The “new atheists” have caused a stir but have also shown their ignorance when they step outside their domain of scientific expertise and talk about metaphysics while denigrating philosophy. One result is that philosophers are now taking them on — and they have come out slugging. I’m seeing a new generation of philosophers, mostly Christians, who are pulverizing the puny arguments of the atheists.
One example is the philosopher Edward Feser. He wrote a book “The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheists”. You can see his blog at http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/. IDers have also tussled with him a bit — and lost. I’m reading his latest book which is on metaphysics, and he crushes scientism in chapter 0 (I thought only mathematicians had a chapter 0). He goes on to show how metaphysics properly done is a true science.
One point of relevance here is how Feser goes back to what science, particularly physics, has been doing but people are so used to it they’ve forgotten. It has to do with qualities. The early scientists distinguished between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are things like quantity, extension, etc. that can be measured. The other qualities were at first ignored but later explained in terms of primary qualities. For example, color has been redefined as merely something perceived but not real because it’s a secondary quality.
This has advantages in terms of physical science and technology but there’s nothing inherently primary about primary qualities. Other qualities could just as well be chosen. My wife is an artist and color is primary for her art. But scientism takes the methodological exclusion or redefinition of certain qualities as a discovery that they don’t really exist, which is clearly false.
The warning for creationists is against taking the Bible to refer to the world as redefined by physics. For example, color is a real quality just as much as mass or position. Physics doesn’t say that but we should.
BTW some atheistic philosophers understand these things. Thomas Nagel is one, and his latest book “Mind and Cosmos” is subtitled, “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”.
August 2014