Category: atheism

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?

NYT series: Religion is back, and it’s a good thing, too. Dawkins responds and dissents.

April 24, 2025 • 11:00 am

The NYT’s associate editor Lauren Jackson is doing a year-long series on “belief” for the paper. In her latest piece (click below to read, or find it archived here), she pulls out all the stops, averring the several points that we’ve seen appearing over and over again in the MSM. To wit:

1.) America needs religion to hang together as a society. Religious people by almost any measure are happier, less lonely, more educated, and more well off than nonbelievers. That, she implies, is a reason to believe, even though she herself is a nonbeliever. (I guess she has “belief in belief”.)

2.) But religion is waning in America (this is based on a Pew survey that shows that the “Christian share of the U.S. population stabilizes.” But look at the data below she adduces! It’s pretty pathetic, showing a decline over two years as the percentage of “Americans who identify as Christian”, a figure that has been fairly constant since 2019 at about 63%. This is after nearly 20 years of a steady decline. The percentage of “nones” (people not affiliated with a particular denomination) has also dropped by 2-3% in one year (2022-2023) and all this has heartened believers (or “believers in belief”) to cheer for the perceived resurgence of religion in America.

3.) Jackson, an ex-Mormon and now nonbeliever, nevertheless applauds this trend as well, for, after she left the Latter-day Saints, she never found the happiness and connection she achieved as a Mormon. Her laments about this loss verge on a Big Whine, for one wants to keep asking her “Well, why don’t you go back to religion?” Jackson’s answer is unsatisfactory.

4.) And we get the usual palaver that most of us harbor a God-shaped “hole in our hearts”: a desperate need for religion that can’t be filled by any other activity or form of sociality.

I’ve argued against many of these claims before, and this post is a précis of Jackson’s long argument. But below I’ll show you how Richard Dawkins has answered her—far better than I.  What is worth pondering is why the media is making such a big brouhaha about religion’s resurgence now (see articles by Dreher, Douthat, and Hirsi Ali), and why they insist that only belief in God can quell our angst.  I attribute this largely to two things: the pandemic and Trump, both of which have made people unhappy and insecure. And when that happens people turn to faith.

But I digress: here’s the article. I’ll give some indented quotes:

Here’s her reason for giving up Mormonism. It seems to have little to do with the religions’s ludicrous truth claims, but with her desire to conform to her peers.  But she couldn’t, as Barry Manilow sang, “get the feeling again,” no matter what she did:

I never really wanted to leave my faith. I wasn’t interested in exile — familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.

My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the last 30 years. I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. Around 40 million Americans have left churches over the last few decades, and about 30 percent of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

That’s what I did, too. I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

And her proclamation that religion is back!:

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. [JAC: Generational?] People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

Well, if she admits that religion will probably continue to wane, then what is she celebrating? The “limits”—-the pathetic “limits” you see in the graph above?

She goes on at length about studies showing the palpable advantage of religion in promoting happiness and well-being, and I’m not familiar with much of that work. Even so, if we don’t believe in God for various reasons (mine is “no evidence”) are we supposed to force ourselves to believe because if we pretend to, we might actually lapse back into belief? And there are all those friendly people you can meet in church.

Yes, Ms. Jackson longs and pines for her God, but she just can’t get that feeling again. Here’s the biggest whine, which makes me want to shake her and say, “Go back to church, for crying out loud!”: Bolding is mine:

But many of these “nones” have had a dawning recognition that they had thrown “the baby out with the baptismal water,” as my colleague Michelle Cottle said.

“I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now,” Ms. Mahoney told me.

Like Ms. Mahoney and many other “nones,” I too feel stuck. I miss what I had. In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary — when the baby arrives, the moving truck comes or grief overwhelms. I lost answers about planets, galaxies, eternity. I still find it odd to move through the world, going to the gym and sending Slack messages, with these questions threatening to overtake me. Shouldn’t I be dumbstruck, constantly? Shouldn’t we all?

. . . In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

Well, as I’ve discussed sporadically, and readers mostly agree, our lives do NOT have a purpose imposed by the outside, including by belief in God. The idea of your “life’s purpose” is confected: it is a made-up construct incorporating the things you’ve done that you find satisfying, meaningful, or enjoyable.  And this brings up the question of evidence for God, something that’s pretty much neglected by Jackson.

Bolding is mine below.  I don’t see why she can’t go back—perhaps not to Mormonism, but there are plenty of more humanistic faiths, including deism and pantheism. There’s even Unitarian Universalism, a non-goddy faith that’s currently riven by social-justice issues. But what about Quakerism?

