I’ve posted several times on the claim that humans have an innate longing for God that must be filled by either religion or some simulacrum of religion. This is the famous “God-shaped hole” in our psyche claimed by believers and those whom Dan Dennett called “believers in belief.” This trope appears regularly, and the last time I discussed the “God-shaped hole” was on Christmas Eve when a Free Press article described an atheist mother lamenting the absence of religious traditions to which she could expose her children on Christmas.
With the recent kerFFRFle in which some people (including me) argue that wokeness and gender activism have taken the form of a quasi-religion—a claim that’s the subject of a whole book by John McWhorter—some people have taken to blaming atheists for creating this hole and for the need for something to replace traditional faiths. By taking away people’s religion, they say, we have made society worse as erstwhile believers start glomming onto all kinds of nonsense. (Apparently religion is a good form of nonsense.)
Well, yes, some people do need god, but that need has declined steadily in the West, and in many places the hole doesn’t seem to be filled with quasi-religions. Northern Europe and Scandinavia, for instance, have long become largely atheistic. Exactly 0% of Icelanders under 25 believe that God created the world, and 40% of them identify as atheists. But is Scandinavia filled with especially woke people, clinging to crystals and other forms of woo, and being the most gender-activist people in the world? Not that I know of. So my thesis is that while some people will always need God, many do not, and their numbers will decrease over time as the world population becomes better and better off. (Religiosity is negatively correlated with well being and other indices of happiness.)
And really, isn’t it condescending to say that we atheists should not publicly criticize belief in gods because it might create even worse forms of religion? Are we supposed to shut up about the harms and false claims of traditional faiths? That’s simply a “little people” argument, one founded on “belief in belief.”
In today’s Spectator, Richard Dawkins takes up the god-shaped hole argument, though he concentrates largely on recent accusations that he himself helped dig that hole. Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here.
Here are two people accusing Richard of wielding the Atheistic Shovel:
An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:
“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”
And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organisation that’s been taken over by the trans cult:
“An atheistic organisation worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”
There are other arguments, but Dawkinss concludes that the rejection of what he calls “trans nonsense” (I’d call it “gender-activist extremism”) should be based not on the fact that it replaces the supposed benefits of religion, but on science itself:
The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.
. . . How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.
This dispels the argument that people must hold irrational beliefs—”quasi religions”—to replace real religions. I would extend the argument a bit further, though. While admitting that it’s hard for some folks to let go of gods, I’ll also argue that quasi-religion nonsense can be laid at the door not of atheism, but of the kind of faith that leads people to embrace important beliefs without good evidence.
I am a creationist who reads this blog by Dr Coyne religiously (for many years now)..I guess in part because I want Jerry to fill his God shaped hole with the God of Isaac and Abraham..but then again my God shaped hole and longing for answers is part of why I read his posts. I tend to skip over Jesus and Mo…but the rest is informative and interesting. Looking forward to more and hopefully a time when Jerry can visit Israel again…my favorite posts..including the description of meals!!
Have you read Jerry’s book about the evidence for evolution? If so, do you continue to reject evolution because you think the evidence is poor, or because you feel obligated to reject evolution because of your Christian faith?
If the latter, I’m sorry but that seems like a mental straightjacket. I would readily reject evolution and be open to some type of “creator” if the evidence was forthcoming, and I could easily think of many types of evidence that would falsify evolution and support some type of separate creation of species and a recent creation of earth. It’s just that no such evidence is forthcoming, while the evidence for evolution and against creationism is overwhelming.
Far be it for me to answer for professor Coyne (apologies if he takes offence for this) but it seems to me – having read the article – that he doesn’t believe he has a God shaped hole to be filled. I agree with this.
It seems to me that the whole idea of a God shaped hole is flawed. We are talking about the rejection of ideas that we believe to be false, not the removal of physical stuff. But to carry the flawed analogy further, would you rather have a brain tumour or a brain tumour shaped hole?
It doesn’t strike me that this idea of God you put in your God shaped hole is a net benefit, particularly as, in your case, it seems to have led you to believe things that aren’t true (creationism).
No offense taken. You’re right, I have no god-shaped hole that I can detect. I have scrutinized both my body and my psyche, and I cannot find such a hole, much less one shaped like a divine being. I do not feel the need for anything to replace even the mild faith that I embraced in my youth. Of course the advociates of this flawed argument could say that anything that I do or believe fills that hole, including not believing in gods, liking to drink wine, and loving good books. But they would be wrong.
Scandinavia has a very specific culture, but you could find “woke” elements similar to those found in what we describe as “wokeism” today much earlier than in other places. Was this related to this “God-shaped hole”? I don’t know, but should not be completely disregarded.
Tried to find the PDF on the “Siðmennt, the Icelandic Ethical Humanis Association, conducted a survey in 2015 to assess the religious beliefs of Icelanders published in January 2016” but ChatGPT could not find the file. Note: The 0% is for those Icelanders “under 25”, but point still valid.
I left out the under 25 bit; will add it. Thanks!
If you come to your atheism, or support it, by being a skeptic, by reading and understanding bad arguments and evidence for bad ideas, that hardly leaves a hole for credulity to enter. It is probably more pertinent to ask why teachers seem to feel it is necessary to peddle fairy-stories of one sort or another, or why we hire teachers that do.
I went to Catholic school in Newfoundland Canada in the 70’s and became an atheist about 25 years ago. Today I find the idea of God, and in many ways spirituality in general, not important. And in some ways problematic. It’s like having a nice boat, being obsessed about how nice it looks, and never taking it out.
That said, I’m glad there are people like Dawkins, Pinker, and you who challenge this nonsense!
I think it’s foolish to blame atheists for creating a “God-shaped hole” or, worse, for the rise of Wokeism. I rather think that the “God-shaped hole” is simply a myth—as does Dawkins. People who were raised to be believers—but who later become atheists through reason—may feel a certain sense of loss (a hole), but I doubt that people who are brought up as non-believers think that anything is missing at all. They devote their interests—and apply their energies—to whatever gives them pleasure or a sense of accomplishment. I don’t think that very many obsess about a vague nothingness lurking above. They’re just living their lives.
Indeed. The “God-shaped hole” is often the exact shape of the god that these folks were initially indoctrinated in. The shape never seems to come in the form of Zeus or Odin.
Personal anecdote: many years ago, when I finally discarded my few remaining religious beliefs in the face of all the evidence, I expected to miss them and to be a bit regretful about my decision. In other words, I was sort of expecting to have a God-shaped hole in my life. Instead, I felt a huge sense of liberation and euphoria, which in a sense has never left me. I now know quite a few apostates, and they all seem to feel the same way. The ‘God-shaped hole’ is yet another myth the faithful like to tell themselves.
As I like to say, with linguobuccal adjacency, “Thank God, I’m an atheist!”
Amazing how much it annoys some believers.
Wokeism is best explained as an extremist reaction to the success of sex-equality and anti-racism. Now that both concepts are (rightfully) unassailable, some self-righteous opportunists have capitalized on them by assuming a pose of ultra-virtue and hunting down those who don’t comply with it. As with religion, sanctimony leads to persecution of the “evil.”
The most woke usually have elite positions that they wish to retain by proclaiming their virtue. Many of them are in academia; frustrated over their lack of economic and political power, they compensate with cultural power, their intellectual influence over students at the elite colleges, who go on to positions in the ruling class and assuage their class guilt by enforcing wokism.
Fueling all of this has been the rise of therapy culture in America, which has encouraged many people to view themselves as traumatized victims and has created a worldview where victimhood equals moral purity; hence the oppression Olympics. Virtue is now equated with oppressed victimhood, which requires the identification of as many evil oppressors as possible. In response to such oppression, the victim can do no wrong and thus benefits from a double standard in treatment.
With all this mind, is it any wonder that wokeism has thrived, and managed to do so without any encouragement from any of the important New Atheists?
As for the God-shaped hole, this is trumpeted by people who have always been believers and opportunistically seize upon the conversions of a few former atheists who have become religious because they were either emotionally vulnerable or never strong thinkers to begin with. That’s all there is to it. It’s not surprising when the sort of atheist who never gave concentrated thought to the implications of nonbelief becomes the sort of believer who gives equally shallow thought to the problems of religion. Good riddance.
I am one of those people. I can’t speak for any of the other people like me, but when the penny finally dropped for me, it was more like a revelation. When I realised that the whole faith thing was just a giant trick, I felt liberated: I no longer had to invent convoluted schemes to reconcile what I knew about the World with what I believed about God.
So what to do about the 3-5% of high schoolers in the U.S. that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds are either self-identified transgender or questioning of their gender? Teens with issues.
They should get psychological help for their psychological problems but I for one don’t think they should get drastic and and irreversible medical interventions.
Indeed! Funnily enough, there weren’t 3-5% of high schoolers with such a delusion when we older readers of WEIT were there. (Of course, we’re supposed to believe that this is because nowadays it’s possible for young people to express their “authentic selves”, whilst simultaneously also believing that being trans is so distressing that they are at imminent risk of suicide.)
“I would draw out the argument a bit further and, while admitting that it’s hard for some folks to let go of gods, I’ll also argue that quasi-religion nonsense can be laid at the door not of atheism, but of the kind of faith that leads people to embrace important beliefs without good evidence.”
The real crux of the problem may be that, several centuries on, most of us have not absorbed the principles of the Enlightenment, chief among those rigorous testing of assertions about reality.
Many of us born in the 20th/21st century have enjoyed the successes of the scientific revolution, but have no understanding of the habits of thought and processes that made these successes possible. I may “believe in evolution” simply because that is what I was taught in school as received knowledge. But I may have no idea how to successfully counter a creationist who questions it, because examining the logic of a proposition and the supporting evidence was never a part of my education.
So, a person may be a default atheist and “against religion” based on received knowledge and social conditioning, but will then flit over to some other set of quasi-dogmas because they never learned to properly interrogate ideas.
For me, atheism is a SIDE EFFECT of a concerted habit of examining the truthfulness of assertions about reality. If the evidence for God was strong, I would not be an atheist.
Well put. This may be my STEM background bias speaking, but I think a lot of the woke nonsense that comes almost exclusively from the grievance studies crowd is due to those academic disciplines having no corrective feedback loops.
Good points. Not everyone is using scientific-style reasoning.
Transgenderism long predates the New Atheism. In the 50’s, sex change surgery was practiced in Denmark. An American, Christine Jorgenson, who transitioned in 1952 became a minor celebrity in America after her surgery. So this was not something invented or only practiced in recent post New Atheist years. See Wikipedia Christine Jorgenson for more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen
Yes, transgender folk have been around in the West for a while, but nobody can deny (and this is documented by many, including Abigail Shrier), that the proportion of people claiming to be trans or of non male or female GENDER has skyrocketed in recent years. Who ever claimed that it juss started?
Speaking of the skyrocket and social contagion, I have a friend/colleague/age contemporary. She has three kids (2 boys and 1 girl) and works as a professor at a university. In 2019, she told me her youngest son (he was 9) thought he was gay. In 2024, she said her oldest son (early 20s) was trans. What are the odds that both her sons are LGBTQ+ and that this isn’t due to her wokeism?
It’s telling that the youngest son merely thought he was gay, whereas the older son was declared to actually be trans.
Kids might think they’re gay (or, more accurately, they might think they’re likely to turn out to be gay when they get older), but we all know that the answer to that question will be established decisively one way or the other once they mature sexually: the final arbiter of whether anyone is or is not gay is their physiology — how their (post-pubertal) body reacts in the presence of other people who are male or female.
Trans doesn’t have a level of physical/physiological “falsification or verification” like homosexuality does. Whether one “is” or “isn’t” trans is entirely dependent on a psychological chain of events, a series of beliefs influenced by one’s social environment. It’s mind games all the way down in a way that homosexuality simply isn’t.
Absolutely, Artymorty.
Interestingly, when I asked my friend if her youngest still identified as gay five years later, she said she wasn’t sure. My hunch? She suspects he doesn’t but isn’t ready to admit it.
Having two LGBTQ+ sons elevates her status to “shabby chic” in academia, especially in a red state. (She’s also spearheaded multiple DEI grants at her institution, adding to her progressive credentials.)
As for her oldest, I’ll revisit the topic when he’s 25 or 26—after his frontal cortex has fully matured. Until then, teens are especially impressionable, heavily influenced by their peers. Right now, being trans is one of the trendiest identities for a young person, even adding economic and social cachet for parents eager to showcase their own value.
“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . .”
From the OP. Well, it is not a cult. It has been around for decades. And no, New Atheists can’t be blamed for any of this. Somebody you quoted seems to think Atheists are responsible. Others seem to think it is an issue with “Woke” culture. I suspect the problem of transgender athletes have raised issues over the last decade that have made transgender something of a rabid culture war issue today.
Sexology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology all have something to say about heterosexual military males (such as Christine Jorgensen of the famous “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” headlines) and their extremely high rates of crossdressing and eventually identifying as “transgender women”.
The fact that transsexualism/transvestism — recently euphemistically rechristened “transgenderism” among the heterosexual majority — emerged in the West in the 20th Century is not arbitrary or a coincidence. (We still call them “TS/TV” in the older corners of the gay male scene, and we don’t pretend they’re “real” women, because we’ve closely watched the phenomenon evolve over decades.)
It’s widely believed to be a product of two things: (1) the phenomenon of autogynephilia — heterosexual males whose physiological mating and pair-bonding instincts have inadvertently fixated on themselves and their own bodies (thus, straight men desiring to transform into their sexual “targets” and turn themselves into “real women”); and (2) the post-Enlightenment and post-Industrial transformation of society from collectivism to individualism, which separated men in the West from strict social roles and community responsibilities, and freed them to pursue their private romantic and sexual fantasies with degrees of freedom they don’t have elsewhere.
Farmers in Botswana aren’t rushing off to indulge the physiological sparks of erotic and romantic pleasure they privately experience when they imagine transforming into women. But suburban American husbands experiencing a mid-life crisis and perhaps some PTSD from military combat, on the other hand, have strong motives to jump into the TS/TV (or “transgender”) subculture to indulge their desires.
As for why trans is so extremely pervasive among military males (a staggering number of the most prominent trans activists are veterans), a number of theories have been proposed, including that men predisposed to transvestism gravitate towards careers with uniforms (they have a “masculine uniform” while serving their duties to society, and a “feminine uniform” while serving their private desires), or that the behavioural profile of the average military career man — high-testosterone, sexually aggressive, risk-taking — happens to favour those who are more likely to “come out” publicly with their crossdressing proclivities, while more “average” men will limit the habit to the privacy of the bedroom.
Thanks for your insights.
“As for why trans is so extremely pervasive among military males (a staggering number of the most prominent trans activists are veterans) . . .”
A quibble: While it is possible that military men are disproportionately represented among trans-identifying people, the phenomenon is not “pervasive” among military men—at least not among those with whom I served for over 20 years.
Back when the Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner change was fascinating the media, I recall reading a specialist who said that the Jenner profile was typical for those who “transitioned”: middle-aged man who had been highly successful in a “manly” field in which high testosterone was not uncommon. Other fields could include some Wall Street types, surgeons, pilots, and a few other military disciplines, among others. (As opposed to the teen girl trend we now see.) While we could invent sociological stories for why this might be so, I would first lean toward biological reasons. A guess, but nothing more: sharply declining or fluctuating testosterone levels in some previously high-testosterone, alpha males during midlife generates physiological changes that can lead to atypical behavioral shifts and attempts by the brain to make sense of the changes. The stories provided, allowed, or encouraged by society now come into play. I have no idea whether this is even feasible, but it is the area of inquiry into which my untutored self would start.
We have all seen the more typical pattern: an impatient father can mellow into a doting grandfather; a young brawler can later exude calm and be a voice of reason under duress. That this normal process might go to extremes shouldn’t surprise us. But that is a far cry from what we are now seeing in schools among children where social contagion seems rampant and “trans away the gay” has become the new conversion therapy.
I don’t think I buy the “declining testosterone” theory, although I do find it interesting.
From interviewing middle-aged male transitioners and reading many of their stories, my sense is that it’s changes in their life circumstances (rather than their T levels) that push them “over the line” and lead them to come out publicly with their erstwhile private crossdressing kinks.
For example: Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. He was well-known in the tabloids as a crossdresser at home. You can google “Bruce Jenner crossdresser” and filter for results before he “came out”, and you’ll find troves of articles. In Bruce’s case, he was about to be arrested and charged for vehicular manslaughter following a reckless driving incident in Malibu when he “came out” as Caitlyn. The impetus for his public change was an actual crisis: he was in deep mental distress because he was about to go to jail. Psychologically, it was something like hiding behind his Caitlyn persona because he was in a panic. (The media circus that ensued after his “coming out” as Caitlyn led the DA to drop the charges. He literally got away with manslaughter by coming out as trans.)
Often men report “coming out” after they’ve established the social security to do so: they retire from their jobs, or the kids move out of the house, or they secure the big promotion and feel they’re not at risk of getting fired anymore if they dare to come to work in a dress, that kind of thing. Anecdotally, they talk of typical mid-life crisis circumstances, rather than weakening-testosterone-related things like libido and vitality changes.
And I agree, all of that is an entirely separate phenomenon from the recent craze among teens and young adults, and it’s also an entirely separate phenomenon from feminine young gay males (and their masculine lesbian female counterparts) who crossdress and seek “sex changes” for yet still different reasons. These are three separate phenomena that only superficially look the same.
Thanks, Artmorty, for your thoughtful. complex comment — it speaks to circumstances of a former in-law who transitioned some years ago, surgery, etc. This person (now deceased) was former military and had spoken of some of the topics you describe. You have added — for me — insight.
That’s a fascinating theory, Artymorty – thanks!
It’s not a God shaped hole, it’s a hole shaped God.
I didn’t expect the anthropic principle in this thread! The Spanish Inquisition, possibly, but not that….
I must confess to being a bit sorry to learn from Dawkins that G.K. Chesterton never made the remark about those losing their religion then “believing in anything” rather than nothing. I remember it being phrased a bit differently, but no matter. I hope my being an atheist doesn’t diminish my appreciation for those capable of making clever remarks, even wrong ones.
And I am a distributionist in my economics, as was Chesterton, Dorothy Day, and more recently, Garry Wills (much to the disappointment of William F. Buckley). Maybe growing up Protestant in a neighborhood of Irish Catholic millworkers had some effect on me after all.
My family thinks so, giving me a sweatshirt declaring “Curmudgeon – It’s Not Just a Word, It’s a Lifestyle” for Christmas. I’d say that’s an appropriate response to living in a faith-addled world.
The aphorism apparently misattributed to Chesterton — “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything” — may sound clever, but has never impressed me as being clever. Basically, if people don’t believe in this one thing, then they’ll believe in one of the many other things.
Well, yes. They will. I think you have to start out believing that the first alternative is best, to end up with the conclusion that therefore, it’s best. Also not impressive.
It has always seemed to me to be a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. By “anything” he seems to imply that the person will be taken in by arrant nonsense, or otherwise snared by deceptions. As if believing in god were not exactly that.
“[S]ome people…argue that wokeness and gender activism have taken the form of a quasi-religion…[while others] have taken to blaming atheists for creating this [god-shaped] hole and for the need for something to replace traditional faiths.“
This is all so ironic because Kat Grant and FFRF argue out the other sides of their mouths that atheists have also become an arm of Christian nationalism by merely agreeing that a woman is an adult human female and not merely whoever she says she is.
I think people with a “god shaped hole” are people who were likely raised in religion then left. People who didn’t have religion imposed on them as children are less likely to have this problem. There are still far more of the former than the latter.
The former are therefore still looking for something with structure, moral certitude, some kind of community or organizing principle. Atheism per se does poorly at this because atheism is just the rejection of a particular organizing principle, albeit one that is very good at what it does.
The “hole” people have isn’t “god shaped.” It’s community and organizing principle shaped. Gods and religion fill that hole but it’s not the only thing that can. We’ve simply been conditioned to think it’s the only or best thing because it’s done such a good (as in, effective) job of it for so long.
