New Atheist?

"New Atheist" is a label now being hung on non-believers that are a bit aggressive when it comes to challenging the claims of religion. And as much as I am not a fan of labels, if someone insisted on calling me a "new atheist" it would be hard to suggest they are wrong. I see the claim "god exists" as much the same as claiming "Santa exists". Insisting that only religious people can properly evaluate the truth behind the claim for god is like suggesting only a 4-year-old can tell you the truth about Santa. The big difference is the 4-year-old will not subvert every available social structure in order to make writing letters to Santa mandatory; in English mind you, on white bond paper (20# letter sized), using hand written cursive, blue ballpoint pen, and with a promise of cookies to be waiting by the fireplace.  (I'm not sure what label is used for someone who has recently abandoned belief in god without being very aggressive in challenging religion.)

Though some believers might be quick to hang the label on me, it may be that other "new atheists" would pause. It is true that I have absolutely no god belief. It is equally true that I lump magic, religion, superstition, and the super-natural together as discredited ideas born of a still childish species. But many of the most vocal "new atheists" seem to be pretty hard-core materialists, seeing the cosmos as some kind of machine winding down in compliance with deterministic laws. That doesn't describe the cosmos as we find it to be. Einstein moved space and time from the stage on which history unfolded to being part of the unfolding. When Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg threw Quantum Mechanics into the mix the determinism that seemed unavoidable under Newton turned out to be malleable after all. The laws of physics may be immutable, but they do not dictate the future.

Material is not bits of hard stuff bouncing off each other in focused and narrow trajectories, but rather bubbles or bundles of energy without a fixed place, endlessly interacting. For the most part the avenues of those interactions are mystery. Push the language a bit and discover we don't really know what is meant by the phrase, 'bundles of energy". (So far as I can tell much is known about how light - energy - functions; but no one knows what it is.) Unwind the universe back to the beginning, let it start again, and a different history would unfold.

Materialistic determinism is not part of the cosmos.

In a like manor new atheists, atheists in general really, are often assumed to hold to a form of reductionism; claiming that emergent phenomena can be entirely understood in terms of more fundamental processes. Some atheists do just this, but not all. Maybe not even most. Sometimes emergent phenomena can be explained by more fundamental processes, but that is not the same as being either understood or experienced. Explaining is knowledge. Understanding is wisdom. Atheists are big on understanding; but that doesn't mean the pursuit of wisdom is abandoned.

Atheist, materialist, reductionist ... labels that probably do fit some people, but not everyone, and not even every atheist. Ours is an endlessly creative cosmos, neither materialist or reductionist, churning out new processes and emergent phenomena all the time. We are both expressions of and participants in that creativity. The hubris of religion lies in the claim that this universe isn't big enough or complex enough to account of creatures such as ourselves. This in spite of our growing understanding that the universe is limitless, may be just one of a limitless number of universes, and is complex in ways that are beyond our grasp.

There was a time when religion fostered the human desire to understand god's universe. It is hard to imagine that any of the early pioneers, like Newton, ever dreamed that their inquiries would lead to an understanding that there is no god in the cosmos. But that is where understanding lead; and a species that created elaborate mythologies of a personal god to explain the misunderstood, (and - let us be honest - to satisfy our ego) now stands at a crossroad. The religions of our ancestors were first attempts, but wrong. Insisting those mythologies are "The Truth" to the point of oppression, suppression, and war, now compromises the chances that we can survive our own history. The religions of the future will have to fit a cosmos indifferent to any particular evolutionary path. "Chosen", in the sense that one is special to the universe, (or the creator thereof) is no longer a label that fits any human tribe.

So I guess I am a "New Atheist" after all.