This reads a bit too much like religion is a failed science. and hints at science as a replacement religion.
Religion isn't a failed science, it's a failed philosophy. Science isn't a replacement religion, it's a step forward in how to best understand our world; religion didn't try to understand, but it still tried (and regularly failed) to explain it.
Science the answer to the problems of civil rights civil rights?
Not alone, but it's certainly one of the inputs.
Science and the problems with big business.
The problems with big business aren't to do with the science that's being used, it's to do with the science that's being ignored; less physics and IT and more sociology and psychology would improve the impact of business on the world.
I'm not sure how you arrive at these things. It seems like extending science and religion into things they are not.
By contrast, that contention doesn't make any sense to me. Science is a methodology for investigation - if something is, then scientific methodology can be used to investigate it. On that basis, I can't imagine anything that's beyond science. On the other hand, religion is predicated on the idea that there's something else, but that we don't know anything about it for sure; on that basis, how can we determine what it might interrelate with, or be confident of any of the conclusions - I can't see anything that warrants the involvement of religion.
Putting all the nice things in the science basket and the nasty things in the file marked religion.
I'm not putting them anywhere. I can see no benefit to religion that can't easily be found in other places, and innumerable drawbacks. By contrast, whilst the application of science is at the mercy of the individuals doing the applying, it at least has the potential (which has been realised in many, many places) of improving our lives in ways that other things just haven't been able to: medicine, communications, transport, agriculture...
Part of that problem is the internet and satellite TV both products of science.
Not really - a couple of hundred years ago we didn't have the internet or satellite TV, and it was Western European colonialism making its cultural impact the defining thought of the time - it's about behaviour, not about technology. The technology might determine how it's done, but it's the psychology and sociology that will determine the why and how best to address it.
I think you are crediting these people with too much. Hitchens and Harris being very much on board the post reagan republican agenda.
I think you need to read Harris, in particular, again. I'm not that up on Hitchens, I was never as impressed with him as people expected me to be.
When their reputation as quasi religious leaders fades perhaps they will be seen in a more realistic and contextual light.
The only people who see them as 'quasi-religious' are the religious, who can't seem to break out of the idea that this is some sort of spiritual contest rather than seeing it as a contest of 'spiritual' vs reality.
Sadly while Dawkins was promoting atheism a bit more than the public awareness of science people were beginning to lose interest in science. I think it remains with a mixed reputation, It looks mystifying and priestly and sadly some in it have made it look a bit snotty. Like religion it is not appreciated as it's should be and in a lot of ways in service to consumerism and big business. An opportunity has been missed by science becoming niche, priestly and badly mixed up with celebrity atheism.
He responded with the espousal of atheism because religion was doing things like fly planes into buildings; he did plenty of espousing science, too, but as ever the media reports that which generates either fear or disgust in their audience, and atheism does that for a segment of the populace in way that science doesn't. Science isn't in the habit of making science look 'priestly', but unfortunately science hasn't been active enough in controlling how it is depicted, leaving it to a media that just lazily co-opts the existing orthodoxy and overlays the new paradigm on it.
Ask Old Atheists.
I am an old atheist; I still don't see the difference. It's not like there's new not-gods, or new ways of not having enough evidence to accept the proposition. It's not even as though there are significant new religions not to believe in. What's 'new'?
There were other arguments as well. Philosophical arguments and ethical arguments.
Nobody is arguing that god isn't real because of the ethical impacts; people are arguing that religious 'values' are questionable, and the ethical inferences from those therefore unjustifiable, BECAUSE it's apparent that the ideas of god presented don't hold up. Atheism leads to a take on ethics, but that doesn't make the atheism new - it doesn't even make the ethical follow-up new.
By focussing on science the new atheists became scientistical.
It's not atheism that's focussed on the findings of science, though, it's the modern world. It's a new world, but it's the same atheism.
Indeed if you look in Wikipedia, fellow atheists have levelled two big criticism at it. 1) It's a stealth religion 2) It has a goodly amount of scientism to it.
And there are atheists out there who claim to be 'spiritual, not religious'. Atheists can also be wrong. Atheism is, by definition, not a stealth religion. As to whether an argument has 'scientism' in it... scientism is defined as 'the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values'. Now, currently, it's undeniably the best; whether it's the only reliable method depends on what other methods are offered, but it's certainly holding its own at the moment. If the worst accusation levelled is 'scientism' then frankly I don't see an issue.
The world cannot exactly be said to be doing just fine and that is down to Progress but yes there are vast swathes without it but since that is partly because it is suppressed, I'm not sure how much of that atheism would want to own.
Show me the bit that was suppressed because of atheism and not, say, some totalitarian political stance which deployed a notional atheism to suppress opposition. I didn't say the entire world was fine, I said there were vast swathes that were doing perfectly fine without religion.
Again globally, the impact of the application of science looks perhaps more negative than you give it credit for secondly I feel atheism merging with science in your tone.
There have been negatives, but on balance the world is demonstrably better for the results of scientific enquiry. Life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, eradication of diseases, access to healthcare, reliability of access to food and water are all massively better. It's not a finished work, and there have been instances where science has been applied in negative - even horrific - ways, but the world is a better place overall.
How is atheism merging in that? Centuries of religion didn't achieve very much, if any of that. Certainly it's questionable if religion itself ever healed or fed anyone, and the selective nature of its attempts to educate pale into insignificance. If you see atheism in the description you can choose to see that as a product of my tone, or you can choose to see that's because all of this was achieved without the need for - and at times in the face of the deliberate opposition from - religion.
And there it is, goodness me, not just science tainted with atheism but science tainted with antitheism.
Bit of an ad hominem to describe it as 'tainted' but there you go. Needless to say, it's an ad hominem in the absence of an actual argument; the point stands, science is an attempt at demonstrating why a particular conclusion should be considered valid, religion is the claim of knowledge with no justification whatsoever. That's why any conclusion of science can be contested, two competing theories can be compared and contrasted and one selected as more or less likely. Once you accept one religious claim, though, you've no basis for rejecting any of others, for they're all equally baseless claims in the absence of evidence.
There is little point in learning the detail of the claims of religion; it's just several centuries of elaborate navel-gazing formulated into a pretence of academia to try and justify the continued existence of absolutely nothing of intellectual merit.
That is based on Empiricism.
Oh god, no, not based on the premise that if we've no evidence that it's real we can probably ignore it! How terrible... that's the worst you can throw around, that it's empiricist?
Thats opinion, you missed out experience, moral exploration and self examination....
No, no I haven't. Experience is questionable, there's any number of ways of showing that humanity is susceptible to sensory flaws, confirmation bias and any number of other ways of making our understanding questionable. Neither moral nor self exploration leads to an idea of god unless you start from the idea of god, and neither requires the idea of a god in order to conduct the examination.
...not much of that in atheism given the reaction to concepts such as sin and moral reality
What is 'sin'? Show me how you demonstrate 'sin'? As to the idea that there's a 'moral reality', a fairly superficial survey of cultural differences quickly shows that morality is a function of society and derives from the collective decisions of the culture, it doesn't exist as some independent fundamental to be discovered.
your beginning to rant and parody and having tried at the start to label religion as failed science you've now said is isn't really science.
Yes it's a parody; the other option is to take it seriously, and it doesn't deserve that. You've seen my view of religion as a failed science, I haven't. Science isn't about what it's used for - it's not science because it investigates the world, it's science because of the method it uses to do that. Religion can try to investigate the world, but it's not a science (failed or otherwise) because it doesn't follow the evidence, it presumes the conclusion and tries to explain how reality fits the presumption; it's the polar opposite of science.
Science certainly has no call to moral behaviour. Since it doesn't do morality.
You need to keep up with the literature; whether you consider morality to be something in its own right or an emergent property of culture and society, if it is then it's within science's remit. The only way for science not to do morality would be if morality wasn't real.
As far as moral behaviour is concerned in science moral is the redundant part. This sounds like it's come from someone from somewhere where there is a suspicion that religion makes people evil.
Science has, for too long, not tried to tackle the knottier, more human elements of the world like morality, but science is not redundant when it comes to moral investigation. I don't have a suspicion that religion makes people evil - evil people happen in relation to any given morality, we are a variable species - but religion offers opportunity for evil to co-opt totalitarianism and authoritarianism which makes them particularly dangerous.
Now that is new atheist.
Fearing religious extremists is new atheist? I think you want to let the average Tory-voting, Church of England (nominally) middle-Englander and most of the (ironically extremist) Christian Americans know.
Since science isn't going to help with morality where is it going to come from without a book of laws and regulations.
Science is looking at morality. Even if it weren't, which book of fairy tales should we choose instead?
Without a pronouncement from say, a Sam Harris, who are the new moses's going to be.....Priestly people in labcloaks! plus sa change.
If people follow a priest, that's about people. If people follow the Chief Medical Adviser's pronouncement because he wears the regalia and stands at the lectern, that's the sort of ritualistic behaviour that religion thrives on, and it's a shame, and we should be teaching people better. But if he's making his judgements, and telling people to follow them, based on a range of experts analysing the infection rates and the spread and previous examples then we're still in a better place than if he's pulled it out of his arse because someone two thousand years ago made up an imaginary friend and wrote a really, really bad book about it. We could still stand to educate people in critical thinking better, yes, but people blindly following evidence led decisions is a better state of affairs than people blindly following someone with mental health issues and a funky hat.
If you are looking to find morality in the genes, immorality is there too.
It may be that any particular behavioural trends are traceable to genetics; what makes them moral or immoral, though, is a far more complex interaction of political, economic, social, cultural, geographic, and who knows how many other influences over a range of people.
No, morality I think we will agree has to come in some kind of deep transformation. It won't come to us in an issue of new scientist.
Morality will come, as it always does, from society. That society, we can hope, will be informed more by the New Scientist than by the second, third or fourth attempted ret-con of a bronze-age storm and war-god.
O.
