Scan barcode
A review by itys
The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Fry, Sam Harris
5.0
I appreciate New Atheism for the simple reason, as with the late Christopher Hitchens and his desire not to eliminate religion but to keep it as a dialectical partner (what's Socrates without an interlocutor), that its members are challenging. This book is a modified version of a conversation that happened between these four prominent intellectuals and atheists nearly 12 years ago. Detractions aside (the absence of women or people of colour in the discussion, the use of magisterial or ex cathedra sources as caricatures of "theology" and what "theologians do") there is much to learn within these pages, especially for the religious.
There were two points that stuck out to me. The first in a comment by Dennett: "I share your impatience with officials of the churches - the people who have this as their professional life. It seems to me that they know better. The congregation's don't know better, because it's maintained that they should not know better. I do get very anxious about ridiculing the belief of the flock, because of the way in which they have ceded to their leaders, they've delegated authority to their leaders, and they presume their leaders are going to do it right. Who stands up and says, 'the buck stops here'? Well, it seems to me it's the preachers themselves, it's the priests, it's the bishops. And we really should hold their feet to the fire. For instance, just take the issue of creationism. If somebody in a fundamentalist church thinks that creationism makes sense because their pastor told them so, well, I can understand that and excuse that. We all get a lot of what we take to be true from people whom we respect and whom we view as authorities. We don't check everything out. But where did the pastor get this idea? And I don't care where he got it. He or she is responsible because their job is to know what they're talking about, in a way that the congregation is not."
Creationism aside, Dennett's final point is haunting to me. In my field, experts often bemoan the ignorance of regular everyday believers. I think on the one hand it is the responsibility of experts to help every day people understand and connect with the best information, the best truth that they can. On the other hand, Dennett's point is also relevant because it is the responsibility that leaders and public spokespeople who decide to speak on issues outside of their necessary expertise (science, economics, politics, and often ironically the Bible and theology) must be careful because congregants rely on them to filter expertise down.
The second point that leap out at me was the following comment by Hitchens: "...as I realized when I thought one evening, they never come up with anything new. Well, why would they? Their arguments are very old by definition. And they were all evolved when we knew very, very little about the natural order." This is something that a lot of religious people take for granted, that our understanding of nature has changed. Even though our understanding of the natural and what is natural has changed, many still seem to be stuck asking questions attached to a former understanding of nature. So do we grasp our current understanding of nature and ask new questions, new formidable ways of expressing the infinite and the Incarnate? Or do we superimpose an archaic understanding of nature, useful in its own time, but empirically untenable for our own, in order to preserve some semblance of what we think or conceive "religious authority" to be?
There were two points that stuck out to me. The first in a comment by Dennett: "I share your impatience with officials of the churches - the people who have this as their professional life. It seems to me that they know better. The congregation's don't know better, because it's maintained that they should not know better. I do get very anxious about ridiculing the belief of the flock, because of the way in which they have ceded to their leaders, they've delegated authority to their leaders, and they presume their leaders are going to do it right. Who stands up and says, 'the buck stops here'? Well, it seems to me it's the preachers themselves, it's the priests, it's the bishops. And we really should hold their feet to the fire. For instance, just take the issue of creationism. If somebody in a fundamentalist church thinks that creationism makes sense because their pastor told them so, well, I can understand that and excuse that. We all get a lot of what we take to be true from people whom we respect and whom we view as authorities. We don't check everything out. But where did the pastor get this idea? And I don't care where he got it. He or she is responsible because their job is to know what they're talking about, in a way that the congregation is not."
Creationism aside, Dennett's final point is haunting to me. In my field, experts often bemoan the ignorance of regular everyday believers. I think on the one hand it is the responsibility of experts to help every day people understand and connect with the best information, the best truth that they can. On the other hand, Dennett's point is also relevant because it is the responsibility that leaders and public spokespeople who decide to speak on issues outside of their necessary expertise (science, economics, politics, and often ironically the Bible and theology) must be careful because congregants rely on them to filter expertise down.
The second point that leap out at me was the following comment by Hitchens: "...as I realized when I thought one evening, they never come up with anything new. Well, why would they? Their arguments are very old by definition. And they were all evolved when we knew very, very little about the natural order." This is something that a lot of religious people take for granted, that our understanding of nature has changed. Even though our understanding of the natural and what is natural has changed, many still seem to be stuck asking questions attached to a former understanding of nature. So do we grasp our current understanding of nature and ask new questions, new formidable ways of expressing the infinite and the Incarnate? Or do we superimpose an archaic understanding of nature, useful in its own time, but empirically untenable for our own, in order to preserve some semblance of what we think or conceive "religious authority" to be?