Category: atheism

Once again, the superstitionists proclaim the death of New Atheism—and atheism in general

March 26, 2026 • 11:30 am

The oxymoronically-named Union of Catholic Christian Rationalists (UCCR) has joined the yammering pack of believers that keeps telling us that New Atheism has died, when, in fact, it did its job and then moved on. It’s like saying that suffragism failed and has died out!  The New-Atheist-dissers are trying desperately to explain the failure of a phenomenon that not only succeeded in changing minds, but whose proponents, no longer consumed by a need to point out the lack of evidence for gods, have moved on to other things.

You can read this tripe by clicking the UCCR articlebelow. Excerpts are indented, and my own comments are flush left. The piece is also archived here in case they want to correct stuff like their mis-naming of Rebecca Watson.

Here’s their intro (bolding is theirs):

Why did New Atheism fail?

Numerous observers have tried to explain the astonishing failure of new atheism, despite a society that was intellectually lazy, affluent, and consumerist, and that agreed with them on everything: the supposed anachronism of religious thought, the bigotry of moral judgments, the violence generated by religions, and the unhealthy mixing of politics and religion.

And yet, as the rationalist Scott Alexander observed, “in the bubble where no one believes in God anymore and everyone is fully concerned with sexual minorities and Trump, it is less painful to be a Catholic than a fan of Dawkins.”

Indeed, Alexander continues, only in the case of “New Atheism”, “modern progressive culture turned toward the ‘new atheists’ and, seeing itself, said: ‘This is truly stupid and annoying.’”

UCCR was born precisely during the years of fame of the “new atheists,” out of the need to provide a tool for believers “surrounded” by opinion-makers, intellectuals, and journalists. We followed the evolution of the phenomenon and its deflation, despite predictions that it would dominate the scene.

Having familiarity with the topic, we suggest five decisive factors to explain the disastrous end of “New Atheism.”

They are of course more biased against atheism than they are familiar with the topic.  I’ll condense the five factors; there is more text at the site:

1.) The election of Obama

It may seem incredible, but former U.S. President Barack Obama delivered the first major blow to the “new atheists.”

First of all, his election removed the “common enemy” that had ensured unity within the movement.

Before 2008, the glue binding activists was the much-hated conservative George W. Bush. Biologist PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins (today bitter enemies) appeared together publicly to oppose Bush and became idols celebrated by the progressive establishment.

Secondly, the Obama administration—supported by major media and cultural circles—pulled the rug out from under them: it reshaped American (and thus Western) culture by making criticism of Islam politically incorrect.

In fact, “New Atheism” emerged in the aftermath of September 11, and for years Islam was the preferred tool for generalizing about religious violence.

Under Obama, however, it became a minefield, and the first to step on it were two leading figures, Sam Harris and Michael Onfray, who began to be viewed negatively and portrayed as racists even by progressive media.

Obama was elected in 2008 and, as you see below, America’s rejection of established religion was well underway by then.

2.) Rejection by the academic world.

After the publication of his bestseller “The God Delusion” (2006), Dawkins, together with the other “horsemen,” began to denigrate agnostics and “moderate atheists,” accusing them of tolerating religious opinions and refusing to take sides.

Over time, the entire academic world was accused of cowardice for not joining the attack on religion. One example was Coyne’s media campaign against the agnostic historian Bart D. Ehrman, author of works defending the historicity of Christ.

Another emblematic case was the media pressure by Sam Harris in the New York Times and against the scientific community to prevent the Christian geneticist Francis Collins from remaining head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The attempt of “New Atheism” to enter and influence the academic world was explicitly stated at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference.

But the resounding failure was confirmed by the deep embarrassment expressed by non-believing academics themselves. For example, Nobel laureate Peter Higgs stated: “The problem with Dawkins is that he focuses his attacks on fundamentalists, but clearly not all believers are like that. In this sense, I think Dawkins’ attitude is fundamentalist, from the opposite side.”

Having lost the academic world, all their visibility depended entirely on media support, which gradually began to crumble, as seen above.

In fact, in the last relevant survey I could find, published in 2010, 23% of American college professors were agnostics and atheists, compared to just 4% of the American public. If there were no reporting bias, the rate of nonbelief among university academics is about six times higher than that of the American public in general. Once again, the authors of this dire piece are not using data as evidence, but simply ad hominem arguments—mostly detailing people’s criticisms of Dawkins and Sam Harris. But given the continuing rise of “nones” (which may have hit a temporary plateau but has not decreased), these are post hoc rationalizations. As faith slips away from Americans, it’s not enough for religionists to hold on to their personal beliefs—they need the support of like-minded people to make them think they’re on the right track.

