The Designer of the Intelligent Designer

[Tobin S.]

I'm reading Michael Shermer's book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design and it just struck me as absurd. Books like that should not have to be written. All of that energy, paper, and time wasted on something that should not even be arguable, i.e reality. However, we live in a world where the best selling book of all time is a work of fiction that 2.1 billion people in today's world believe is the literal truth and the words of a god. We live in a world where only 17% of the population thinks that all religion is bunk. I guess that's a little more absurd.

I've gone on a reading marathon lately. For a long time I was an agnostic, but I didn't bother to educate myself about skepticism, science, and atheism. I just didn't believe in religion. A couple of months ago I borrowed Cosmos by Carl Sagan from my step-dad and my spare time has been filled with reading since then. I've read three of Sagan's books, a book about atheism by Eric Maisel, a book about mental illness by Tracy L. Harris, and I'm currently about half way through the above mentioned Shermer book. On deck I have another book by Shermer and a book by Victor J. Stenger called The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. If you've read Stenger's book I'd be interested in hearing your reviews. How does New Atheism differ from the Regular Ol' Atheism?

[immoderate]

1. I went to a lecture by Stenger. He was great.

He was plugging a previous book God: The Failed Hypothesis, I think. Stenger, being a top physicist, and a real scientist, has some insights into the nature of reality that give some weight to his views.

--imm

[Warpy]

2. New Atheists are just old atheists who no longer feel compelled

to stay silently in the closet to make believers in bunk feel a little more secure. New atheists are old atheists who are speaking up when some believer starts talking smack and dehumanizing atheists.

That's why they're freaking out. Believing in bunk requires perfect consensus.

[phantom power]

4. Yes. New Atheists = "Atheists posing us a serious threat"

[laconicsax]

3. New atheists differ in one important respect.

They wrote books on the subject that sold a lot of copies.

If Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens had only sold as many copies as say, Michael Martin's The Case Against Christianity, they wouldn't have been branded the 'new atheists.'

'New atheism' is just regular ol' atheism with a bestseller.