And if her beliefs have changed, perhaps, just perhaps, she sees that it’s really impossible for her to regain faith because she realized that there’s simply no evidence for a god.  So we have the equivalent of a child who can’t take her teddy bear to school and yet desperately longs for it because it gives her such comfort.  Again, bolding is mine.

But I don’t feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. Most importantly, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

Part of my response is in 1 Corintians 13:11, and I’ll substitute “woman” for “man”:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a woman, I put away childish things.

Time to ditch the teddy bear.

This is where Richard Dawkins enters.  Ms. Jackson, wracked with doubt, had read Richard’s books, which had some influence on her. So she called him up and asked him about the need for faith:

A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America’s secularization had stagnated.

He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. “It seems to me, should be reasonably easy to sort out,” he said. For ethics, he encouraged people to take civics classes and host a weekly discussion club. For community? “Play golf.”

He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith: “It should be quite easy to show documentary films: David Attenborough films, Carl Sagan films, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide.”

But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren’t enough.

Well, there was nothing else for me to do than forward the article to Richard, since he was quoted.  It turns out he hadn’t seen it.  But, in about a day, he knocked out a short but trenchant response to Jackson’s agonized lucubrations. His piece is a masterpiece of defending humanism. I am not going to quote it except for the very last bit, for you can read it on his Substack by clicking on the link below (it’s also archived here).

The ending:

Who needs New Age spirituality (“sound baths”, “energy healing”, “astrology”),who needs to thumb-suck under a mental comfort blanket, who needs gods, when reality is there for the taking?

I’d say, “Touché.”

Dawkins in the Spectator on that pesky “God-shaped hole”

January 3, 2025 • 9:15 am

I’ve posted several times on the claim that humans have an innate longing for God that must be filled by either religion or some simulacrum of religion. This is the famous “God-shaped hole” in our psyche claimed by believers and those whom Dan Dennett called “believers in belief.” This trope appears regularly, and the last time I discussed the “God-shaped hole” was on Christmas Eve when a Free Press article described an atheist mother lamenting the absence of religious traditions to which she could expose her children on Christmas.

With the recent kerFFRFle in which some people (including me) argue that wokeness and gender activism have taken the form of a quasi-religion—a claim that’s the subject of a whole book by John McWhorter—some people have taken to blaming atheists for creating this hole and for the need for something to replace traditional faiths. By taking away people’s religion, they say, we have made society worse as erstwhile believers start glomming onto all kinds of nonsense. (Apparently religion is a good form of nonsense.)

Well, yes, some people do need god, but that need has declined steadily in the West, and in many places the hole doesn’t seem to be filled with quasi-religions.  Northern Europe and Scandinavia, for instance, have long become largely atheistic. Exactly 0% of Icelanders under 25 believe that God created the world, and 40% of them identify as atheists.  But is Scandinavia filled with especially woke people, clinging to crystals and other forms of woo, and being the most gender-activist people in the world? Not that I know of.  So my thesis is that while some people will always need God, many do not, and their numbers will decrease over time as the world population becomes better and better off. (Religiosity is negatively correlated with well being and other indices of happiness.)

And really, isn’t it condescending to say that we atheists should not publicly criticize belief in gods because it might create even worse forms of religion?  Are we supposed to shut up about the harms and false claims of traditional faiths? That’s simply a “little people” argument, one founded on “belief in belief.”

In today’s Spectator, Richard Dawkins takes up the god-shaped hole argument, though he concentrates largely on recent accusations that he himself helped dig that hole. Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here.

Here are two people accusing Richard of wielding the Atheistic Shovel:

An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:

“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”

And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organisation that’s been taken over by the trans cult:

“An atheistic organisation worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”

There are other arguments, but  Dawkinss concludes that the rejection of what he calls “trans nonsense” (I’d call it “gender-activist extremism”) should be based not on the fact that it replaces the supposed benefits of religion, but on science itself:

The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.

. . . How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.

This dispels the argument that people must hold irrational beliefs—”quasi religions”—to replace real religions.  I would extend the argument a bit further, though.  While admitting that it’s hard for some folks to let go of gods, I’ll also argue that quasi-religion nonsense can be laid at the door not of atheism, but of the kind of faith that leads people to embrace important beliefs without good evidence.

