Thursday, January 05, 2006

Ramblings on the State of Modern Atheism

I discovered this link on the blog of a Christian philosopher, who introduced it as "terrific post on the current state of atheism."

2 comments:

Will Kratos said...

Well, I agree with everything that he said in the first paragraph. When it comes to the second and third, however, things go downhill. For instance, disagreement is obviously going to occur when it comes to "the failure" of arguments supportive of atheism. That's his personal biases talking. When it comes to "growing influences", he says that the large population of muddled or irrational atheists leaves us with a big potential problem. What he doesn't consider, though, is that the main activists for atheism may constitute those "rarities" that he talks about - and given the main activists, I'd say that is largely the case.

But insofar as his four categories go, that applies to virtually all groups supportive of any political idea, philosophical idea, etc. He points this out himself with respect to theists, and I don't see it as the "current state" of atheism as much as I see it as something that has generally always been the case for any group that supports any ideology. This is because people in general are dumb. Not because the positions are necessarily dumb.

Secular Outpost said...

I think even the first paragraph contains controversial statements. For example, when commenting on people "who have taken the trouble to be informed about the issues surrounding the question of God's existence," the author claims that many of those individuals "end up on the opposite end" (i.e., concluding that God exists). He could be right about that, but he also could be mistaken. I do not find evidence supporting that controversial claim anywhere in his blog entry.