New Atheist pamphleteer John Loftus is like a train wreck orchestrated by Zeno of Elea: As Loftus rams headlong into the devastating objections of his critics, the chassis, wheels, gears, and passenger body parts that are the contents of his mind proceed through ever more thorough stages of pulverization. And yet somehow, the grisly disaster just never stops. Loftus continues on at full speed, tiny bits of metal and flesh reduced to even smaller bits, and those to yet smaller ones, ad infinitum. You feel you ought to turn away in horror, but nevertheless find yourself settling back, metaphysically transfixed and reaching for the Jiffy Pop.
Recall some current events recounted in a recent post. Atheist philosopher Keith Parsons had lamented the tendency of New Atheists to ignore rather than answer the best arguments of the other side, to refuse to do their homework before commenting on philosophical matters, and to resort to mere invective in place of argumentation. Loftus, entirely ignoring what Parsons actually said, dismissed him on ad hominem grounds, averring that Parsons is “just old” and likes getting attention -- thereby deploying, in defense of the New Atheism, some of the very traits Parsons deplores in the New Atheism. A restrained Parsons then replied with a polite and reasoned defense of himself against this gratuitous attack. Whereupon Loftus accused Parsons of “unfairly” “attacking” him, and dismissed Parsons’ new remarks too as something which “obvious[ly]” “don’t need” a response.
Well, no sooner had the pixels dried on that, than Loftus put up another anti-Parsons rant. Maybe he decided it was not so “obvious” after all that Parsons’ remarks “don’t need” a response. Or maybe not, because as it happens, Loftus’ latest tantrum also completely fails to respond to what Parsons actually said.
Start with the (unintentionally) comically best line of the rant, wherein Loftus predicts, vis-à-vis his latest post: “I take it Parsons is probably too arrogant to respond to me.” This despite the fact that the allegedly too-arrogant-to-respond-to-Loftus Parsons already had responded to Loftus (indeed, his response is precisely what Loftus is complaining about), and, again, did so politely rather than arrogantly. And this despite the fact that Loftus himself had just gotten done arrogantly dismissing Parsons as not worth responding to. If Loftus isn’t the most clueless man on earth, the only alternative can be that he is in fact the Platonic Form of Cluelessness, that in which all merely finitely clueless men participate.
Yet arrogance is not the only Loftus-like quality Loftus projects onto Parsons. He assures us that Parsons is “both arrogant and ignorant.” How so?
First, Loftus charges that Parsons is an “elitist” who “arrogant[ly] think[s] only sophisticated atheist philosophers can adequately respond to sophisticated Christian philosophers, such that any non-philosopher who tries is ignorant and shouldn't respond at all.” The slight problem with this, of course, is that Parsons never said any such thing. What he said is that an atheist should take on the best arguments of the other side rather than the weakest, and should try to understand those arguments before criticizing them. He never said that only a professional atheist philosopher is capable of doing this. Loftus is simply attacking a straw man.
Loftus also asserts, in defense of his fellow New Atheists, that “scientists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne know more than enough to argue sophisticated Christian philosophers are wrong, even though they don't know as much as they do to respond on their turf.”
Well, suppose some creationist said that he already “knows more than enough to argue that Darwinian biologists are wrong, even though he doesn't know as much as they do to respond on their turf.” Loftus would be outraged, and rightly so. Darwinian biologists are precisely the ones who know best the arguments for Darwinian evolution, so that no one who is unwilling to respond “on their turf” could possibly “know more than enough” to reject those arguments.
But exactly the same thing is true of the arguments of natural theology. Unless you know the “turf” that Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. are playing on, you cannot possibly “know more than enough” to reject their arguments. No doubt Loftus will assert that the cases are not really parallel. But merely asserting is all he does, which is exactly the problem. For whether the cases are parallel or not is precisely what is at issue between him and Parsons. Hence merely to assert that the cases are not parallel is simply to beg the question.
With a straight face, apparently (though really, who the hell knows what Loftus is doing behind that keyboard?), Loftus describes himself as “a philosophically sophisticated atheist.” Philosophically sophisticated? Well, he certainly knows something about logical fallacies, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately, he must have left his logic class early the day the professor said: “Oh, and by the way, class, these are ways not to reason.”
Then there are Loftus’s grounds for calling Parsons “ignorant.” Here they are. Brace yourself:
I also consider Parsons to be ignorant not to realize that the real ignorance is the ignorance of faith… The whole reason sophisticated Christian arguments exist in the first place is because it takes sophistication to make their faith palatable. The more the sophistication then the more the obfuscation, since their faith can only be defended by confusing people who don't share that sophistication. Defenses of Christianity are nothing but special pleading hiding underneath several layers of obfuscation with a sophistication to make it appear otherwise. It's nothing less than special pleading all the way down.
Now, of course, to know that the defenses really are nothing more than “special pleading,” you’d first have to actually examine them, to show exactly how they go wrong, and to show also that they go wrong so badly that no one could possibly be convinced of them except as a dishonest exercise in special pleading. Yet examining them in this way is precisely what Loftus says he and other New Atheists can justifiably refuse to do. That is to say, they insist dogmatically that they can reject arguments and evidence without having actually to examine them -- just like, you know, they constantly accuse religious people of doing. Evidently, it isn’t really dogmatism and ignorance Loftus dislikes, but only religiousdogmatism and ignorance. Atheistic dogmatism and ignorance are OK. But you knew that already if you’ve ever had the misfortune of wasting more than five minutes of your life reading John Loftus.
Anyway, this is of course just the old New Atheist story, the core, manifestly question-begging argument underlying the entire movement: We know even the most sophisticated religious arguments aren’t worth bothering with, because religious claims are just too obviously stupid to be true; and we know they are just too obviously stupid to be true because even the most sophisticated religious arguments aren’t worth bothering with! Loftus is a metaphysical marvel. He isn’t just a never-ending train wreck; he is a train which somehow manages to speed into a brick wall despite running in a perfectly circular loop.
Loftus has said that while he is all for “reasonably dissecting” the views of one’s opponents, there are some views that are so manifestly “irrational” that outright “ridicule” is what is called for. Well, by now he’s certainly proven that much beyond any doubt!