Sam Harris vs. Brian Greene on religion

December 27, 2024 • 12:30 pm

Here physicist Brian Greene argues with Sam Harris about approaches to dispelling false beliefs, aka religion. Greene argues that simply acquainting people with science will make them less religious (or at least he implies it), and avers that some New Atheists have been ineffective because they call religious people “stupid”. (That’s not so true!). Harris, however, says that the “carrot” attitude of Greene (and Greene really doesn’t use a carrot because he doesn’t criticize religous belief at all) may not be as effective as Harris’s “stick”, which is simply rational argument about what is true and open criticism of the harms of religion. As Sam says, it’s false to assert that you can’t reason people out of religion because he’s seen it happen. So have I.

Sam notes what seems to be the case: Greene just doesn’t want to be the “go-to guy for why you can’t have your cake and eat it too in the matter of science and religion.”  On the other hand, Sam notes that in some ways religion is bad for science. For example, some religious beliefs are inimical to understanding science, including accepting global warming. And of course creationism is still with us in the form of ID.  Sam then asks whether Greene shouldn’t be pushing harder against such inimical religious beliefs. Greene responds that in physics he doesn’t encounter that kind of religious mishigass, which is found more in biology. It’s more than that, though, because I believe that in the past Greene, as one of the organizers of the World Science Festival, has participated in osculating the rump of faith. As I wrote in 2020:

On the other hand [Greene] takes lots of money from the John Templeton Foundation to run the World Science Festival, and there’s always some Templeton-sponsored events that reconcile religion and science or enable “spirituality”.  In fact, Dan Dennett withdrew from a Festival panel when he learned it was backed by Templeton (see the first link in this sentence). And Greene has always been reluctant to say anything bad about religion, despite the fact that he seems to be an atheist. Although he’s said that “there’s much in New Atheism that resonates with me“, he’s admitted that his strategy is less confrontational and less antagonistic than scientists like Dawkins. In fact, as we see below, it no longer seems the least confrontational and antagonistic, but rather worshipful.

There’s more, but I think that one element in Greene’s reticence is knowing that if one criticizes religion, one loses popularity. The fastest way to erode one’s acclaim as a science writer or popularizer is to criticize religion, even if you do it separately from talking about science. Neil deGrasse Tyson has also learned that lesson.

 

Sam Harris is still explaining why religion is bad

December 12, 2024 • 11:30 am

Every once in a while Sam Harris, who must be overwhelmed with his writing on Substack, his podcast, and his complex meditation site, gets back to what brought him public notice: criticism of religion. And even if you know his views from The End of Faith or Letter to a Christian Nation, you’ll benefit if you’re able to read the two pieces below. (These two Substack essays have titles clearly drawn from the latter book.)

Apparently some high-handed Christian, just called “X,” wrote to Sam chewing him out for dissing Christianity, saying that atheism didn’t disprove God’s existence, claiming that Sam didn’t understand modern religion or sophisticated theology, asserting that religion makes people behave better, and arguing that Sam’s criticism of religion—Christianity in particularly—showed that he was intolerant.

Well, this is all meat for Sam’s grinder, and the poor “X” got it ten ways from Sunday, in two posts on Sam’s site. You won’t be able to access them all unless you’re a member of his Substack, but I’ve linked to them anyway and will give some of the delicious quotes I found. And, in case you haven’t read Sam’s first two books and can read these essays, they’re a decent substitute. (But you should read the books.) Click on the headlines to go to the site.

 

First, a response to X’s claim that Sam was arguing against religious extremists, not moderates (this in fact was taken up in The End of Faith). I’ve indented Sam’s comments.

So let me address my longstanding frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded. It is true that their “sophisticated” theology has generally taught me to appreciate the candor of religious fanatics. Whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, moderates like yourself claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken extremists to be the sole representatives of these great faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason and contemporary ethics, and that our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” Needless to say, such casuistry generally comes moistened by great sighs of condescension.

. . . . The problem, as I see it, is that religious moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting this is that they just have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody is ever motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis of religion. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certainty in most respects—often blinds a person to the reality of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now especially unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between their faith and extremism. But there isn’t. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is not a moderate. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac from the 14th century—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, and to hunt witches (good luck). Of course, you can cherry-pick scripture and find inspiration to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are fit only to be crushed in God’s loving machinery of justice.

Part 2 of the evisceration of X:

Here, Sam argues why religion is not a net good.

-To be clear, I do not “disdain” religious moderates. I do, however, disdain bad ideas and bad arguments—which, I’m afraid, religious moderates tend to produce in great quantities. I’d like to point out that you didn’t rebut any of the substantial challenges I made in my last volley. Rather, you went on to make other points, most of which I find irrelevant to the case I made against religious faith. For instance, you remind me that many people find religion—both its doctrines and its institutions—important sources of comfort and inspiration. You also insist that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. But you could gather such facts until the end of time, and they wouldn’t begin to suggest that the God of Abraham actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that he came to Earth in the person of Jesus Christ to redeem our sins.

