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John Haught Offers a Critique of the "New Atheists"

Feb 25th, 2008
by Drew Tatusko.

http://www.cokesbury.com/products/5.0/9780664233044.JPGJohn Haught offers a fantastic critique of atheism and expresses in much better language something I have raised as a question regarding the value-laden claims made by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris in direct opposition to anything we might call "faith" religious or otherwise. This is a concluding passage to his critique that is worth quoting at length:

With the hard-core atheists one has to ask this newer breed: What is the basis of your moral rectitude? How, in other words, if there is no eternal ground of values, can your own strict standards be anything other than arbitrary, conventional, historically limited human concoctions? But you take them as absolutely binding. And if you are a Darwinian, how can your moral values ultimately be anything more than blind contrivances of evolutionary selection? But again, in your condemnation of the evils of religion you must be assuming a standard of goodness so timeless and absolute as to be God-given. Of course, no one objects to your making moral judgments. But if you, your tribe or mindless mother nature is the ultimate ground of your values, why does your sense of rightness function with such assuredness in your moral indictment of all people of faith? Can your own frail lives and easily impressionable minds—since you are human just like the rest of us—be the source of something so adamantine as your own sense of rightness? "Excuse us for being so direct," my students would ask, "but if you are going to fall back now on evolutionary biology, how can random events and blind natural selection account for the absoluteness that you attribute to the values that justify your intolerance of faith? Or, if you do not want Darwin to give the whole answer, can the historically varying winds of human culture account fully for the rocklike solidity of your righteousness?"

Dawkins declares that the biblical God is a monster, Harris that God is evil, Hitchens that God is not great. But without some fixed sense of rightness how can one distinguish what is monstrous, evil or "not great" from its opposite? In order to make such value judgments one must assume, as the hard-core atheists are honest enough to acknowledge, that there exists somewhere, in some mode of being, a realm of rightness that does not owe its existence completely to human invention, Darwinian selection or social construction. And if we allow the hard-core atheists into our discussion, we can draw this conclusion: If absolute values exist, then God exists. But if God does not exist, then neither do absolute values, and one should not issue moral judgments as though they do.

As noted in the footnote, "This article is adapted from God and the New Atheism, published this month by Westminster John Knox." The full citation of the volume can be found here. If the article in Christian Century is any indicator, this looks like a must read response to the surge of atheist arguments in the market right now.

(HT: A Thinking Reed)

Related posts:

  1. spitting on atheists
  2. standing at the precipice of reason
  3. is atheism ideological?
  4. choosing god is an absurdity that leads to a rational outcome
  5. faith: the foundation of knowledge?

Posted in: Atheist Inquisitions, Religion.

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  • Alan
    Haught may be confusing attitude with certitude.

    Since I read a lot ideological polemic, I’m used to the attitude, but those who are not exposed to it might be shocked, shocked to find such rough-and-tumble rhetoric being used in public.

    My recollection is that Harris seemed to be trying to be provocative, but his book didn’t really contain anything that hadn’t been discussed and argued about over and over. It also contained what I would consider some pretty faulty reasoning in some instances.

    I have been surprised in the past at the level of sensitivity sometimes displayed by some religious folks and the level of respect accorded them in academic discourse. In one of the first undergraduate lectures I attended that touched on these subjects I asked a fairly straight-forward question – “what historical evidence is there for the existence of Jesus” – and I received a straight-forward and informative answer. However, afterwards, I was warned by the lecturer that the question was not very polite to raise in public.

    This was pretty surprising and disappointing to me since this very question has been the subject of discussion and commentary for, I believe, hundreds of years.
  • Alan,

    I think that's the problem with a deontological ethic in general. It leads to implausible ends - and this is no matter what basis on which you found such values. But the assertion that God=absolute values is rather absurd, you are correct.

    I think what Haught is arguing here is that the hard-core atheist position seems to posit some kind of non-contingent values. But how one goes from saying that there are these non-contingent values somewhere and that this therefore must mean God exists is a confusing statement at best.
  • Alan
    RE: If absolute values exist, then God exists. But if God does not exist, then neither do absolute values...

    Maybe his book explains this, but I find it to be a very puzzling assertion. First of all, what is meant by “absolute values exist”? I assume that what is meant is that some assertion of value is true, under all circumstances, at all times, for all people, in all places. So, for instance, one might assert that human life is always and without exception of fundamental value.

