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Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2014

Stephen R.L. Clark
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Abstract

Atheists in general need share no particular political or metaphysical views, but atheists of the most modern, Western, militant sort, escaping from a merely nihilistic mind-set, are usually humanists of an especially triumphalist kind. In this paper I offer a critical analysis and partial history of their claims, suggesting that they are members of a distinctively Christian heretical sect, formed in reaction to equally heretical forms of monotheistic idolatry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 277 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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Footnotes

1

First presented as a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture at the New Atheism conference at Lancaster University, 2nd to 3rd April 2012. My thanks especially to Sarah Hitchens, Brian Garvey, Fern Elsdon-Baker and Andrew Brown.

References

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29 For an empathetic account of Olympian religion see Otto, W.F. The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, tr. Hadas, M. (Thames & Hudson: London 1954Google Scholar; 1st published as Die Götter Griechenlands in 1929).

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33 Steven Jones ‘Islam, Charles Darwin and the denial of science’: Daily Telegraph 3rd December 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8931518/Islam-Charles-Darwin-and-the-denial-of-science.html (accessed 27th May 2014).

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38 Benedict XVI to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, on the occasion of the international congress ‘From Galileo's Telescope to Evolutionary Cosmology’ (30th November – 2nd December 2009), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091126_fisichella-telescopio_en.html).

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40 C.Koons, Robert ‘Science and Theism: concord not conflict’ in Copan, Paul & Moser, Paul, eds, The Rationality of Theism (Taylor & Francis: London 2003)Google Scholar, 82.

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49 Athanasius On the Incarnation (written c.318 AD), ch.8, para.47.

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51 Dawkins, Richard ‘Gaps in the Mind’: Cavalieri, Paola & Singer, Peter, eds, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity (Fourth Estate: London 1993), 80–87Google Scholar; The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976), 9–10Google Scholar.

52 Oddly, some physicists have suggested that the way things are ‘now’ is settled by how they will be ‘in the end’. The one and only ‘real’ history is the one consolidated and confirmed by the Final Observers. See Hawking, Stephen & Mlodinow, Leonard The Grand Design (Bantam Press: London 2010)Google Scholar, 82–3: ‘the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities’ until the very last days! This point does not seem, as far as I can tell, to have been picked up by evolutionary theorists.

53 See Whewell's, William – entirely orthodox – rebuttal of Richard Owen's argument that there must be intelligent life on Jupiter so that its moons could have an audience: William Whewell Of the Plurality of Worlds, ed., Ruse, Michael (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2001Google Scholar; 1st published by John W. Parker: London, 1853), 183–4.

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69 1 John 4.1.

70 1 John 4.7–8.