Naturalism and the New Atheism
Naturalism and the New Atheism
A recent phenomenon known as the New Atheism has arisen in the past couple of years. In one sense nothing is new about the doctrine of atheism itself. It has been around for centuries. Atheism is the doctrine that there is no God, and the atheism of Richard Dawkins is in this respect no different from the atheism of Baron d'Holbach. But there is a difference in the way the New Atheists advocate for atheism. Aggressive advocates of atheism, they maintain that religious belief is not only false but also held in an irrational way by adherents and is morally pernicious. They feel no obligation to respect the religious beliefs of others; rather, their stated goal is to usher in the end of religious belief, especially belief in the existence of God.
One of the central claims they make is there is no evidence whatsoever for belief in the existence of God. All of the evidence lies firmly on the side of unbelief, not on the side of belief. Persons who believe in God do so for irrational motives, not because there are any good reasons to believe in God. To be rational is to form beliefs in accordance with the methods of natural science; natural science leads us in the direction of atheism; therefore all reasonable people should be atheists and not theists.
The work of many atheists, such as Dawkins or Dennett, is not merely to defend atheism, the view that there are no gods, but to uphold and support their positive philosophy, a doctrine that could best be described as metaphysical naturalism. A metaphysical naturalist maintains that the natural order is all there is. As Carl Sagan put it, the cosmos is all that was, is, or ever will be. This belief in philosophical naturalism is supposed to be what we should believe instead of Christian theism.
Is naturalism the inevitable, logical result of scientific thinking? It seems hard to deny the legitimacy of science as a way of knowing. Even young-Earth scientific creationists do not say that the Christian faith is true and that science is just wrong. Rather, they say that if science had been done right, it would have upheld the traditional teaching drawn from a literal (I would say hyperliteral) reading of the book of Genesis.
In my view there is a profound problem with naturalism. In order for natural science to be possible, a natural world must be analyzable in scientific terms. However, scientists must also use scientific methods to discover the truth about the natural world. The contention of the argument from reason is that if the world were truly what naturalism says it is, there would be matter, but there would be no scientists to discover the properties of matter.