Christopher Beha‘s new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, appears to have gotten a lot of attention (including a guest essay in the NYT and a long essay in the New Yorker)—more attention than it deserves, I think—for several reasons. First, there’s a resurgence of books dissing “new atheism”, mainly because it doesn’t give us meaning, doesn’t fill the “God-shaped” hole that supposedly afflicts all of us. Second, the book makes the familiar argument that science itself (connected with atheism, it’s argued) is impotent at explaining consciousness, and the religious public loves to hear that science is stymied by such a problem (in the case of consciousness, it isn’t; the problem is just hard). Finally, Beha has name recognition because he was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine for four years.
I haven’t read the whole book, but I’ve read both of his articles above as well as other reviews, and I’m not impressed, as there’s really nothing new here. Still, I suppose that just as the arguments of atheism must be made repeatedly to enlighten each new generation, so the arguments against atheism must also be made again and again by believers. (I wonder, though, why, if New Atheism was such a dud, as many say, there are so many books going after it.)
Click below to read an archived version.
I’ve written on this website two critiques of excerpts and arguments from Beha’s book (here and here), and I just saw another negative review by Ronald Lindsay in Free Inquiry. Lindsay pretty much sums up the problems with the book in these paragraphs:
Building on his skepticism about science, Beha further argues that science cannot explain consciousness, which, for him, is a limitation that “proved fatal.” He states that science deals with material things, and because consciousness “is not material … not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge,” then “[b]y the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist.”
Wow, that’s several misstatements in the space of a few sentences. To begin, consciousness is not a “thing.” It’s a processing of information based on inputs from indisputably material things. And there are few, if any, scientists who claim consciousness is not real. Finally, there is overwhelming evidence that the processing of information that is consciousness is dependent on the existence of and proper functioning of our material brains, which science does study with increasing understanding. No, we do not yet have a complete explanation of how consciousness arises, but that is no justification for inferring there is some immaterial, spiritual reality beyond the reach of science.
Frankly, these arguments are so poor they seem like makeweights for Beha’s real beef with atheism: it doesn’t direct him how to live. Beha’s disenchantment with atheism began when he realized atheism didn’t answer the question “How should I be?” Atheism did not tell him “what is good.” As Beha states, most atheists hold that people decide for themselves how to live.
Here is the crux of the quarrel that many theists have with atheism. They believe atheism leaves them rudderless, thrown back on their own resources in forging a life with meaning and value. By contrast, they believe that God provides them with an objective grounding, with clear direction. They no longer have to decide for themselves.
No, atheism doesn’t tell us how to live. It’s simply a claim that there is no convincing evidence for divine beings, ergo we shouldn’t accept them, much less make them the centerpiece of our lives. If as a you want to find a way to live, you must go beyond that. Some people like Beha find it easy to slip into an existing religion, which comes ready-made with meaning. (But how do you know you’ve chosen the right or “true” religion?) Others do the harder work of thinking for themselves, with many atheists accepting secular humanism as a guideline, but interpeting it in their own way. Beha is apparently afflicted with doubt (he used to be an atheist), but has settled on Catholicism.
Parrales and the Atlantic are surprisingly appreciative of Beha’s glomming onto his youthful Catholicism. The last paragraph of the review is this:
Is it possible to understand Christianity as a bulwark against social change and still hold on to faith sincerely? I think so—Ali and Vance have elsewhere also reflected more personally on their conversions, for example. But describing one’s religion primarily as a tool to harken back to the past, or as a way to defeat your enemies, risks overlooking the humanizing power of belief. This is what makes Beha’s book so worthwhile, for showing how religion at its best offers more than a theory of cultural renewal. As his there-and-back-again story conveys, faith can foster humility, of the mind and of the heart, and a desire to see others with the love that they believe God sees in people.
Yes, religion gives us ready-made morality, comforting fictions, and, of course, a community of fellow believers. That’s about all the “meaning” it offers. As for its “humanizing” power, how does believing in fiction “humanize” you? Sure, you can cite the Golden Rule, but secularists have made the same argument. And there’s nothing in humanism that promotes misogyny, hatred of non-humanists, or the like—the ubiquitous downsides of religion. Was Parrales thinking of all religions when he wrote that, including Islam, Hinduism, fundamentalist Christianity, and so on? Are those “humanizing” faiths?
