Gray is one of my favorite philosophers, although his forays into pantheism can be annoying. Also, sometimes his “new” books are made up of old essays or rehash the same themes as previous books. But his political and philosophical observations are uncorrupted by expediency.

Easily answered. I’ve never even heard of Gray, much less read any of his books. But perhaps I should, he sounds surpassingly brilliant! Anyhow, I would conclude that any similarities in what we are saying about the New Atheists lies primarily in the fact that these things are completely obvious to the sufficiently observant.

I would also differentiate the trained mechanic from the automotive engineer and the theoretical physicist.

I would say that it is superstitious to believe that an automotive mechanic knows everything about how any particular combustion engine works, because none of them do. Moreover, all of them together do not know everything about how any particular engine works, nor can any text explain it precisely. However, many people hold the superstition that a mechanic merely needs to “look at it” and can confidently give an accurate diagnosis. Even if they don’t believe that, they probably believe that if they spend $79 for a computer test, the diagnosis will be correct.

A mechanical engineer knows even less about how any particular engine works, but more about how engines are supposed to work. Automotive executives hope that engineers can account for all possible problems with a design, and so marketers promote the superstition that engineers have designed car engines that will always perform according to the ideal desires of consumers. However, until a large number are road-tested, the engineer does not really know the probabilities of what will happen in aggregate; and he cannot predict what will happen in any specific case.

A theoretical physicist, however, knows even less than an engineer about any particular internal combustion engine, especially if he rigorously disregards any experimental data that are anomalous or which insufficiently control independent variables. Fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, in particular, make a lot of assumptions because it is simply impossible to narrow down the independent variables enough to create a highly accurate model. However, most people superstitiously believe that a physicist can accurately describe every process occurring in an engine. Even if he could, that doesn’t mean I would trust him to fix it if all he has is theoretical knowledge of generic processes.

The qualitative difference here depends on what you don’t know, as you imply with the bald statement, “it is false.” The car is real and it really works. The technology is real. The scientific principles that underlie the technology really yield results often enough to justify using them in engineering. Nevertheless, faith in any particular car-related science is a superstition if it is based on the principle that “since cars are real, I can trust anything related to them that sounds scientific.” This doesn’t invalidate the science; it invalidates the faith of the ignorant.

Furthermore, if a theoretical physicist familiar only with current car models found a miscellaneous pile of old car parts, it would be superstitious to believe that he could accurately reconstruct all the cars that the old parts are from and describe in detail how they worked, how they were constructed, and the reasons for similarities to the current models. This is the problem with the historical sciences.

Science can separate what is real from what is falsely believed to be real. That’s not superstition, but is instead the classic form of iconoclasm. If one believes something one does not understand, and it is false, then it is distinguished from those who trust and put their faith in others who better understand that science is not superstition. Most people don’t really understand the internal combustion engine, either, and leave the maintenance of their autos up to a trained mechanic. You would call that superstition, and you would suggest that such beliefs are no better than those who believe in magic flying carpets. I think there is a qualitative difference that should be recognized.

Yet, although Gray has been expressing these opinions consistently for years, I don’t believe Vox cites him anywhere. So maybe they just happen to have read the same books on the subject, or maybe while Vox was in London he took a class taught by Gray.

However, I am not seeking to promote Gray’s point of view here, but rather to provoke questions about Vox Day’s point of view. On a particular range of subjects, Day seems almost to have cribbed from Gray. Since Day’s opinions on a wide range of subjects are, by his own admission, not expert opinions but merely intelligent observations, it is reasonable to assume that his similarities to Gray are due to having read Gray or being indebted to the same sources.

As to your implication that Gray is incoherent, I take that as evidence that his political opinions are just too crazy for the average split-brained political animal to accept. Please stop reading his comments, or your head may explode.

Like Nietzsche, he seems to have a great appreciation for paganism and for a very animalistic view of human nature. Like Vine Deloria, he expresses admiration for religions that have a cyclical view of history, such as Buddhism and the shamanistic religions. In Straw Dogs, he comes uncomfortably close to promoting Gaian pantheism, and this comes through in all his essays on animal rights and environmental protection. I am being kind by comparing him to Spinoza, who had a sophisticated theology that denied the existence of any kind of personal deity.

Gray simply asserts that atheism represents a functionally impossible view that religion is vestigial to humanity and easily superseded by rationalism. In an odd echo of one of Santayana’s privately expressed opinions, Gray humorously compares the atheist attitude toward religion to the Victorian attitude toward sex:

“Liberal humanists repress religious experience–in themselves and others–in much the same way that sexuality was repressed in the strait-laced societies of the past. When I refer to repression here, I mean it in precisely the Freudian sense. In secular cultures, religion is buried in the unconscious, only to reappear–as sex did among the Victorians–in grotesque and illicit forms. If, as some claim, the Victorians covered piano legs in a vain effort to exorcise sex from their lives, secular humanists behave similarly when they condemn religion as irrational. It seems not to have occurred to them to ask where it comes from. History and anthropology show it to be a species-wide phenomenon. There is no more reason to think that we will cease to be religious animals than there is to think we will some day be asexual.” ["Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs," Heresies (2004), p. 46.]