The Last Superstition Quotes

“It is not just that secularists happen to reject and oppose religion; it's that there is nothing more to their creed than rejecting and opposing religion. . . . The fact is that secularists are "for" reason and science only to the extent that they don't lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“For faith, properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed...it is nothing less than the will to keep one's mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Better for them to deny the mind--and with it rationality, truth, and science itself--than to admit the soul. Once again, the secularist manifests the very dogmatism of which he accuses the religious believer, and in rationalizing it is willing to contemplate absurdities of which no religious believer has ever dreamed.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“If the Canadian parliament, say, should declare that in light of evolving social mores, triangles should be regarded as sometimes having four sides, and decree also that anyone who expresses disagreement with this judgment shall be deemed guilty of discriminatory hate speech against four-sided triangles, none of this would change the geometrical facts in the least, but merely cast doubt on the sanity of Canadian parliamentarians.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Dawkins, as I have said, tells us that there is “absolutely no reason” to think that the Unmoved Mover, First Cause, etc. is omnipotent, omniscient, good, and so forth. Perhaps what he meant to say was “absolutely no reason, apart from the many thousands of pages of detailed philosophical argumentation for this conclusion that have been produced over the centuries by thinkers of genius, and which I am not going to bother trying to answer.” So, a slip of the pen, perhaps.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“The skin cells on your nose might well be “potential human beings,” in the loose sense in which a rubber ball is a “potential eraser.” But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials. Harris and his ilk might want to ignore the importance of this distinction, but that it is a genuine distinction cannot rationally be denied.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one’s listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred. (The Sophists are still with us. Today we call them “lawyers,” “professors of literary criticism,” and “Michael Moore.”)”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“A copy of Skeptic magazine ostentatiously tucked under his arm, the Darwin fish on the bumper of his car proudly signals his group identification with other members of the herd of “independent thinkers.” He “knows” that there is no God, and he isn’t sure whether even the thoughts he thinks he’s having are real or not. But he is pretty sure that his “selfish genes” and/or his “memes” in some way manipulate his every action, and quite certain that there’s nothing questionable per se about “marrying” another man, strangling an unwanted disabled infant, or sodomizing a goat or a corpse (if that’s “what you’re into”). Despite his hatred of religion, he thinks global warming a greater danger than Islamic terrorism, and whether “meat is murder” is a proposition he thinks eminently worthy of consideration.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Overall, then, Aristotle just isn't as "sexy" as Plato. His only advantage is being right.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“And needless to say, smugness is half the fun of being a liberal (the other half being the tearing down of everything one’s ancestors, and one’s betters generally, worked so hard to build).”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Of course, there are people who deny that such obvious differences are real – Marxists, anarchists, radical feminists, and other denizens of the intellectual slums, who mistake an inability to make the simplest conceptual distinctions for deep insight. To these, it seems, we can add the ranks of secularist “thinkers.” When “New Atheists” and their ilk assure us in all seriousness that believing in God is just like believing in the Easter bunny, or that teaching religion is tantamount to child abuse, they remind me of the freshman philosophy student who once proudly declared to me his “discovery” that taking a girl out on a date was really no different from hiring a call girl, since what it’s “all about” is giving something in exchange for sex. In both cases, the analysis put forward is evidence not of profound philosophical understanding, but merely of being a shallow and sophomoric jackass.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“What Hitchens should have written is: “I wouldn’t know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., even if I were intellectually honest; but then, neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“a secularist colleague of mine once assured me that he didn’t need to bother reading writers like Aquinas, since he “already knew” that they must be wrong – though judging from his grasp of what such writers mean by “God” (he confidently trotted out a few stupid anthropomorphisms, tiresome comparisons to the Easter bunny, etc.), it was obvious that he knew no such thing. It was like trying to discuss Titian with a three-year-old who thinks painting is something you do with your fingers.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“For you do by nature want to do what you take to be good for you; reason reveals that what is in fact good for you is acting in a way that is conducive to the fulfillment of the ends or purposes inherent in human nature; and so if you are rational, and thus open to seeing what is in fact good for you, you will take the fulfillment of those ends or purposes to be good for you and act accordingly. This may require a fight against one’s desires and such a fight might in some cases be so extremely difficult and unpleasant that one might not have the stomach for it. But that is a problem of will, not of reason. It doesn’t show that the rational thing is not to struggle against one’s desires, but only that doing the rational thing can sometimes be extremely difficult and unpleasant.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“These books are all refreshingly clear-headed and unfashionable, free of cant and free of Kant;”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Notice in any event that at every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious. Whatever one’s ultimate appraisal of these arguments, the New Atheist’s pretense that a religious view of the world can only ever be the result of wishful thinking rather than objective rational argumentation is thereby exposed as a falsehood, the product, if not of willful deception, at least of inexcusable ignorance of the views of the most significant religious thinkers. That alone suffices to show that the arguments of Dawkins and his gang are worthless. For even if, per impossibile, their atheism turned out to be correct, they would not have arrived at it by rational means, shamelessly caricaturing as they do the best arguments for the other side, when they are not ignoring them altogether.