PZ Myers just posted a disparaging blog on the “New Agnostics,” which inadvertently covers a lot of what I dislike about the shallow New Atheist position:
One other specific issue I have to take with Rosenbaum is that he’s lazy. He’s got one question that he’s absolutely sure will stump the atheists, and justify his rejection of them. It’s an old and distinguished philosophical question, but hardly relevant.
Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive….
Although, actually, some of us do have pretty good answers to the question, and it’s apparent that Rosenbaum hasn’t even tried to look them up before posing with [sic] his challenge. He could have looked up Sean Carroll, who gives a characteristically thoughtful and rather philosophical answer.
Ultimately, the problem is that the question—”Why is there something rather than nothing?”—doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.
Well, except in the “many universes” perspective which Rosenbaum sort of mentions (and which I have no use for, but which is probably the dominant way to get around the philosophical problems with the collapse of the quantum wavefunction, etc.).
Not to mention that the idea that a question “doesn’t make sense” in part because it has no satisfying answer is a pretty mind-bogglingly stupid notion. But this is what happens when scientists try to do philosophy. Seriously. (I had read Carroll’s piece before, and been completely unimpressed by it.)
Or perhaps he could have looked up Victor Stenger, who is a bit more blunt.
What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.
As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”
Of course, those guys are mere physicists. Nothing they could say would be at all persuasive.
Awfully close there to an ironic/sarcastic argument from authority, there; but leaving that aside, you know how regularly scientists will bring up the idea that you’re not allowed to ask “What were things like before the Big Bang?” because “time only began with the Big Bang itself, so it’s meaningless to ask what existed ‘before’ it”?
Stenger and Wilczek are quite happy, when it suits them, to conjecture about what happened/existed before the Big Bang (and to have eternal laws of physics existing in that Nothing/vacuum state; and how did those laws get there? they don’t say; perhaps being lawless is an “unstable” state?). And Myers swallows and regurgitates it whole, because it suits him, too.
Also, the question of Something vs. Nothing which Stenger and Wilczek are trying to answer (and which Myers seems to think they’ve given a sensible/convincing/blunt/“pretty good” answer to) is precisely the same question which Carroll has just tried to prove “doesn’t make sense”!
So which is it? Does the question not make sense and therefore have no answer, or has it already been answered (and therefore implicitly does make sense)? Doesn’t appear that the none-too-philosophical Myers has noticed that inconsistency, either! Yet he’s considering the “New Agnostics” author to be “a chipper flibbertigibbet who is proudly agnostic (no problem with that) and as dumb as they come”! A little reflection would serve “Darwin’s tick” better.
“Are you agnostic about fairies?” is a good question, because it highlights what people actually think. John [Wilkins] gives the right answer; he doesn’t believe in fairies. Most people say the same thing. The point is that it is not only possible, it is reasonable to reject major categories of belief. John also gives the right answer about the Catholic god, which is just as phantasmal as fairies, and he also gives the very same answer about deist or pantheist gods that all the New Atheists give. Neither I nor Dawkins nor Larry Moran nor any atheist I’ve ever talked to will say that we have evidence that the remote and abstract God of Leibniz does not exist.
Yes, the Catholic god doesn’t exist, Zeus doesn’t exist, blah, blah, blah, etc. But is your self-awareness the product of Spirit looking through you, or is it just an emergent property of your neural network (and thus potentially of silicon neural networks, too)? The answer is that there is no answer, i.e., we will never know. (Even if you replaced a person’s brain, neuron-by-neuron, with silicon functional equivalents, and found that your self-awareness was unaltered through all that, it still wouldn’t tell you whether that self-awareness was itself Spirit.) But it’s a question which one can very reasonably be agnostic about, in the “religious sense” of agnostic—because if that Spirit exists, It is (impersonal, transcendent/immanent) God.
And, the answer to that question is directly relevant to the question of how Something has emanated from Nothing, i.e., of whether the God of the Yogis exists.
Myers continues, on why the New Atheism isn’t a religion:
Whenever we take a position on anything, it immediately opens up the possibility of opposition and segregation into multiple camps. We don’t like brussels sprouts; They love the slimy little things. Tribes are what people do, naturally and spontaneously. The question is always about how they deal with other tribes—shall we execute Brussels Sprouts Eaters, or is it sufficient to merely deport them, or shall we just have an information campaign and make fun of the crazy people who eat the awful green balls?
But, all religions began as cults; and cults are not defined simply by how they treat people outside of the group, but much more on how they bind people into the in-group. (Making fun of people outside the group of course accomplishes both functions, for those already inside.) Myers and his ilk are being disingenuous in pretending that what they are doing is simply mounting an “information campaign,” while not executing or even excommunicating non-atheists: If the people outside your group who are asking quite reasonable questions are denigrated as being “as dumb as they come,” it would be best to not ask too many questions, eh? And when the group’s leaders give blatantly nonsensical responses to those same questions (as Myers has done), and when pointing that out results in one experiencing the rancor of the group in defense of their “wise leader” and ideals (just as any defense of PETA on the same board will result in one being called a “troll”)….
Plus, if you think about it, any “lapsed atheist” would indeed no longer be fit to join in the “atheist games,” by definition. So they do in fact get de facto excommunicated.
Any strongly-defined in-group, regardless of how “rational” the tenets it accepts as conditions of membership, will demonstrate cultist tendencies; it’s just human nature. Groups of atheists and scientists included (e.g., in Oppenheimer saying that “if we cannot prove Bohm wrong, we must agree to ignore him”). To see Myers arguing that “atheism isn’t a religion” (which it isn’t) misses that point so completely, it’s almost funny. Seeing him call people outside of his (Brussels sprout-eating) in-group “crazy” is just as “amusing”: Scientology has used the same tactic for decades, now.
“New Atheism” is not a religion, certainly. (Nor is self-correcting science, obviously.) But is it a cult? Arguably, yes. At least, it’s rapidly getting there.
(I have observed before that if either PZ or Ophelia Benson had ever gotten themselves into full-blown [psychological or political, etc.] cults, they would never have been able to “think themselves out” of those groups. You can see that very clearly again, here.)
Half a decade ago, I spent a few hours reading the postings on an atheism list-serv. One of the threads ended with a poster claiming that agnostics were taking a “cowardly” position, in not being able to admit that God doesn’t exist, and that therefore the atheist position is the only rational one. (No doubt PZ would agree.)
I’ve said it before, I will say it again: These people confidently stop asking questions at precisely the point that any reasonably intelligent spiritual (not religious) teenage seeker starts asking them. (Sam Harris is a rare exception among the New Atheists, there, in spite of—nay, because of [or at least consistent with]—his dalliances with the New Age fraud Ken Wilber.) It’s not that such seekers ever actually find answers that stand up to thorough questioning and evidence. But at least they don’t try to blithely brush the questions under the rug, and then turn around and rend the people asking them. Further, you can only actually understand the full, convincing range of reasons for how spiritual claims don’t stand up to questioning by … well, by writing (or at least reading) a book such as this (blog’s) one, which traces the evolution of religion/spirituality from our hunter-gatherer days.
In general, I’m proud to consider myself a “militant atheist.” But unthinking crap like the “Waterboy to the Four Horsemen” has posted there, makes me cringe.