Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortedned to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning.. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read his article for free as it’s been archived. Click below if you want a lame justification for theism:
Beha, considering nonbelief after he gave it up in college, decided that there were two forms of atheism: a scientific form and a “romantic” form. Quotes from his article are indented below, though bold headings are mine,
Scientific atheism
Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.
The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.
As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.
Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.
Of course I don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses. The answer to that blockheaded objection is that yes, that’s right, but only the scientific method construed broadly (i.e. empirical work with testing or replication) actually WORKS. If you want to establish where typhoid comes from, and then prevent it or cure it, then you must use a secular, empirical method: science.
Now Beha admits that this world view does “work”. But then he says it has problems. Fur one thing, it doesn’t give you meaning, nor, he adds, does it explain consciousness:
If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.
Here the man is deeply confused. Of course subjective experience is “real” to the subject, but it’s very hard (“the hard problem”) to figure out how it arises in the brain. And denying that consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain (and elsewhere) is just wrong. We know it’s wrong, for we can affect consciousness by material interventions like anesthesia and psychological tricks, so the phenomenon must, unless it comes from God, be “material” in origin. Here Beha seems perilously close to Douthat saying that because science can’t explain consciousness, there must be a god.
Romantic atheism
Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.
Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.
Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.
But romantic atheism also fails to give us “meaning,” and Beha desperately wants and needs meaning!
A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt.
Once again we see Beha desperately looking for a world view that gives his life meaning—and happiness. That much is clear from not only the above, but from other stuff.
Beha wants “meaning”, and that meaning must come from faith (Some quotes)
Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
. . .After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.
I’m not sure how “faith”—Beha is curiously reticent to tell us what he actually believes—is supposed to provide us with an “absolute foundation”, unless you become a traditional theist who thinks that God interacts with you personally and that it is this God that gives your life meaning. But he won’t say that in clear, explicit terms. One hallmark of the new “liberal” religion is that it’s both fuzzy and slippery.
Beha goes on to argue that “liberals” (aka people who don’t buy Trump) adhere to both forms of atheism, but, in the end, to ground not just life but also society requires theism, for theism is our only source of “rights”:
Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.
. . .Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.
“Our status as creatures of God”? How does he know there is a God? Is it because science can’t explain emotions and other subjective experiences—that we don’t understand consciousness? In the end, Beha apparently thinks there’s a God because it makes him feel better, and gives his life meaning.
Well, good for him! But there are plenty of us who derive “meaning” as a result of doing what we find fulfilling and joyful (see this interesting post and thread). I, for one, never pondered the question “what must I do to give my life meaning?” That meaning arose, as for many of us, as post facto rationalization of doing what we found to be fulfilling.
At any rate, this is a curiously anodyne essay, absolutely personal and not generalizable to the rest of humanity. It is the story of a journey, but one that ends with embracing a god for which there’s no evidence. Excuse me if I can’t follow that path.
*************
Beha, clearly flogging his newfound theism, has a guest essay in the Feb. 11 NYT, “My conversion to skeptical belief” (archived here), which emphasizes that his beliefs are inextricably intertwined with doubt, and so he repeats what many believers have said before. An example:
In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.
What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.
Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.
. . . To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.
What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend.
Of course the worldview of humanism could yield the same results, except you needn’t ground your acts and beliefs in a Sky Daddy. Why must actions be somehow grounded in the supernatural instead of in a philosophy that you should be kind and helpful to your fellow humans?
h/t Barry
Why would anyone put in any time or effort debating this? It is beyond debate and is the modern equivalent of wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Umm. . . you’re telling me I’m wasting my time? Sorry, but I write about what I want, and this article got widespread publicity and needs to be answered.
I always bristle at the comment that “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” In response I generally ask the speaker whether he has enough “faith” not to believe in leprechauns and vampires.
I think what they really mean is that they aren’t brave enough. Brave enough to tell other people they don’t believe. Brave enough to face the existential crisis.
Atheism isn’t a faith. It’s a lack of faith. The oxymoronic title is probably meant to be an erudite joke, accessible only to the lettered cognoscenti. Typical New Yorker fare.
And I don’t understand this obsession with “meaning.” Does such a thing even exist so as to require explanation at all? I don’t think so, and it’s completely over the top to assert that life’s “meaning” is the province of the divine.
Agree all-round with your concise comment. I thought the same about the title. “Aren’t We Clever.”
I believe existence must have meaning — if not there is no reason to be good – therefore I decide there must be some kind of God = I am a rational, sceptical believer.
Follow the logic, if you can.
