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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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This post of Scott's about New Atheism is required reading, if you haven't read it already.

New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.

"Hamartiology" is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.

I'd add that New Atheism is also failed metaphysics and epistemology. I also agree that it was a substitute for hamartiology and to some extent narrow axiology. However in a very funny ways it adopted the overall cultural flow of other philosophical traditions, ranging from hermeticism to humanism to naive empiricism, namely that you can get to "The Truth" by critique and negation. All you have to do is to identify the Big Bad (e.g. religion), remove it, and then everything will be "better".

Of course there is no grounding for what better means, what is "The Truth" or anything like that. What happened next is the search for the replacement. Sam Harris tried to tie it to Secular Humanism, utilitarianism and the rest of it. This is the same what Big Yud and Alexander tried to do in their own way reviving Quine with addition of quantum physics and a lot of parables and stories. I see a resurgence of some new grey tribe attempts at philosophy, mostly going for some sort of idealist monism be it Sean Carolls "universal wavefunction is all that exists" or Max Tegmark mathematical realism or computationalism of Joscha Bach. These are all some sort of RETVRN to previous philosophical traditions dated even to presocratics, but instead of "all is water" or "all is flux" we now have these new monadic entities. Only they are even stupider as they want to have legitimacy of empiricist tradition without addressing arguments from Hume or Quine. Of course there are other splinters, including roundabout return to religiosity and Christianity, the latter of which I consider a more robust paradigm.

However significant part of the crowd was captured by the thrill of the hunt and went over to Critical Theory tradition, it just provided other Big Bads after the original project failed. That is why I sometimes called these philosophizes as theological conspiracy theories - they evade all the hard questions just assume that things can get better if we tear down "bad" things around us.

So New Atheism failed, because in the end it was always broad tent "anti-something" coalition and there were internal fractures regarding where to move next.

Scott's writing sometimes annoys the shit out of me.

There are certain tics of his that get on my nerves alright. What specifically annoys you?

I think largely it's his self-satisfied voice, and my sense that he imagines his own glistening bubble of experience generalizes. He's at his best I think when he doesn't simplify or draw satisfactory conclusions. That shows intellectual rigor, and I expect intellectual rigor is why many people read him to begin with.

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