But Parrales emphasizes in his piece that Beha’s falling in love with a woman (curiously, an atheist who remains a nonbeliever!) is what brought him back to Jesus. We hear the usual arguments that stuff like “love” cannot be explained or understood by scientists, something that’s completely irrelevant to the evidence for gods. Perrales:
For Beha, though, falling in love was more than merely analogous to having faith; it was a catalyst. More than a decade after first reading Russell, he began seeing someone. It went poorly at first—he acted “wooden and self-conscious” and rambled about his literary ambitions while she nodded politely. (“She was not the kind of person who judged other people on what they did for a living,” Beha writes.) But once he changed course and tried to make her laugh instead, she taught him two things: that he could, and that he was “still capable” of both being happy and making another person so. Within a year, they were engaged.
That wasn’t the only change. He quit drinking. His depression receded. The thought of having kids, something he had previously written off as a futile act, now appealed to him. As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.”
The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin. Romantic idealism—Beha’s term for the belief of atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche that each individual must fashion meaning in a meaningless universe—could not contend with the fact that Beha hadn’t brought about his newfound sense of meaning on his own. It was external, at the mercy of someone else.
To Beha’s surprise, the Catholic faith that he thought he had left behind provided the meaning he was seeking. Inspired by medieval-Christian mysticism—a tradition that emphasizes contemplation and a “willingness to live with perplexity”—and the New Testament’s claim that God is not just loving but love itself, he started attending Mass once again.
Surprise! Beha found that Catholicism was a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece left. How convenient! Contemplation, of course, is not the purview of just Catholicism (many humanists meditate), and of course a scientific frame of mind (or rationality itself) mandates being a diehard skeptic. There are no bigger skeptics and doubters than scientists, for it’s a professional virtue.
There’s more, but I’ll add just one more bit. Perrales describes others, notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali and J. D. Vance, of also finding solace in religion, not because of its truth claims but because it’s a remedy for a “lack of meaning”
Take the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In 2023, after many years as a committed atheist, she described her conversion to Christianity as being motivated by a desire to “fight off” the “formidable forces” of authoritarianism, Islam, and “woke ideology.” She made no mention of Christ, or of love. At a 2021 conference, J. D. Vance described his conversion to Catholicism by saying, “I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” The British rapper Zuby posted on X a few years ago that “the West is absolutely screwed if it loses Christianity.” (The post received nearly 2 million views and earned a reply from Elon Musk, who said, “I think you’re probably right.”)
Parrales hasn’t done his homework, for, as I recall, Hirsi Ali did admit she accepted the tenets of Christianity. At first I couldn’t find the proof, but Grok gave me the evidence:
In a live debate with Richard Dawkins at the Dissident Dialogues Festival in New York on June 3, 2024 (hosted by UnHerd), Hirsi Ali explicitly addressed her acceptance of key tenets. When Dawkins pressed her on whether she believes in the virgin birth and Resurrection, she responded affirmatively to the latter, stating, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.”
She framed this as a deliberate choice rooted in her personal spiritual experience, including answered prayers during a time of crisis, which led her to embrace the “story of Jesus Christ” as a symbol of redemption and rebirth.
At any rate, I was sad to see The Atlantic boosting faith, and boosting it as a medicine that can give meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives.
If science can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t explain hunger either. Neither of those are material and subject to the kind of observation which materialistic science takes as the only basis of knowledge. Reductive accounts which flatten my craving for ice cream into a mere process in the brain are neither sufficient nor satisfying. They don’t really explain what is special about hunger. Or ice cream.
And we haven’t even started talking about the Hunger for God. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.
Science can tell us a lot about hunger — and ice cream.
Regarding the latter, it starts with taste buds in the tongue, which can detect sweetness, bitterness and various other aspects of flavour. Information on these is sent to the brain for further processing.
Science also knows a lot about hunger, which is why drugs like Ozempic can reduce it.
The issue here recurs over and over. People reject incomplete scientific explanations (often with little understanding of how much is understood) and opt for supernatural explanations based solely on a promise.
Invoking God doesn’t tell you anything about how hunger or taste work, nor about how consciousness works. It merely allows you to say “there is an explanation: God did it” while knowing nothing about that explanation. It is about intellectual comfort, not intellectual understanding.
