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[–] PeaceSeeker 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Of all the New Atheists, Sam Harris is one of the few who was actually a trained philosopher - which makes the shallowness of his worldview all the more damning. On Daniel Dennett, and then Harris:

You would think someone trained in philosophy would understand that there is no intermediary stage between being and nothing, but if something that obvious escaped his notice, it should come as no surprise that he missed the obvious error in his main statement: the universe created itself ex nihilo. In spite of his credentials as a professional philosopher (or perhaps because of them), Dennett failed to see that the idea of a self-creating universe is an absurdity for a very simple reason: In order to bring itself into existence, the universe would have to exist before it existed. If Dennett wants us to take his atheist cosmology seriously, he will have to explain how something can exist before it exists. The fact that he feels no need to explain the most obvious objection his cosmology raises, bespeaks an appalling ignorance of the philosophical tradition Dennett supposedly mastered on his way to becoming a professional philosopher.

Or I guess as you'd put it, he invented a new tradition from the ground up!

When it comes to defending atheism, metaphysics is, as Feser puts it, "rationally unavoidable", but that didn't stop the new atheists from making fools of themselves in public by displaying "their manifest ignorance" of the philosophical tradition they purport to overturn. The "shallowness of their philosophical analysis" is "breathtaking." Feser "gets the impression that the bulk of their education in Christian theology consisted of reading Elmer Gantry while in college, supplemented with a viewing of Inherit the Wind and a Sunday morning spent channel-surfing televangelists." Feser finds this ignorance unsurprising "in the case of either Dawkins - a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn't know metaphysics from Metamucil - or Vanity Fair boy Hitchens, who probably thinks metaphysics is the sort of thing people like Shirley MacLaine start babbling about when they've lost their box office cachet," but appalling "in the case of Dennett and Harris, who are trained philosophers" and yet unaware that "the vast majority of the greatest philosophers and scientists in the history of Western civilization...have firmly believed in the existence of God...on the basis of entirely rational arguments".

E. Michael Jones, Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality, pgs. 34-35

As for Harris' actual comments here, he readily conflates many points. Private revelation vs public. Evidence vs faith uninformed by reason. And he seems to think the Gospels being written decades after the events calls into question their reporting, whereas the number of manuscripts and proximity in time to the events described rivals all other historic texts from that period. The reason "half the world" believes in Jesus Christ is because eleven fishermen and a lawyer, plus a former violent persecutor of Christians, all went to their deaths to testify to the many miracles they saw, and in so doing established a Church which has served to dispense grace to those within it, and that includes further miracles, ever since. I'm sure a bunch of Indians desperate for spiritual validation would show up to see underwhelming "miracles" from a guy with an afro. But the miracles of Lourdes, or Sokolka, or Fatima, or Guadeloupe, are far from underwhelming...nor is the miracle of a bunch of fishermen establishing a worldwide religion by letting themselves be martyred underwhelming. Not at all.

@chirogonemd