Hmmm, there does not seem to be any logic there to follow.
🤷
So up until the moment God handed Moses the 10 Commandments, the Israelites were under the presumption that murdering is fine? C’mon, we are smart, we can figure out ways to behave without argument from authority. On the contrary, it’s often those who want to act in immoral ways that need religion to justify it.
I suspect you’re correct about the title’s jocular intent, but still, it comes dangerously close to those who (used to?) assert that “secular humanism is a religion”; the once-towering New Yorker may now want it both ways. How the mighty have tumbled!
It may be an erudite joke, but the author does argue that atheism is a kind of faith, since you can’t support “scientific atheism” from first principles.
Perhaps I could be described as a reality-based non-theist. I really do feel sorry for the folks who cannot find meaning and purpose in their lives without their particular god/religion.
Lincoln tells the story of a woman who wants some fresh beef from the butcher. He says to her, ‘madam’ we’ve butchered a beef just this morning.’ ‘The whole thing?’
‘Yes, we never butcher less than the whole animal.’
Beha and his ilk should just ‘go the whole hog’ (to change the mammal in question):
take your Christianity all the way: timor mortis conturbat me, so I and my cat Pascal will depend on salvation and heaven.
Instead, they bleed out religion until it’s nothing more than a post-UU mental game. Anodyne, like the first sip of a first glass of wine (and not even red wine).
Again, the use of the term belief is very slippery. I “believe” that there is no such thing as the super-natural, by which I mean, that, looking at the last 500 years of growth in human knowledge of the world, I am convinced that there is no such thing. But to say. “After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view. . .”, well, no atheism or materialism or naturalism isn’t a World View, and the championing of one’s own truth, or antinomianism, isn’t going to lead to one. The quest for meaning is just left over theism.
I don’t understand what being progressive or “uber-progressive” has to do with being soft on religion, especially since “uber-progressives” are pretty doctrinaire about a lot of other stuff. My impressive is that if you are a ‘liberal’ theist and vote Democrat, your behavior in practice likely aligns with humanists. Exactly how Ross Douthat fits in seems different.
As a scientist one should be skeptical. One can be unsatisfied with atheism and the limits of scientific understanding. But Sagan and Hitchens have noted, the super-extraordinary claims of religion are not, on inspection, found to be based on reliable evidence.
As PCCE notes, advances in medicine and technology vindicate the scientific approach. There really isn’t an alternative. Cognitive dissonance for the theists.
Well, the progressive MSM is becoming increasingly pro-religion. I do not understand the connection myself, but others have seen the same thing I have.
I am puzzled as well by the link between the far-left political people and this strange desire to promote religion. My guess is that these folks fail to realize that religion is almost never about a search for “meaning.” Among most religious people in most human generations, religion has been an effective form of behavior control. Religion is the community telling the individual what to believe and how to behave, on threat of complete shunning, or partial behavioral restrictions, or sometimes worse threats, such as violence (in this life and the next life). But the people on the far left, who have the leisure time for thinking about “meaning,” assume that all religion is really about “meaning.” Only a small percentage of religious people spend much time on that question.
“Purpose in life” and “Finding meaning in life” is truly very religious–going on the fundamentalist, literal interpretation of the Bible, radio station my Christian landlady listens to. I hear it every morning.
Perhaps it’s their surreptitious way of justifying their cozying up to Islamism, i.e., disguising it as a quasi-universalist belief?
To the progressive intelligentsia, religion is just another form of therapy, and many progressives have succumbed to therapy culture: Religion is the ultimate “safe space.” To such people it’s also a form of self-actualization as valid as changing one’s gender, and so on.
Additionally, people like Beha, being liberal arts majors, tend to know very little about science but have a great suspicion and jealousy of scientists, since the scientist has far more impact on the world than the average writer for The New Yorker. But the Behas of the world want to feel deep and have a sense of self-importance, so they recoil from “scientific materialism” for supposedly being reductionist and shallow. The religion-friendly intelligentsia usually views science only in negative terms, for its capacity to damage the world. They rarely acknowledge, let alone celebrate, the scientific achievements that allow them to lead pampered lives.
Lastly, we’re living in age where intellectuals are all about caring for the
disadvantaged and “marginalized,” and they view religion as important to “the little people” and the oppressed. One must not insult the ultimate form of therapy for the marginalized! And progressives like Beha consider themselves marginalized and helpless in the age of Trump and other evils, so they’re turning to religion for a source of certainty and uplift. Of course their version of religion is usually a woolly, non-codified set of beliefs designed to feed their sense of self-importance and deepness—Beha’s God caters to progressive intellectuals and probably is one too. In any case, it’s sad to see The New Yorker publish such rubbish. It makes me long for the days of Thurber and Perelman.