I read this article the other day, as I am an Atlantic subscriber and visit the website often—sometimes only to be annoyed. When I read it, I thought it was awful. The point about consciousness not being explained made my eyes roll. Consciousness—and it’s not obvious that we should even reify it as a “thing”—is a function of the brain. Consciousness doesn’t exist without a brain, and it collapses when the brain is destroyed. And the “falling in love” stuff led me to conclude that the article—and perhaps the book (although I haven’t read it)—is utterly unserious.
But alas, it is important to call this stuff out, as there continues to be a ready audience for these kinds of apologetics.
If you’re an Atlantic subscriber, you must have been entertained by Heath W. Carter’s recent piece, Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism, which seemed to argue that what we need is more religion in public life.
I do not subscribe but maybe I can find it archived.
I think you can also fully access it on the Atlantic website: Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism.
If not, here is the archived version.
“Atheism (or science) cannot explain consciousness” is not the gotcha the religious think it is, because nor can anything else!
If some theistic or non-scientific way-of-knowing did have a convincing explanation of consciousess, whereas atheism/science did not, then that would be a good argument. But there is nothing such.
“God put it there” is not an explanation of consciousness (certainly it’s no better than “it evolved, evolution made us conscious”). And nor is “let’s explain consciousness by starting with consciousness (as embodied in God)”. Starting with what you’re trying to explain is not an explanation.
An honest gotcha would be: as yet, science has not explained consciousness. Which of course is not a gotcha
Yet Behar values a theocratic “willingness to live with perplexity” but not a scientific willingness to investigate perplexity?
New Atheism was not a dud. The collective writings were very helpful to many people including myself. Thanks for your contributions.
This column dovetails with the recent one on the relative rarity of “literal” Christians, who believe in the literal truth of the Nicene Creed and if Roman Catholic the totality of Catholic belief including the saints and dogma developed in the 1800s and 1900s relating to Virgin Mary.
This book and the Atlantic article play up angles where science has still not explained things rather than the plethora of religious beliefs which have been disproved.
There is some variation of New-Age Christianity being pushed here, which ignores inconvenient truths.
Exactly. Why do these people feel the need to be told how to live? That would be an interesting article.
Thank you for the link to the Ronald Lindsey review.
Beha seems to offer an argument that I associate with David Bentley Hart. “You can’t explain consciousness. I can, so I must be right.”
My favorite form of consciousness is unconsciousness, i.e., the dreams that come to
me in sleep. If this were to lead me to religion, I would worship Hypnos and Morpheus, the relevant Greek deities. But I’m not sure what would substitute for the Nicene Creed in this system of worship. I won’t find out until tonight, or some night.
The question is, why do we become unconscious in the first place (by getting knocked out, anesthesia, etc.) if consciousness is not only an emergent phenomenon of the neural networks in our brains but due to some “immaterial, spiritual reality” that just uses the brain as a sophisticated interface to remotely control our bodies like an FPV drone.
Shouldn’t this immaterial spirit thingy not still be conscious (just cut off from its bodily sensor system, i.e. a temporary locked-in syndrome)?
The times I have been truly® unconscious, involved di-isopropylphenol and perhaps a hint of fentanyl.
Yepp, had the same experience… if you can call it that, because I truly® didn’t experience anything.
Atheism explains everything. There is only the natural world. That is why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. The only meaning in anything is what we make for ourselves. We cease to exist when we die, that is why we never hear from the dead. Etc. It all makes perfect sense.
I don’t think we should give up prematurely on the “science tells [does not tell] us how to live” theme. If I want to live a long time, science has a lot to contribute. Vaccines? Science (if you’ll allow me to include my discipline, psychology) can even tell us some “determinants” of whether or not we want to live a long time … seems less strong in males if we’re to believe Darwin Award winners … genes or environment?
Many values entail choosing a course of action to achieve the end goals and science offers the promise of making more informed choices. And science also promises to help us understand the values themselves, including the role of religion. Why do seem people feel a need for a “supernatural meaning”? Science is the only way to answer that and myriad related questions.
It sounds to me as if some of the people quoted are uncomfortable with the solitude of not having faith. They prefer a belief that many other people also believe, something with history, with an organized dogma. Being alone without a supreme being or a community- even if it is a large group of complete strangers- can be frightening for many. They must believe the alternative to theism is nihilism.
