The New Atheists still hold onto the hope that God may be tapping out of the fight. In recent months, they have hit the campaign trail in a fury. New Atheist rockstar Richard Dawkins has shown up on The O'Reilly Factor and The Colbert Report, Sam Harris has covered cable talk shows and talk radio segments, and even the late great Carl Sagan is making a comeback post-mortem with a new release due out in the coming months with or without the help of George Noory. Despite all the valiant efforts, New Atheists still find themselves running into some marketing setbacks. For one, they never seem to propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. Atheism and fatalism start to sound synanomous after awhile. New Atheism fancies itself a straightforward appeal to our intellect, no emotion involved. The problem is, this approach proves dangerous if the religious community comes back and supports their belief with (shock and awe) Reason.
If truth is merely an idea with no Figurehead, you’re going to have a hard time getting a movement off the ground, right? Maybe the movement needs an Ascension into Heaven. Perhaps look into making a god to follow out of someone with star power – a galvanizing character of their own to follow. Oprah and Keanu Reeves come to mind. Sam Harris might do, but no offense against Sam, they need a little more sex appeal, a haggard beard, the Hippie-look, someone like Jesus Christ. Someone that people see like they did back with the Guy from Galilee and say, now there’s a guy that has that Shepherd Smith swoon appeal. I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth. Where do I put my nets?
The Urgency Conundrum
In addition to the lack of a Mobilizing Force, New Atheism wrestles with what I call the Urgency Conundrum. Warren Allen Smith, author of the year 2000 encyclopedia “Who’s Who In Hell?”, spent six decades up to age 85 sending letters asking people if they believe in God. He is a committed atheist. He is currently working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia. He’s working hard. Why the urgency, you ask? He fears he doesn’t have many years before the memory drain. And he worries about the threat of fundamentalism in the East AND the West. It's a bit paradoxical. Why be so worried about saving a world with no intrinsic value, anyway? We don’t bend over backwards to save a cockroach. All they do is freak out the kids. We kill it, then we flush it, and we still sleep well at night.
The March of Morality
Another big question the movement can't seem to market its way out of is the "Origins of Morality" quest. A recent U.S. News article finds Jay Tolson planting these questions in the scientific fields of Consciousness Research. French mathematician Rene' Descartes gave us Cartesian Dualism where bodily organs send perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind. The mind would ponder, then makes decisions and direct the bodies' responses in word and deed. Cognitive theorists, over time, scoffed at this as the “Ghost in the Machine” argument but it worked well for awhile.
Recently neuroscientists like Francis Crick have picked up the trail with works such as "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul". He argues that "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett backs him up with his `Fame in the Brain' analogy. At any one moment there are many potential conscious states in the body, many contending neuronal "assemblies", vying for "celebrity", for their moment in the spotlight. But only one can win the competition and it all depends on who is the Alpha-Neuronal assembly.
This begs the question, Where do the rules come from for the game? The conscious mind comes up with orderly representations of meaning, but it doesn’t
create meaning. Where do we get the meaning from? Why do we want to give something meaning? Why does a kiss mean more to us than just, “Hmm, my brain just registered pressure from an outside force against my face. (Maybe that’s why man invented the French Kiss, just to take the pressure off the situation, but I digress).
All of this brings up the question posed by Jay Tolson. Am I just a survival machine? Is "meaning" nothing more than the sum of appropriate responses to information in ultimate service to life. If this is true, then life purpose, freedom and individuality are just reassuring illusions of possible survival value. (And great fodder for making the NY Times Bestseller list for a lot of psychobabblers involved in Life Coaching). But if our personality and very beliefs are simply the end result of some physiological Great Race to the service of our ultimate survival, then why do we have heroes willing to die for others rather than survive? Somebody should tell firefighters that they’re really screwed up in the head!
As recent as this summer, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, himself a professed convert to Christianity, faced off in a scientific smackdown at the invitation of Time Magazine. Evolution, the complexity of life, miracles, stem cell research, the problem of good and evil and other heady topics were discussed. My impression after reading the transcripts is what follows.
Every decade or so a new group of people rise up to take God to the mat over His existence. They do this because they are enlightened. They have seen ALL the variables and have measured God and found Him wanting. Their omniscience allows them to do this. They explain to us that our faith has held us back from exploring and they show us gently how we have explained God into existence. They can do this because they have explained Him out of existence. They pity us. We should pity ourselves. If we were only willing to try something new, we would discover things we would never have known otherwise. Think about it, someone had to be the first to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things, here, and drink whatever comes out", right? If it wasn't for someone's faith...er...enlightenment, we'd still be eating our cereal dry. And if it wasn't for these enlightened individuals, we'd all still be running around amazed by the size of the universe and acting like we don't yet understand its farthest reaches. When all is said and done, I say, thank GOD for atheists!