Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This new column from The Atlantic, arguing that the existence of God is just as likely as that of any scientific phenomenon we can’t see, comes from reader Norman, who said this: “I think that this whole thing is just a passing fad, but God seems to be making a bit of a (local) comeback.”
Indeed. In fact, I was surprised that The Atlantic, a publication I respect, would resort to publishing such ridiculous arguments for the existence of a god. Brooks’s argument comes down to this syllogism (examples come from both me and Brooks):
a.) Science accepts a lot of things we can’t see directly, like quantum phenomenon, electrons, or the use of infrared radiation and electricity as ways animals use to detect their environment. Those phenomena have subsequently been verified, though science still is studying things we can’t yet verify, like dark matter and energy
b.) Similarly, humans accept a lot of things we can’t see—most notably God
c.) Therefore, just as we shouldn’t dismiss the non-seeable phenomena of science, we shouldn’t dismiss the existence of gods.
You’ve probably already detected the fallacy in this argument, but I’ll wait a bit until you read Brooks’s piece. Click on the headline below to go to the archived version.
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.
This bio implies he’s a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!
But click below to see how low the mighty Atlantic has fallen:
Here is the thesis Brook’s defending (in the second paragraph; his quotes are indented). First, he quotes cosmonaut Gherman Titov—the first human in space—who said he didn’t see either angels or God during his space flight. Bolding is mine:
[Titov’s claim] a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and can’t physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn’t exist. If you insist on that thing’s existence because you feel it, believe in it, or have faith in it, you are deluded or a fool.
No matter your stance on religion, the Titovian philosophy is a foolish position. Indeed, life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.
It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today’s scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter—the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons.
Quarks are so small that they cannot be observed at any visual scale; they are understood to be pointlike entities that have zero dimensionality. And yet, no physicist believes quarks don’t exist, because the theoretical and indirect empirical evidence that they do is overwhelming.
Here you see his big fallacy. Yes quarks are unseen, and so were electrons or their quantum-mechanical movement (until recently). But they were hypotheses that weren’t accepted until we found empirical evidence for them. This often takes the form of predictions that were later verified. You can see some evidence for quarks here, and below you can see a photograph that actually uses fancy technology to visualize not just electrons, but their predicted orbitals, which shows the probability of finding an electron in a given position. The photo comes from the site of Quantum Physics Lady (caption from her site, too), and the method for generating this “photo” of electrons in a hydrogen atom was outlined in New Scientist as below:
But how on earth do you make an image of such an object? Measuring the position of a single electron “collapses” the wave function, forcing it to pick a particular position, but that alone is not representative of its normal, quantum presence in the atom. “Wave functions are difficult to measure. They’re exquisite quantum objects that change their appearance upon observation,” says Aneta Stodolna of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Her team decided to make a picture using a technique dreamed up 30 years ago that can be thought of as a quantum microscope. Rather than taking an image of a single atom, they sampled a bunch of atoms. This removes the quantum nature of each individual atom’s electron, forcing it to choose a particular location from those it is allowed to reside in. Do it with enough atoms and the number choosing each spot will reflect the quantum probabilities laid out by the wave function.
Stodolna’s team made a beam of atomic hydrogen and zapped it with two separate lasers that excited the atoms’ electrons by precise amounts. An applied electric field then pushed the excited electrons away from their respective nuclei, towards a detector about half a metre away.
The electrons emitted waves that produced an interference pattern on the detector (see “An atom undressed”). Crucially, the pattern was a projection of the spacings of the energy levels in the hydrogen atom, as laid out in the wave function, with bright rings where electrons were present and dark lanes where they were not (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/mmz). “You can think about our experiment as a tool that allows you to look inside the atom and see what’s going on,” Stodolna says.
Isn’t that fascinating?
(From Quantum Electron orbitals at four energy levels–increasing from (a) to (d). Each image was computer-generated by combining images of many electrons. [Image source: “Smile Hydrogen Atom, You’re on Quantum Camera.” Reporting on the scientific work of Aneta Stodolna and others; FOM Institute AMOLF, Amsterdam, Netherlands]
But of course quantum mechanics and electrons were already accepted as provisional truths before this photo, as their existence (like the earlier existence of atoms) made predictions that were absolutely met. (Now we can actually visualize atoms.) And you can think of lots of physics and chemistry phenomena that we can’t see with our eyes, but whose existence is virtually certain because they make testable predictions.,
But what testable predictions of an unseen God can Brooks make? He doesn’t give us any; he just compares science and religion without mentioning the crucial role of testability.