In her book The Mattering Instinct, Rebecca Goldstein outlines a moral system derived from atheistic principles, so it’s wrong to say atheism can’t tell us “what’s good”. She tells us we all have an instinct to matter, and she describes the “geography” of mattering. She cites the current scientific understanding, that entropy is the natural order of the universe, that life is a struggle against entropy, and aiding that struggle is the basis for a moral system.
Umm. . . that is a moral system derived from several principles, not just a disbelief in god. Did you read what I wrote? I said “from atheism”. I did not add “and from other stuff too”. Also I said “how to live,” not “what’s good”.
There’s something sad in the spectacle of people intellectually regressing in the manner of Beha and getting rewarded by fawning attention in the press. He peddles a weak God-of-the Gaps argument to justify retreating into an intellectually unjustifiable faith that offers a pre-made morality. “God is my safety blanket” is the type of sentiment that would have been widely mocked in the years when “New” Atheism was riding high. But today’s culture is a therapy culture and treats safety blankets as holy.
Beha says falling in love made him religious (will falling out do the opposite, or lead to Satan worship?). Since he couldn’t accept a scientific explanation for what he was undergoing, he decided God is love. For all his cant about religion bringing humility, he shows his arrogance here, and how religion’s appeal is in boosting the ego. When Beha falls in love, it must not be a mere neurochemical process, no sir. GOD HIMSELF was really behind it, because God loves him! And now he can describe himself as a better person, not despite but because he has taken the intellectual regression of falling back into Catholicism. And he gets to collect book royalties from it too.
The idea that atheism is a reaction to a lack of love or a misinterpretation of sexual urges has long been an accusation made by believers upset that people start to question belief during adolescence. Pardon me while I barf, but this idea, standard back in the days when men judged guilty of adultery were sentenced to prison for two or three years of hard labor, now looks comical as open expressions of sexuality are pretty much the norm.
Christopher Beha sees loves as a feeling. His feeling grew when he discovered he could make his bride-to-be laugh. He makes atheists laugh too. Could his book about abandoning atheism be an expression of another feeling, perhaps a base desire for social acceptance and power?
What Beha loves… er… is money,
cynical yes.
We all like the stuff and writing fiction is as we know, a good way to get it.
The guy has been a cold fish for forever and a lady walks in and…. giddy as hell he declares god did it! Love story, and yes.
Unfortunately we have already seen that book and movie.
Atheism doesn’t explain how to bake a cake, change a tire, build a birdhouse, or anything else.. “Atheism” is not an explanation of anything at all, and does not claim to be. It is a description of a mental state, I.e. non belief. Beha fails to recognize that “God” isn’t an explanation either. God belief is a description of a mental state, i.e. belief, posing as an explanation built upon an unsupported assertion. “God did it” explains nothing. That otherwise intelligent people think this way never ceases to amaze me.
Parahrasing Ricky Gervais:
Atheism is very simple. You say there’s a God somewhere, and I (Gervais) say ‘OK, I don’t believe you.’
/paraphrase
There’s a video clip with his expressions that really makes this down-to-Earth and importantly, nearly non-confrontational.
PCC(E) :
“… the book makes the familiar argument that science itself (connected with atheism, it’s argued) is impotent at explaining consciousness, and the religious public loves to hear that science is stymied by such a problem …”
I’d give that a hearty 🎯
The interesting thing IMHO/thinking-fast is that this setup strikes me as – I want to say the same cheap epistemic spell – that Gnostics practice :
“Ooo, look – that thing you do? Yeah, well you didn’t look at all the problematics with it. But we did! It gave us special consciousness, so why not stop your struggle, and join our happy fun club that enjoys a heightened consciousness?”
I agree. Although religions such as Christianity may offer a sense of purpose and meaning, which some find comforting, this is not sufficient grounds for deciding what is the “truth”. The step of “faith” for many comes after a thoughtful decision-making process, one that builds upon a foundation of facts, evidence, and careful analysis and consideration. Thay’s why numerious Nobel Prize winning scientists are are able to take the sometimes uncomfortable last step of faith, and are able to identify as Christians.
I read this post about Beha’s book right after reading the post about the death of Bob Trivers (had a few WEITs to catch up on). It was so interesting to read how Beha’s main beef with atheism is it doesn’t tell him how to live, because when reading about the theories proposed by Trivers it is clear evolution does “tell” us how to live.