What’s new about the New Atheists – and what isn’t

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
is through the waking state when we practise sadhana bhakti.
Thank you very much. What is it when atheists started becoming aggressive from around 2005 onwards with BBC serials such as Religion is the Root of All Evil, which was led by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris saying that if one has to choose between abolishing rape and abolishing religion, he would prefer religion because it was the cause of greater suffering or Richard Dawkins coming up with a super long expletive for God and always brought into the forefront of public consciousness, especially in the western world, that atheism had morphed into not just atheism but antithesm. Richard Dawkins started his book The God Delusion declaring that anyone who read this book would end up a disbeliever, a non-believer who loses his faith in God and that was his purpose in writing the book.
This level of intolerance towards religion and this open agenda to convert people towards atheism was quite unprecedented and this aggressiveness of the new atheists was also accompanied by remarkable success of their books with the books of Daniel Nett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and especially Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion becoming runaway bestsellers, of course to be fair, even books by the faithful such as God The Evidence by Patrick Lane or Language of God by Francis Collins also became bestsellers. Alasdair McGrath’s response to Richard Dawkins, The Dawkins Delusion or for that matter, David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion. The point is that as Berlinski pointed out in his book The Devil’s Delusion that what is new about the new atheism is the aggressiveness and just as the biblical God says that thou shall not worship any other God before me, the atheists essentially end up saying that thou shall have no belief system except ours.
Atheism is the only right belief system and everything else is wrong. Now Richard Dawkins justified this historically unprecedented, we could say, public aggression against God and religion by saying that 9-11 they all thought that that religion was foolish but it was not all that harmful but now they felt that religion was outright dangerous and that had to be avoided and thus they were on a mission to destroy religion, to end religion. Interestingly, Alasdair McGrath, he began his book, on his book cover he had a quote by another atheist who said that Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion makes me feel embarrassed to be an atheist and Alasdair McGrath’s book tells why that is so and has provoked it here because that headline or that which is put as a in the top in Alasdair McGrath’s book cover indicated the fault lines which divided even atheists religious people often see often tend to see all atheists in one colour as people who reject the God that they believe but even atheists like everyone else come in different shades and here was an atheist saying that he was embarrassed by the God delusion and he was appreciating the book of a theist as having shown why the God delusion was embarrassing so what is going on here to make sense of what is happening we need to look beyond today’s immediate situation or the current temporary situation to the history Richard Dawkins, Daniel Lennart and others they pioneered something called as scientific atheism and this grew historically as a reaction to scientific theism or we call it natural theology so essentially God historically has been understood as a transcendental being of course different religious traditions have different conceptions of God and they all understand that God does manifest in this world in some ways but God in his essence is understood to be a transcendental being and thus in some ways we cannot know him just through the actions of this is through what I’ve said there in this world the way to know him is through scripture Vedanta Sutra also says that the way to know about Brahman the absolute truth is through Shastra now since the time of what is called as enlightenment in western intellectual history normally the spiritual circles use the word enlightenment to refer to spiritual enlightenment where one gets spiritual vision and understand gets deeper perception or comprehension of one’s spiritual side or of the underlying spiritual reality but in western intellectual history the word enlightenment was used to refer to scientific enlightenment when the engine of modern science started gaining momentum and tumultuous changes started being made in the conceptual and practical world world for people so as science material science started studying nature understanding the mechanisms through laws and through mathematics understanding the mechanisms that govern material nature and then tapping those mechanisms for for the hope of human progress and along with such appreciation of nature or utilisation of nature for technological purposes also came a branch of study that became especially prominent was natural philosophy natural theology where the study of nature many scientists felt they could in that in the intricacy in the design in the mechanisms governing nature they could perceive the hand of God so the pioneering scientists like Newton Galileo Copernicus they all felt that science what at that time was known as natural theology which later on came to be known as science they already uncovered pointed to the existence of God and over the centuries as science started explaining more and more things the overall mentality became that things could be explained without God also so that means whereas originally the idea of the universe was theistic that God is the creator and the controller eventually the idea became that of that God is the creator but not the controller that there is that the universe is now controlled by the laws which have been uncovered by science and that in that sense the universe is like a clock in clock the clockwork universe was the standard metaphor which was used after Newtonian physics became mainstream a clock is clearly designed by an intelligent clockmaker but that clockmaker has no longer any control on the clock it now functions simply by its own mechanisms and those mechanisms when that metaphor is applied to the universe the world is made by God but it is now working according to mechanisms and if those mechanisms are understood by science then science can make the universe work according to human will and eventually when the theory of evolution came about and became and became mainstream then God was felt unnecessary even as a as a or as creator because things could have come about by divine by by the idea of evolution so of course evolution was extended here from biological mechanism to a universal ideology universal ideological explanation and whether such a leap was such a leap was never warranted by the evidence and still atheists capitalised on this idea and that’s how atheism spread very rapidly riding piggyback on science and this scientific atheism is what is characterised by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and other people like this now apart from this scientific atheism we could say there is something called humanist atheism humanistic atheism or scientific atheism or you could say scientific humanism humanistic atheism secular humanists whichever word you want to use so this humanistic atheism focused on atheism not as a not as a as unscientific or irrational but as a human need that people needed to believe and unless so for example Misha and then Karl Marx they felt that Sigmund Freud also among them so Freud felt that the belief in God stemmed from a personal emotional insecurity where people needed some father figure in their lives and Marx felt when he famously said religion is the opium of the masses he felt that class inequality in this world made people long for justice in some other world and religion fed that hope fed that longing so it was a belief in God was primarily a socio-economic longing so these thinkers felt that unless these human needs be the emotional or social unless these needs were met religion would not go away and Marx was very influential so humanistic atheism doesn’t try to prove that God doesn’t exist it simply assumes that God doesn’t exist and then tries to explain why in spite of the irrationality of atheism of religion why it still has so much currency so much popularity