"Unphilosophical"

Scott Stevens, Religion and Ethics Editor of ABC Online (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American Broadcasting Company) has written a piece called "The Poverty Of the New Atheism," the content of which it should be easy to discern from the title. As with most such pieces, Stevens is unable to discuss the ideas of the New Atheists without spending most of his time criticizing their delivery. In fact, he's so focused on the tone of Dawkins et. al. that he forgets to even make an argument.

Therefore, as much as I'd like to, I can't say that Stevens commits an ad hominem fallacy when he calls the New Atheists "unphilosophical," because to call it a fallacy would imply that Stevens has made an error in his reasoning. He hasn't, because he's not reasoning so much as lashing out.

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life - one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx's great observation about the "theological" dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the "New Atheists" look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

In short, Stevens is all for criticism of religion so long as one does it with a proper attitude of reverence for what one is criticizing. This is nothing new--it's become quite the popular sentiment in liberal Christian circles since the New Atheists' rise to fame. But it's not an argument. It has nothing to do with what Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennet have said, and everything to do with how they have said it. Stevens does go a bit farther than previous critics, though, in directing some scorn at the New Atheists' readers, as well. (So is Stevens also illiterate, or has he not read any of the books he's criticizing?)

But for all this abuse to constitute a fallacy, Stevens would have to be using it as a counter argument, and as nearly as I can tell, he's not. He yammers on about Marx for a bit, but it's just paragraphs of throat clearing.

But Marx's critique of religion has an unexpected twist, a barb in the tail that implicates [the New Atheists] by exposing the deeper complicity concealed by their cynicism. For, to be "dis-illusioned" in Marx's sense is not heroically to free oneself from the shackles and blinders of religious ideology and thus to gaze freely upon the world as it truly is, as Dawkins and Harris and even Hitchens would suppose.

Rather, to be "dis-illusioned" is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called "the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth".

Being one of the New Atheists' illiterate readers, I barely feel qualified to comment, but it seems to me that Marx's "dis-illusionment" is precisely to "gaze freely upon the world as it truly is." Unless Stevens is suggesting that exposing "oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence" is somehow to construct another illusion to replace the religious illusion one has cast aside.

This still isn't an argument, though. It's just a contrast, and a confused one at that. Stevens accuses the New Atheists of cynicism, but praises Marx for recognizing that the world as it truly is, is a pretty terrible place. Illiterate though I may be, I have at least read Dawkins, and his message is that life gets better when you cast off religious illusions, not worse. What's really bowing us downwards to the earth is not reality, but the delusion that an omnipotent, omniscient being is judging us every moment of every day. The good news is that we all have the innate capacity to see through the delusion, if we want to use it. That's not cynicism--if anything, it's too optimistic.

Stevens, on the other hand, thinks that getting rid of illusions should leave us with nothing but misery. Why? His concern with being philosophical might have prompted him to offer an argument, rather than insults and appeals to Marx. Stevens, it seems, is not even unphilosophical--he's just angry and, yes, cynical. That doesn't make him wrong, of course--it just makes him uninteresting.