I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who imagine themselves to be dependent upon their church for a sense of purpose and community, and who do good things wherever their missionary work takes them. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr.—that a very randy and unscrupulous dowser—by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? And what of the Scientologist next door, who appears to be living his best possible life? Does his success in Hollywood increase your admiration for that patent charlatan, L. Ron Hubbard?

Something that often gets neglected in these discussions is that if one religion is absolutely true, all the others are wrong. And Sam, like the other New Atheists, is absolutely concerned with religious truth, for at bottom most religious behavior is based on the conviction that the tenets of one’s faith are true. If you believe that Christ wasn’t resurrected, you can hardly call yourself a Christian. One important reason for seeing if a religion is “true” is given below: you need good reasons for behaving as you do. But first this:

If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong:

  • Jesus Christ was the Messiah—so the Jews are wrong.
  • Jesus was divine and resurrected—so the Muslims are wrong (“Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.” Qur’an, 4:157).
  • There is only one God—so the Hindus are wrong.

But, of course, the Christians have no better reason to think they’re right than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.

And here’s my favorite bit, which tells you why the truth of one’s religion is crucial:

As I have argued elsewhere, the alleged usefulness of religion—the fact that people find it consoling or that it sometimes gets them to do good things—is not an argument for its truth.

And, of course, the utility of religious faith can also be disputed. Wherever religion makes people feel better, or gets them to do good things, it does so for bad reasons—when good reasons are available. Which strikes you as more moral, helping people out of a sincere concern for their suffering, or helping them because you believe God wants you to do it? Personally, I’d prefer that my children acquire the former attitude.

And religion often inspires people to do bad things that they would not otherwise do. For instance, at this very moment in Syria and Iraq, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims can be found drilling holes into each other’s skulls with power tools. What are the chances they would be doing this without the “benefit” of their incompatible religious beliefs and identities?

As the late Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

On to “sophisticated philosophy” and exegesis:

The Bible, as you suggest, “defies easy synthesis” and “can be hard to understand.” But it is worse than that. No, I haven’t argued that the book “is principally about owning slaves”—just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong, which is a terrible flaw in a book that is widely imagined to be perfect.

The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor, the meek, and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument—and they knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest repository of wisdom we have.

Below is the only part of the essays that confuses me. Sam thinks we have no free will (he has a book called Free Will that’s well worth reading). If that’s the case, how can he say this?

It is true that many atheists are convinced that they know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith or Waking Up know that I am not convinced of this. While I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the brain, I do not think that the reducibility of consciousness to unconscious information processing has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t justify crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world.

It sounds to me that he is separating mind and matter, not a stand that comports with determinism.  It’s always seemed to me palpably unscientific to say, knowing that the brain is made of matter and that our thoughts and behaviors stem almost entirely from the brain, that consciousness (a brain product) must also come from matter and its physical behavior. In fact, this is the point that Sam seems to make repeatedly on his meditation website. But maybe I’m not understanding something,

In the end, Sam gives “X” a final drubbing after “X” calls Sam intolerant for criticizing Christianity.   Sam’s superb writing and thinking make it sting all the harder:

What if I told you that I am confident that I have an even number of cells in my body? Would it be intolerant of you to doubt me? What are the chances that I am in a position to have counted my cells and counted them correctly? Note that, unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections, my claim has a 50% chance of being true—and yet it is clearly ridiculous.

Forgive me for stating the obvious: No Christian has ever been in a position to be confident (much less certain) that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he will one day return to Earth wielding magic powers. Observing this fact is not a form of intolerance.

You seem to have taken special offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be honest on every other topic, in this instance, she doesn’t want to distinguish what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) from (1) what she wants to be true or (2) what will keep her children from being too sad in Granny’s absence. So Mommy is lying—either to herself or to her kids—and we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than learn how to grieve, we learn to lie to ourselves, or to those we love.

You can complain about the intolerance of atheists all you want, but that won’t make unjustified claims to knowledge appear more reasonable; it won’t differentiate your religious beliefs from the beliefs of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won’t constitute an adequate response to anything I have written here, or am likely to write in the future.

Harris is a gifted man, and I’m baffled at the number of people who seem to intensely dislike him.

