My Problem with the so-called New Atheism

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TL;DR: "I don't like what these people are saying so I'm going to attempt to ridicule them with ad hominem because I can't actually put forward a decent argument."

The idea of arguing is very primitive anyway; were you to explore the subject with parallel thinking I believe you'd probably reach a far different conclusion. Of course, that necessitates leaving your bias behind you, and you don't really seem the person to do that if this post is anything to go by.

If you look at the adjectives used in your post, most of them are emotional and very few are objective. What this suggests is your points, perceptions and interpretation are based mostly if not entirely on emotion and not on any sort of objective fact. You're also employing a rather damning case of appeal to authority. Here's how it would sound if you were to include one more famous scientist, who invented the MRI machine yet is a young earth creationist (need I say more?): "Raymond Vahan Damadian would not agree with what these people are saying, so naturally they must be false."



Basically you sound like Ken Ham.

 

Lawrence Krauss is one of the progenitors of the idea of dark energy, which he and most other "mainstream cosmologists" claim constitutes 68% of the cosmos...and about which we know not a single thing.

To me, this is not science, it is absolutely theology. Postulating an invisible energy source, a force-field that permeates all of space-time, yet has no known causal connection to the rest of physics and which makes no empirical prediction, is plain and simple curve fitting. It fails as science, it fails as physics, and it fails as philosophy.

To quote Richard, who I think summed up the modern cosmological situation quite well (though in writing about dark matter, he in fact meant dark fluid):

This is what Krauss does, and it's my opinion as a physicist that he is a moron and deserves to be made fun of for it.

Because he goes to talk about his "passion for reason and science"...and then preaches to the atheist choir about how modern physics PROVES his own theology, that the Universe came from nothing at all!



This is simply making a mockery of the English language and does nothing to advance our conceptual understanding of what's going on. Again, Buddhists have written for many thousands about the Universe having come from nothing at all. Simply throwing a few calculations in front of your sheep does not in any way make this a more logically sound or attractive position; Krauss simply changes the goalposts and claims victory over all world religions without having done much of anything at all.

I came into this discussion at the age of 13, having read and been fairly convinced by Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens--I took the whole New Atheist trip, in other words. Whatever "bias" I seem to have, I promise, is really nothing more than my own flair as a writer, which I think makes the conversation that much more entertaining. (Although I do admittedly go overboard sometimes and ought really tone it down since I do want to remain civil and reasonable.)

Certainly I have explored the topic with enormous parallel thinking, and I have absolutely reached far different conclusions at different times in my life. But I'm not arguing in favor of any of that--I'm arguing that Schrodinger was in fact correct back in the early 1900s with what he taught about the birth of science and technology and that the New Atheists, through their lack of education in both philosophy and physics, simply miss the point of entirely.

I don't think anything I wrote is any less (or more) logical or any less entertaining than the way the New Atheists choose to debate religion, so I do feel I'm in the best of company:

I find this absolutely hilarious.

If Dawkins can call god a homophobic, racist, I feel that I must surely be allowed to call Krauss a moronic pseudo-philosopher who couldn't do real cosmology even if God himself came down and tried to walk him through it.

Both claims, I feel, have enormous FACTUAL justification.

Like I said, the post itself contains enormous emotional appeals, but this says nothing of whether the argument is also factually correct or objective--all this establishes is that I believe my claims are more emotionally satisfying that pure atheism.

I do freely admit the "logicality" (I would venture to call it emotional coldness) of atheism at least on the surface appears to give it a more scientific veneer than the sort of pseudo-deistic pantheism Schrodinger is arguing for.

To quote Schrodinger once more:

I'd hate to sound like Ken Ham, so you might have me there.

At the same time, Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and cosmologist and expert in general relativity, the quantum theory, theoretical biology, and even cognitive science before cognitive science even really existed as an academic discipline within psychology...

He was a good friend to and collaborator with Albert Einstein, whose own words at times echo very similar religious sentiments, and Schrodinger believed that he saw "eye to eye...on certain essential points, with Max Planck and Ernst Cassirer."

So it's not that we're talking about some lone quantum physicists here--we are in fact discussing the very men who created the whole of modern physics in the first place.

And I'm not so much appealing to Schrodinger's authority as a scientist as I am unashamedly stealing his argument for myself. Make of that what you will.

Schrodinger himself saw the hand of God in the quantum mechanics of DNA, which was discovered by Crick and Watson thanks to his 1944 book, What is Life?:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...6329/Do-our-genes-reveal-the-hand-of-God.html
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/feb/07/wonders-life-physicist-revolution-biology

From What is Life? (1944):
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, views DNA similarly (although admittedly, I haven't actually read his book on the subject):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-God-Scientist-Presents/dp/1416542744

The history of QM, the end result being Schrodinger's book Mind and Matter (1958), unabashedly pro-immortality from the standpoint of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, the defining work of cognitive science:
http://www.academia.edu/260503/_Mysticism_in_quantum_mechanics_the_forgotten_controversy_

 

Understandable, since his theory is not testable.

