Too Simple to Be Wrong: Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit

[muriel_volestrangler]

36. I wouldn't restrict the comparison to science; religion is stagnant compared to politics, too

The 'Bronze Age goat herders' (probably, more accurately, Iron Age pastoralists, since they had more than goats, and were post 1000 BC) believed in a theocracy, with a 'divinely appointed' monarch, slavery, institutionalized misogyny, and the death penalty for a wide variety of harmless infractions of religious superstitions. Since then, humanity has progressed with things like democracy, equality of the sexes, and so on. Not perfectly, of course, but the roles of those who want to keep the Iron Age rules in holding back the progress is painfully obvious. That's why morality based on the religion of the herders is a horribly conservative mistake that needs to be corrected.

As for the article: it's a huge strawman, as far as Harris, or Dawkins, is concerned - it actually has to admit that Harris doesn't talk about the Bronze Age at all, and that Dawkins is talking about the suitability of a creation myth, but the author waves his hands with "but it does not matter", and proceeds to lay about his strawman with gusto.

To answer the question in the last bit of the excerpt:

What is wrong, from the moral point of view, with that particular set of goat herders, was their massive bigotry - see above. What was wrong with them from the scientific point of view (what Dawkins was talking about) is that their origin myth was constructed before they had understood the half-lives of radioactive isotopes (the particular area of science Dawkins is explaining, and in which he is disparaging the attempts of a few extremists to claim that the earth could still be just 6,000 years old, even with the figures we get from measuring the isotopes).

I await the next instalment from Paul Wallace with as much eagerness as I await a delivery of rotting fish on my doorstep.