The so-called “New Atheism” is a relatively well-defined, very recent, still unfold- ing cultural phenomenon with import for public understanding of both science and philosophy. Arguably, the opening salvo of the New Atheists was The End of Faith by Sam Harris, published in 2004, followed in rapid succession by a number of other titles penned by Harris himself, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and Christopher Hitchens.
When it comes to the issue of why being moral, however, Dawkins shows most clearly his limitations. For instance, he seems to be unaware of what many philosophers consider by far the most powerful argument in favor of the idea that gods and morality are entirely logically independent issues: the so-called Euthyphro dilemma posed by Plato in
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10. Interestingly, and I do not think at all coincidentally, these three authors are the chief New Atheists with science backgrounds (and to this list we could easily add evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and developmental biologist P. Z. Myers, as mentioned previously), though Stenger has long since retired from physics, Dawkins has not put out technical works in decades, and Harris has turned to a career as a full-time author after completing his PhD in neuroscience. 147 148
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Massimo Pigliucci the homonymous dialogue from 24 centuries ago.11 Moreover, of course, the positive argument in favor of secular morality has been made forcefully and comprehensively by a number of philosophers throughout the past two millennia, from Socrates in The Republic to Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Science here is simply not needed, and its role is largely conned to theagain completely distinctquestion of how a sense of morality may have evolved biologically, as opposed to how morality itself is justied logically.
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Finally, let us turn to point (3), the part of the book devoted to a scientic examination of the god hypothesis. Here Dawkins does manage to reasonably bring up scientic notions that, for instance, make ideas like a young earth, or the slightly more sophisticated concept of irreducible complexity championed by Intelligent Design proponents, clearly untenable. Nonetheless, in the end he has to resort to philosophical aid, what he refers to as his argument from improbability, which is essentially an invocation of Occams razor. That is not a problem in and of itself, since after all Occams razoras much as it is clearly an extra-empirical criterionis routinely invoked within scientic practice. The real issue is that Dawkins (and most if not all of the New Atheists) does not seem to appreciate the fact that there is no coherent or sensible way in which the idea of god can possibly be considered a hypothesis in any sense remotely resembling the scientic sense of the term. The problem is that
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