The eyes, of course, are not the only way to find scientific truth. If a hypothesis or theory predicts other phenomena we can test, we can take it as provisional truth. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted that mass warps space-time, and thus could bend light. Subsequent experiments and observations verified that, so we can have some confidence in the “truth” of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
On a more macro scale, the existence of evolution was doubted for years because “we’ve never seen anything evolving.” Well, now we have: instances of “microevolution” occurring within a human lifetime. But the phenomenon of evolution in general, or of macroevolution (one “type” of organism evolving into another over large spans of time) have now been indirectly proven true (again, I mean “provisionally” true, though I’d bet thousands of bucks that birds evolved from reptiles). The verification of evolution and macroevolution comes from fossils, biogeography, molecular biology, and so on. It’s in WEIT.
Throughout the article, Brooks shows his complete ignorance of how science works by making arguments like the one above, and also pointing out stuff like this:
Although some components of the material world are too small to see, the existence of such facets of reality beyond human perception enjoys widespread and uncontroversial belief. Multivariate calculus, for example, is a rudimentary mathematical tool commonly learned at school that can solve real-life problems such as how to optimize the schedules of, say, five people at once. Yet when it involves more than three variables, calculus is operating in a dimensionality that cannot be depicted graphically in any conventional way. This makes scientific sense, too, because neuroscientists have shown that we can think in dimensions higher than those we can actually see. That itself constitutes a belief in an unseen—indeed, unseeable—reality.
This sounds pretty much like gobbledygook, and if you read the Nature paper on “dimensions of thinking”, you see that those dimensions are very different from the spatial dimensions with which we’re familiar.
But it gets worse. Brooks slots into his specious analogy the fact that some animals have senses using phenomena like infrared radiation or electrical fields—phenomena that we can’t perceive with our own senses. But he forgets that we can perceive how these senses work simply using conventional science: doing empirical tests. We can manipulate radiation and electrical fields, we can remove organs that use them, and so on. Here’s another specious bit:
Beyond the abstract realms of mathematics and physics, the natural sciences (such as zoology and biology) offer similar proofs. We know for a fact that senses beyond the five that humans possess exist for other species. Sharks have specialized sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which give them electroreception, the ability to detect electrical fields generated by the muscular and neural activity of other living organisms. Jewel beetles have infrared organs that register the radiation emitted by fires. Many snakes have a sense similar to infrared vision, which enables them to perceive a thermal image of potential prey.
Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don’t exist would be silly, even dangerous.
That made me laugh. How does Brooks think that we’ve verified the existence of these senses? I can assure you that it’s not through faith or revelation.
These existence of these senses would remain as hypotheses, not facts, unless we were able to test whether ther really was electroreception. Now, can we find any direct or indirect empirical evidence for God? No, in fact, if you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God—or, indeed, any kind of divine force that doesn’t act according to physical laws—your predictions flout reality. Such a god would never kill thousands of people with tsunamis, or give children fatal cancers. The theological response, of course, is that “God works in mysterious ways.” If that’s the response, then, we’re not able to make any predictions based on God’s existence, and of course we lack any evidence for that existence in the first place. The “answers”, if there are any, are untestable claims that theologians simply make stuff up. As the late Victor Stenger said,
We have countless examples where evidence for God should have been found, but was not. This absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It refutes the common assertion that science has nothing to say about God.
Similarly, we have no reason to believe that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware—and which are as yet undiscovered.
You can see this same argument in the famous “invisible dragon” analogy made by Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World. In this great piece, Sagan describes the arguments of a proponent of the existence of an invisible, fire-breathing dragon in his garage. This proponent is implicitly compared to a theologian who keeps defending the existence of a deity for whom, like the dragon, no evidence can be adduced. The difference between the unseen stuff that Brooks says leaves open the existence of God and the unseen stuff that science doesn’t yet understand is that science does not give credence to unseen stuff until there’s evidence for it.
In contrast, religionists like Brooks tout “feelings, belief, and faith” as things that may point to a God. He should read my Slate article, “No Faith in Science,” which shows how religious faith differs from scientific “faith”, which is merely a synonym for “confidence based on evidence.”
Brooks’s final argument is that God’s existence is plausible because many scientists believe in God:
This can’t simply be dismissed as premodern thinking. In a 2009 survey, the Pew Research Center found that among scientists who belonged to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, just over half (51 percent) believed in “some form of deity or higher power.” Defying the general trend that young adults are becoming less religious than their elders, scientists under 35, who have grown up amid the latest breakthroughs, were the most religious in the survey: 66 percent were believers, as opposed to 46 percent of scientists 65 and older.
But he neglects these data I adduce in Faith Versus Fact—data that are publicly available. This is from p. 13 of my book, and the data are from later than 2009.
Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling.
When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.
Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.
I go on to discuss various explanations for the correlation between degree of scientific achievement and atheism, and you can probably think of at least two. But of course scientists are human, and the fact that some of them believe in God or a “higher power” doesn’t give an iota of evidence for that higher power. Remember, scientists are far more atheistic than members of the general public.
In the end, though, the answer to Brooks’s title question is this: “You can keep an open mind, but as the lack of evidence becomes more pervasive, your mind should start closing.” In this case, the lack of evidence for God compared to the evidence for scientific phenomena that we can’t see directly should start making Brooks doubt the existence of God. Brooks should be even more hesitant because many phenomena previously not understood and thus touted as evidence for God —lightning, plagues, and so on—eventually yielded to empirical study. Revelation and faith are no way to find truth, and no way to find God, either.
When the existence of God likewise starts yielding to empirical study, then we can start thinking about Brooks’s claims. Right now they are just foolish, bespeaking an ignorance of the difference between science and religious faith. It should embarrass The Atlantic for having published this stuff.
45 thoughts on “More god-touting, this time in The Atlantic”
OMG! Now I’m sorry that I sent this article your way. (Lacking free will, I couldn’t help myself.) You must have been up all night writing this refutation. Thank you for using your platform to bring this insanity to everyone’s attention.
I couldn’t believe that the Atlantic would publish something so utterly terrible. It’s an embarrassment. But, there you go. News outlets and magazines are tripping over themselves to rekindle belief in the unbelievable. Pathetic.
Naah, it took about an hour. I have learned over the 16 years of this website how to think and write fast. Sadly, my brain is not as good as it was in, say, 2009.
More often than not, you create and write faster than I can read and understand.
Welp, people believe all kinds of crazy stuff based on faith and horrible reasoning. Seven percent of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows!
I just can’t fathom that Brooks didn’t find a way to shoehorn C. S. Lewis and the Trilemma into the volume.
Terrific column. It is curious that these pseudo-religious articles and books are coming out now.
There are a number of ways to look at the “Arthur Brooks fallacy”, but my suggestion is the confusion between “some of the things people believed in with little known evidence eventually turned out to be true” and gullibly believing “anything”
“God” falls in the general category of “Too Good to be True” and the Carl Sagan “extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence”.
However, agnostics can say that it’s not exactly that we don’t believe in God, but that from an Occam’s razor perspective he hasn’t made His existence “evident”.
It’s not clear to me that He wants to be worshipped anyway.
Wait just a second–as an Ordained Minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I resent this religious prejudice!
And, by the way, I am not alone–just in my small part of western New York state, there are 125 other FSM Ministers!
All praise His Noodliness!
Brooks’ argument can also be applied to anything: witches, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, telekinesis, even the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So what if there’s no evidence of them? There might be some special dimension or elusive sense which may give you evidence if you’re special but you’ll never get them if you don’t “open your mind”.
A terrific rebuttal to a tiresome argument.
Things like dark matter, dark energy, and quarks are not really invisible to us, since we detect them by means other than directly with our eyes. Taking dark matter as an example, we cannot see d.m. directly but we can see how it warps the passage of light thru space, and only space curved by gravity can do that. So the observed distortions of distant galaxies become our ‘other eyes’ that see dark matter, as it were. It’s a bit like how a camera filming in a different room takes the place of our eyes. We can’t directly see what is happening in the room, but we can later see what the camera recorded.
So these things are not really invisible to us since they are not invisible to our ‘other eyes’.
Meanwhile, for god or whatever, that is invisible in every sense, as god is only detected only thru the imagination and thru ignorance. And the invisible and the non-existent look exactly the same.
“[ Arthur C. Brooks ] is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023)”
This to me discerns this strain of thought as distinct from theology – namely, theosophy.
In a nutshell :
This is a trend with examples going back a long ways – making sounds like an off-the-shelf religion-as-we-know-it – but dialectically blending your own gnosis of “God” so as to subvert the faith, as it becomes deliberately unclear which “God” the gnostic means.
Oprah has pushed tons of New Thought Leaders (search that up) on her show including Deepak Chopra. The book title above ^^ is a red flag for Hermetic alchemy – creationism, building your life – as example, consider The Secret also pushed by Oprah. Here, though, there is a re-synthesis of “God” as-we-know-it to a New Age Religion-y one that sounds cooler than the old-fashioned one your poor, unenlightened ancestors followed.
Brooks and Winfrey really mean it (for that book title) – building your life – where you are the creator – Creationism but you’re God, controlling everything – theosophy … Sophisticated Theosophy(TM), perhaps, trying an appeal to empirical natural sciences brainiacs.
OK, not a nutshell, more like a hollowed-out tree stump.
I get that for some people god must exist, so that no matter how small the gap, he has to be in there, but I still wonder how people can continue to make the god of the gaps argument as the hole gets smaller and small, making god less and less meaningful.
“Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences . . .”
I wonder how many of those NAS members would publicly affirm that a woman is an adult human female—and how that percentage compares both to scientists at less prestigious institutions and to the public at large.
I understand your point and have no reason to doubt the data on the issue you discuss. But it’s worth remembering that the social pressure to conform one’s professed belief to peer-group expectations increases as one climbs the prestige pole and can distort these types of comparisons on other matters—and maybe on this one, though I suspect only at the margins.
All I know is that virtually every scientist I’ve met in my field (and in others, like Sean Carroll and Steve Weinberg) were diehard atheists. They were not pretending.
I wonder if the surveys were anonymous. In any case, even if a majority of scientists believed in God — which they probably did at one time — it makes no difference. It is not evidence of existence. So the response to Brooks’s final argument would be, so what?
I’ve heard that philosophers are notoriously atheist. But I don’t think they counted theologians as philosophers for the surveys 🙂
These super sophisticated arguments for the not necessarily non-existence of God can occasionally be interesting, but I don’t think the question of whether or not an entity for whom the word ‘God’ is a reasonable label is an interesting question.
There could be millions of entities for whom the word ‘God’ is a reasonable label. Aliens thousands of years ahead of us in technology, for example.
IMHO, the following are more interesting questions, and much harder to answer ‘rationally’:
Was the universe created by an entity that cares whether or not we believe in Him/Her/It?
Is there evidence for any specific God or Gods (as opposed to the abstract idea of God)?
I admit to taking too much pleasure in reading this excellent take-down. For a long time I have wondered how Brooks landed a regular column in the Atlantic. All of his columns I have read (I stopped reading them; the title of this one created a painful eye-roll) have been like “happiness” junk food: superficial and slight on scientific evidence of his grand conclusions. He must have something amazing going based on his impressive career. I just can’t figure out what that is based on his Atlantic work.
Disagree that a person’s religion and denomination are meaningless. It very much frames how they think about promoting their beliefs, or worse, forcing their beliefs on others. In the US, Catholicism has a history of trying to deny other’s rights, such as with birth control and abortion- all while protecting child abusers. Oprah is not strictly Baptist. She seems to be a Christian who is open-minded about multiple ways of approaching a spiritual life. I don’t agree with her beliefs, but I don’t see her voting for someone who wants to take people’s rights away.
Which Catholic principles does Arthur C. Brooks illustrate in the Atlantic piece?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. was answered by someone (approximately) “I do not want more things in my philosophy than there are in heaven and Earth.”
This sentence was uttered by a fictitious, early 17th century character in the belief that he’d been spoken to by the ghost of his murdered father, killed by poison administered through his ear, if my ageing memory is correct.
So, do the people who like this Hamlet quotation think that there really are ghosts calling for vengeance? If not, why not?
Recently I listened to a youngish Thai woman expressing with UTTER conviction her and her family’s several experiences of Thai ghosts and how they were more malign than NZ ghosts.
Great post, Jerry. Also, just for a moment in the explanation of the photo I almost understood a little about quantum physics – a very rare occurrence.
I appreciate your efforts! This wave of religious stuff — social contagion? Trendy in some circles, it seems. This country has been subject to waves of religious fever in times past. As others above stated, plenty of examples of people believing in what a woo/spiritual friend called — the invisible world. She wasn’t referring to anything that could be externally verified.
Mathematics popped up there, in the form of calculus, so let me put in my 0.0002 cents.
Mathematicians generally use the word “exists” to refer to all kinds of concepts. For example everybody’s favourite number, pi, is said to exist, as do all other numbers. The Ree simple groups exist (and were discovered — not invented — by an old professor of mine).
Now we can’t see any of those things and we never will, but that’s not an excuse for God, just like all those other scientific concepts you described.
PCC(e), an inconsequential correction to something you wrote:
Cosmonaut Gherman Titov wasn’t the first human in space. That was cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Titov was the fourth human to fly into space and the second to orbit the Earth.
I’m cynical, so the famous razor implies to me: chchng! 🤑
No joke that life is getting shittier for the masses…don’t we all feel that + data? Religion feeds off fear and distress- things going bad- hope for a better future. These god books are obviously in vogue and they all become bestsellers garnering all that that entails. chchng!
There is no data point that will falsify religious belief. You prayed and feel better? God did it. You prayed and feel worse? God is testing you or it is His will.
Scientific models incorporate elements “unseen,” but if predictions do not match observations, they are modified or discarded.
Ask a religious person: is there any event or discovery that would make you change your mind?
Plenty of religious persons have changed their mind; I’ve met quite a few for whom understanding evolution did the trick. Others have realized that the nature of the world doesn’t comport with their notion of an omnipotent and benevolent god. So yes, there are data that could falsify religion. Evolution, for example, falsifies the creation story of Genesis, and archaeology makes hash of the “flight from Egypt” story.
Agree with your argument. Brooks is out of his depth in the scientific world.
I have a particular interest in space travel so I note that Gherman Titov was the second human in space after Yuri Gagarin.
Good stuff, but how does absence of evidence become evidence of absence in this case?
There’s no way to test something that is not clearly formulated. So, theologians can easily circumvent your point by saying that human definitions never exhaust God. An absence of children with fatal cancers or other natural disasters would not be accepted (by believers) as a consequence of God’s presence, because the concept of God itself came out of a recognition of “evil” (or events that are unfortunate or undesirable)
Science has always been modest and has carefully restricted the ambitions of metaphysics. It had to give up on many traditional human questions and move on to what’s more realistically solvable. Atheists don’t dismiss God because they don’t see any evidence (encountering such an evidence would lead most rational atheists into believing they’ve gone mad), but because they don’t have any reasons to even entertain some beliefs. It’s purely pragmatic and a priori.
There’s no way to test something that is not clearly formulated.
That is right. And that is the point. Scientific thinking evolved to make precise and reliable statements about the natural world. What constitutes evidence is better defined, and the criteria for what qualifies as an explanation are more rigorous. Religious people also claim evidence for God: they see evidence for God all around them! The explanation for the universe and life is simple: it is God’s creation! These are extreme but not altogether uncommon examples. This kind of loose thinking can result in evidence for all kinds of things that even the same religious people might consider nonsense: other religions, for example. What counts for evidence, and what counts as an explanation are the points at issue. When people say that they lost faith in God they mean they lost faith in God as they have characterized Him. How do they know what God is like?
So, theologians can easily circumvent your point by saying that human definitions never exhaust God.
Yes! It’s easy because the standards of rigour that apply to scientific thinking do not apply to religious thinking. Theologians can, and frequently do, formulate theological defences against arguments assailing religion. The ideas of god and the creation are not well defined. To the extent that they are, one can examine them. Suppose that the statement is that if the Christian God exists, then there will be no birth defects (with some definition of what that means). Then a single such birth will prove that God does not exist. But that is not how religion works. Maybe our understanding of suffering and divine love is flawed. We don’t know the mind of God. That is how religion works.
The difference in standards means that people get to speak of religious truth as being different from scientific truth. They don’t want to speak of religious-neither-true-nor-false-nonsense because that would reflect badly upon them.
It’s purely pragmatic and a priori.
Despite the rather vague definition of god (any god), there are those who say what might convince them. Very brave of them. It might have been discussed here: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2010/07/07/what-would-convince-you-that-god-exists/
I recall the philosopher Dan Dennett being asked what would convince him of God. But I couldn’t find a reference to that interview.
The word ‘supernatural’ is fine to use loosely in ordinary conversation. But I don’t think it holds up to more rigorus scrutiny. But that matters not at all to the religious.
I don’t see anything new that is stated here. You’ve basically expanded on what I’ve said, but from the perspective of somebody who wants to act like a salesman of the scientific enteprise, or a purveyor of scientism, which would be an appropriate characterization of most new-atheists. Those who have actually made some fruitful impact on the development of scientific knowledge, or even the genuine underlabourers working in labs and so on, don’t feel the need to preach to people about the superiority of scientific method in advancing certain domains of human knowledge. They just do their work and think carefully before talking to ultra-religious people who are desperate and socially insecure. But I just want to point out one thing in what you’ve said:
“Suppose that the statement is that if the Christian God exists, then there will be no birth defects (with some definition of what that means). Then a single such birth will prove that God does not exist. But that is not how religion works”
That’s not how science works either. Science doesn’t advance by testing some propositions against observation of empirical regularities or just registering statistical invariances. It’s not just induction that’s involved in science. There are conjectures, revisions and extensions of theories, normative appraisal of why certain events seem typical while others seem atypical (and the explanation therein) and so on. Religions don’t even have the capacity to make such precise hypotheses to test them (as they have emerged as a social-moral heuristic of some sort), so the problem you’re identifying is a pseudo-problem.
I think there is a difference. My point is that scientific statements are precise enough that we have to take negative results seriously. In principle, a single event that directly contradicts a theory would have to be considered. The practical question would be if it really happened or if it was a measurement error.
OMG! Now I’m sorry that I sent this article your way. (Lacking free will, I couldn’t help myself.) You must have been up all night writing this refutation. Thank you for using your platform to bring this insanity to everyone’s attention.
I couldn’t believe that the Atlantic would publish something so utterly terrible. It’s an embarrassment. But, there you go. News outlets and magazines are tripping over themselves to rekindle belief in the unbelievable. Pathetic.
Naah, it took about an hour. I have learned over the 16 years of this website how to think and write fast. Sadly, my brain is not as good as it was in, say, 2009.
You’ve had a lot of practice at this.
“how to think and right fast”
Sometimes too fast! A trait many of us share.
LOL!
Classic!
I write faster in the comments than in the posts!
More often than not, you create and write faster than I can read and understand.
Welp, people believe all kinds of crazy stuff based on faith and horrible reasoning. Seven percent of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows!
I just can’t fathom that Brooks didn’t find a way to shoehorn C. S. Lewis and the Trilemma into the volume.
Perhaps they really don’t. There is hope.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/brown-milk-study-cows.php
Terrific column. It is curious that these pseudo-religious articles and books are coming out now.
There are a number of ways to look at the “Arthur Brooks fallacy”, but my suggestion is the confusion between “some of the things people believed in with little known evidence eventually turned out to be true” and gullibly believing “anything”
Flying Spaghetti Monster is too obvious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#/media/File:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage_HD.jpg
“God” falls in the general category of “Too Good to be True” and the Carl Sagan “extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence”.
However, agnostics can say that it’s not exactly that we don’t believe in God, but that from an Occam’s razor perspective he hasn’t made His existence “evident”.
It’s not clear to me that He wants to be worshipped anyway.
Wait just a second–as an Ordained Minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I resent this religious prejudice!
And, by the way, I am not alone–just in my small part of western New York state, there are 125 other FSM Ministers!
All praise His Noodliness!
Brooks’ argument can also be applied to anything: witches, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, telekinesis, even the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So what if there’s no evidence of them? There might be some special dimension or elusive sense which may give you evidence if you’re special but you’ll never get them if you don’t “open your mind”.
I was going to make that point but forgot to. Thanks!
A terrific rebuttal to a tiresome argument.
Things like dark matter, dark energy, and quarks are not really invisible to us, since we detect them by means other than directly with our eyes. Taking dark matter as an example, we cannot see d.m. directly but we can see how it warps the passage of light thru space, and only space curved by gravity can do that. So the observed distortions of distant galaxies become our ‘other eyes’ that see dark matter, as it were. It’s a bit like how a camera filming in a different room takes the place of our eyes. We can’t directly see what is happening in the room, but we can later see what the camera recorded.
So these things are not really invisible to us since they are not invisible to our ‘other eyes’.
Meanwhile, for god or whatever, that is invisible in every sense, as god is only detected only thru the imagination and thru ignorance. And the invisible and the non-existent look exactly the same.
emphasis added :
“[ Arthur C. Brooks ] is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023)”
This to me discerns this strain of thought as distinct from theology – namely, theosophy.
In a nutshell :
This is a trend with examples going back a long ways – making sounds like an off-the-shelf religion-as-we-know-it – but dialectically blending your own gnosis of “God” so as to subvert the faith, as it becomes deliberately unclear which “God” the gnostic means.
Oprah has pushed tons of New Thought Leaders (search that up) on her show including Deepak Chopra. The book title above ^^ is a red flag for Hermetic alchemy – creationism, building your life – as example, consider The Secret also pushed by Oprah. Here, though, there is a re-synthesis of “God” as-we-know-it to a New Age Religion-y one that sounds cooler than the old-fashioned one your poor, unenlightened ancestors followed.
Brooks and Winfrey really mean it (for that book title) – building your life – where you are the creator – Creationism but you’re God, controlling everything – theosophy … Sophisticated Theosophy(TM), perhaps, trying an appeal to empirical natural sciences brainiacs.
OK, not a nutshell, more like a hollowed-out tree stump.
Follow-up after looking around a bit :
“New Thought” is an older trend. E.g. Phineas Quimby, Franz Mesmer, William James (if those ring a bell).
Deepak Chopra is associated with the “Evolutionary Leaders” (sadly, PCC(E) is not 😆).
Oprah has promoted “Evolutionary Leaders”. I’d have to look further how I got “New Thought” connected to that.
There is one thing less in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in a purely religious philosophy.
I get that for some people god must exist, so that no matter how small the gap, he has to be in there, but I still wonder how people can continue to make the god of the gaps argument as the hole gets smaller and small, making god less and less meaningful.
“Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences . . .”
I wonder how many of those NAS members would publicly affirm that a woman is an adult human female—and how that percentage compares both to scientists at less prestigious institutions and to the public at large.
I understand your point and have no reason to doubt the data on the issue you discuss. But it’s worth remembering that the social pressure to conform one’s professed belief to peer-group expectations increases as one climbs the prestige pole and can distort these types of comparisons on other matters—and maybe on this one, though I suspect only at the margins.
All I know is that virtually every scientist I’ve met in my field (and in others, like Sean Carroll and Steve Weinberg) were diehard atheists. They were not pretending.
I wonder if the surveys were anonymous. In any case, even if a majority of scientists believed in God — which they probably did at one time — it makes no difference. It is not evidence of existence. So the response to Brooks’s final argument would be, so what?
I’ve heard that philosophers are notoriously atheist. But I don’t think they counted theologians as philosophers for the surveys 🙂
These super sophisticated arguments for the not necessarily non-existence of God can occasionally be interesting, but I don’t think the question of whether or not an entity for whom the word ‘God’ is a reasonable label is an interesting question.
There could be millions of entities for whom the word ‘God’ is a reasonable label. Aliens thousands of years ahead of us in technology, for example.
IMHO, the following are more interesting questions, and much harder to answer ‘rationally’:
Was the universe created by an entity that cares whether or not we believe in Him/Her/It?
Is there evidence for any specific God or Gods (as opposed to the abstract idea of God)?
Is that two questions? Or are you accepting as an implicit premise that the universe was created?
I admit to taking too much pleasure in reading this excellent take-down. For a long time I have wondered how Brooks landed a regular column in the Atlantic. All of his columns I have read (I stopped reading them; the title of this one created a painful eye-roll) have been like “happiness” junk food: superficial and slight on scientific evidence of his grand conclusions. He must have something amazing going based on his impressive career. I just can’t figure out what that is based on his Atlantic work.
What god is this guy peddling? I hope it’s not the monstrous god of the bible.
He is Catholic.
And Oprah Winfrey is a Baptist.
It is quite meaningless.
Gnostic cults advertise their orthodox elements to appease, and then tempt followers to join them.
Disagree that a person’s religion and denomination are meaningless. It very much frames how they think about promoting their beliefs, or worse, forcing their beliefs on others. In the US, Catholicism has a history of trying to deny other’s rights, such as with birth control and abortion- all while protecting child abusers. Oprah is not strictly Baptist. She seems to be a Christian who is open-minded about multiple ways of approaching a spiritual life. I don’t agree with her beliefs, but I don’t see her voting for someone who wants to take people’s rights away.
Which Catholic principles does Arthur C. Brooks illustrate in the Atlantic piece?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. was answered by someone (approximately) “I do not want more things in my philosophy than there are in heaven and Earth.”
This sentence was uttered by a fictitious, early 17th century character in the belief that he’d been spoken to by the ghost of his murdered father, killed by poison administered through his ear, if my ageing memory is correct.
So, do the people who like this Hamlet quotation think that there really are ghosts calling for vengeance? If not, why not?
Recently I listened to a youngish Thai woman expressing with UTTER conviction her and her family’s several experiences of Thai ghosts and how they were more malign than NZ ghosts.
Great post, Jerry. Also, just for a moment in the explanation of the photo I almost understood a little about quantum physics – a very rare occurrence.
Agreed, but I have heard the quotation used to justify a belief in the supernatural. That was my point.
I appreciate your efforts! This wave of religious stuff — social contagion? Trendy in some circles, it seems. This country has been subject to waves of religious fever in times past. As others above stated, plenty of examples of people believing in what a woo/spiritual friend called — the invisible world. She wasn’t referring to anything that could be externally verified.
Mathematics popped up there, in the form of calculus, so let me put in my 0.0002 cents.
Mathematicians generally use the word “exists” to refer to all kinds of concepts. For example everybody’s favourite number, pi, is said to exist, as do all other numbers. The Ree simple groups exist (and were discovered — not invented — by an old professor of mine).
Now we can’t see any of those things and we never will, but that’s not an excuse for God, just like all those other scientific concepts you described.
PCC(e), an inconsequential correction to something you wrote:
Cosmonaut Gherman Titov wasn’t the first human in space. That was cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Titov was the fourth human to fly into space and the second to orbit the Earth.
βPer
I’m cynical, so the famous razor implies to me: chchng! 🤑
No joke that life is getting shittier for the masses…don’t we all feel that + data? Religion feeds off fear and distress- things going bad- hope for a better future. These god books are obviously in vogue and they all become bestsellers garnering all that that entails. chchng!
And happy halloween! Ave Satanas 😈
Sagan’s invisible dragon aka Russell’s unseeable teapot https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/146437425361005537/
There is no data point that will falsify religious belief. You prayed and feel better? God did it. You prayed and feel worse? God is testing you or it is His will.
Scientific models incorporate elements “unseen,” but if predictions do not match observations, they are modified or discarded.
Ask a religious person: is there any event or discovery that would make you change your mind?
Plenty of religious persons have changed their mind; I’ve met quite a few for whom understanding evolution did the trick. Others have realized that the nature of the world doesn’t comport with their notion of an omnipotent and benevolent god. So yes, there are data that could falsify religion. Evolution, for example, falsifies the creation story of Genesis, and archaeology makes hash of the “flight from Egypt” story.
Just a thought, not an argument: the West is socially sick. Therefore ‘God help us!’
Agree with your argument. Brooks is out of his depth in the scientific world.
I have a particular interest in space travel so I note that Gherman Titov was the second human in space after Yuri Gagarin.
Good stuff, but how does absence of evidence become evidence of absence in this case?
There’s no way to test something that is not clearly formulated. So, theologians can easily circumvent your point by saying that human definitions never exhaust God. An absence of children with fatal cancers or other natural disasters would not be accepted (by believers) as a consequence of God’s presence, because the concept of God itself came out of a recognition of “evil” (or events that are unfortunate or undesirable)
Science has always been modest and has carefully restricted the ambitions of metaphysics. It had to give up on many traditional human questions and move on to what’s more realistically solvable. Atheists don’t dismiss God because they don’t see any evidence (encountering such an evidence would lead most rational atheists into believing they’ve gone mad), but because they don’t have any reasons to even entertain some beliefs. It’s purely pragmatic and a priori.
That is right. And that is the point. Scientific thinking evolved to make precise and reliable statements about the natural world. What constitutes evidence is better defined, and the criteria for what qualifies as an explanation are more rigorous. Religious people also claim evidence for God: they see evidence for God all around them! The explanation for the universe and life is simple: it is God’s creation! These are extreme but not altogether uncommon examples. This kind of loose thinking can result in evidence for all kinds of things that even the same religious people might consider nonsense: other religions, for example. What counts for evidence, and what counts as an explanation are the points at issue. When people say that they lost faith in God they mean they lost faith in God as they have characterized Him. How do they know what God is like?
Yes! It’s easy because the standards of rigour that apply to scientific thinking do not apply to religious thinking. Theologians can, and frequently do, formulate theological defences against arguments assailing religion. The ideas of god and the creation are not well defined. To the extent that they are, one can examine them. Suppose that the statement is that if the Christian God exists, then there will be no birth defects (with some definition of what that means). Then a single such birth will prove that God does not exist. But that is not how religion works. Maybe our understanding of suffering and divine love is flawed. We don’t know the mind of God. That is how religion works.
The difference in standards means that people get to speak of religious truth as being different from scientific truth. They don’t want to speak of religious-neither-true-nor-false-nonsense because that would reflect badly upon them.
Despite the rather vague definition of god (any god), there are those who say what might convince them. Very brave of them. It might have been discussed here: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2010/07/07/what-would-convince-you-that-god-exists/
I recall the philosopher Dan Dennett being asked what would convince him of God. But I couldn’t find a reference to that interview.
The word ‘supernatural’ is fine to use loosely in ordinary conversation. But I don’t think it holds up to more rigorus scrutiny. But that matters not at all to the religious.
I don’t see anything new that is stated here. You’ve basically expanded on what I’ve said, but from the perspective of somebody who wants to act like a salesman of the scientific enteprise, or a purveyor of scientism, which would be an appropriate characterization of most new-atheists. Those who have actually made some fruitful impact on the development of scientific knowledge, or even the genuine underlabourers working in labs and so on, don’t feel the need to preach to people about the superiority of scientific method in advancing certain domains of human knowledge. They just do their work and think carefully before talking to ultra-religious people who are desperate and socially insecure. But I just want to point out one thing in what you’ve said:
“Suppose that the statement is that if the Christian God exists, then there will be no birth defects (with some definition of what that means). Then a single such birth will prove that God does not exist. But that is not how religion works”
That’s not how science works either. Science doesn’t advance by testing some propositions against observation of empirical regularities or just registering statistical invariances. It’s not just induction that’s involved in science. There are conjectures, revisions and extensions of theories, normative appraisal of why certain events seem typical while others seem atypical (and the explanation therein) and so on. Religions don’t even have the capacity to make such precise hypotheses to test them (as they have emerged as a social-moral heuristic of some sort), so the problem you’re identifying is a pseudo-problem.
I think there is a difference. My point is that scientific statements are precise enough that we have to take negative results seriously. In principle, a single event that directly contradicts a theory would have to be considered. The practical question would be if it really happened or if it was a measurement error.