I think it reflects attempts of squishy-minded leftie “liberals” to resolve their cognitive dissonance when confronted with the aggressive stance of Islam, which they do not understand in the least.
New Atheism is seen as islamophobic! This was much less true during the presidency of George Bush. Democrats might also be aware that their African-American voters tend to have a strong faith. Latin American immigrants are also not hostile to religion.
The progressive coalition that ascribed the evil of Republicans to their belief in Jesus no longer holds. Despite most Evangelicals voting for Trump, religion has not been an important topic in recent elections. As in the days before the New Atheists, intelligent people have little use for faith but find it rude to admit that.
Ohfercryinoutloud. The article is based on one of the most thoughtless of fallacies I’ve encountered. Atheism is a faith? Bah. It’s is a faith like baldness is a hairstyle.
Brilliant! I’m using this. My apologies if I fail to cite you, but when “baldness is a hairstyle” goes viral, the original source will recede (like a hairline).
And don’t forget: “Atheism is a faith like abstinence is a sex position.”
HA! Its an oldie but a goodie. Ed (as he often does) beat me to the punch here!
D.A.
NYC
– very bald, very atheist. 🙂
Right. It’s one I’ve always liked because what this guy claims he’s done gets my knickers in a twist. He hasn’t lost a faith, what he’s done is gained a delusion.
My opinion is that this need to believe is based on two things: fear of death and need for an external authority. The idea that once we die, it is all over, is unsettling. It is difficult for me to imagine that I- my consciousness- will cease to exist. That is how many religions comfort believers: it’s never over. You will still exist after you die. Admittedly he did not discuss this aspect in these excerpts; I would be curious to know what his beliefs are. It is unseemly to suggest you are interested in everlasting life rather than Meaning, but this is a promise of Christianity and other religions.
As to the Big Question of Meaning: theism requires an external authority to supply answers to these difficult questions about existence. This authority provides a steady reassurance, the rock that stabilizes the terror of answering those questions for oneself. This all-powerful authority will guide you, is universally true, you need only to embrace the mystical other way of knowing: this is deeply calming.
I can understand the first – the thought of no longer existing is scary (although, to paraphrase Mark Twain, you won’t suffer the slightest inconvenience from it) – but the second just seems to outsource the responsibility for meaning-making from yourself to another (fictitious) person.
And what exactly is this meaning that religion supposedly provides? Is it the idea that if you’re “good” you get to spend the rest of eternity in some sort of a religious stupor worshipping your god, apparently indifferent to the fact that some of your friends and relatives are likely being tortured in hell for the same eternity?
What about the offer of 72 cute female virgin sex slaves to enjoy forever? Maybe that’s why Islam is on the rise – it offers a better deal in the afterlife! (for men anyway – 72 virgin males is probably not a very enticing prospect for most women)
Tell them the catch is that they can’t have sex with them because those 72 women must remain virgins for all eternity, and if the guy tries to have sex with any of them he goes straight down to Hell. Or maybe it really is a mistranslation and what they really get is just 72 raisins — to sustain themselves with for the rest of eternity.
I’ve seen footage of Islamic preachers telling young men that they will have permanent erections in Paradise to use on their 72 virgins any time they wish, so your interpretation does not seem to be the norm. But I agree it would be great if the “72 raisins” interpretation gained currency in the Islamic world – perhaps there would be fewer suicide bombings!
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”
-John Dewey
A Common Faith
Yale University Press
1934
People who find God or embrace religion because it’s more emotionally satisfying have given up some high moral ground. If they’ve abandoned the pursuit of truth for the Big Question which provides the foundation for their life, who are they to object when others adopt a similar position for the little things?
What, Trump lied? But he and his Republican allies find this new world view so much more meaningful than the one lacking this leap of faith. There’s a public movement striving to undermine the basic conclusions of your field of expertise? Well, have you thought about it from their perspective and appreciated how they benefit? Truth? La di da, we don’t care.
I don’t think a “livable world view” which can’t actually be applied to life is either true or useful.
Discussion of “meaning” always reminds me of “turtles all the way down.” If God supplies us meaning, where does God get his or her meaning?
P.S. I loved the comments about atheism, baldness, and abstinence.
And if having meaning requires belief in a creator, then an uncreated God can’t have have any meaning to his existence — poor fella.
