New Atheism | Benjamin Studebaker

Tag: New Atheism

Why Richard Dawkins Fails to Appreciate Plato

The other day, Richard Dawkins had a go at Plato:

Surprised by common reverence for Plato. Alexandrians like Eratosthenes made superb progress. But what did Plato say that was actually right? And didn’t he mislead generations of theologians & philosophers into thinking you could find truth by making stuff up in an armchair?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) December 16, 2019

It’s not the first time. Dawkins has a thing for picking on Plato. He said this back in March:

Philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead)

Plato “thought of vision as due not to light entering but rather to particles shooting out of the eyes” (R Gregory, Eye & Brain)

Why didn’t he settle it with a simple experiment? Because experiments aren’t philosophy?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 6, 2019

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The Moral Irrelevance of the God Question

A while back, I wrote about the separation of moral philosophy and metaphysics. I argued in agreement with Dworkin that whether or not a moral claim is true does not rely on objective metaphysical blunt facts about the nature of the universe. It occurred to me today that this makes the entire debate between the new atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and the like and traditional religion irrelevant to questions of moral philosophy–the metaphysical debate about whether or not there is a deity and what that deity’s nature might be can have no bearing whatsoever on our moral theory.

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Benjamin Studebaker

Tag: New Atheism

December 23, 2019

Why Richard Dawkins Fails to Appreciate Plato

June 9, 2013

The Moral Irrelevance of the God Question