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Rationality – the ability to grasp forms or essences and to reason on the basis of them – has as its natural end or final cause the attainment of truth, of understanding the world around us. And free will has as its natural end or final cause the choice of those actions that best accord with the truth as it is discovered by reason, and in particular in accord with the truth about a human being’s own nature or essence. That is, as we shall see, exactly what morality is from the point of view of Aristotle and Aquinas: the habitual choice of actions that further the hierarchically ordered natural ends entailed by human nature.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“If you make the effort to work through the ideas I’ll be setting out in this book, then even if you do not end up agreeing with me that the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the natural law conception of morality are rationally unavoidable, you will understand how reasonable people could be convinced of this.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“The fact is that secularists are “for” reason and science only to the extent that they don’t lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Secular theorists often assume they know what a religious argument is like: they present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant complexity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin. With this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life. . . . But those who have bothered to make themselves familiar with existing religious-based arguments in modern political theory know that this is mostly a travesty . . 13”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“(Liberalism is like this: Purporting to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, what it really gives us is a diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“without God we are left with a choice of succumbing to megalomania or erotomania.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“There are many serious arguments for the existence of God – the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has suggested that there are at least “two dozen or so” [...] One that is worth mentioning in passing given the themes of the previous chapter derives from St. Augustine, and can be summarized in the following way. As we have seen, it is very hard to avoid realism about universals, propositions, and numbers and other mathematical objects. For the reasons we examined, the existence of these entities in some form or other cannot reasonably be denied, and it is implausible to regard them either as material things or as dependent on the human mind for their existence. [...] At the same time, it is also hard to see how they could exist apart from any mind whatsoever: a proposition, for example, just seems clearly to be the sort of thing that exists only as entertained or contemplated by a mind. Furthermore, it seems implausible to say, as Aristotle apparently would, that triangularity (for example), though neither material nor entirely mental, would go completely out of existence if every particular triangular thing and every mind that might think about triangularity went out of existence.[...] But if universals, propositions, and mathematical objections are eternal and necessarily existing entities that cannot plausibly exist apart from a mind, and such a mind could not (for the reasons we have seen) be a finite or limited mind like ours, it follows that they must exist in an eternal and infinite mind. But such a mind is exactly what God is supposed to be. Hence it follows that God exists.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Part of the problem with Dawkins’s criticisms of Aquinas, then (and of the other New Atheists’ criticisms of certain other religious arguments), is that they fail to understand the difference between a scientific hypothesis and an attempted metaphysical demonstration, and illegitimately judge the latter as if it were the former. Of course, they might respond by claiming that scientific reasoning, and maybe mathematical reasoning too, are the only legitimate kinds, and seek thereby to rule out metaphysical arguments from the get go. But there are two problems with this view (which is known as “scientism” or “positivism”). First, if they want to take this position, they’ll need to defend it and not simply assert it; otherwise they’ll be begging the question against their opponents and indulging in just the sort of dogmatism they claim to oppose. Second, the moment they attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified using metaphysical arguments.”
― Edward Feserser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“To understand Plato, we have to break free of the lazy assumption that everything real must have some location in time and space; indeed, his whole point is that the Theory of Forms, if correct, proves that there is more to reality than the world of time and space. We also have to break free of the lazy habit (as Plato sees it) of assuming that our senses are our only sources of knowledge of reality. For the highest level of reality is not knowable through the senses, but only via the intellect. The world of the senses – of particular geometrical objects, particular human beings, particular just or unjust actions, and the like – might serve at most as kind of a pointer to something beyond itself, to a realm that includes the Form of Triangularity, the Form of Humanness, and the Form of Justice. We can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell the former world, but not the latter, which we know instead through pure thought or unaided reason.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“No single book on any subject, however well-argued and correct in its conclusions, can be expected to convince every reasonable person, certainly not all at once, all by itself, or after a single reading; the way in which we human beings come to believe things is, for good or ill, much more complicated than that.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“When “New Atheists” and their ilk assure us in all seriousness that believing in God is just like believing in the Easter bunny, or that teaching religion is tantamount to child abuse, they remind me of the freshman philosophy student who once proudly declared to me his “discovery” that taking a girl out on a date was really no different from hiring a call girl, since what it’s “all about” is giving something in exchange for sex. In both cases, the analysis put forward is evidence not of profound philosophical understanding, but merely of being a shallow and sophomoric jackass.
Yet many secularists believe, [...] things that are even more crassly stupid than this, things that
merit them the label “superstitious” if anyone merits it.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Physicist Paul Davies tells us that “science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn’t made by a god or a supernatural being,” and acknowledges that, partially out of fear of “open[ing] the door to religious fundamentalists . . . many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.” Among prominent contemporary philosophers, Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism