Category: Accommodationism

The Free Press touts God again, celebrating some intellectuals who have embraced Christianity

October 9, 2025 • 10:30 am

Something strange is happening to the mainstream media in the U.S.  Supposedly objective, its venues now spend a good bit of their time touting something for which there is no evidence: God.  The New York Times publishes excerpts of Ross Douthat’s recent book: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (the last word should really be “Christian”), the Free Press does the same, adding other op-ed pieces on the “God-shaped hole” that supposedly is a lacuna in our brain that deprives us of meaning, and everywhere I look there’s jubilation at an apparent (but not real) revival of religion in the U.S.

Although statistics show religion declining everywhere in the West (save in small enclaves inhabited by Muslims), these articles collect anecdotes about former atheists who have, by finding God, found personal happiness and salvation.  They are, I think, a reflection of how the MSM thinks the present malaise in the West can be cured.  War is everywhere, Trump seems to be ruining American democracy, people don’t feel that they’re doing well economically, and, ironically, in a lot of the West (especially Europe) the “decline” of the West seems to be caused by religion itself: the immigration of Muslims who don’t assimilate into Western culture and, it seems, often want to destroy it.  But for all these ills Christianity (and sometimes Judaism) is said to be the palliative. This is, the MSM thinks, “good news.”

These articles, like the new one below from The Free Press (expect CBS to become more religious) tend to follow the same format, to wit:

  1. They begin with an anecdote about how a nonbeliever found God and that brought him or her to a place of peace and happiness.
  2. The articles then recount the sad decline of belief (mostly Christianity) in the West
  3. They suggest the thesis that all people have the damn “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, meaning that we NEED religion to give our lives meaning and purpose. Apparently no other belief system, including humanism, can caulk that hole.
  4. They then recount a number of stories of other people who gave up atheism to find God.
  5. Throughout the article, the tacit assumption (as in the piece below) is that belief in God is not merely a convenience to improve your life, but is based on facts, including Biblical stories about Jesus, the Resurrection, and so on. This is more than what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the idea that if we can just get people to believe, even if we don’t ourselves, society will be better. But, as in this piece, the people they highlight really do seem to believe not just in God but the factual assertions of their faith, even if many of us, like me, can’t force ourselves to base our lives on something we consider unlikely or nonexistent.
  6. Somewhere in the article there’s invariably a slur on Richard Dawkins, who is seen as the Antichrist who keeps the God-shaped hole open. In reality, Dawkins, like the rest of us, doesn’t have that hole, and doesn’t think we need to find a superstition to complete our lives.
  7. The articles finish with a ringing claim that if we could just believe, our lives would have meaning, morality would improve (because, after all, what reason is there to be moral without God?), and the whole world would be better off.

It’s all bullpucky, of course, but it’s interesting to see the proliferation of similar articles on our God-shaped hole, and how nothing but Abrahamic religion can fill it. Below, for example, is a Facebook meme from the Nativity Lutheran Church of Alexandria, Virginia.

The MSM’s tilt towards religion is made clearer when you see that it’s not objective: that is, you don’t read articles on the advantages of atheism, or even the reasons why people give up faith to become nonbelievers. (More of these people exist than do atheists who embrace faith.)

And so we have this new Free Press article from Peter Savodnik, identified as “senior editor at The Free Press. Previously, he wrote for Vanity Fair as well as GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other publications, reporting from the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the United States.” Click to read, or find the article archived for free here.

Here are the requisite components (the bolded headings are mine, while indented bits are from the article):

1. The opening anecdote. It tells of Matthew Crawford, a nonbeliever, who was “always searching” because he had that God-shaped hole (henceforth, GSH).  He then gave a talk in a church in Canada and met a lovely woman, Marilyn Simon who was religious. The rest is history:

Suddenly, in this lovely, faraway church—festooned with stained-glass windows and mahogany pews and a baby grand piano and crosses dedicated to the memory of those congregants killed in the world wars—Crawford could glimpse a new future. One that included Simon. And, maybe, God.

Finally, late last year, Crawford converted to the Anglican Church. Then, in June, Crawford and Simon were married at Saint Margaret’s.

“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.

Indeed!

2. Describing the phenomenon of people embracing faith. I’m particularly distressed that Jon Haidt—brought up in a Jewish family but is now an atheist—still mentions the damn GSH.  If we all have it, why hasn’t he filled his?

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

3. Why you can’t have a good society without belief.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

These people have apparently not grasped the concept of humanism: the belief in helping our fellow H. sapiens using not religious principles or superstition, but reason and science. Steve Pinker’s books, especially Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of our Nature,  he argues convincingly that society’s improvements over the last few hundred years have been impeded by religion and facilitated by science and reason. Indeed, the subtitle of the first book is “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”  It’s well known that the most dysfunctional societies are also the most religious, and that people tend to turn to God only when their societies can’t afford them sufficient well being. (See my arguments in my 2012 “presidential paper” in Evolution. The president of the Society for the Study of Evolution gets to write one paper for the journal, and this was mine. But believe me, I had trouble getting it past the reviewers since I said that religion held back progress, with one of those signs of progress being acceptance of the truth of evolution.)

And as I pointed out, you don’t need God to be moral unless you think there’s a Big Nun in the Sky, waiting to rap your knuckles when you sin. Plenty of moral philosophers (Plato, Kant, Spinoza, Socrates, Rawls, Grayling, Russell, etc. etc. etc.) have constructed moral systems based on humanism and reason.

4. But religion is declining!

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022. By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States. A majority will comprise people of other faiths and, to a much greater extent, “nones,” meaning those who have no faith at all.

There’s no doubt about this, though some obtuse miscreants like to point out blips in the trend over centuries of declining belief in God. In the Middle Ages, everyone was a Christian in Europe. Now, in places like Sweden and Denmark, you’d be hard pressed to find a real believer. And this trend is also true in America, as the excerpt above notes.

5. Here comes the “evidence”: stories of people who embraced faith. 

Now, 17 years after the four horsemen first met, Hitchens is dead. So is Dennett. Harris remains an atheist. “I don’t know if it’s a real trend,” Harris told me in an email about our current religious awakening. “Call me when people start believing in Poseidon.”