I should add that as I quote and document in Faith Versus Fact, American scientists are 41% atheists, with only 33% believing in God (the other didn’t answer or were “spiritual”). If you look at more accomplished scientists, the rate of atheism rises to nearly 100%. It’s simply dumb to think that academics as a lot have rejected New Atheism.

3.) The response of believing intellectuals

Another reason for the decline of “New Atheism” lies in the entry into the debate of various Christian scientists, philosophers, and thinkers.

A new generation of believing intellectuals succeeded in presenting reasonable arguments in support of faith, showing that the “New Atheists” spent much of their time constructing straw-man arguments about religion, only to knock them down.

In his books, for example, Richard Dawkins strongly opposed a god that no one has ever believed in: the famous “god of the gaps”.

Some of these Christian intellectuals engaged directly with “New Atheism” by publishing books explicitly opposed to it, catching irreligious activists off guard. Among them:

  • John Lennox, emeritus professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, author of “God’s Undertaker”;
  • Amir D. Aczel, professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, author of “Why Science Does Not Disprove God”;
  • Francis Collins, renowned geneticist, author of “The Language of God”;
  • Kenneth R. Miller, emeritus professor of biology at Brown University, author of “Finding Darwin’s God”;
  • Owen Gingerich, emeritus professor of Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University, author of “God’s Universe”;
  • Arthur Peacocke, theologian and biochemist at Oxford, author of “Paths From Science Towards God”.

More briefly, we also mention philosophers Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Robert Spaemann, Roger Trigg, Richard Swinburne, and Richard Schroder; physicists Gerald Schroeder, John Polkinghorne, and Russell Stannard; and sociologist Rodney Stark.

I have to laugh when I look at that list of names.  While Ken Miller, who’s circumspect about exactly what he believes, is a good scientist and textbook writer, I’ve look at the beliefs of most of these people either on this website or in Faith Versus Fact. I usually don’t count theologians as intellectuals because most of them adhere to an unevidenced superstition—that there’s a God.  They are academics with a delusion.  If you want to take frozen waterfalls as evidence for God, for example, read Francis Collins. Or, for a good laugh when you want reasons why people think that Jesus was Lord, read the “evidence” used by C. S. Lewish. For every name they give above, I could give the name of five real intellectuals who are atheists.

This next one’s a corker, and even mentions me:

4.) The “Elevatorgate Scandal”

In 2011, a minor dispute about the behavior of participants at an atheist convention became known as “elevatorgate” and sparked the first major internal feud among irreligious activists online.

Feminist Emma Watson was sexually harassed in an elevator and publicly reported it, but was rebuked by leaders of “New Atheism” for risking negative publicity for their movement.

This episode marked the beginning of a break between the movement and feminism.

The situation worsened when Richard Dawkins made sexist remarks about the victim, hosted on the blog of PZ Myers. The community split between feminists and Dawkins supporters.

At that point, PZ Myers turned against Dawkins, labeling him racist and Islamophobic, alongside Sam Harris.

The media amplified everything and even named Dawkins among the worst misogynists of the year—a devastating blow to the movement.

Gradually, more commentators began to turn against the “priests of atheism”. Biologist Jerry Coyne tried for a time to defend Dawkins and Harris but eventually burned out. Today, much of his blog focuses on cats. . . .

First of all, “Elevatorgate” involved Rebecca Watson, not the actress Emma Watson. Do your homework, Christians! But beyond that, no, Elevatorgate did not make people start believing in God again, or erode the increase in nonbelief, as you can see by looking at the years around 2011 in the two plots below. It was a tempest in a teapot, and there’s not a scintilla of evidence that it buttressed faith, stemmed the rise of atheism, and so on. It just led some people who already hated Dawkins to criticize him even more.

As for me being “burned out” and focusing on cats, that’s ludicrous. I’m as atheistic as ever, and still promulgating it, as I am in this piece. But after I spent three years researching and writing Faith Versus Fact, I grew weary of banging the same old drum, and decided to bang it only when necessary, for example when this moronic article came out. As for “focusing on cats”, you be the judge. Sure, I write about them, but they’re by no means in every post I put up.

And, god help me, we have the last one:

5.) Richard Dawkins

The creator himself turned out to be the worst cause of his creation’s demise.

