Tag: Sam Harris

Post New Atheism

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.

I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.

That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality.… Read the rest

Non-Cognitivist Trajectories in Moral Subjectivism

Mark Davis1 Comment

imageWhen I say that “greed is not good” the everyday mind creates a series of images and references, from Gordon Gekko’s inverse proposition to general feelings about inequality and our complex motivations as people. There is a network of feelings and, perhaps, some facts that might be recalled or searched for to justify the position. As a moral claim, though, it might most easily be considered connotative rather than cognitive in that it suggests a collection of secondary emotional expressions and networks of ideas that support or deny it.

I mention this (and the theories that are consonant with this kind of reasoning are called non-cognitivist and, variously, emotive and expressive), because there is a very real tendency to reduce moral ideas to objective versus subjective, especially in atheist-theist debates. I recently watched one such debate between Matt Dillahunty and an orthodox priest where the standard litany revolved around claims about objectivity versus subjectivity of truth. Objectivity of truth is often portrayed as something like, “without God there is no basis for morality. God provides moral absolutes. Therefore atheists are immoral.” The atheists inevitably reply that the scriptural God is a horrific demon who slaughters His creation and condones slavery and other ideas that are morally repugnant to the modern mind. And then the religious descend into what might be called “advanced apologetics” that try to diminish, contextualize, or dismiss such objections.

But we are fairly certain regardless of the tradition that there are inevitable nuances to any kind of moral structure. Thou shalt not kill gets revised to thou shalt not murder. So we have to parse manslaughter in pursuit of a greater good against any rules-based approach to such a simplistic commandment.… Read the rest