There is this curious belief held among many religious people that life without faith in God cannot have meaning. It seems to me that that opinion can only arise from a rather limited list of friends. I am a scientist, and count among my scientific colleagues/friends people who are atheists as well as those who are believers. All of them know full well that those on the other side of the line do not lack meaning in their lives because of their beliefs. Did Francis Crick lack meaning in his life? How about Richard Feynman?
I have a theory, which isn’t mine, that a certain class of people will always rebel against whatever is. Once upon a time, they would rebel against whatever the broader society held dear. But as social circles have become more homogeneous, with people living, learning, and working mostly among people of their own socioeconomic class, the broader society has lost relevance to them. A subclass of the rebels only compares themselves to those who matter—the ones in their circles. And yet they still rebel.
The itch to always chase some new thing doesn’t fade with either their successes or failures. Nor does it matter that, like adolescents, they all tend to play the same tunes. What matters is that they are in opposition to the “adults” in the room, who, in their eyes, have become the new conformists, clinging to the conventions of their particular social class. All this is to say, this is where the rebels find their meaning—at worship in the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Opposition.
I cannot, of course, know whether Beha attends the congregation, but he is clearly writing for its bulletin.
“Being an atheist didn’t give my life meaning, so I became a theist.” I’ve never understood this statement. Can someone really decide to believe in God because it feels more convenient? If so, how does one accomplish that?
Also, it seems you’d have to add a belief in immortality; otherwise, your life has no meaning even if God exists. Again, how do you go about that?
I’m going to look up how old this article’s writer is, but I was struck that one of his chief complaints seems to be that it’s hard work to find “meaning” (still not really sure what almost anyone means by this) in life.
Aw buddy, I’m sorry some things are hard.
It’s such an immature and, frankly, whiny “problem”. I’m unimpressed by anyone who finds the actual fact of their existence–of getting the chance to see this world and discover a way to want to be in it–an empty task.
Certainly there are physically, intellectually, and emotionally difficult things in life. This strange preoccupation with “crisis of meaning” seems pretty indistinguishable to me from malingering.
He’s 46. Definitely a pitiful problem for a man his age. Goodness.
Hope is more important than meaning. I believe life has no meaning, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as knowing there’s no justice in the world—and there won’t be any in the afterlife either.
At heart, I suspect the correct model here is theism first then “rational” justification rather than reason leading to theistic beliefs, which is how the author and others present it. Allows someone to maintain the illusion that they are a rational, skeptic, logical, … person who nonetheless believes because it is reasonable to do so. Here the author believes there must be meaning in life, which seems to be interpreted at the outset as something beyond ourselves. He looks (not too hard) for this supranatural meaning in various a-theistic worldviews and not finding it, concludes it must be somewhere else, in theism. Low and behold, my belief in supranatural meaning is justified without compromising my belief that I am a rational person. I can have my cake and eat it too!
“My life has lost its meaning!” = “I don’t feel important!”
Surprising how well this equation works.
Related to your reaction is ‘Life is not important’ which I never hear religious people saying.
It’s hard to understand how pretending to believe in religious dogma you know to be false can help, but some people claim it works. It leads to a better life. Nevertheless, the point is that scientific materialism is true and religion is false. What works does not always give us what’s true. But if we “don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses” and rely only on “the scientific method construed broadly… actually WORKS”, then we have lost our advantage over religion. We end up with something like Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria–– science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry and there is no conflict between them. Beha agrees that science works, but questions whether that proves that scientific materialism is true.
The “belief in god gives meaning to life” is, by any rational analysis, aggressively stupid. It’s like admitting you need to be someone’s plaything to have “meaning”. No one has ever given a coherent answer to how believing in any god can possibly give life meaning — mainly because there is no answer to that question that makes any sense. We are not here to be “tested” to see if we are good enough to be either tortured for eternity for not believing in god or to be tortured for eternity by being forced to sing god’s praises forever and ever. Beha clearly had a mental breakdown, IMO.
Beha’s (now lost) faith in atheism is just another form of religious thinking. No wonder then that he’s losing faith in it. Philosophic and scientific materialism contend that it is we who make the gods and human spirituality and that the proverbial gods are made in our own image. That is, we project onto our creations a lot of our own needy and nasty stuff – DSM class psychotic disorders/narcissistic and anti social personality disorders writ large. Existential issues, the desire for meaning? Absolutely. But we create these, the gods do not dump them in our laps. If there are political/social etc obstacles preventing or undermining the development of meaning, look for fellow travelers, unite with them and pick up the gauntlet, because there you are likely to find/enhance meaning.