The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

280 Pages·2012·1.23 MB·English

by  Edward Feser

The Last Superstition
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Copyright © 2008 by Edward Feser
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of St.
Augustine’s Press.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Feser, Edward.
The last superstition: a refutation of the new atheism /
Edward Feser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58731-451-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-58731-451-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. God. 2. Atheism. I. Title.
BL473.F47 2008
211 – dc22 2008030859
Paperbound edition ISBN: 978-1-58731-452-0 (2010) ∞ The paper used in this
publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard
for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.
ST. AUGUSTINE’S PRESS
www.staugustine.net
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Bad Religion
“The New Atheism”
The old philosophy
The abuse of science
Religion and counter-religion
Things to come
2. Greeks Bearing Gifts
From Thales to Socrates
Plato’s Theory of Forms
Realism, nominalism, and conceptualism
Aristotle’s metaphysics
A. Actuality and potentiality
B. Form and matter
C. The four causes
3. Getting Medieval
What Aquinas didn’t say
The existence of God
A. The Unmoved Mover
B. The First Cause
C. The Supreme Intelligence
4. Scholastic Aptitude
The soul
Natural law
Faith, reason, and evil
5. Descent of the Modernists
Pre-birth of the modern
Thoroughly modern metaphysics
Inventing the mind-body problem
Universal acid
A. The problem of skepticism
B. The problem of induction
C. Personal identity
D. Free will
E. Natural rights
F. Morality in general
Back to Plato’s cave
6. Aristotle’s Revenge
How to lose your mind
The lump under the rug
Irreducible teleology
A. Biological phenomena
B. Complex inorganic systems
C. Basic laws of nature
It’s the moon, stupid
Notes
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
“And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse puts good for evil being
himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having
studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about ‘the shadow of an ass,’
which he confounds with a horse, but about good which he confounds with evil – what will be the
harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?”
Plato, Phaedrus1
“
A small error in the beginning of something is a great one at the end.”
St. Thomas Aquinas (paraphrasing Aristotle),
On Being and Essence2
At the time of this writing, exactly one week has passed since the Supreme Court
of the State of California decreed that homosexuals have a “basic civil right” to
marry someone of the same sex. Whether these Golden State solons will follow
up their remarkable finding with a ruling to the effect that an ass is the same as a
horse, it is too early to say; but they have already gone well beyond the
sophistical orator of Plato’s dialogue in “confounding good with evil,” not to
mention reason with insanity. Malcolm Muggeridge famously said that “without
God we are left with a choice of succumbing to megalomania or erotomania.”3
The court’s majority, in declaring by sheer judicial fiat the equal dignity under
law of the family and sodomy, would appear to have gone Muggeridge one
better by succumbing to both at once.
The reference to God is apropos. The successes of the movement to
recognize “same-sex marriage” have been nothing if not sudden. Just over a
decade ago the very idea would have been laughed off as crackpot or extreme;
now it is those who oppose it who are frequently labeled crackpots and
extremists. But equally sudden has been the rise of ostentatious unbelief as the
de rigueur position of the smart set. Mainstream progressives and non-
conformists of earlier generations would have found it necessary to profess
belief in at least a “social gospel” and to hide their doubts about the
metaphysical claims of religion behind a haze of pseudo-theological
psychobabble. Yet atheist chic is now, out of the blue as it were, the stuff of best
sellers, celebrity endorsements, and suburban reading groups. It is as if the
urbane cocktail hour secularist liberalism of the twentieth century has, by way of
the slow but sure inebriation produced by an unbroken series of social and
the slow but sure inebriation produced by an unbroken series of social and
judicial triumphs, now become in the twenty-first century fall-down-sloppy
drunk and lost all inhibition, by turns blaspheming, whoring, and otherwise
offending against all sane and decent sensibilities as the mood strikes it.
The confluence of these developments is no accident, though not for the
reasons liberal secularists suppose. To their minds (or what is left of them)
sexual libertinism and contempt for religion, as public, mass phenomena (rather
than as the private eccentricities of a decadent elite, which of course have always
been with us) constitute the final victory of reason, twin fruits of the modern
scientific worldview whose full consequences are only now becoming widely
perceived over four centuries after its birth. But in reality they are (to paraphrase
Aquinas paraphrasing Aristotle) two very “great errors” that have followed
gradually but inevitably, not upon any actual finding of modern science, but
rather upon what might at first glance seem at most a relatively “small error” of
a philosophical nature committed by the founders of modern science and modern
philosophy.
This is a book about that error: about what the error is, why it is an error,
what its consequences are, and how correcting it reveals that it is a (certain kind
of) moral and religious traditionalist, and not the secular liberal, who is the true
upholder of reason.
Disgust and distress over the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and his ilk
and at the near total collapse of traditional morality represented by “same-sex
marriage” and related phenomena were only half of the motivation for my
writing the essay that follows. The other half was disgust and distress over the
largely inept and ineffective (as it seems to me) response to these developments
put forward by many religious and political conservatives. Rather than counter
the skeptic’s false assertion that religion is necessarily based on “faith” (in the
bastardized sense of the will to believe something in the absence of evidence),
too many contemporary defenders of religion seem content to suggest that lots of
what secularists believe is also based on faith, that religious belief is in any case
here to stay and has certain social benefits, and so on. In the face of judicial
decisions like the one recently made in California, too many conservatives natter
on about whether it ought to be the courts or “the people” who get to “define”
marriage, effectively conceding to their opponents the idiotic supposition that
the question fundamentally concerns what meaning we ought arbitrarily to attach
to a certain word.
But the most important thing to know about the belief that God exists is not
that most citizens happen (for now anyway) to share it, that it tends to uphold