The New Atheists and Their Recent Attacks

philosophy was on metaphysics which is defined as the philosophy of ultimate causes and the ultimate reality beyond the physical sense world.

Metaphysics was closely tied to theology. Plato, with his doctrine of the “unmoved mover” and the great medieval philosophers all respectfully regarded God as the starting point or baseline of thought. Descartes brought in a major shift away from metaphysics to an emphasis on epistemology.

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge or how we can be certain of what we know. Descartes also brought the rise of modern philosophy in which it is asserted that truth is known or discovered by human intellect and not given by revelation (the Bible).

Modern philosophers thought that an ideal system of absolute moral values could be discovered by human reason and this would bring about a perfect world. They rejected the ancient wisdom given by God in the Bible.

Modernism was very limited under Descartes but expanded gradually until David Hume (1711 – 1776) and the Enlightenment philosophers brought empiricism to high prominence. Empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes only through the senses.

The nineteenth century brought us Darwin and his idea that humans descended from apes. This brought a major shift to anthropology which is the philosophy of what it means to be human.

The rejection of God and of God’s morality because of Darwinism brought the rise of communism and fascism as atheist political philosophies. (Though Nazism was technically an occultic system it was heavily influenced by evolution based racial theories.)

The mass murders that occurred under Hitler, Stalin and Mao caused a

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