I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the tech geniuses and media personalities and celebrities who once embodied the new atheism are rethinking what we lose when we lose religion.

I’ll just summarize the people cited by Savodnik to show there’s a GSH in us all

5a. Russell Brand

In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

Could that figure be. . .  God?  Or Jesus? (They’re really the same thing, of course.)  Brand is notoriously malleable, so while I will believe him, I don’t see that “beckoning figure.”

5b. Peter Thiel

In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

How does Thiel know about this “plan”? It’s curious that everyone who seems to know enough about God to use him to plug that GSH nevertheless starts scratching their heads when asked why God lets good people (often innocent children) suffer horrible deaths. Ignorance kicks in when a phenomenon doesn’t comport with the Abrahamic God. (The article is almost solely about people who embrace Christianity, so we’ll consider that the default option,.)

5c. Elon Musk

Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

5d. Jordan Peterson (of course). 

hen, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

More word salad from Peterson.  When asked for evidence for his God, Peterson always waffles, regurgitating a completely opaque set of words.

5e. Paul Kingsnorth. His story is long, invoking a nature-shaped hole, a Zen-Buddhist shaped hole, and, finally, he filled his GSH with a true faith: Romanian Orthodoxy. I’ll spare you the details and cut to the chase:

When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”

“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”

“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Yes, and that is what “faith” is: an irrational choice. Pity that the term “a man of faith” is seen as praise rather than denigration. When someone admits that their choice, on which they base a huge portion of their existence, isn’t based on reason or evidence (see Andrew Sullivan below), i tend to think less of them. Not as friends, of course, as I have religious friends, but I secretly take their ability to reason and accept evidence down a notch

5f. Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Hirsi Ali, who rejected Islam and was an atheist for a long time, embraced Christianity after a long period of depression, during  which she tried to fill the GSH with drinking. If religion relieved her depression, who am I to say that she should reject it? She might otherwise be dead, and that would be bad for all of us. Nevertheless, as Richard Dawkins has said (to much opprobrium), her decision was not based on evidence but on despair. (See addendum at bottom.)

Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”

In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?

Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”

In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”

The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.

“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.

Because I admire Hirsi Ali so much, I’m not going to rag on her.  And given that her religion staved off depression, it’s maladaptive to try to talk her out of it. I’m skipping over a lot of other anecdotes her to get to one more believer.

5g. Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a semi-pious Catholic, and an incisive thinker about most things—with religion being a notable exception. Get a load of this:

The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?

Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”

“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”

Translation: “The genius of ritual is that you don’t have to give reasons for what you believe, or for why you’re a Catholic rather than a Jew.” It’s all explained because he likes wafers better than latkes.  Seriously, though, expressing faith is not the same thing as understanding why you embrace a particular faith.

6. The obligatory smear of Dawkins.  Yes, of course it’s there: he’s not depicted in a flattering light. Further, his remark that he is a “cultural Christian” has given believers both grounds to say he’s religious and also to denigrate him for having a bit of faith. That’s unfair, for he’s just describing a tribe, the same way that I say I’m a cultural Jew. I don’t believe in God or any truth claims of Judaism.  I just like being a member of a group that not only doesn’t proselytize, but has a number of members who are overachievers. From the article:

When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.

Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”

“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.

. . . .The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”

I think Hirsi Ali does believe those tenets of Christianity, but it’s also true that she thinks that belief in Christianity will stave off barbarism (instantiated in Islam) in Western society.  I think relief of depression is a better reason for belief than is the supposedly salubrious effects of Christianity in saving Western civilization. What will save Western civilization is an adherence to secular Western values of democracy, reason, and humanism. Why certain parts of Europe are collapsing is not because of a lack of adherence to Christianity. It’s because people are afraid to stand up for democracy and against irrationality, superstition, and authoritarianism. But I’m digressing: a bit more:

And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”

It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.

“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?

When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.

“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”

We’ve recently discussed the “artistic advantages” of Christianity, and readers weren’t impressed by them. And that’s not why I’m a cultural Jew.  As far as Kingsnorth is concerned, yes, religion is indeed the result of chemicals (and neurons) in the brain. That is what underlies “experiences of God”, which of course can well be delusions or hallucinations. And the reason religion is declining is because people are realizing that “experiences of God” are not evidence, and while there should be evidence of God, there isn’t any. Why do we lack evidence now when the Bible tells us it was ubiquitous 2 millennia ago? What happened? Why did God decide to start playing hide and seek (actually, just “hide”)?

7. The Closing: Faith is Good! And it’s increasing!

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” [Jordan] Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”

This brokenness may explain why, for the first time in American history, young men—who have been especially hard hit by the opioid crisis, and are getting fewer college degrees, and finding it harder than ever to land a job—are more religious than young women. A survey of Orthodox churches in the United States, for example, reported a 78 percent rise in converts from 2019 to 2022, with the new male believers outnumbering the female.

It may also explain why so many young people are pushing back against the idea that religion is unfashionable. One of the largest Christian revivals in U.S. history, which happened in 2023, in Wilmore, Kentucky, was led almost entirely by young people. The Latin Catholic Mass is making a return, partly driven by young parishioners craving a greater sense of tradition and ritual. Young Catholic women are donning veils to express their devotion.

. . .But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”

Hall acknowledged that accessing that love, incorporating it into one’s life, was a process—shedding the rhythms and mores of secular society, burrowing deep into oneself. “You’re not going to solve anything if you don’t go down deeper,” he told me. “That’s where the heart of the crisis lies.”

No, the fact of our existence is a testament to materialistic evolution: the same thing that allows malaria to kill hundreds of thousands of babies and for cancers to grow in the brains of infants. It’s the same thing that kills millions of people in earthquakes and floods.  The “we are always loved” stuff doesn’t ring true with those people, and is simply made up by humans.  For if God is loving, he has a strange way of expressing it, like a man who is usually okay but occasionally beats his wife.

It is shedding religion, not shedding secular values, that has led to the increase in our well-being, for, as Steve Pinker argues, our progress is nearly always dependent on resisting religious values in favor of humanistic ones.

