On Daniel Dennett
07/13/2013
Found this in an old SNJ (I will be sorting through them for a while) and rather liked it (Dennett, if you don't recognize the name, is one of the aggressive atheists, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea). I had just read a piece in which he predicted that religion would soon wither away, now that we have science and stuff:
Does Dennett really think that unbelief is new, and that exposure to science automatically induces it? Does he really believe that indoctrinating young people in it will crush, within a generation, the human desire for the Absolute? Does he think that no one has ever lost his faith by ignorance and regained it by learning, or lost it by emotion and regained it by reason? Does he think atheism has languished only because no one has ever considered its arguments? Does he, in short, understand anything at all about the human soul?
You can read the whole post here.
Here's D.B Hart's gleeful evisceration of Dennett:
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles7/HartDennet.php
Posted by: Rob G | 07/15/2013 at 07:32 AM
Can't read it right now, but I look forward to it.
Posted by: Mac | 07/15/2013 at 09:47 AM
A friend of mine said to me recently that what atheists and fundamentalists have in common is that they are positive about their beliefs. I would describe that friend as a liberal Southern Baptist; which is a contradiction of terms.
Posted by: Stu | 07/15/2013 at 01:08 PM
Liberal SBs are not so very rare. But they do tend to be sort of evanescent, because they leave when the other SBs don't come around to their way of thinking. E.g. Jimmy Carter.
Posted by: Mac | 07/15/2013 at 01:52 PM
I've only had time to read about a quarter or so of Hart's piece, but: what fun! "He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle." Ha. This in my experience is the standard procedure by which materialists establish that Darwinism proves the non-existence of God.
Posted by: Mac | 07/15/2013 at 02:01 PM