A fé dos novos ateus: uma análise sobre o discurso neoateísta e sua influência na academia.

Abstract

The September 11, 2001 attacks sparked strong growth in anti-religious sentiment around the world. Then there was a succession of publications and reissues of books by militant authors of atheism attacking any and all forms of religion. Writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have gone on to sell millions of books and have entered the list of best sellers in several countries. This set of factors contributed to the resurgence of a more aggressive and radical form of atheism, which today has been called "new atheism" or "neo-atheism". This dissertation has three main objectives: a) to know the origin and development of the neo-theistic discourse; b) to investigate the scientific basis of this discourse from the perspective of discoveries in the field of Genetics; and c) understand the influence of the speech of the new atheists and the way he maintains his hegemony in the higher education system. In the first and third part of the dissertation, the method described by Foucault was used, which states that a more comprehensive and assertive analysis of a discourse requires two complementary aspects: the “genealogical perspective” and the “critical perspective”. In the second part, the method used was the literature review of studies on the genetic code. The results revealed that the origin of the discourse and the neo-theistic movement itself lies in the second half of the century. XIX, and that this speech came to meet an anti-religious feeling that prevailed among the most influential scientists of the time. The “will to truth” of this period quickly made this speech elevated to the position of hegemonic in the Academy. Empirical research and conclusions by many scientists have also shown that several of the claims related to Genetics that are used in the speech of the new atheists have already been refuted and today can be considered scientific myths. It was also found that the discourse of the new atheism makes use of the four great systems of exclusion described by Foucault, they are: the interdiction of the word, the segregation by madness, the rarefaction and the control of the production of disciplines. It was also observed that the lack of scientific basis for the neo-theistic discourse demanded from its members a dogmatic and almost unquestionable acceptance of its scientific claims, demanding from its signatories a “fundamentalist” anti-theistic stance. Finally, the results of the present research demonstrated that the hegemony of the neo-neo discourse brings losses to the development of Science and that the theodicy spread by them is, in fact, a dangerous discourse that can represent a great risk to religious freedom.