**********************************

UPDATE: In the last hour Richard Dawkins has posted a very apposite piece on his website The Poetry of Reality. Click to read it (I don’t know if you need a subscription, as I have one):

An except:

Jordan Peterson, an even more famous soothsayer of the so-called Christian revival, not only ignores facts, he openly disdains them. Drunk on symbolism, he seems sincerely not to care whether something is factually true or not. In a filmed conversation, I asked him point-blank, “Did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That’s a factual question.” After a long pause in which Peterson declined to answer, I added, “It’s not a value question.” The moderator, Alex O’Connor, an extremely intelligent young man who read Theology at Oxford, then chimed in: “You must understand what you’re being asked here.” And he continued to cross-question Peterson, trying in every possible way to get him to answer the simple factual question. Did Jesus have a human father or no? Time and again, Peterson made it abundantly clear that he has not the slightest interest in whether such propositions are factually true or not, Well, I suppose that’s his privilege, just as it’s my privilege to hate beetroot. But some of us think factual questions matter. To put it mildly, scientists do, lawyers do, police officers do, journalists do, historians do (at least they damn well should care) and I strongly suspect you do too.

Earlier this year, a dear friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity. We then had a public discussion in New York, during which her sincerity shone like a beacon. She believed that Christianity had saved her from a severe bout of depression. I could sympathize with that, and the audience clearly did. But I still pressed her with my one fundamental question. “IS IT TRUE?” Not, “Is it true that it saved you from depression?” It surely was true in her case. Not, “Does Christianity do good in the world?” Maybe it does. Not, “Would it be a good thing if most people were Chistian?” Maybe it would. The latter two questions are value questions, not factual questions at all.

I meant none of those things. I meant, “Do you think the truth claims of Christianity are valid? Is it factually true that the universe was designed by a supernatural intelligence, God? Is it true that Jesus was born of a virgin? Is it true that he rose from the dead? Is it true that people have a soul that can survive bodily death?” There are three respectable answers to any of these questions. “Yes (I think the evidence supports a yes answer).” “No (I think the evidence supports a no answer).” “I don’t know (not enough evidence).” Ayaan’s answer was, “I choose to believe.” I don’t think believing is something you can choose to do. What do you think?

Science editor of Sunday Times touts book “proving” God’s existence

October 5, 2025 • 10:15 am

In the face of declining belief in God in countries like the US and UK, believers are looking for any evidence that God exists.  But there’s nothing new to support the existence of the supernatural, though as science finds out more truths about the Universe, and we think of more questions about things (e.g., what is “dark matter”), religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they so desperately need. And so a new book simply reprises the “god of the gaps” argument, a shopworn argument that has been tried–and has failed–many times before, both philosophically and scientifically. First, recent data from the US and UK on declining belief in God.

Here are figures from a 2023 Church Times article showing waning belief in the UK since 1981, though belief in life after death has held steady (belief in God is the line at the top in orange).. Click to read article:

And a similar decline from a 2022 Gallup poll showing a decline of about belief in the US of about 18% since 1950.

In both cases the trends are unmistakable, and, with a few hiccups, inexorable.  How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for “proof of God.”

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of London (h/t Pyers). Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.

The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, published by Palomar on October 14 at £22.  It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week.

The two authors are both believers, of course (excerpts from the Times are indented):

These authors — like Dawkins and Hawking — consider themselves men of science. Bolloré, 79, from Brittany, is a computer engineer who has founded a series of successful heavy industry, engineering and mechanical firms; Bonnassies, 59, from Paris, studied science and maths before a career as an entrepreneur in the French media industry.

Both are also men of faith. Bolloré is a lifelong Catholic. Bonnassies, who did not find his Christian faith until his twenties, said he thought before his conversion that “believers were irrational people”, adding: “God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary — I found it crazy.” Yet it was logic, he said, that won him around: “The surprise was there were many rational reasons to believe in God.”

And here is the book’s argument summarized by the Sunday Times. It amounts to no more than this (this is my characterization.

We do not understand how the universe began or how life began.  If everything occurs by materialistic processes, what caused the Big Bang, and how did life originate? The most “rational” solution is a creator. 

And some excerpts from the laudatory review in the Times (why are they touting superstition?):

Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.

But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.

Good Lord: has the argument ever been off the table? William Lane Craig has been banging the drum about it for years. But I digress; here’s more:

In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.

. . . .Instead, the authors have written a critique of materialism — the theory that all reality, including our origins, thoughts and consciousness, can be explained solely by physical matter and physical processes.

The materialist narrative for the beginnings of the universe and life on earth is so full of holes, he and Bonnassies argue, that every modern scientific advance increases the strength of the case that a “creator” is the only rational explanation.

The authors insist that their book is not a religious one, or one touting the advantages of faith. No, it’s a critique of one of the underpinnings of science, materialism.

The authors’ ideas have received support from unexpected quarters. The renowned physicist Robert Wilson, who was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, agreed to write the foreword to the book. “Although the general thesis … that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence,” he wrote. “If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”

Yes, but if God exists, how did He/She/They/It come into existence? Why terminate the regress of causes at the creator God instead of going back even further. After all, God is not simple, as Dawkins has emphasized, so how do an immaterial being of such complexity and power come about?

Here are the two main arguments described in the Times (my headings, indented matter from article).

The Universe:

For the past century, for example, scientists have known the universe is expanding. If stars and galaxies are always moving further apart, logic dictates, the universe must have started at a single point, in a state of immense density. In 1931 the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître termed this the “primeval atom”. We now call it the Big Bang.

But if all matter originates from that single explosion, and materialism dictates there is nothing outside of matter, what caused the bang?

Evolution:

According to the theory of evolution, this incredibly sophisticated data storage system — 40,000 billion times more dense than the most advanced computer today — emerged from the primordial soup quite by chance. The authors write: “While we still do not know how that gap was bridged, or a fortiori, how to replicate such an event, we do know enough to appreciate its infinite improbability.”=

Finally, I find this bit pathetic:

Bolloré acknowledged that the book does not present proof of God’s existence. “You cannot prove it,” he said. “You have evidence for one theory — the existence of God. And you have evidence for the other one, which is the non-existence of God. The best you can do is to compare the two sides of the scale.”

