dastardly stem wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:18 pm
Thanks, Stak. That was an extremely helpful response. And I think you've nailed Hart's position, obviously you've considered his ideas before. But yes, his point stated early in the book was to speak to atheists and help them understand why they are wrong and he is right. But I don't think he did a fair job in defining an atheist position and I don't think he attempted to simplify his take enough for us lay readers to make much of his points. As I said, to me it seemed like he intentionally attempted to confuse his readers rather than clarify anything as he intended. That is extremely frustrating for me.
I think there is a tendency for theists writing ostensibly apologetic material to focus on what they perceive to be “popular” forms of unbelief in lieu of engaging the more obscure yet more substantial manifestations. I can imagine the rationale for doing this is along the lines of, “More people are being influenced by a Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, or a Sam Harris than a Jordan Howard Sobel or a Graham Oppy, so I should focus on the former instead of the latter.” I can appreciate why that appears to be a prudent course, but I think it is fundamentally misguided.
Every person you engage with exerts some kind of influence over you whether you are conscious of it or not and so if you wade into a pile of bellicose atheists and start responding to them, you run the risk of behaving like them or worse. Religious fundamentalists of every stripe understand this very well, but their folly is to try and insulate people from ever being influenced by those outside the community in the first place; it is a short term solution that inevitably will fail. I think the best course of action is to be mindful of the influence and take appropriate steps to mitigate the negative aspects and accentuate the positive.
So Hart comes to the contemporary issue of theism versus atheism and starts surveying the landscape by reading post 9/11 critiques of religion by atheists. What he finds is an aggressive denunciation of religious belief predicated on social issues like Creation Science and Intelligent Design advocates trying to manipulate school boards, rampant sexual abuse perpetuated and shielded by clergy, violent acts of terrorism, discrimination directed at LGBT individuals and communities, and so on. These litanies against the social ills of practiced religion are joined with refutations of the classical arguments for God’s existence and rebuttals to contemporary arguments that, at best leave a lot to be desired and at worst are totally incompotent. All of this material is organized around the motif that there is no intellectually respectable form of religious belief and those believers who are undeniably intelligent are assessed as being religious for social and psychological reasons that make them suspect.
It isn’t hard to understand why Hart decides to push back in a similar manner, but in doing so his message gets lost in all the rhetoric and intellectual posturing. In all his chest-thumping about how atheism has no foundation to it, curious readers struggle to understand just what exactly Hart is trying to say or even what he really believes outside theism is better than atheism. I’m sure there was a sizable audience who were happy to read atheists getting a taste of their own medicine by someone capable of delivering it, but serving fans is better left to entertainers than theologians.