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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2010/06/an_agnostic_manifesto.html
I would not go so far as to argue that there's a "new agnosticism" on the rise. But I think it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsuwpported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)
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.
[...]
This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs. I'm thinking in particular here of the ones who like to call themselves "the brights." (Or have they given up on that comically unfortunate term?) The "brights" seem like rather dim bulbs when it comes to this question. It's amazing how the New Atheists boastfully stride over this pons asinorum as if it weren't there.
[...]
In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I can't wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.
[...]
So true. The verbal vitriol and vituperation that self-proclaimed New Atheists indulge in in the comments section of crusading atheist and Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins' blog recently caused Dawkins himself, horrified by the not excessively "bright" mob he'd created, to shut down his comments section. (The concern was attacks on my fellow Templeton Cambridge fellow Chris Mooney who is a pro-science atheist but not an "incompatibilist," a nonsense term I don't have the patience to explain but for which they wanted his blood.)
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I would not go so far as to argue that there's a "new agnosticism" on the rise. But I think it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsuwpported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)
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.
[...]
This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs. I'm thinking in particular here of the ones who like to call themselves "the brights." (Or have they given up on that comically unfortunate term?) The "brights" seem like rather dim bulbs when it comes to this question. It's amazing how the New Atheists boastfully stride over this pons asinorum as if it weren't there.
[...]
In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I can't wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.
[...]
So true. The verbal vitriol and vituperation that self-proclaimed New Atheists indulge in in the comments section of crusading atheist and Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins' blog recently caused Dawkins himself, horrified by the not excessively "bright" mob he'd created, to shut down his comments section. (The concern was attacks on my fellow Templeton Cambridge fellow Chris Mooney who is a pro-science atheist but not an "incompatibilist," a nonsense term I don't have the patience to explain but for which they wanted his blood.)
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