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This book was in the college bookstore today. I noticed it while I was buying books for classes, and skimmed it. It's pretty much what it promises: a condemnation of all religious belief, moderate or otherwise, as dangerous and delusional. It argues for the end of religious tolerance on the part of atheists, and so on.
These sorts of thing stopped bothering me long ago; people have been claiming a new age of reason since before the American Revolution, Bertrand Russell made a better argument for it than this bozo, and it strikes me as so much hot air and revisionism, almost as silly as Intelligent Design in its own way.
But I was given pause by something I saw in the notes at the end. I'm going from memory here, but it went something like:
It went on for a bit after that, but not in any relevant way that I could discern. Something about a thing remaining true even if nobody ever knew it, which makes perfect sense but seems utterly unimportant given the universal sense implied by the argument.
I did some snooping on wikipedia, and it seems that the secular humanist press in general has very mixed feelings about the book. I am not assuming that he speaks for everyone here by any means. But I cannot see any way around the one conclusion to be drawn from this note: He appears to be disparaging empiricism in a book decrying faith and superstition. Snuh?
I'm content to shrug this off as lone-nut talk if need be, but until tomorrow when I can ask my philosophy prof about it, I'm curious as to whether anybody here has encountered a strain of "modern philosophical realism" which does not hold physical experience up as the gold standard.
These sorts of thing stopped bothering me long ago; people have been claiming a new age of reason since before the American Revolution, Bertrand Russell made a better argument for it than this bozo, and it strikes me as so much hot air and revisionism, almost as silly as Intelligent Design in its own way.
But I was given pause by something I saw in the notes at the end. I'm going from memory here, but it went something like:
There is a certain naive school of realism which holds that what we experience with our senses must be "real," i.e. that if we can touch the table, it is real. While this attitude is a necessary heuristic for day-to-day life, neither I nor any philosophical student of modern realism would endorse it.
I did some snooping on wikipedia, and it seems that the secular humanist press in general has very mixed feelings about the book. I am not assuming that he speaks for everyone here by any means. But I cannot see any way around the one conclusion to be drawn from this note: He appears to be disparaging empiricism in a book decrying faith and superstition. Snuh?
I'm content to shrug this off as lone-nut talk if need be, but until tomorrow when I can ask my philosophy prof about it, I'm curious as to whether anybody here has encountered a strain of "modern philosophical realism" which does not hold physical experience up as the gold standard.
I'm sure Ecthy will agree 
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