a simple daddy-god, because that idea is easier for us to attack? While the belief is actually “more complex” and we should only attack the whole complex thing?
OR are we quite correctly pointing out that even a supposedly-sophisticated theologist truly does believe in a daddy-god when it comes right down to it? When a simple test on a literal body would destroy his entire faith?
Yeah, no, I won’t stand for any of Terry Eagleton’s mockery of atheists. I don’t know if he chose to be an asshole for the same reasons he chose to be a Catholic, if he’s an asshole because he’s an Oxbridge intellectual, if he’s an asshole because he’s a rich Marxist, if he’s an asshole because he’s just an asshole …
If anyone could convince me to stand up in support of any of the Atheist Thought Leaders, that would be Eagleton.
I’ll defend Dawkins here. His popular books have been excellent explanations of the mechanics and implications of evolution in general. I thought he was careful in The Selfish Gene not to overstate his case, he was clear that he was taking a metaphor. I also think that anyone who is fuzzy about evolution as a concept should read Climbing Mount Improbable. With The God Delusion he didn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, but he said it clearly and completely. The whole “religion is child abuse” thing was a bit over the top, and some of his gaffes have been clueless and embarrassing, but yeah, he is basically a grumpy old man these days. Still, I think much of what he has been reviled for has been taken out of context, and I do not see him in any way as a “bourgeois apologist for neo-imperialism”. In fact, it is just those neo-imperialists that seem to hate him the most.
Dennett really impressed me with Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. His next effort, Freedom Evolves was little more than a rehash from his previous book, and broke little new ground. It talked about degrees of freedom in a system, but not so much how that relates to concepts such as “free will” or even volitional freedom in humans. I haven’t read The Intentional Stance, but with KN’s recommendation I think I’ll put it on my list. And yes, the “Brights” thing was a total embarrassment. Not well thought out at all.
Sam Harris. I wanted to like him. I really did. I read The Moral Landscape and after the introduction thought it might have some potential. Unfortunately, the book ended up being junk. Poorly thought out arguments, assuming his conclusions, and not much evidence of being particularly knowledgable in his own field. As polemics go, it was very poorly supported. But there was definitely a lot of ego wrapped up in it. I haven’t been much interested in anything he has to say since.
I completely disagree! I didn’t think much of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and didn’t read any more of Dennett for years – then read Freedom Evolves, which I thought was brilliant. I didn’t see it as a “rehash” of DDI, though. Perhaps I need to read DDI again….
I think liking one of these writers depends on where you are when you encounter them.
Also, politics seems to be wrapped up in one’s response.
In fact, I see politics playing the same role as fundamentalist religion in much of the discussion.
I wish someone would take him. Away.
Lizzie:
As I said above, I found it to be somewhat of a hodgepodge. It reads like half a book (or one much shorter book) onto which several at best tangentially related and/or recycled essays were tacked.
It probably spoke to my condition at the time. Well, it did.
It isn’t surprising to see the New Atheists bashed by believers, but I’m fascinated by the gallons of bile being showered upon them by their fellow atheists and skeptics. Some of the criticisms are quite irrational.
One of the worst recent examples was Greta Christina’s labeling of Sam Harris as a “sexist, patronizing asshole”. The reasoning behind her assessment was absymal, and it underscores the importance of being skeptical of one’s own beliefs, particularly the emotionally charged ones.
Dawkins himself provided an example of this with his bizarre criticism of Nadia Eweida, the British Airways employee who wanted to wear a cross at work:
He was angry, and it led him to say something ridiculous and irrational.
keiths,
Dawkins seems to have been doing that a bit too often of late.
He needs to be reminded of the old saying: “Make sure that the brain is fully engaged before releasing the tongue.”
Harris crusade against Christians in scientific disciplines was pathetic. Compare
Harris vs. TE Francis Collins
Harris vs. YEC John Hartnett
http://www.uncommondescent.com/creationism/yec-john-harnett-accumulates-almost-5-7-million-dollars-in-science-grants/
Harris is an intellectual lightweight,
http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2015/05/06/sam-harris-gets-schooled-by-noam-chomsky/
just the product of his hollywood mama who paid for his trancendental meditaiton and controlled substance usages:
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/sam-harris-finally-makes-sense-to-me/
Chomsky was a Pol Pot fan Boy. I would hardly hold him up as an exemplar of political morality.
Wikipedia
From Noyau:
hotshoe:
Patrick:
I haven’t personally heard or read anything by Dawkins that I find offensive.
I find all political tribalism offensive, but I tend just to ignore it. I mostly use the BA77 scroll wheel ( the 40 hp outboard version) when encountering political writing.
I used to follow both Dawkins and Harris on Twitter, but I had to stop. I’m not sure if it was more a matter of their tweets or those of their really sycophantic followers, though. At one point Harris was offering some large sum of money to anybody who could find a flaw in some argument of his. I thought that was funny.
I PMed him that his little game might be illegal in Mass. because it looked like you had to buy his book to enter his lottery, (as well as silly, because he wasn’t really impartial) so he changed his rules–both put the argument on the web and appointed somebody else to judge the entries.
I thought that was good of him, but still thought (and think) that the idea is presumptuous. I stopped following him, so I don’t know if anybody won the , but I can guess.
Dawkins, too, is really cocky on line, and I’ve noticed that a couple of British philosophers (whom I DO follow) make fun of him (and his posse) occasionally. I believe I learned quite a bit from one of his books, but I’m not really qualified to say if it was any good–it was a pop science book on evolution for people like me who don’t know much about it. Fun read, though.
ETA: Now that I think more about it, I may have read two of Dawkins’ books–or one and a half. I think I’ve read one paper by Harris and listened/watched his contribution to a debate on atheism: he did a nice job, I think. So I’m guessing it’s not the published stuff or the debates so much as the on-line persona of these guys that has earned them the reputation of being a couple of assholes.
walto,
I have points of disagreement with each of the prominent New Atheists, but none that would justify sweeping statements like these from hotshoe:
And:
Or this one from Kantian Naturalist:
ETA: To which hotshoe replied:
Is there a problem with being Islamophobic? That is, fear of people who equate religious and secular law?
I see lots of comments on dominionism, but no organized and vocal objection to Christophobia.