how to throw yourself a public pity party
How many times have you been told not to judge a book by its cover and to always take time to find out what’s inside? Don’t get me wrong, it’s still good advice, but sometimes the book’s cover immediately signals such a stark and profound degree of ineptitude that bringing yourself to even skim the pages is pretty difficult. Such is the case with the platitudes and pseudo-profundities of Ron Rosenbaum’s declaration of New Agnosticism. They’re here, they don’t know, and apparently they’d like the rest of us to lower our heads in ignorance and just stay there, lest we become deranged, science-worshipping counterparts to religious fundamentalists. Oh no, that’s not the snark talking here. It’s the argument underlying Rosenbaum’s thesis…
Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question [itself] presents a fundamental mystery that bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive.
Wow, gee, if Rosenbaum’s lack of grasp on physics and inability to actually do some research into how most of today’s theories about what triggered the Big Bang are playing out, say that cosmology is unpersuasive, can the mere scientists who spend their lives trying to answer these questions with evidence rather than lazy and intellectually dishonest navel-gazing sessions, ever have a chance at answering our existential questions about the universe? This Ray Comfort-esqe phrasing, preceded by several paragraphs of whining about the mean atheists who just can’t bear the weight of his arguments persecuting people like Medieval Inquisitors, is the hallmark of a glib sophist with an inferiority complex and nothing more. The last time I heard the good old something-from-nothing trick, was from a theologian who suddenly decided that if he said the word science at some point during his speeches, his reasons would suddenly become scientific. Out of Rosenbaum’s one person pity party of a column, it’s even less impressive and it’s this heartfelt intent at marching to the defense of willful ignorance that irritates atheists, not their inability to appreciate his supposedly weighty arguments.
Look, saying that you don’t know is a perfectly valid answer when you really don’t know. But Ron wants to leave it at that and declare that we’ll never know something so we might as well resign ourselves to “sitting around and looking serious and saying ‘isn’t life mysterious?’” to quote Tim Minchin. That’s not agnosticism. That’s the same exact close-minded censorship of an entire realm of potential human knowledge fundamentalists love to promote, and against which atheists fight. Not knowing is okay, but it shouldn’t be your default position. An atheist doesn’t have faith that science will hand us the answers on a silver platter, but says that he doesn’t know and intends to find out through research and experimentation. When my readers ask me questions out of my areas of fluency, I read up on the topic and learn something in the process. On the other hand, Ron and those who think like him just don’t want to go through the trouble and whine how those who can’t take all this self-defeating mewing about the limits of human knowledge and pleas to settle for mediocrity in science and philosophy, relentlessly torment them with their facts and ridicule.
