Though I’m setting this post to go up on a Tuesday afternoon, I’m actually writing it late at night, so I’ll keep my comments on the book short:
(1) It’s odd how Haught lumps all the New Atheists together, and doesn’t even seem to much acknowledge Sam Harris’ main claim, that Al-Queda and related groups really are motivated by the religious ideology they claim to be motivated by.
(2) Haught mixes up two senses of “tolerance” for a belief: (a) saying nice things about it and not mean things about it (b) not trying to use police power to eliminate it (pp. 8-10). He can’t seem to grasp that the New Atheists are attacking (a) while largely embracing (b).
(3) I can’t determine what Haught actually thinks about God. The closest he comes to a clear statement of his doctrine is when he says (pp. 87-88): “In one sense God is the ultimate in Being, Meaning, Goodness, and Beauty, but unless these impersonal absolutes are animated by the pulse of personality, they cannot attract personal beings at the deepest level of our existence.
(4) Haught admits the Bible contains barbaric things, but claims to discern a good moral core. Why he treats the Bible as special, and whether he would be comfortable finding a similar core in other similarly barbaric texts, is unclear.
(5) Haught is sorely confused about the differences between atheism, naturalism, etc. He also seems to think you can’t be a good Darwinist if you think something is an evolutionary byproduct rather than an evolutionary adaptation.
(6) He buys the claim that evolution would have no tendency whatever to produce reliable cognitive mechanisms. I don’t understand why anyone believes this.
(7) He thinks the fact that Dawkins bothers with arguments for and against the existence of God shows a hidden weakness in Dawkins’ evolutionary theory of religion.
(8) Haught is a huge mess of confusion on what faith is supposed to be. There’s a sense that the New Atheists have the wrong definition, but Haught’s suggestions on the correct definition diverge wildly. For example:
(p. 5): “Theologians today understand faith as the commitment of one’s whole being to God. But the new atheists, echoing a now-obsolete theology, think of faith in a narrow intellectual and propositional sense.”
(p. 6): “Of course, all knowing has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is rightly called faith, even if our critics are offended by the term.”
(p.61): “Generally speaking, faith is the state of being drawn toward or being grasped by something of utmost importance, what Tillich calls ‘ultimate concern.’”
Furthermore, there’s a sense that Haught’s dispute with the New Atheists over faith is a verbal one: Haught seems willing to admit that, even if “belief without evidence” is okay, there is something widely practiced by unsophisticated believers in that neighborhood which is uncool. To Haught, though, this verbal dispute is no “mere” verbal dispute, it is critical to him to use the word “faith” the way liberal theologians define it as opposed to how ordinary people define it. The definition of faith is treated as a prize in rhetorical skirmish, and also at times something to be discovered by theologians, as if theologians somehow latched on to the concept long before they made their “discovery” of its true nature.
(9) I had another point but I forgot it.
I just had a few thoughts, because I never quite understood the atheist take on this. To believe that everything should be perceptible by the human mind or instruments created by the human mind is one of the greatest forms of pride (and therefore ignorance) in my opinion. It is liken to a two-dimensional being scoffing at the possible reality of a three-dimensional one which does not intersect it, demanding two-dimensional proof of the three-dimensional being’s existence. Think of it this way. The mineral has no consciousness compared to a plant, and cannot understand the reality of a plant, even though they are made of the same substance. A plant likewise, cannot hope to begin to understand the reality of the animal. The animal, cannot hope to understand the station of man. And man, though aware of spiritual reality in the same way an animal may be aware of the presence of a man, cannot hope to understand the true reality of the station above him, spiritual reality. To try and explain everything using one set of dimensions, one set of rules, one set of procedures can prove things within its own contexts. But we find that this is the problem modern quantum physics has run up against, which is why they have now come to subscribe to an eleven-dimensional (in some cases ten-dimensional) system with equations that corroborate our three-dimensional observations. How do you understand this? Thanks for listening.
It’s always the same once you dig a bit below the surface, isn’t it?
@ Vahid:
You have a valid point in that one may not be able to understand a concept using tools designed to understand a different concept. However, making a jump to a belief in a creator due to a lack of understanding of the complete picture is illogical. We simply need to keep looking for logical explanations much the same as science has done for hundreds of years. Thus, physicists are expanding their minds to the possibility of more dimensions. But, this expansion is in step with what we already understand about our universe.