Correct about what? Bashing dark energy as being unfounded assertion then proclaiming Schrodinger is correct about... karma?

Of course it does. Science is concerned with matters of fact. It knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity, as Schrodinger says, but the scientific method does not try to solve for these, because it will fail.

Yes, they are learned men, but I don't even see an argument for your point, only ad hom against Krauss and praise for the already esteemed pioneers of modern science.

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There's not much pleasure in taking a nihilistic worldview, but knowing what DNA is doesn't lead to conclusions about god. Science can only explain the biology of consciousness, not the meaning of it.

 

Correct about the metaphysics of mind, whereas Krauss is nothing but a preacher.

Here is how Schrodinger summarizes the physical situation for us:

Again, this is hardly different from the Spinozist view advocated by Einstein throughout his life: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

This is not what cosmologists like Krauss or Hawking claim: They say that we have no need for God anymore because modern cosmology PROVES the universe "can and will come from nothing."

You say "of course it does", but this is a statement in direct opposition to the thesis of New Atheism, that God is essentially a scientific hypothesis that we no longer have a use for.

Compare physicist Sean Carroll:



Carroll clearly doesn't understand Planck or Schrodinger's neo-pantheistic God, so his statements are indeed wildly uncharacteristic of the actual findings of modern science--but just listening to his talk, you would never know any of this, and would perhaps be persuaded that to be a modern physicist is to be an atheist, which is not the case.

My point is that "cosmologists" like Krauss use the methods established by Planck and Schrodinger without understanding the epistemological significance behind them, and this leads to them misunderstanding the significance of their own work. A philosophically illiterate nitwit does not a good physicist make.

And yet, we have done virtually nothing to explain the biology of consciousness since Schrodinger's time, despite enormous advances in physics, neuroscience, technology, and economic conditions.

The idea that consciousness will be explained by more reductionist science is precisely the idea that Schrodinger is attacking, in line with the views of Maxwell Planck. Consciousness according to Schrodinger is our world picture itself, so our world picture naturally cannot contain its own maker.

From Planck:

And again:

Again, this is completely incongruous with everything I've ever read Dawkins write about the nature of the scientific method. Yet it was spoken by the man who singlehandedly launched us into the quantum age--a man far more "turned on" than some Oxford biology professor.

It is my claim that men as Dawkins and Krauss and Carroll have completely misunderstood the epistemology behind modern genetics and physics, all of which relies on the quantum theory for validation.

 

I apologize for not responding to your whole post, but I think that this is the heart of your argument. Are you saying that the work of Schrodinger et al. undercuts atheism? If so, can you explain why?

 

Partially, but Schrodinger referred to himself as both an atheist as well as a Vedantist (Indian philosopher). My point is that Schrodinger's atheism is a poetical kind that acknowledges the reality of beauty, of purpose, and of God:

AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD!?

Yes. This is the sort of forward-thinking and nuance that men like Dawkins and Harris simply do not understand or (as I believe more likely--Harris cites Schrodinger's book My View of the World, showing incontrovertibly that he actually makes a conscious choice and effort to intentionally ignore the entire content) do not care to understand.

Dawkins certainly never produced any mathematics of worth in his entire life, nor has Sam Harris. So when they venture to talk of the quantum theory or of modern physics at all, they are completely incompetent laypeople whose opinions carry no more weight than, say, those of a homeless man wandering the streets...

From the Nobel Prize winning physicist and founder of quantum chemistry Wolfgang Pauli, quoting astronomer Johannes Kepler:

And again,

Well, now Dawkins is a biologist and so generally has no use of understanding of mathematics at all...

It's a damn shame, but reading Kepler really makes you question Dawkins's and Harris's competency as scientists specifically and as thinkers generally.

Antony Flew, perhaps the world's most notorious atheist philosopher to recant his position--after many, many years--cites Schrodinger in his book There is a God, in large part a challenge to Dawkins' The God Delusion. Naturally, Dawkins addresses the God of the Enlightened Physicist only in the first chapter of his God Delusion, and only extraordinarily superficially. Schrodinger is unfortunately never mentioned... only Stephen Hawking who quite honestly doesn't have a care in the world about any of this.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/00...rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop

But Dawkins equivocates Hawking's belief with Einstein's belief with the belief of physicists generally... in other words, the entire premise of his book and thesis on God is a transparently obvious logical fallacy once you know what to look for.
http://www.amazon.com/God-New-Physi...53827&sr=1-1&keywords=God+and+the+New+Physics

The question can itself perhaps better be termed in the language of Free Will and of Materialism.