But he said that many areas of science require as big a leap of faith as that demanded by faith in God. “We are all believers,” he said. “Believers in God believe, with some evidence — and believers in materialism, they believe in plenty of things which are a little bit weird.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest critics of the French edition of the book have not been scientists, but priests. “Some theologians say we don’t want evidence of God because it would reduce the merit of faith,” he said. “‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”

Here we see that the authors offer only two alternatives: God or not-God, but the alternative is really materialistic processes that we do not understand but might with more work.  And faith in materialism or science is not at all the same thing as faith in religion, an argument I dispelled in Slate some years ago.

The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured.  It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God. So do books like Heaven is for Real!

And so we get “evidence” from unexplained origins—of both life and the Universe.  To the authors, both of these fit into to a combination of The Cosmological Argument (or “First Cause” argument) and the “God of the Gaps” argument.  Readers should know the problems with both of these, and if you don’t, simply look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the relevant sections of Wikipedia.  Since we don’t know how the Universe came into being (i.e., what is the physics behind the Big Bang?), or how the first form of “life” originated, it’s foolish and impossible weigh ignorance against a belief in God—and not just God, but clearly the Abrahamic God— the god of both authors.

I have spent more than half my life dealing with these arguments, and will say just one more thing before I show a few of the Times readers’ comments. The existence of a creator God, especially of the Christian subspecies, should not be accepted simply because it’s hard at present for materialism to explain some things.  Instead, look to the Universe itself for positive proof of God: do we see signs of a loving, omnipotent creator God in the universe?

Carl Sagan discussed what evidence could count in favor of not just God, but the Christian God, as I do as well in Faith Versus Fact. But we don’t have any of that evidence. Why did God create so much of the Universe that is inhospitable for life? Why do little kids get cancers that kill them? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes happen that kill thousands of innocent people? These things cannot be explained rationally by positing a beneficent and omnipotent creator God.  In the absence of these explanations, and of positive evidence for God (e.g., Jesus coming back and doing real miracles documented extensively by film and newspapers, or, as Sagan noted, the stars arranging themselves to spell “I am that I am” in Hebrew), the best alternative is atheism, the view “there is no positive evidence for God.”  Thus the “god” side of the scales becomes lighter over time, continuing the trend begun when one after another “unexplainable” miracle or phenomenon was been explained by materialism. And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang, nor have biologists given up trying to understand how life originated.  Will the authors give up their thesis if one day, under early life conditions, scientists see a primitive form of life originating in the lab, or create a theory of how there could be cyclical universes or multiple Big Bangs creating multiple universes? I doubt it, for they are “men of faith”.

A few readers’ comments. The first one was upvoted the most:

And some more. (The readers are clearly smarter than the authors, though there are some believers in there, too.)

There are 1100 comments, so knock yourself out! As for the Sunday Times, well, they decided to present an argument for God without interviewing detractors.

My Quillette review of Francis Collins’s new book on healing America with science, truth, trust, and faith

March 13, 2025 • 9:15 am

As I note in my new review of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, he’s a very good scientist and science administrator, but also a pious evangelical Christian (remember the frozen waterfalls that brought him to Jesus?).  Collins had previously written a book arguing that science and Christianity were not only compatible, but complementary ways of finding the truth, but now he’s produced another. As I say in my review of the new book in Quillette (click on screenshot below, or find my review archived here):

While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.

As the author of Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, I wouldn’t be expected to laud Collins’s thesis, and I didn’t.  You can read the review for yourself, but I spend a lot of time criticizing Collins’s claim that science combined with religion is the best way to find the “truths”to repair the deep divisions in America’s polity. Even if those divisions—Collins largely means Republicans vs. Democrats—can be repaired, saying that the way forward is combine the “truths” of science and religion is a deeply misguided claim.

I won’t go into details, but of course religion is simply not a way to discover truth, especially since Collins’s definition of “truth” is basically “facts about the world on which everyone agrees”: in other words, empirical truth. Religion can’t find such truths, as it lacks the methodology.  Note that Collins does not espouse Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” claim that science and religion are compatible because they deal with completely different issues, with science alone getting the ambit of empirical truth. Gould’s claim, described in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, was also misguided, and you can read my old TLS critique of it here.) No, Collins asserts that religion can find empirical truths. Sadly, he gives no examples where religion can beat science–just a bunch of questions that religion can supposedly answer (e.g., “How should I live my life?”).

I’ll give one more quote from my review:

What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.

Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.

Click below (or here):

Although it seems obvious to me that religion and science are incompatible insofar as both make empirical claims (granted, some of faith’s claims are hard to test), it’s not obvious to the many Americans who blithely get their vaccinations but then head to Church and recite the “truths” of the Nicene Creed. Sam Harris pointed this out in a piece he wrote opposing Collins’s appointment as NIH director:

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

While I wouldn’t have opposed Collins’s appointment on the basis of his faith, I would have if he had shown any signs that his faith would affect his science. As it turned out, it didn’t: Collins left his religion at the door of the NIH.  But he continues to proselytize for both Christianity as the “true” faith and for a perfect harmony between science and religion.

In a patronizing New Yorker article (is that redundant?) about Collins and his book that I just discovered, I was sad to see another pal soften his views about Collins, science, and faith:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who fiercely criticized Collins’s nomination on account of his “primitive, shamanistic, superstitious” religious views, told me in an e-mail that he had changed his mind about Collins, for two reasons. “One is the sheer competence and skill with which he’s directed the Institutes, blending scientific judgment with political acumen,” Pinker wrote. “The other is a newly appreciated imperative, in an age of increasing political polarization, toward making institutions of science trustworthy to a broad swath of the public, of diverse political orientations.” In a way, I thought, Pinker was saying that representation matters: science has an audience, and the right speaker can persuade all of that audience to listen. “A spokesperson for science who is not branded as a left-wing partisan is an asset for the wider acceptance of science across the political spectrum,” Pinker said. But Collins is more than a spokesperson for science. He is also a kind of representative, within the scientific community, of American communities that his peers sometimes fail to reach.

Pinker’s first point is right, and, as I said, I wouldn’t—and didn’t—oppose Collins’s nomination as NIH director.But the author then interprets Pinker as making the “Little People” argument: science will be accepted more broadly if scientists accept religion, even if those scientists don’t practice it. In other words, we have to avoid criticizing superstition if America is to fully embrace science.