People raised without religion either learned to find their own community and organizing promotes in other places or, in a state of vulnerability, religion swooped in and took up residence.
Human beings evolved to be, in the words of anthropologist Pascal Boyer, coalition builders. It’s what allowed our relatively weak and slow ancestors to survive a dangerous environment.
One aspect of that evolved tendency to assemble coalitions was the invention of beliefs, behaviors, and practices, adherence to which signaled one’s loyalty to the group. These behaviors and practices could be irrational or illogical, as long as they didn’t induce behavior that reduced an individual’s chances of passing on his or her genes.
That innate urge to build coalitions that often use what are clearly irrational beliefs, behaviors, and practices to signal belonging is still with us today, of course, in the form of things like religion, woke-ism, and conspiracy theories.
TL;DR: We evolved to form relatively small (and therefore cognitively manageable) social groups. It’s never been a question of religion OR some other set of irrational beliefs; we were always going to form all manner of groups with all manner of signals of loyalty. It’s not a god-shaped hole, it’s a tribe-shaped hole.
It’s not a “God-shaped hole.” It’s the need for mental engagement and self-reflection, with oneself as both the subject and the audience. Most people recognize that no one on Earth wants to hear every thought, desire, or emotion they have. Lovers, friends, and therapists may help occasionally, but for those who pray, God provides a constant, willing audience—one who listens, cares, and loves unconditionally, at least in evangelical Christianity.
Prayer is like a dialogue with oneself, a mental act of writing one’s personality, dreams, and life, shaped by an imagined audience. It mirrors the “theory of mind” used by writers to anticipate how readers might respond.
In essence, prayer is a simpler, lower-effort form of writing—one always accessible, regardless of time or place.
To better counter the “God-shaped hole” argument, Dawkins might explore the sheer pleasure of writing all day to someone believed to love them unconditionally. While his essay was thoughtful, it’s unlikely to resonate with those on the Right who invoke this metaphorical void. For many, the act of writing fulfills this deep need for mental engagement—especially for those with higher IQs. Writers hone their craft, while for those who pray, the “craft” is shaping their own identity and inner life. Secular humanism doesn’t seem to address this particular need. To be clear, I’m not advocating for prayer, but I do think I understand the need it satisfies—the one people often label as “God-shaped.”
I think the dominance in Academia of Postmodernism, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and Grievance Studies explains the pervasiveness of wokeism better than the lack of belief in a god.
Wokeism is the logical consequence of taking these theories seriously, as if they represented a true understanding of reality.
And I bet many trans activists are of the “spiritual but not religious” sort. I would like to see some data about this, as I’m not sure. Just a guess.
If human psychology is the source of religious belief, then the God-shaped hole is a real feature of human psychology. That leads to the debunking argument against religion.
David Chalmers: Why do people believe that God exists? One sort of answer is in evolutionary or psychological terms. One hypothesis is that it enhanced evolutionary fitness to believe in a god, perhaps because this belief gave special motivation for action. Another is that belief in God helps to fulfill a deep seated need for meaning in our life. If we accept a hypothesis like this, many people think that our justification for believing in God falls away. After all, if our beliefs in God can wholly be explained without God, then it looks as if it would be a giant coincidence if there was actually a God that made those beliefs correct. “Debunking Arguments for Illusionism about Consciousness” 2020
The same debunking arguments can be used against quasi-religious replacement faiths, like trans-sexual cults or fascism.
Nice.
Can you explain what’s logically flawed about what you call the “little people” argument? Atheists often use that term for the argument that some (but not all) people have a psychological need for religion, and that those people are worse off without religion than with it. I’ve often seen atheists disparage this argument as being “condescending” or in similar terms, but I’ve never seen anyone actually explain why it’s false.
As I said in a comment on one of your earlier posts, studies have found that the tendency to be religious has a heritability of about 0.4. In other words, the data suggests that some people have more of a genetic propensity to be religious than others. It does not seem at all unreasonable to say that for people with such a genetic tendency, giving up religion would be more psychologically difficult than it is for people who have less genetic predisposition to be religious.
