Major figures of New Atheism include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, collectively referred to as the "Four Horsemen" of the movement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpiVkTvKCXU , as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, until her conversion to Christianity in 2023.
The Four Horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens
@chtomlin
7 years ago (edited)
What is offensive is your characterizations of religious positions a Tribal, reflexive or fearful. You call church leaders Con artist. How is that not offensive? What we perceive as obnoxious children with delayed development makes it even more offensive. In the end, both sides are condescending of the others lack of awareness.
What is so interesting here to me is how nearly every position you pose is wrong about Christians. Virgin Mary is not a God, we often consider if we are wrong and we realize our Faith is just that Faith.
So it seems that the big issue here for you fellows is that you don't realize that teachers of faith work much like the teachers of most any study. You don't teach any beginner or early stage student, in the same way Masters of a subject will cover it among themselves. Good teachers use gradients and add depth as the student is ready. You guys are sort of like the ones who dropped out of Martial arts as a white belt because you are not being taught the subtle details they share with the 4th degree Black Belts. Yes, funny you are condescending given you are the dropouts of spiritual study, basically because you 4 are too immature to realize you are not ready for more careful study.
Religion is so much more honest than Science, which is merely the latest theory, backed up by the latest efforts to generate evidence, masquerading as fact, only to be debunked in the coming years. At least Religion starts from a position of Faith based on practice of thousands of years of evidence, but never claiming proof or actually know anything except thru belief. Why is it your rules that decides what is a legal move? How does the "scientific method," with all it's weakness and failures gain such a high status?
Somehow you all seem to confuse a mere tool or method to study things, with a way of Spiritual living. How are they in competition or fighting for a place in your lives. No christian denies the tool of scientific method for studying certain things, no more than they need to throw out other tools like saws and drills because of their faith. Why would buying a car mean I shouldn't keep my house? They are different things and serve us in life in different ways. The question is why you 4 decided to live in your car.
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"What is consciousness, and how is it related to neural activity? Do we have free will? How, if at all, are we different from artificial-intelligence systems? And—a question that famously placed him as one of the ‘four horsemen’ of new atheism, together with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris—does God exist?"
1) the best way to polish his ideas was to discuss them with undergraduate students.
2) to describe the human mind — specifically, consciousness — in a way that is strongly rooted in the third-person perspective, which he called heterophenomenology, using data-driven research.
3) about free will. Dennett argued that people have free will because of their ability to deliberate, reason and even reason about reasoning; abilities that Dennett argued developed through evolution. Harris believes that free will is an illusion.
4) natural selection is only one possible principle by which traits have evolved.
5) attention-grabbing statements: translating complicated ideas into clear, sometimes sensational knowledge dissemination.
Liad Mudrik is a cognitive neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Brain, Mind & Consciousness programme, where Dennett served as an adviser.
"Daniel Dennett (died at age 82): ‘New atheism’ philosopher who sparked debate on consciousness Cognitive scientist who boldly explored free will, the human mind and AI, and rejected the existence of God."
"Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Beirut, Lebanon, because his father was a secret agent at the US Office of Strategic Services. In 1947, his father died in a plane crash in Ethiopia, and the family moved back to Boston. After graduating from Harvard, he gained a PhD at the University of Oxford, UK, in 1965, where he explored the concept of intentionality, which would underpin much of his later work. After a six-year spell at the University of California, Irvine, he moved to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, which became his academic home."