Richard Dawkins was the most prominent figure, a YouTube celebrity and tireless preacher. After “elevatorgate,” however, he became a target of internal criticism.

His downfall, however, came with social media—especially Twitter. Without editorial filtering, the zoologist revealed aspects of himself that had previously remained hidden.

With nearly a million followers, his sexist and racist remarks, his defense of “mild pedophilia”, encouragement of infidelity, and criticism of mothers who give birth to children with Down syndrome did not go unnoticed.

For years he has become a mockery online, especially after opposing the transgender movement.

According to Vice, “he has dishonored atheism”. His books have flopped, and even his most important scientific theory, the “selfish gene”, has been challenged by physiologist Denis Noble.

Yes, people have found plenty of “reasons” to go after Richard Dawkins, and he’s become the lightning rod for believers who hate atheism.  But nowhere in those criticisms, or in this very piece, do we see any refutation of Richard’s main reason to be an atheist: lack of evidence.  One would think that a genuine reason for rejecting atheism is that new evidence for a personal god has appeared. It hasn’t, and even a new line of anti-atheistic arguments, Intelligent Design, has come to nothing.

As for Dawkins’s books flopping, I’d suggest the authors look up the sales of The God Delusion, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Blind Watchmaker, and others. All of them were bestsellers, and all gave arguments against religious belief.

Here’s the summary of the piece:

Primatologist Frans De Waal accused the “new atheists” of being “obsessed with the non-existence of God, going on media campaigns, wearing T-shirts proclaiming their lack of faith, and calling for militant atheism.”

But he also asked: “What does atheism have to offer that is worth fighting for in this way?”

This is the question that remains. Defining oneself as “anti-” allows only limited survival; without offering meaningful answers to life’s meaning, failure is inevitable.

Philosopher Philippe Nemo wrote a remarkable epitaph for “New Atheism,” which we reproduce in full:

“Despite attempts to eradicate Christianity, atheism has died a natural death; it was not killed, since the modern world has given—and continues to give—it every opportunity to defend its cause and offer humanity new reasons for living. Opportunities wasted, because it failed to keep its promises, did not fulfill the intellectual programs that constituted its only attraction, and did not succeed in showing that man is less miserable without God than with God.”1.

This is ridiculous, of course. First, nobody, including the Great Satan Richard Dawkins—thinks of atheism as something that gives their life meaning.  It is simply a lack of belief in gods: an abandonment of religious superstition.

And what were the “promises” that New Atheism made? None, as far as I can tell. They maintained only that if you accept things based on evidence, you’re not going to embrace religion. And as the power of science grows (it’s one reason people give for leaving religions), so the grip of belief loosens.

The rise of nonbelief in America is documented in the two plots below, one from Pew and the other from Gallup. The plots (summaried in The Baptist News!) show the rise of the “nones”—people who don’t embrace an established church—as well as the fall of the ‘not-nones,” that is, people who do adhere to an established church.

Yeah, nonbelief has really fallen in America since the first New Atheist book (by Sam Harris) in 2004. NOT!

One question for readers:

Why are so many people eager to proclaim the death of New Atheism?

This is a Gallup plot:

And a Pew plot:

Atlantic: What atheism (supposedly) can’t explain

March 15, 2026 • 11:30 am

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.

Here’s the video, so check for yourself, (start 7 minutes in). Hirsi Ali is reluctant to admit her specific beliefs, perhaps because it’s embarrassing.  I don’t get the “I choose to believe” claim. Because you “choose” to believe what you find consoling doesn’t make it true!
As I recall, the audience in this debate was firmly on Ayaan’s side, but I haven’t listened to this debate for several years.

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.

The New York Times highlights faith again

March 2, 2026 • 10:45 am

Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist. 

What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.

Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post  “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.”  I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author.  From my post:

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 shortened 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 the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets).  Stuff like this roils my kishkes:

Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:

Timothy Egan is the author of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith,” among other books, and a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.

So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them.  And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.

As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15.  As reviewer Egan says:

As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”

Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:

In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.

This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.

But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:

Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.

He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”

But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)

But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning.  Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.

Egan:

Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?

I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism.  The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:

Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.

If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.

“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”

The proper response to this conclusion is “meh”.

A New Yorker writer “loses faith in atheism”

February 15, 2026 • 10:15 am

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

 

God: celestial dictator or kindly father?

