Julian Baggini’s recent opinion piece, “The New Atheist Movement is Destructive”, strings together a series of flimsy claims and a general eschewal of the requirements of accuracy and relevance in criticizing the new atheists, to lead to a conclusion that, while truly extraordinary given the briefest glance at history, is unfortunately all-too-typical of such criticism.
First, a methodological quibble. Pointing out that he has not read the books of the new atheists, Mr. Baggini argues that this does not disqualify him from opining about them. He need not read the books, he claims, since they would only tell him what he already believes and could only be addressed to agnostics and open-minded believers. I confess to doing much the same thing, though not for the same reasons. For something like a text book or an introduction to atheism, I feel confident in passing over them, not because I expect to believe everything in them but because I expect they will provide no new information to me. But that is based on having looked at dozens of them and found them to be much of a piece.
The books by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris are not just freshman texts in philosophy of religion though, something Mr. Baggini cannot know without at least cracking a cover. I can vouch for two of the books, Dennett’s and Dawkins’ – I haven’t read the other two, so I couldn’t say, and will hereafter confine my remarks (tacitly) to the two new atheists mentioned. Neither Dennett’s book nor Dawkins’ contains an atheist manifesto, listing only things every atheist believes, or a Cole’s Notes summary for philosophy of religion.
Still, I wouldn’t force Mr. Baggini to read anything he regards as a waste of time. And fortunately, when he turns to justifying his right to an opinion, it turns out the books he has not read are not actually the subject of his critique anyway. After a brief reference to Bayard’s book to support his claims – a book I find in the Humour section of my bookstore, by the way – he redirects his criticisms to “the general tone and direction [of] the new atheism”, “how [the new atheists] are perceived” and “the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews”.
I am uncertain whether I should bother to point out that criticising ‘general impressions’ of such phenomena is inevitably superficial and highly questionable, unless one can comment on their accuracy and relevance, which would require Mr. Baggini to have better information than simple ‘perceptions’. Surely this seems too obvious a concern.
However, I would not prevent Mr. Baggini from discussing these general perceptions and impressions all he likes. Had the rest of his article been this scrupulous, there would be no issue between us. For he quickly moves on from these, to attribute faults to the new atheists themselves, attributions which his admitted information cannot support. If he had stuck with criticising perceptions, his apparent point, that the perception of the new atheism, not the new atheism itself, is counter-productive, would be indisputable, in my view.
No such scruples. He proposes to combat the misunderstanding that atheism is “a negative attack on religious belief”, and so, is ‘parasitic’ upon religion. The new atheists are at fault, he says, for lending credence to this myth.
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