But while there’s no need for scientists to bang on about religion when we’re teaching about or promoting science, no scientist should ever approve of a belief in unevidenced superstition, or of any system of such supterstition.  Yet that’s exactly what Collins does in his book, and it’s why the book is misguided, flatly wrong about accommodationism, and unenlightening.

Sam Harris and Brian Greene debate religion vs. science, and how to deal with believers

February 11, 2025 • 11:15 am

Here we have two notables on opposite sides of the religion-versus-faith issue, or at least clashing about how to deal with the oft-claimed incompatibility between science and religion. In one corner is Sam Harris, who, as you know, is a hard-core critic of faith, and not shy about saying that. His book The End of Faith could be counted as the beginning of New Atheism. In the other corner is Brian Greene, who doesn’t like to criticize religion because, he says, confrontation turns people off (he refused to autograph my Faith vs. Fact book that I was auctioning off for charity).  And Greene doesn’t mind taking Templeton money to fund his World Science Festival.

This 9-minute discussion, from 2018, is part of a 2+-hour discussion you can find here.

Greene argues there’s a big reason to avoid being as hard-core as Harris. He claims that being vociferous (apparently like Harris or Dawkins) undercuts the stated goal of atheists to spread rationality. For Greene sees New Atheists as elitists who tell people that they are “stupid”—a contention that we often hear but I don’t think carries much truth. (Try finding such a statement in Faith vs. Fact!) Rather, Greene believes that people’s deconversion is best accomplished indirectly: by getting people to appreciate the natural wonders of the universe and showing your passion for them. This, he thinks, “will drive things in a good direction.” (I believe he means letting go of religion, though Greene isn’t explicit.) I can’t quite see how that would work.

Sam responds that people’s minds can change; believers can become nonbelievers. That is true, and I’ve seen it and, indeed, have even been instrumental in changing some minds that way. (No, I don’t call people “stupid.”)  Greene responds that he’s changed minds, too, but yet he fails to show that the “soft” approach is more efficacious. How many I-got-people-to-give-up-religion anecdotes does he have? As Sam says, “You’re talking about the carrot and I’m talking about the stick. And the stick works.”  This exchange, by the way, is hilarious.

Sam responds that there are some religious views that in fact facilitate the ruination of nature (global warming, for example, can be justified as a necessary precursor of The End Times).  Greene responds that he’s rarely confronted with such people.

My methods are clearly the same as Sam’s, though I wouldn’t for a minute tell Greene that he has to go after religion big-time. That’s just not his way. However—and I don’t have evidence for this—I do think that the direct approach to criticizing faith, one that avoids ad hominem attacks—is more efficacious. I don’t think telling people that science and faith are perfectly compatible, for instance, can account for the rise of the “nones” in recent years. It appears that many people have become “nones” because they realized that religion is irrational and in conflict with science. As a paper published in 2023 noted:

. . . . the authors queried self-identified religious nones about their reasons for leaving their religion. In response, each participant wrote a short personal essay, which was coded by the research team. Four primary themes emerged. About half of the sample (51.8%) reported leaving for intellectual reasons or because they outgrew their faith. Roughly a fifth of the sample (21.9%) reported religious trauma, such as the hypocrisy of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Others (14.9%) reported leaving religion because of personal adversity, such as an inability to make sense of the tragic death of a child, or social reasons (11.4%), including a religious community’s being unwelcoming.

In other words, by far the most common reason for leaving faith is because people perceive that it has no intellectual underpinnings. They don’t leave it because appreciating a passion for the university changes them “in a good way”. (Note that New Atheists also emphasize at least two of the other three reasons people give up their faith.)

How religion impedes science: a new historical study

December 17, 2024 • 10:15 am

I wanted to like this paper because its thesis—that the prevalence and dogmatism of religion impedes scientific progress—is one on which I’ve written a book. This paper purports to demonstrate such an incompatibility between science and religion using data, but the data are correlative without any indication of causation, and the data have some problems.  To be sure, the data are provocative, and author Matías Cabello may be on to something, but right now the paper is at SSRN (Social Science Research Network) and doesn’t appear to have been published or peer-reviewed. You can see it by clicking the title below or download paper here. If you’re interested, read it and form your own opinion.

For a long time historians of science, the most prominent of which was the late Ronald Numbers, maintained that the “conflict hypothesis”—that religion and science were in historical conflict—was dead wrong. I never found their arguments convincing, one reason being that they would weasel and wiggle around clear cases of conflict, like that of Galileo versus the Catholic Church. Sure, there were other things beyond a Bible/science conflict involved in that dispute, but you’d have to be blind not to see that the heliocentric solar system, and Galileo’s writings promoting it, deeply irked the Catholic Church. One philosopher who also sided with these “no-conflict” folks was the late Michael Ruse, who, though an atheist, devoted a lot of time and writings to showing the science and religion are compatible. I found him tendentious and unedifying. Finally, Francis Collins, former head of the NIH and of the Human Genome Project, has come out with a new book, The Road to Wisdom, which goes to great lengths to show that one can be a scientist and a believer, too (he’s an Evangelical Christian).

My book Faith Versus Fact makes a case that in fact the two areas are incompatible, since they both involve empirical assertions about the universe, but only science has a way to test and verify them. (Read the book.) And in the beginning I dispel the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion, supporting the “conflict” hypothesis. But I won’t go on, as you can read it for yourself.

At any rate, Cabello’s manuscript uses historical and present-day data to make two points:

a.) The conflict between religion and science can be seen because science began to grow up until 1520, but then stagnated between 1520 and 1720.  This 200-year period, says Cabello, coincided with a growing religious dogmatism, imposed largely by the Catholic Church. At the same time, science itself stagnated. After 1720, when the Counter-Reformation ended and Catholic dogma waned, science began to grow rapidly again. This correlation, says Cabello, is some evidence that religious (mainly Catholic) dogma was repressing the growth of science.

b.) Analysing Wikidata on nearly 125,000 scientists, Cabello found (and equations are involved) that scientists who were less religious over the entire period (yes, he controls for some extraneous variables)—scientists including deists, pantheists, agnostics, and atheists— tended to be more accomplished than scientists who were clearly religious. (Quakers, who are in the middle, tended to be more scientifically accomplished than religious people but not as much as freethinkers.)

Now readers who scrutinize the paper will probably find a lot to beef about, and since I read it only twice, and not very carefully, I’m not going to come out in strong support of its results. But I do want to call attention to it because it’s one of the few papers to support the “conflict” hypothesis with data.

a.) The temporal correlations.

Here are some plots showing the change in religiosity over time and the change in science activity over time. The first plot gauges religiosity by looking at the frequency of “God-referring words”—”God”, “Jesus,” and “Christ”—in Google books published in five different European languages.

You can see that religion increased around 1520, and stayed fairly constant (in terms of word density) until about 1720, when it began a more rapid decline that seems to have asymptoted at a low level around 1900.

(From paper): (a) shows that God-referring words (God, Jesus, and Christ, in vernacular and Latin) appear with greater frequency in the period 1520–1720 than before and after, suggesting a rise-and-fall pattern of religiosity Source: Own work based on Google’s ngram service (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Here is the corresponding temporal change in science activity, using as a proxy the density of words in books associated with science or protoscience (see caption for words counted). The stagnation between 1520 and 1720 is clearer here, followed by a rise in science word density up to the present time. One sees an inverse correlation between the lines in (a) and (b), a mirroring that Caballo considers evidence for his thesis.

(from paper) (b) shows that the post-1720 decline of God-referring words coincides with the increased use of words that were strongly associated with (proto)science already in the 1500s (medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, philosophy, hypothesis, logic, and experiment, in vernacular and Latin). Source: Own work based on Google’s ngramservice (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Further evidence is adduced in the following two graphs of the “pace of science,” based on word counts of scientists and discoverers per capita during different periods (top graph) compared to per capita words in Wikipedia about scientists and discoverers. Both graphs show the same stagnation during the 200 years after 1520, with, in this case, an increase before 1520 and again after 1720. The notes on the graphs are indented below both:

Notes: (a) shows that the per capita number of famous scientists and discoverers aged 20 to40 stagnated between 1520 and 1720, while it had been growing before and grew thereafter; (b) shows that the impact of these scientists, proxied by the number of words written in their biographies, declined during that same period, while it had been growing before and thereafter. Overall, these figures suggest that Europe’s scientific output per capita stagnated during the age of religious fever that spans roughly between 1520 and 1720. Source: Wikipedia’s scientists and discoverers are from Laouenan et al. (2022). Population data is from the Maddison Project Database 2020 (Bolt and Van Zanden, 2020), Prados de la Escosura, ÅLAlvarez-Nogal, and Santiago-Caballero (2021), Malanima (2011).

Finally, here’s a graph of the degree of “secularization” of science, taken as “the percentage of all scientists who were clergy.  This is not so convincing to me because before the 18th century only clergy had the luxury of doing science, as it was an avocation. And the proportion of clergy doing science isn’t, to me, a strong index of how much science itself was impeded by the beliefs of clergymen. After 1720, one could begin to make a living doing science, and thus didn’t need a clergyman’s stipend to do science. Nevertheless, one can’t dismiss these data completely.

From paper: Notes: The figure depicts the share of famous scientists and proto-scientists who were part of the clergy according to Wikidata’s person description or occupation. It shows that the share remained stable at around 20% during the religious revival of 1520–1700, while it had been declining before and continued to decline thereafter, with 1720 marking the sharp beginning of a quick secularization of science.

And one thing is for sure: scientists began losing their religion after the turn of the 18th century, to the point now that, in America and Britain, scientists are far less religious than the average person. The proportion of believers in America’s National Academy of Sciences, for instance, is about 8%—just about exactly the proportion of atheists among the general population! As I point out in my book, as one rises higher in science, going from employment at a university to employment in an elite university to membership in the National Academy, the proportion of believers drop steadily, something that’s also true in the UK. This could mean that the more atheistic you are, the higher you’re likely to rise in science, OR that the better scientist you become, the more you lose your faith. OR, it could reflect both factors.

b. The religiosity versus the achievements of scientists.

Finally, the author did a multivariate calculation on the “fame” of scientists related to their religiosity, dividing scientists into three classes: least dogmatic (atheists, deists, agnostics, and pantheists), “moderately dogmatic” (Unitarians and Quakers), and “strictly dogmatic” (Puritans and Jesuits, religious groups who did the most science). He found that accomplishment, as reflected in words in Wikipedia, was highly, significantly, and positively associated with membership in the “least dogmatic” group, and not nearly as correlated with membership in the other two groups (Quakers born after the 17th century are an exception; they are scientifically accomplished.) Cabello thinks that freedom from religious belief “opened up a whole path of ideas disconnected from the prevailing thought system”, allowing scientists to become more accomplished.

Again, one could pick nits with these data, and I’m not going to answer potential criticisms, as the author deals with some of them. I’ll just give his conclusion:

This article presents quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival and zeal associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.

There are two further points. First, as the author notes, we don’t know why lack of religiosity is correlated with  greater scientific accomplishment, something that I discuss above. He says this:

All these results are silent about the direction of causality. Did high-impact thinking lead to abandon dogmas? Or did less dogmatic minds produce high-impact science? Or both? The correlation can be interpreted either way. Charles Darwin, for example, became agnostic late in life, what suggests that science may have eroded his beliefs. Newton, by contrast, was young (“very early in life”) when he “abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity” (Keynes, 2010); this suggests that his unorthodox beliefs may have opened the way for his science. Such bidirectional causality is consistent with the aggregate and regional trends and propositions discussed in previous sections.

Finally, Caballo ponders why opposition to the “conflict hypothesis” (which, by the way, is embraced by a majority of Americans) is so strong among academics.  His theory is that academics see a lot of religious scientists, and from that conclude that there can be no conflict. To that I’d respond, “those people demonstrate compartmentalization, not compatibility.”

Instead, I’d say that people like Numbers and Ruse adopt the “no conflict” hypothesis because it is more or less a “woke” point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin, too.  You don’t get popular by touting a conflict, as I’ve learned, but people love to hear that you can be religious and also embrace modern science. Even if those people are atheists, they can be “atheist butters” or promoters of the “little people” hypothesis that society needs religion to act as a social glue. If you tell people that it’s a form of cognitive dissonance to be both religious and a supporter of science, one might think that the glue would dissolve. (It won’t.) And, of course, “sophisticated” believers don’t like to hear that their faith is at odds with science.

But it is.

h/t: Bruce

Richard Dawkins talks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about why she’s a Christian and what she really believes

June 14, 2024 • 9:50 am

I watch few videos and listen to few podcasts, but this is one I recommend highly.

As most of us know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali declared recently that she had given up atheism and had become a Christian. In the Unherd article to which I linked, she argued that her belief rested largely on seeing Christianity as a bulwark against sinister forces, like Islam and Chinese Communism, out to destroy Western civilization. As she said in that article:

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This, of course, left some questions, most notably this: Does Hirsi Ali really believe the tenets of Christianity—for example the divinity and Resurrection of Jesus—or did she accept it on the basis of its salubrious effects on society? In the 70-minute discussion below between atheist Richard Dawkins and newly-formed Christian Hirsi Ali, that question is answered, but we also learn that Hirsi Ali came to Christianity for reasons beyond its effects on society. In fact, we learn that she became a Christian mainly because of its effects on her own well being.

First, the YouTube notes, apparently written by Richard:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a hero, a staunch fighter against the violent intolerance and bossy control freakery of Islamism. She is also a personal friend of whom I am very fond. When she recently announced her conversion to Christianity, I assumed that she must be no more than a political Christian, regarding Christianity as a bulwark against Islam. I have some sympathy with the view that if you must have a religion at all, Christianity is hugely better than the leading alternative. In Hilaire Belloc’s words, “Always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.”

I agreed to have a public conversation with her in New York, in which I was all prepared to emphasize the distinction between a political Christian and a true believing Christian, who actually thinks Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. I think the distinction is a really important one. I don’t think a political Christian is a real Christian, any more than the kind of cultural Christian I am myself.

When we met on the stage at the Dissident Dialogues meeting in New York, I was wrongfooted when Ayaan began with a personal statement which seemed to suggest that she really is a believing Christian, not just a political Christian. Well, her form of words was “I choose to believe.” I’m not sure what to make of that. Anyways, see what you think; here is the recording of our New York meeting.

The upshot is that their disagreement is almost entirely about faith versus fact. Richard sees Christianity, and theism in general, as an empirical hypothesis—one of great importance if it were true.  But, like me, he sees little evidence for the tenets of Christianity, or for the existence of a God, and that there is also not inconsiderable evidence against the tenets of Christianity.

Hirsi Ali, on the other hand, accepted Christianity since it helped her in a time of crisis, because she sees it as having filled the “spiritual void” that was inside her during a period of mental instability.  She then became a real, believing Christian because of that, but also because she chose to believe the message of Christianity, which she sees as one of love and acceptance. And with the acceptance of that message came the acceptance of Christian tenets like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, the virginity of Mary, and so on. (She’s not sure if there’s a soul that survives us after death.)  These are things that, she says repeatedly, she chooses to believe because they helped her personally. The empirical truth of these tenets she takes as a “different plane of perception,” which I construe as “a different way of knowing”. It is a subjective, emotional way of knowing, not all that different from the “other way of knowing” of people like the Māori.

Over and over again, Richard tries to draw the conversation back to the issue of what is empirically true—that is, what nearly all reasonable people would agree what really exists in the universe if were they given the evidence.  As a scientist, Richard is truth-based, always looking for the relevant empirical evidence. In contrast, Hirsi Ali looks within and sees whether the message and tenets of Christianity comport not only with what not only soothes her, but also seems “wise.” I’ll give a brief conclusion before the video, which I urge you to watch, but indented below are a few notes I made while watching the video.

Here are a few notes I took during the discussion. I’ve indented them, but they’re my own words:

In 2024, Hirsi Ali says she experienced a personal crisis, involving anxiety, depression, and self-loathing. It got to the point that didn’t want to live any more. She started self-medicating and consulting psychiatrists, seeing these potential remedies as “evidence-based science”. But nothing worked until one therapist diagnosed her with “spiritual bankruptcy”.  So Hirsi Ali started praying because she “had absolutely nothing to lose”.  She then immediately felt “connected to something higher and greater than herself.” That was Christianity, and she considered her discovery of it a “miracle.” She goes on to say that her conversion is hard to explain, but she is writing a book about it.

Dawkins responds by asserting that a “Christian has to believe in something“, and wonders what, exactly, does she believe about Christianity: did Jesus rise from the dead, was he the son of God and son of a virgin, and so on?  She responds that these tenets of Christianity “make sense and are wise.” And so she no longer mocks faith, but argues says that people with faith have something that atheists don’t have. (My response: yes, they have faith: belief in what consoles them regardless of its truth.) Judging by the applause, the audience seems to be sympathetic with Hirsi Ali’s view of the salubrious nature of religion.

The difference between the two is summarized in Hirsi Ali’s statement,  “I choose to accept the story of Jesus Christ”, and that that belief rests on a “different ways of perception.” It is “her choice”.

She adds that the message of Western civilization is “essentially Christian”, something that is often told to atheists to silence them: “The whole basis for our culture (and your morality)”, they tell us, “is Christianity.” I find this a debatable assertion, since the whole basis of Judaism is not Christianity, and essentially there is no difference in moral values between Jews and Christians. (Islam, however, is a different matter. I would have asked Hirsi Ali if she thought that Jews, who don’t accept Jesus as the son of God, are doomed and will go to hell. Further, the Enlightenment was a rejection of Christian authoritarianism, so can you praise something because its rejection led to better things?

You have to hand it to Richard. He pulls no punches with Hirsi Ali, saying that the whole Christian story of original sin and our salvation through belief in Jesus is  “obvious nonsense” and “theological bullshit”.  Christianity, he says, is obsessed with sin. But you also have to hand it to Hirsi Ali for standing by her guns (even though I disagree with her): she responds that “Christianity is obsessed with love.” (Loud applause follows; the audience are clearly, as Dennett might have said, “Believers in belief.”)  I’m not sure, further, having watched American Christians, whether in general they’re “obsessed with love”.