February 3, 2026 • 10:00 am

The only television show I watch regularly is the NBC Evening News: I watch the whole thing from 5:30-6, completely ignoring phone calls and other disturbances. Last night the lead story was about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, a well-liked NBC news journalist and co-anchor of the network’s Today show.  Mother and daughter were close, with Nancy often appearing on Savannah’s show.

Nancy Guthrie was 84, and simply disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona on Sunday.  She has limited mobility, and when she didn’t show up for church a friend called the police, who discovered her disappearance.  Nancy Guthrie relies on medication that she must take every 24 hours or she might die.  An interview with the local sheriff revealed that there were signs of violence, and that Nancy was probably abducted.  It’s now Tuesday, so she might already be dead.

The NBC news, both national and local, gave the disappearance not only the lead story, but also lots of air time because Savannah’s a member of the network family. The first paragraph of the NBC national news story is this:

“TODAY” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie is asking for prayers for her mother’s safe return as Arizona authorities continue to investigate her possible abduction.

Savannah also related, on the evening news, that the greatest gift she got from her mother was a deep belief in God, as you see in the plea for prayers above.  On the local NBC news, anchor Alison Rosati ended her report on the disappearance by saying that she and other NBCers were also praying for Nancy Guthrie.

This is a tragedy for the Guthrie family, especially because Savannah and her mom were so close, and I won’t be dismissive of the call for prayers by nearly all the reporters. It did, however, get me thinking about people’s views about what prayers are supposed to accomplish, how they’re received by the God people imagine, and how educated people (Savannah has a J.D. from Georgetown Law) come to think that prayers are useful.

It’s clear that all the calls for prayer by newspeople reflect the still-pervasive religiosity of America, though I’m not sure whether, for some, the call for prayer is just a pro forma expression of sympathy. But surely for many prayers are supposed to work: God is supposed to hear them and do something—in this case intercede to help bring Nancy Guthrie back alive. And that got me thinking about how people connect prayer with the listener: God. Religious Jews are, by the way, among the most fervent pray-ers, with prayer serving as a constant connection with God.  And, like prayers in other religions. Jews sometimes use prayer to ask for personal benefits or simply to propitiate God.

The train of thought continued. What kind of God is more likely to effect changes requested in prayer? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and good, wouldn’t He know that people want things, like Nancy Guthrie’s return, and not need their prayers to find out? (He presumably can read people’s minds.) A god who requires prayers to effect change would be dictatorial and mean-spirited, demanding that obsequious people supplicate and propitiate him. But surely that’s not the kind of God most Christians imagine. (My feeling is that Jews envision a somewhat angrier God—the one in the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, despite quasi-scientific studies showing that intercessory prayers don’t work, people ignore that data, as of course they would; it’s tantamount to admitting that there’s no personal God who has a relationship with you.  Sam Harris has suggested that these studies are weak, and Wikipedia quotes him this way:

Harris also criticized existing empirical studies for limiting themselves to prayers for relatively unmiraculous events, such as recovery from heart surgery. He suggested a simple experiment to settle the issue:[32]

Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.

He has a point of course, and that experiment would never work.  But it’s intercessory prayer. Perhaps God answers only prayers coming from the afflicted themselves. But that implies that the “thoughts and prayers” of other people, as in the Guthrie case, are useless. In the end, the very idea of petitionary and intercessory prayer being effective implies that God is, as Christopher Hitchens said, like a Celestial Dictator presiding over a divine North Korea, requiring constant propitiation by obsequious believers. How could it be otherwise?

One response by liberal religionists is that one prays not for help, but simply as a form of meditation or rumination.  In other words, perhaps putting things into words—even words that nobody is hearing—helps you as a form of therapy, or in sorting out your thoughts and problems. That’s fine, though it’s unclear why rumination alone wouldn’t suffice.

I won’t deny anybody their belief in God, but I don’t want people forcing their beliefs on me, which is what occurs when newspeople ask for my prayers. I have none to give, though I wish people in trouble well, and hope that Nancy Guthrie returns.

These thoughts may sound cold-hearted, but they’re similar to what Dan Dennett wrote in his wonderful essay, “Thank Goodness“, describing who should really have been thanked for saving his life after a near-fatal aortic dissection:

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any  more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends’ remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: “I’ve been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK.” The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.” What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don’t expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

In other words, “thoughts” are fine; “prayers,” not so much.

I’m writing this simply to work out my own thoughts about prayer and its ubiquity, but I would appreciate hearing from readers about this issue.  What do you think when you hear others asking for prayers.  Is prayer a good thing, and what does it presume about God?  Any thoughts (but no prayers) are welcome, and put them below.