I think this explains why Northern European countries have been able to give up religion with less difficulty than the U.S. has. As an evolutionary biologist you’re no doubt familiar with the founder effect, and the founding population of the United States was comprised mostly of Europeans who were religious pilgrims. They were people whose religious convictions were so strong that they took the difficult journey across the Atlantic for the sake of religious freedom. If the founding population of the United States was more devoutly religious than those who stayed behind in Europe, this could have produced a situation where the U.S. has more of a genetic predisposition to be religious than European countries do, and also to be more susceptible to woke ideology as a substitute for traditional religious beliefs.
Although I’m not religious by most standards, I do feel that a “god-shaped hole” is something that I have. My being a deist fills it part of the way, and I’m also slightly religious about some things that have nothing to do with either traditional religion or wokeness. For example, I regard Shigeru Miyamoto as an almost godlike figure, which is a common attitude among gamers. (The New York Times once described him as “almost a living god in the game world”.)
I never said the little people argument was wrong, I said that it is made by atheists and is condescending in the sense that it thinks that society absolutely needs religion to function properly I do not agree.
As for your founder effect argument, I do not agree, because there is no evidence that the founders were more religious than other Europeans instead of just being of a minority religion. Further, there has been TONS of migration into the US since then, and people from all over the world. Giving a heritability does not advance your argument in the face of the extreme mixing of genes that has gone on in America in the last 200 years (do not forget Africans, who did not come here because they were religious!)
i also noted that yes, some people do have a need for religion, so you being one of them is an anecdote that says nothing about the overall need to be religious. Northern Europe has largely become atheistic or agnostic in the last 200 years, and everywhere the nones are increasing in proportion. That is happening too quickly to be the results of genetic change! It is a purely social change.
I wasn’t arguing that the change that’s happened over the past 200 years is due to genes. I agree that a genetic change couldn’t have occurred that quickly. My argument is that if a society had less of a genetic tendency to be religious in the first place, it will be able to give up religion relatively painlessly, as has occurred in Northern Europe. On the other hand if a society is more strongly predisposed to be religious, that society will find it more difficult to give up religion without substituting something else (such as wokeness) as a replacement. And I think this explains the different outcomes that have occurred when comparing Scandinavian countries to the United States.
Even if the founder effect isn’t an adequate explanation, it’s hard to dispute that the United States has long been especially strongly religious when compared to European countries. For example, for as long as data has been available, acceptance of evolution in the United States has lagged behind its acceptance in European countries. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1126746 (Also note that when this study was done in the early 2000s, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden already had the highest levels of acceptance.)
The genetic basis of a trait tells you nothing about how fast it can be changed by culture. We have a HUGE evolved/genetic desire to have kids, but a lot of people either curtail that desire or short circuit it with birth control. There is heritability and there is the genetic control of development, and they are not the same thing though both are often conflated. But neither of them tell you how a new cultural change can affect a trati–especially a behavioral trait. There are many explanations of why America is more religious than other countries that have nothing to do with genes, like well being.But I am finished with this discussion, if you do not mind.
I think you need to sort out by reading what you mean by genetic tendency (sorry, my apostrophe key is broken).
Some early American colonies were founded by religious colonists. But many of the residents of these colonies were not that religious, and were often a source of problems for the colony’s leaders. America became more religious with The Great Awakenings. What seem to make America more religious seems to have been development of Great Awakening preaching styles that aimed at emotionally charged effects, rather than sedate ritual religion. What happened in America was the invention of AM radio that was quickly adopted by evangelicals and fundamentalists to spread that old time religion. Then cable TV. in the 20’s,creation of Fundamentalism and the rise of aggressive fundamentalist churches and seminaries and publishing houses.
I would add that Europe overall has a better social safety net than the US. If the reverse was true, Europe would probably be more religious than the US. It’s not surprising that the most educated and well-off areas of the US are the least religious ones, whereas religion is strongest in places like Mississippi.
The “Little People” argument isn’t saying that people who feel a need to believe in God are childlike. It’s a criticism of treating believers like children.
“You and I can handle the truth — but we must not explain our reasons to the religious because they can’t handle what we can.” This is a characterization of a reason often given for why atheists should shut up and not write books or articles pointing out flaws in theism. Doing so is harmful. It damages the vulnerable, who lack our resources and resilience.
I think it a condescending argument whether it’s trying to shut down debate on the existence of God or on whether men can get pregnant.
The “people can’t handle the truth” argument is commonly accepted in other areas. Here’s a recent example: https://x.com/sentientist/status/1870971945178579304
The restricting of access to data that’s advocated in that paper, in order to prevent them from being used for “harmful” research, is already being done. Here are two articles discussing that:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
https://www.sciencefictions.org/p/nih-genetics
Mind you, I don’t agree with this particular practice, because I think when a database is funded by taxpayer money (as it is in this case) the data should be available to everyone. My point is that “people can’t handle the truth” is part of the NIH’s official policy, so all behavioral genetics researchers are being treated like children in this particular area. For better or worse, this attitude is part of how science operates in the present.
The “God shaped hole” is the expression of an individual’s unfulfilled social need. Whatever that need is, it can likely be met without having to believe bullshit.
Arguably many people have ‘yearnings’ for meaning, or purpose, or comfort, or understanding, or spirituality, or exploration, or wonder, or communion with a greater organisation etc. English is very vague at capturing these ‘yearnings’.
You can also argue that organised religion is a cuckoo that fits itself into the yearnings hole… but the hole is not ‘god shaped’ any more than a pothole in the road is ‘puddle shaped’.
Excellent article that takes a nuanced approach to the so-called “God-shaped hole.” Dawkins brilliantly debunks the fallacious argument that atheism is responsible for the emergence of new forms of irrationality such as gender extremism.
His example of the Scandinavian countries, largely atheist but not particularly prone to “wokeism,” is particularly pertinent. He rightly points out the patronizing nature of the idea that people need irrational beliefs to give meaning to their lives.
I completely agree with Dawkins that criticism of unfounded religious beliefs should not be censored on the grounds that it might engender other forms of irrational thinking. This is dismissive of human intelligence and our capacity for critical thinking.
His call to base our positions on scientific evidence rather than faith or tradition is crucial, particularly on gender issues. He is right to point out the quasi-religious nature of some extreme positions on these topics.
However, I would have liked the article to explore more the psychological and sociological reasons that push some people to adhere to unfounded beliefs, whether religious or not. A deeper analysis of human needs in terms of meaning and belonging could enrich the debate.
In short, a stimulating article that reminds us of the importance of rational and scientific thinking in our approach to complex societal issues
It comes down to whether one is using scientific reasoning or not. For example I have a good friend who has always been poor at logic and math. While she doesn’t believe in a particular religion, she frequents fortune tellers and reads horoscopes.
As for the commenters at the Friendly Atheist site who were so adamant that trans women were women, I noticed a few things.
My saying is: “Everyone really is an agnostic because no one really knows. Belief is an answer to a different question.”
Reading this issue of WEIT, I realized the solution to a puzzle which has
bothered me for years. The puzzle was: HOW did the multiple forms of grievance studies, critical gender theory, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, and so on, all get established in the groves of academe? Today’s discussion provides an answer: it is because, 50 or more years ago, academic institutions refused to include manuscript analysis, phrenology, homeopathy, and Astrology in their curricula. This decision left an Astrology-shaped hole in academia, which just had to be filled.
Just so!
That made me LOL for real.
Brilliant, Jon!
The “god-shaped hole” argument is a special case of the base-rate fallacy. People discount how common various dogmas and manias were during the times of higher religiosity (due to the general tendency to forget history as it becomes more distant), and so mistakenly believe that the rate is substantially higher than it used to be. Then comes the post hoc ergo propter hoc of blaming the increase on decline in theism. But not only is evidence for causal inference missing, evidence for even a change is missing as well!
I would argue that those who are not capable of critical thinking are prone to group think, of which religion and woke ideology are two varieties. Astrology is another.
My god-shaped hole is filled with spaghetti and meatballs. Ramen!