My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

But this I do know: They cannot cling to their lives without losing them (Matt. 10:39).

If they truly desire a worldview that enlightens rather than impoverishes they must relinquish this clean, well-lit prison they’ve built for themselves. A prison that cannot survive without the five myths described above. These myths must be named for what they are and crucified once and for all. The hammer of a higher God must smash this small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave New Atheists in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down." It is my prayer that this may happen… that we may again walk beside each other, learn from each other, and bear one another’s burdens as we stumble toward whatever enlightenment and redemption await us.

Footnotes

1. Incidentally, in 2004 Flew converted to theism creating a nightmare New Atheists still haven’t recovered from, or been able to respond to with anything significant beyond cheap ad hominem. For more of why he decided to reject a lifetime of Atheism, see Flew (2009).
2. Various theories have been proposed to get around this. The best of these have severe theoretical issues, the worst are downright contrived, and none has any observational support to speak of—a fact that given the extreme energies of the underlying physics they presume isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. For the obvious reason, all have been given far more consideration in New Atheist circles than their theoretical merits alone would otherwise justify, at times even bordering on desperation. In at least one case, New Atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss even went so far as to deliberately falsify a personal communication with one of the first source’s authors (Alexander Vilenkin) in a public exchange regarding the conclusions of that work (Craig, 2013). Incidentally, at least two of the three authors of that paper (Vilenkin and Guth) are Atheists. It’s also worth noting that this is only one of a number of theoretical problems with an eternal universe, although a full treatment is beyond the scope here.
3. The evidence for this is too vast to cite here and a proper treatment of it is beyond the scope of this essay. But the interested reader can start with Wikipedia (2014), Durant (1994), McGrew and McGrew (2012), Habermas and Flew (2009), Habermas (2009), and Craig (1998).
4. One case in point is Stephen Hawking, who despite being one of the greatest cosmologists of the last century (if not the greatest) considers himself a strong advocate of “the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others…” (Hawking, 2001), blissfully unaware that Popper was one of Positivism’s strongest critics and even coined the term “the Popper Legend” for the widespread myth that he supported it (Wikipedia, 2014b).
5. The Last Scattering Surface (LSS) is the space-like hypersurface that existed at that stage in the universe’s evolution where it had cooled to a point where it could no longer sustain matter and radiation in plasma form. At this the two “decoupled” from each other allowing radiation to stream freely. Prior to this the universe was opaque to radiation, and thus shut off from observation via telescopes and detectors.
6. Most predictions of an infinite universe are based on FLRW models with locally defined space-time metrics that are naïvely infinite, but lead to an actually infinite global metric structure only if the universe is assumed to have a simply connected topology beyond our visual horizon—a claim which is not necessarily true, and forever unverifiable (Ellis, 2006). And the claim that such universes can be spawned by the underlying dynamics of a so-called Level I multiverse assumes inflationary models in which the quantum fluctuations that generate them occur at mathematical points. While this leads to models that are useful for studying large-scale inflationary dynamics, the assumption itself flatly contradicts real-world general relativity and quantum field theory (Ellis and Stoeger, 2009).
7. This statement is particularly revealing in that this is precisely what Harris himself did! In 2009, long after publishing The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, he received his PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from UCLA. His thesis, titled "The moral landscape: How science could determine human values," argued that neuroimaging can provide a basis for identifying moral regions of the brain. Barely a year after graduating he published the first (2010) edition of a popular book with the very same title (Harris, 2011) leveraging his new-found status as an expert neuroscientist to cynically argue that religious morality is bad and science can replace it. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.



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