An atheist reviews Charles Murray’s new pro-God book

February 2, 2026 • 10:20 am

Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.

Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously.  And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand.  Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:

Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.

But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.

I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.

a.) There is something rather than nothing.

b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation. 

I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)

c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die. 

In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God  Daseler adds further evidence:

Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.

I should add that Murray also accepts “near-death experiences” (“NDE”s) as evidence for God, as do recent books like Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Both of these books have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and some Googling will turn up ample critiques.

d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray

This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer.  But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.

e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.

Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior.  Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt).  Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:

  • There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
  • Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
  • There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
  • When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
  • The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
  • By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
  • There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
  • Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.

And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?

Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.

Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:

Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”

The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”

In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:

I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it?  Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.

If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better.  But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

 “. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.

A lot more osculation of faith at The Free Press

December 24, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve often argued that the Free Press is soft on religion, even more so than its MSM equivalent, the New York Times. The editor of the FP, Bari Weiss, is Jewish, and although it’s not clear to me exactly what she believes (is there a God?), you’ll never see her criticizing religion. Her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted to Judaism, (I believe you have to espouse belief for that–a double entendre), and I can’t remember ever reading anything antireligious or pro-atheism on the site. (I may have missed something.) And now the editors have recruited at least four more religionists as part of a long series about religion celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

There will be monthly paeans to religion for a year, and it may already have been going for a while.  One of the paeans is below: a long, tedious piece about how American required not only the Bible to attain equality of its citizens, but the Old Testament. It’s no accident, of course, that the author, Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, is an Orthodox rabbi.  (More rabbis to come!) The American experiment, he avers, involved the replacement of an earthly king with a heavenly one: God (Yahweh in his case). Well, maybe he was right, but in the end there’s no evidence for a God who makes us all equal. And religion, despite the rabbi’s claim, is waning in America, but the idea of equality remains.

Here’s the editors’ intro to the piece (bolding is mine):

Of all the radical ideas at the heart of the American founding, freedom of religion stands apart. Rarely in human history has a nascent nation rejected religious uniformity and bet instead on liberty, trusting that faiths can live side by side, peacefully and equally. In doing so, America didn’t banish faith, but made room for it to thrive in all its depth and diversity.

For this month’s installment of our America at 250 series, a yearlong celebration of the country’s big birthday, we’re spotlighting faith and how it helped build our nation. You’ll hear from Catholic magazine editor R. R. Reno on how his marriage to a Jewish woman drew him closer to God; from David Wolpe on two towering prophets of history; from Matthew Walther on the kaleidoscope of American religious life; and more.

Today, we kick things off with the great Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains why the flourishing of biblical faith in the new country provided the basis for American equality. For, he writes, “In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God.”—The Editors

If you subscribe, click below to read what the sweating rabbi is trying to say. If you don’t subscribe, well, you have an extra hour to do something fun:

The piece is not particularly well written, and I don’t think it makes its case, but I don’t want to waste time doing an exegesis of this. I just want to show how the Free Press keeps highlighting the benefits of faith—in this case historical ones—over and over again. And I’ll omit all the well-known stuff about the role of religion in the Continental Congress (objections to prayers, etc.) But here’s what the piece says about the Jewish foundation of Americ (all quotes are indented).

John Adams wrote that evening [in 1771] to his wife: “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience. It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning. I must beg you to read that Psalm.” A passage from the Hebrew Bible, describing a divine defense from one’s enemies, so united the members of the new Congress that it seemed heaven-sent.

For the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, this anecdote highlights the prominent role played by the stories, imagery, and ideas of Hebrew scripture in the American revolution. In contrast to Christian texts, which are devoted to describing a kingdom that is “not of this earth,” the tale of biblical Israel is all about a polity that is very earthly indeed. Thus, as Novak noted in On Two Wings, his account of the role of faith in the American founding, “practically all American Christians erected their main arguments about political life from materials in the Jewish Testament.” The story of the Jews offered early Americans a tale from which they could find inspiration in their own crisis.

It also offered another advantage. Focusing on Judaic texts allowed the revolutionaries to avoid exegetical issues pertaining to Christian theology. “Lest their speech be taken as partisan,” Novak added, “Christian leaders usually avoided the idioms of rival denominations—Puritan, Quaker, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist, and Universalist. The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation.” As a means of uniting the diverse group, Novak continues, “the language of Judaism came to be the central language of the American metaphysic—the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race.” Psalm 35 would serve as a symbol of the fact that patriots across America could indeed pray together.