From Sir James Jeans's Physics and Philosophy:

Schrodinger himself hated materialism:

If the men who gave us our ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC PICTURE of the world themselves detested materialism...then I simply have no choice but to laugh when a biologist like Dawkins or Harris goes on to pronounce God dead because of how far our materialist science has progressed. It's enormously dishonest and it quite frankly ignores the whole of modern science--the New Atheists seem to inhabit a post-Darwinian world, yet are still caught in the paradigm of the classical physics: They are arguing as Victorian scientists, in other words. And we all know how beyond words stupid those people were.

Lord Kelvin on the "two dark clouds" of physics...he was still thinking in terms of ether!
http://ether-wind.narod.ru/Kelvin_1901/006.html

Here is how Schrodinger saw the PHYSICAL situation in 1958:

Schrodinger tells us that Boltzmann's view of Time as a statistical occurrence makes it an epiphenomena of Mind and of Consciousness. And if Mind creates Time, it sure as hell can't be limited by its own conceptual creation.

That is a fairly logical argument for immortality. How do Dawkins or Harris respond? I don't believe they ever have.

Read Jeans again. The New Physics affords us a Cosmos infinitely greater than "a mere shelter for brutes." It "form a suitable dwelling-place for free men."

But Sam Harris says he has no Free Will and is therefore not a free man.
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam...UTF8&qid=1432454021&sr=1-1&keywords=free+will

But Harris is a "deep thinker"! He went to Stanford to study philosophy as an undergrad, has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and spent years in India meditating under gurus!



But Schrodinger himself does not give a flying fuck about one's ability to read ancient Indian texts or one's ability to meditate as a means to acquire some "deeper understanding" as Harris touts his his personal experiences as evidence of:

In other words, when the young Sam Harris had to convince his mother to pay for his ~10 year trip to India, Schrodinger's soul--still alive--thought he was acting like an absolute child and retard. But Harris thought it was a good idea that would bring him insight and inner peace--surely, meditation can't be a bad thing, can it?

So Schrodinger openly calls Harris's nihilistic Buddhist philosophy a "bankruptcy of a world view" and "really disturbing," "worse than...Augustinian election or Lutheran salvation by faith."

No wonder Harris was scared shitless to cite the guy! Again, Jeans tells us that the classical world that Harris and Dawkins still inhabit is nothing more than "a mere shelter for brutes." Brutes indeed!

Meditation may well be an interesting technique to be appropriated for improved mental health...I meditate every now and then, and I do enjoy it. But it is just as well, according to Schrodinger, a "foolish superstition" that nobody need indulge in.

In other words, Schrodinger makes the positive claim that Sam Harris flat out wasted 10 years of his life, doing nothing at all, learning not a single thing. It's too bad Harris didn't take the guy seriously back in his 20s, or he could have just gone right into his Ph.D. program and would probably be a whole lot wealthier, having written several additional books. (And probably more thoughtful ones too.)

But the New Atheists respect Harris as some sort of genius or "deep thinker," responsible for sharing his meditative Eastern insights with all the rest of us lowly Westerners.

But Schrodinger thinks all these human beings--especially the New Atheists who have fallen prey to this faux-Eastern spirituality--are in fact little more than borderline retarded.

 

The work of Schrodinger and company solely dealt with the behavior of small objects. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong!), it never discusses God, spirituality, etc. Intelligent men these founders of modern physics were, surely, but coming up with a theory that describes a particular set of circumstances does not grant that all of their beliefs are true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you using the appeal to authority logical fallacy.

I'm not sure that I follow the argument. Is he saying that because time is a statistical occurrence, we still exist in the past?

HA! Agreed.

 

Not an argument from authority...I'm just stealing Schrödinger's argument for myself.

Back in the early 1900s, scientists--and particularly physicists--were not encouraged to be so one-sided in their personalities and professional interests as today. Schrödinger spent much of his youth reading Indian poetry, German Idealist philosophers (e.g., Schopenhauer), religious esotericism (e.g., Spinoza), works of biology, and just all sorts of other interesting and historically relevant pieces of data that modern physicists simply miss out on.

Regardless, Schrödinger was an expert on thermodynamics (information), quantum mechanics (small things), general relativity (big things), quantum biology--a field he founded (living things), cosmology and unified field theory (everything), and he was an atheist philosopher from a very young age.

He is saying that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics are what define the Arrow of Time (Eddington's phrase) according to Boltzmann, and that because entropy is a statistical occurrence within brain and biology and Mind at Large, "What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it."

This is somewhat reminiscent of that line Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita at the Trinity atomic test: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." If man can master time itself, as it certainly seems we ought be able to do, then we create Death within our Mind just as surely as we create our own Life. "But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism."

 

Relevant video on the nature and philosophy of consciousness, "On Schrödinger and Nietzsche on life"

http://digital.library.fordham.edu/cdm/ref/collection/BabBabich/id/12