Richard again says that if you’re a Christian, you have to accept its empirical assertions along with its moral messages; in his words, “You have to take the whole package”.  Ayaan responds again why she believes that Jesus rose from the dead. . . “it is a matter of choice.” She compares Dawkins being moved by art and music to her being moved by religion, though I disagree with this comparison, for nobody asks whether art and music are “true”, only whether they move you or not.

Hirsi Ali apparently thinks that others should accept Christianity, too, so it isn’t simply a personal choice for her, but one that she thinks others should make to both improve their own mental health and Western society. She is no proselytizer, but does argue that others should become Christians, too. I certainly can’t, for I can’t force myself to believe something that I’ve rejected after long thought, and does Hirsi Ali think that children should be brought up believing Christianity is true? (This question isn’t answered.)

Dawkins clarifies that he sees the hypothesis of theism as a scientific hypothesis, and an important one, but one for which there is no evidence. Hirsi Ali says that, religion, contrary to atheism, “offers you something.”  Richard says that yes, faith offers you something comforting, but “that doesn’t make it true.”  Hirsi Ali then advances the recent argument that evidence for God lies in the observation that “there is something rather than nothing” in the universe. To that I’d add that that is a fallacious argument, but even if it did point to a Creator, it wouldn’t for a minute point to the Christian God.

My Take (after hearing it all): This is a very good and civil argument between two smart and thoughtful people, but in the end they epitomize two different ways of perceiving truth. Richard instantiates the scientific approach: you believe in something in proportion to the amount of evidence supporting it. Ayaan epitomizes the “other ways of knowing”: if you feel something is true, and especially if your belief make you feel better, then that is evidence that it is true.

It’s clear, as you’d see if you read my book Faith versus Fact, that I agree with Richard. You can believe what you want, and are welcome to believe what makes you feel better, but subjective “truth” is no way to ascertain what really exists in the universe. Some religious beliefs may help you, and some may help society, but that is also true of secular humanism, and I see secular humanism as a non-divisive guide for conduct that doesn’t rest on superstition.  Almost by definition, secular humanism is not divisive.

And, as northern Europe and Scandinavia show us, a society doesn’t have to accept the tenets of Christianity to be a good and moral society. Data tell us that the religiosity of a country (or of U.S. states) is negatively correlated with the well-being and happiness of its inhabitants. I don’t see how you can ascribe that to Christianity, much religion in general.

Although the audience and the moderator, who says he’s a Christian, appear to be “believers in belief”, I must disagree with Hirsi Ali’s claim that what she subjectively perceives to be true IS true, and that atheism is dangerous to society. Atheism is simply the absence of belief in the supernatural, and of course people want to have a “meaning and purpose” for their lives. Yet, as I’ve argued, “meaning and purpose” are delineated post facto—after people find what makes them feel good and fulfilled. (See my 2018 post when I asked readers what they see as the meaning and purpose of their lives. Virtually nobody named religion as one of those sources.) Steve Pinker has argued, in my view convincingly, that the moral improvement of society in the last 400 years or so has involved the rejection of religion (Christianity existed well before the moral improvement that Pinker discusses). You’ll have to read his two big books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now) to see his argument in full. (The subtitle of the second book is “The Case for Readson, Humanism, Science, and Progress.”) I recommend those books to everyone. Yes, they’re long, and are criticized by those misguided souls who think there’s been no moral or material progress of humanity, but I think they’re excellent and on the mark.

In the end, I think Hirsi Ali makes as good a case for Christianity as can be made. But Richard shows, to me at least, that her case is weak, as it’s based on delusions and superstitions that made her feel good and, that she thinks, will make others also feel good while at the same time staving off the forces of nescience and authoritarianism.

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I invite readers to take an hour and listen to the video below.  And then weigh in in the comments. Do we need people to be religious to stave off anti-Western values and to improve their mental health? Did the Enlightenment and secular humanism really come from Christianity, as Hirsi Ali says, or was it a reaction against Christianity, as Dawkins claims?  Do we need Christianity as THE faith that will fill society’s moral vacuum (if there is one)? And is there really a moral vacuum now, compared to say, five hundred years ago?

Updates: First, I just discovered that Hirsi Ali now has her own Substack site, called “Restoration” (she’s not the only author). If you want to follow her intellectual and spiritual journey, click on the link, though at $75 per year it’s pricier than many other such sites.

And I couldn’t resist adding this quote from the eminent nonbeliever H. L. Mencken.  What if a religion dictates something that you think is immoral? Chritianity certainly does, at least for liberal humanists (see “Catholicism”):

We need an Constitutional amendment keeping religion out of science

June 12, 2024 • 11:45 am

There should be some kind of Constitutional amendment that puts up a wall between science and religion, just like the First Amendment that puts up a wall between government and religion. The incursion of religion into science is never helpful, and is often harmful. It has, for example, led to creationism. (I don’t object so much to the reverse incursion, since science has often disproven assertions of believers (creationism, Adam and Eve, the Exodus out of Egypt, and so on.) Maybe there should be a membrane that allows a one-way leakage of science into religion but prevents the reverse movement.,)

Here’s a new letter in Nature (click headline to access) noting not only the large difference in methodology between seeking “truth” in science vs. religion, but also using the high proportion of nonbelieving scientists (compared to the general public) as evidence for the incompatibility of the two areas. (Matthew sent me this to “cheer me up”.)

The link to the Conlon article is here, and that to the NAS survey is here. 

I discuss in Faith Versus Fact how the more accomplished a scientist is, the more likely they are to be nonbelievers. For example, here’s a quote from page 12 of my book:

Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever.  Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research found 33% who admitted belief in God, while 41% were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”).  In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83% and atheism at only 4%. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheistic than other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling

When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62% being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23% who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than the general public.

Sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that chooses only the most accomplished scientists in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93% of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only the remaining 7% believing in a personal God. This is almost the reverse of the data for “average” Americans.

I then go on to discuss why accomplishment as a scientist is negatively correlated with religiosity. Two explanations immediately stick out, and I think both are at play in these results. But I’ll let readers think up their own reasons.

By the way, the same pattern is seen in UK scientists. A fuil 87% of the members of The Royal Society are atheists or agnostics, while about 49% of Brits believe in God. But I think that 50% would be quite a bit higher if you added Brits who “believe in a higher power”.