On the New Atheism & Philosophy

by Steve Neumann

There is an ongoing battle between some of the New Atheists and, well, I’m not sure what to call the rest of us; but the main point of contention has been that the New Atheists — most of whom are scientists of some sort — either don’t understand philosophy or intentionally ignore it. This has come to a head recently with Massimo’s Twitter War with Sam Harris, as well as Jerry Coyne’s critique of Massimo’s recent paper entitled, “New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement.” Harris didn’t engage Massimo’s paper directly; he was just simply dismissive of Massimo’s relevance in general. But Twitter really isn’t the proper platform for thoughtful discourse anyway. Coyne, on the other hand, wrote at considerable length about what he believes is Massimo’s jealousy over the alleged usurpation of philosophy by science. 

I am a very sarcastic person, and one of the things I like about Massimo, which I’ve learned from reading his posts here as well as interacting with him socially, is his own sarcasm. However, the paper Coyne excoriates isn’t as full of Massimo’s sarcasm as he thinks it is. If you really want to read something that “just drips and seethes” with sarcasm, as Coyne characterizes Massimo’s paper, then read fellow New Atheist Dan Dennett’s review of Sam Harris’s book Free Will.

I reviewed Harris’s book when it first came out, and I was less harsh than both Massimo and Dennett. The worst thing I said was, “Harris admits as much toward the end of his book, which makes his mid-essay tangent all the more baffling,” in reference to his quibble with the free will compatibilists, most notably Dennett. But let me list a few of the sentences from Dennett’s review that one could argue “just drips and seethe” with sarcasm:

But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.

Harris has considered compatibilism, at least cursorily, and his opinion of it is breathtakingly dismissive.

There are more passages that exhibit this curious tactic of heaping scorn on daft doctrines of his own devising while ignoring reasonable compatibilist versions…

Harris...is not finding a “deep” problem with compatibilism but a shallow problem...he has taken on a straw man, and the straw man is beating him. 

These are just the ones that I think can be construed as having a sarcastic tone about them. The main thrust of Dennett’s review, which is quite long, is the failure of New Atheist scientists like Harris to either take seriously or to really engage with the vast philosophical literature on a topic such as free will. And that is precisely one of Massimo’s criticisms as well. Dennett repeatedly says that Harris underestimates and misinterprets the compatibilist position on free will; or that Harris “doesn’t even consider” some other possibilities; or that Harris should have noticed “that he contradicts” some of Dennett’s own examples and ideas; or that Harris “should take more seriously the various tensions he sets up” in some passages, etc.

In addition to the charge that the New Atheists who are scientists and not philosophers disparage philosophy, or don’t take the time to really engage with it, there are two other claims I’d like to address. One is that the New Atheist scientists are injurious to the atheism movement itself; and the other is that they are unjustifiably overreaching in their broadening of the definition or scope of science.

Massimo and I agree on many things, but I disagree with him about the impact of the New Atheists. Like Dennett, I believe the popular New Atheists (with a few notable exceptions) are important precisely because of their visibility: I suppose you could call this “any publicity is good publicity.” At a minimum, it raises awareness of the atheism movement. Additionally, it lets the opposition — in this case, Christianity — know that there is a vigorous and determined community of nonbelievers. And, finally, I think the discussion that is generated by the popular books put out by the New Atheists is really priceless. I mean, this is classic dialectic — at least when the ad hominem rhetoric of the likes of Coyne, et al., don’t muddy the waters. Positions, even extreme ones, need to be staked out and attacked; and the attacks need to be counterattacked, and the result of all this discursive fencing will be to get us closer to more clarified positions that more moderate others can present to the believing community. What are we, as atheists, trying to accomplish anyway? Is it not a reduction in the influence of Christianity in particular and religion in general? [1]

With regard to the scope or definition of science, I also disagree with Massimo somewhat. Jerry Coyne says that science is “any endeavor to find out truths about the universe using observation and reason.” Sam Harris says “When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically.” I don’t have a problem with these claims per se; as I think Massimo and others would agree, there is often a fine line between what counts as philosophy and what counts as science proper. Or, to put it another way, it’s like looking at a brand new metal alloy and trying to identify the individual metals that constitute it. 

And maybe that’s the best way to look at the problem: if we can no longer distinguish between science and philosophy in some areas, maybe it’s time to come up with a different way of talking about this new phenomenon. After all, what used to be called “natural philosophy” eventually evolved or split into the two distinct disciplines of “science” and “philosophy” at some point; maybe it’s time we acknowledged there is a third thing now, a third discipline that can’t properly be called science or philosophy — it’s a new alloy that is just too difficult to characterize using our old categories.

Back before natural philosophy split into science and philosophy, Nietzsche characterized “science” or “physics,” as he often referred to it, as any endeavor that involved serious, rigorous discipline and scholarship. One of the things Nietzsche thought we needed back then (and what I think we still need now) was a re-naturalization of the human being; and to do that, you need to have a passion for knowledge, and a courageous and honest assessment of the knowledge of the world and human nature that turns up in our “science.” In his The Gay Science, he wrote an aphorism that talks about obtaining the freedom (i.e., autonomy) to legislate values for ourselves and create ourselves; and the title of the aphorism is “Long Live Physics!” Again, “physics” for Nietzsche wasn’t what we think of as “physics” today. Interestingly, the physicist Sean Carroll wrote on his website that Nietzsche scholars are quick to point out that he

certainly wasn’t talking about what we ordinarily mean by “physics.” But I’m not so sure. The substance of physics (experimental results, theoretical understandings) is of no help whatsoever in leading a moral life. But the method of physics — open-minded hypothesis testing and scrupulous honesty in confronting what Nature has to tell us — is a pretty good model for other aspects of our lives.

Nietzsche believed that the philosopher’s main job, and main value to humanity, was as a value-creator, not as someone merely concerned with discovering the “facts,” or of providing descriptions or even explanations of the phenomena of the world. So I tend to take my cue from Nietzsche and say that scientists are those who are in the business of describing the physical world, of coming up with explanations of physical phenomena. Of course they must utilize and adhere to the “highest standards of logic and evidence,” but a scientist is still distinct from a philosopher, someone who traffics in “oughts” and not “is’s,” someone who is better positioned to speak about meaning and morals, even if they exploit the discoveries of science in order to inform and ground their reasoning about meaning and morals. 

I’ve said before that science involves description and diagnosis, whereas philosophy involves prescription and prognosis. That, to me, is where the line between our perhaps out of date categories of science and philosophy will forever reside. Let’s come up with a third term to denote the scientific-philosophical alloy that has emerged. 

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[1] I have another post in the works that will deal more with the relationship between philosophy, science and atheism, and that will go into more detail about both the impact of the New Atheism and religious trends in general.