and then it comes to the comes to the conclusion that it is because it fulfils a human need and if some unless some alternative alternatives are provided for fulfilling those human needs people will continue to long for God believe in God so religion theism will continue to exist now in a sense both of these expected religion to go away first through scientific progress scientific atheism through more of science education and secondly through through addressing of psychological wounds or redressing of social wrongs but machine of scientific humanism became badly lost because the experiment to socially implement Marxism as well as communist USSR and China was a disastrous failure when USSR collapsed eventually crumbled it gradually became clear how much atrocity the red countries had performed on their own people and several times more people had been killed in these countries by their own governments than had been killed in both world wars combined together scientific humanism as a political programme for reform lost much of its appeal since then at the same time islamic fundamentalism became more and more of a threat and in response to that there was some fundamentalism some other religions also and so as a response to that scientific atheism which we could say the atheists could be the it could also be called as atheistic fundamentalism also became very prominent and today scientific humanism has its proponents but they are nowhere near influential as near as influential as say Marx and Freud ever were of course after an initial enormous popularity the scientific atheists scientific atheism has recognised that the programme of cultural conversion is going to take time now they want to position themselves as a distinct cultural group minority cultural minority which should also have its rights which needs to be acknowledged so they all the atheists have their political rallies where they come they have come out sessions just like homosexuals they are encouraged to come out and not be embarrassed or hide their sexual orientations similarly atheists are also encouraged to come out and be public about their non-beliefs so what does all this non-belief analysis mean imply so what is new about new atheists that was the title and what is not in terms of content their arguments contain practically nothing although science has advanced tremendously that advance in the last say 50 years or so their advancement has primarily been in terms of technological application it has not been so much in terms of significant fundamental breakthroughs and so although science is used by atheists to buttress their arguments actually what they are advocating is not science but scientism which is science not as a as a quest for understanding the natural world but science as an omniscient ideology which claims we can understand everything and be the only way to understand everything scientism is not scientific because it is a philosophy and whether something can be explained by science or not that is a philosophical question and its answer depends on one’s philosophical presumptions it is not there is no scientific experiment to prove that science can explain everything not as it even a scientific theory but so science itself a tool for acquiring knowledge and it will explain it will give us material explanations of material phenomena whether there is anything non-material in the universe and whether there are non-material explanations which form a part non-material factors and explanations form a part of the universe that is an entirely different question for which the answers need to be explored by appropriate means and science is not one of those means now science can offer us inferences about the possibility of a designer but designing intelligence but it cannot offer us certainty and there are many scientists who believe in god there are many scientists who don’t believe in god and often one’s belief comes from many factors not just from one’s science in fact many scientists form the belief or disbelief based on their interaction with religion and religious people their own childhood experiences their person the childhood upbringing their own experiences which is their way of credibility to religion or made them lose credibility so it is not by their science so there is no no necessarily causal correlation between one’s specialisation in science and one’s belief or disbelief in the bhagavad-gita krishna says that so he says in 16.8 and 9 that he outlines the atheistic mentality and its consequences people say such people say that there is no truth there is no purpose ultimately except worldly gratification and that there is simply that ultimately such people destroy their soul and engage in activities that destroy the world so atheism actually scientific atheism is not a scientific doctrine it’s a scientistic doctrine and it doesn’t it hasn’t been known to promote well-being because science when implemented or rather atheism when implemented at a national level has led to disaster and the solution is not less of god but more of god and it is not a rejection of religion but it is deeper religion which becomes which brings offers people a spiritual connection to offer spiritual experience which offers spiritual illumination thereby enabling them to see the essential commonality of all living beings by which they can transcend whatever differences that religion creates and a superficial adherence to religion creates so there are the three modes of material nature goodness passion and ignorance and which mode one is situated in is also affected by many factors so if someone is situated in goodness and then they become atheistic and somebody situated in ignorance and they become atheistic they will be similar to people although both are atheistic they will be substantially different in their brand of atheism so the important thing is to address people not simply as a group and label them this way or that way but recognise them as individuals and to see how best their consciousness can be elevated so in terms of lifestyle there can be atheists who are also in goodness who are environmentally conscious who are also moral who are sensitive to others and who are also disillusioned with religion and they can be very different from anti-theists who are aggressively against god and religion and by recognising and acknowledging such nuances we can actually find appropriate means for helping different people what are their what is it that stops them from raising their consciousness what is it that stops them from becoming spiritual what is it that stops them from approaching god we find that at an individual level and then address it appropriately so the fanatical intolerance the aggression against religion that is what is new about a new atheist there are arguments in content are not new and such intolerant aggression is tamasic and it is a result of the aggressive intolerance that is there in religion at least in some religions which is also tamasic and what we need is not more of the lower modes passion and ignorance but we need more of goodness where there can be reasoned discussions where there can be recognition of the need for higher consciousness and then there can be the sharing of appropriate means for providing higher consciousness and ultimately we know that even in the hearts of the atheists krishna is present and krishna is their well-wisher also and krishna can work to elevate them in ways that we have no capacity to comprehend so rather than demonising atheists we see them simply as misled and in some cases also as misleading but still they are also parts of krishna and they have chosen their belief systems because of their experiences and for people often their ideas become the language their world view becomes a language with which they communicate with the world and when we speak a theistic language and they speak the atheistic language it is like two people speaking two different languages and no matter how much the how strong the arguments go on nothing constructive can result when two people are talking into different languages no communication really happens so by understanding the historical context by understanding the influence of personal experiences by understanding the modes which different people are situated then we can we take steps to understand people’s language and then present the spiritual message in a in a language that is intelligible to them and thus they may take steps forward to raise their consciousness