    Now, the question that comes to mind is, how would one maintain that this is, indeed true, under all circumstances, at all times, for all people and in all places? I could imagine some arguments in its favor – I could see empirical evidence being marshaled, and I see the possibility of a transcendental argument along the lines that life is what gives all other values their value and therefore must be of supreme and enduring value itself. But any such convincing argument that I can imagine would not involve or depend on the existence of God. “Human life is of absolute and enduring value because God said so” just would not be a convincing argument. “Because God exists” would be a non-sequitur. And if I were to show, some how, some way without reference to God that human life is an absolute value, how would I then be justified in claiming that God exists? And if I had a convincing argument that God does exist, why then would I be able to assert that some particular value or another is absolute? Perhaps this would be so given the nature of the argument for God’s existence, but I don’t see how one could confidently claim such an outcome a priori.

    So, what’s God got to do with it?
  • Paul
    So I'm a newcomer to this blog and have really enjoyed reading some of the entries including one that basically covered the same ground as my comment above (back in November). So I have a PhD (geology) and the whole process taught me that the letters really don't mean much other than the fact that you really like school. The real scientists are the ones publishing on the topics at hand -- publishing peer-reviewed articles is where respect for scientific ideas is gained.
  • Looney,

    I have never actually read that book - even though it's on one of my shelves. I am only referring to where Wheaton consciously situates itself in terms of historic fundamentalism. By balanced I am just saying that they have also distanced themselves from "particularly aggressive style related to the conviction that the separation from cultural decadence and apostate (read liberal) churches are telling marks of faithfulness to Christ" (http://www.wheaton.edu/isae/defining_evangelica...) while retaining key elements of their historic fundamentalist roots.
  • "and Wheaton College (which is where one needs to look for a far more balanced understanding of fundamentalism ..."

    If that is a reference to Mark Noll's book (The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind), I read it and pretty much concluded that Mark Noll was a big part of the problem. Of course I am a fundamentalist engineer working in high tech, and I am the son of a fundamentalist engineering professor, and I am a member of a fundamentalist church in Silicon Valley that probably has 40 or 50 high-tech Ph.d's (out of about 350 members) doing everything from cancer research to signal processing to high energy physics. One thing that would greatly help would be if the mainliners were to acknowledge the fact that fundamentalist Christians aren't disadvantaged in any way with respect to science and technology. Of course that requires accepting that belief in, or rejection of Darwin has zero relevance to the practice and application of science, which seems to be the bug that Mark Noll has.

    As I said, Christians shooting at each other provides ammunition for the new atheists.
  • Paul Niles
    I really liked this argument, and feel that it really boils down the question of the existence of God to its heart. While I don't think the "new athiests" will ever answer this question in a direct manner -- I was recently reading David Hume, and he would seem to argue that goodness is achieved through acclamation by society or approval of one's peers. While no one would really want to admit that their feelings of right and wrong are based on what everyone else thought -- one who was athiestically disposed might argue that it is entirely cultural conditioning and that God never downloads into us a sense of right and wrong. It certainly takes a lot of nobility out of being good, but it would explain why certain practices like slavery were viewed as ok in the past.
  • Looney,

    I think have put myself in those shoes, or at least I have tried. I see their point, but I think it's a pretty skewed and tainted view of religious belief since Dawkins and Hitchens make no real clear cut distinction between the 9/11 bombers, Fred Phelps, Unitarian Universalists who believe in God, Billy Graham, Mother Theresa, and Wheaton College (which is where one needs to look for a far more balanced understanding of fundamentalism - they would have nothing to do with Phelps for sure). All are equally deluded and equally infected by the same poison. Harris is more concerned, it seems, about Mother Theresa's supposed dogmatism than her help of the poor. This is what I characterize as a strawman.
  • You need to put yourself into the shoes of the new atheists. Everything that religion teaches, whether morality or otherwise, is the product of humans with damaged brains and deficient morals (hence suicide bombings and witch burning). The dim view of many towards caricatures of fundamentalists has been morphed to include all religionists. Unfortunately, different Christian groups putting each other down has provided much of the ammunition, although anti-Christian scholars have also helped to firmly establish the meta-narrative.

    From this framework, it is inconceivable to them that they can't do a better job, given superior intellects - or at least up-to-date intellects - and not being negatively influenced by depraved religious types.
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