Here it’s not just religion that was the bedrock foundation of America, but Old Testament Judaism.  Of course, the vast majority of Americans when the country was founded were Christians, and presumably accepted the Jesus stories, but this shows how historians can emphasize some stuff as opposed to other stuff to make their case

And here’s how Thomas Paine, himself an atheist, nevertheless foisted “belief in belief” on Americans in his influential pamphlet Common Sense. “Belief in belief”—the view that it’s good for the “little people” (Americans) to believe in God even if the intellectuals don’t—seems to be the point of view pushed by the Free Press, and, to me, explains why they don’t publish articles that dismantle belief. But I digress.

Paine privately denied the reality of revelation and scorned scripture as fantasy. (He would later voice his views on religion in The Age of Reason, ruining his reputation in America.) But America was a biblically literate land, and with Benjamin Rush’s help, Paine wrote for his audience in Common Sense. The pamphlet—probably the most influential published polemic in the history of the world—changed the way in which Americans regarded their king and monarchy in general.

The essence of Paine’s argument is easy to miss today. In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” Paine asks in Common Sense; “I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.” Not all patriots approved of the pamphlet; John Adams thought its arguments overwrought and exaggerated. But Paine spoke for the many whose own sentiments were evolving. Subjects who had once revered their king were beginning to conclude that the texts of ancient Israel pointed to a new way of seeing themselves.

The tale of America is not merely that of a break with Britain; it is equally a tale of a group of colonists who came to conclude that their equality derived from the monarchy of the Almighty.

There’s more:

But the fact remains that shorn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve. As the Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter reflected in Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, to this day “faith in God provides a justification for the equality that liberal philosophy assumes and cherishes but is often unable to defend.”

This is bushwah. Of course a cogent nonreligious argument can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Read any ethical philosopher (John Rawls is one example), or read the article on “Eauality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the word “God” appears precisely once, and only in a discussion of how Christianity espoused an equality of humans before God.

But even if this historical interpretation be true, as Americans become more and more either atheists or “nones” (those not affiliated with a specific church or faith), the rationale for equality would seem to have disappeared. It hasn’t, because we now base it on humanism, not religion. If you stopped someone in the street and asked Americans why all people are equal before the law, I doubt they say “because that’s what the Old Testament dictates.” They may mutter something about all men being created equal from the Declaration of Independence, but philosophers who give us a rational basis for equality rely not on Divine Command but on secular arguments.

At the end, Rabbi Soloveichik raises the new canard that the waning of religion in America has slowed. They make a great deal about the plateau shown below:

Europeans may wonder at the way our politics is consumed by a culture war that is linked to differences regarding religion, but these debates endure in America because, unlike the largely secular continent across the ocean that was once the cradle of Christendom, faith continues to matter to so many millions of Americans. Even the much-discussed contemporary phenomenon known as the rise of the “nones”—Americans who do not belong to a faith at all—seems to have slowed. Few Americans today know the final lyrics of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” but when God is invoked in our public life, it is meant to remind us of the unique way equality emerged in America, the way religion impacted how Americans came to see themselves.

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the next decades will bring for our country. But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

Mind you, religiosity hasn’t reversed its long-term trend of decreasing; it just has hit a plateau.  Here’s a graph from the Pew article cited by the rabbi:

BUT that goes back to only 2007, and deals only with Christianity. (I bet Islam would show growth.) Let’s take a longer view, looking at Pew data from 1972 to about 2021.  Christianity has fallen nearly 30%, and if you looked way back to the turn of the 20th century, I bet you’d see a much bigger decline. The “plateau” touted above—believers never mention the long term—is just a small segment of the graph, and while religion may increase or remain static, that’s not the long-term trend. In the meantime, “nones” have increased nearly sixfold, and other religions just a tad. Nope, the rabbi’s huzzahs ring hollow.

Look again at the last sentence:

But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

That’s bogus.  There are two predictions that can be made. The first is the rabbi’s obvious one: America will always have some religious people. Yes, faith is sadly still alive, and we’ll have to wait a few centuries until we become like Sweden or Iceland. But the more important prediction is that faith is waning. It ain’t dead yet, but it’s dying. Even so, Americans still espouse equality.

It’s time for the Free Press to publish some stuff about unbelief, its increase over time, and the reasons for it.

I couldn’t help myself. I asked ChatGPT to illustrate some early Americans worshipping God as a king. Not bad, eh?