Dawkins extols the courage of atheists

July 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

Yesterday we had a video of Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock talking about gender activism, and today we have Dawkins writing about the intellectual and moral courage of atheists. This essay is needed because attacks on “New Atheism” continue, with many misguided people saying that New Atheism is dead because either its proponents were muddled or because they were sexual harassers.

Both claims are wrong. Yes, some New Atheists did engage in sexual harassment, but it certainly wasn’t characteristic of the “movement”, and none of the Four Horsemen who inspired Richard’s essay have been accused of it. But to reject New Atheism because of accusations against some of its proponents is fallacious: what’s important is the content of the movement.

And that content was not only unassailable, but based on evidence—or, in religion, the lack thereof. If there was one thing that distinguished the “New” Atheism from the “old” atheism of people like Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, and H. L. Mencken, was its scientific character. The arguments in the books of the “Four Horsemen”—Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins—were infused with science, with repeated assertions that there was no evidence for religious claims, be they for the existence of gods or the ancillary tenets of faith.  For once, faith was seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  Dennett was largely a philosopher of science, Dawkins and Harris were trained as scientists, and Hitchens was science-friendly, constantly keeping up with science.

I would argue that New Atheism was a resounding success, and is no longer touted actively simply because it did its job and is no longer needed. (It is needed, though, about once per generation, just to acquaint the young with its arguments.) Religion is disappearing throughout the West—largely, I think, because it’s been displaced by science and rationality (see Steve Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now for supporting evidence).  And religion, as sociologists tell us, is largely embraced by those who are needy, poor, or sick, with nobody but a god to turn to. Yet as the well-being of the world increases, so its need for religion decreases accordingly.

The rise in America and Europe of the “nones”—those people who lack religious affiliation—attests to the decline of faith. Now comprising 28% of Americans, the percentage of “nones” has risen from 16% in 2007. Yes, some “nones” do believe in a god, a higher power, or are spiritual, but the rejection of organized religion tells us something about Americans’ decreasing need for both faith and for religion as a way to commune with others. Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavia, are losing faith as well: one of my favorite figures is that exactly 0.0% of Icelandic people under 25 believe that God created the world, while 94% believe that the world came about via the Big Bang.

I attribute the rise in atheism not just to the increase of well-being of people in the West, but also to the efforts of the New Atheists, who broadcast the arguments against God widely (all their books were best sellers) and erased much of the shame for publicly admitting you were a nonbeliever. Back in the early days of New Atheism, when I’d lecture in places like the American South, people would often come up to me and thank me for publicly arguing against religion, saying that they experienced strong familial and vocational pressures to adhere to the local faith.  That is disappearing.

On September 30, 2007, the Four Horsemen sat down for a two-hour discussion, filmed by Josh Timonen, that you can watch in two parts on YouTube (here and here). This discussion was then turned into a 2019 book: The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. By that time Hitchens had died, but the three surviving Horsemen were asked to write an additional introductory essay for the book.  The one below is Richard’s essay, which he’s now rewritten to be a standalone piece, and which he’s just published on his website.  I hadn’t read it because I didn’t read the Horsemen book (I listened to the whole conversation), and so missed the essays.

If you did, too, you can see Richard’s piece for free by clicking on the link below:

The three best parts of the essay are its no-pulled-punches denigration of theology (a discipline that has no content, though “religious studies” does), its suggestion of ideas that weren’t part of the original New Atheism, and its theme: that atheists possess a kind of courage that believers don’t have. I’ll give a few quotes (indented) for each area.

The vacuity of theology vs the substance of science:

. . . it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.

. . In 1950, Pope Pius XII (unkindly known as ‘Hitler’s Pope’) promulgated the dogma that Jesus’ mother Mary, on her death, was bodily – i.e. not merely spiritually – lifted up into heaven. ‘Bodily’ means that if you’d looked in her grave, you’d have found it empty. The Pope’s reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. He cited 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. The saying makes no mention of Mary. There is not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the epistle had Mary in mind. We see again the typical theological trick of taking a text and ‘interpreting’ it in a way that just might have some vague, symbolic, hand-waving connection with something else. Presumably, too, like so many religious beliefs, Pius XII’s dogma was at least partly based on a feeling of what would be fitting for one so holy as Mary. But the Pope’s main motivation, according to Dr Kenneth Howell, director of the John Henry Cardinal Newman Institute of Catholic Thought, University of Illinois, came from a different meaning of what was fitting. The world of 1950 was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and desperately needed the balm of a healing message. Howell quotes the Pope’s words, then gives his own interpretation:

Pius XII clearly expresses his hope that meditation on Mary’s assumption will lead the faithful to a greater awareness of our common dignity as the human family. . . . What would impel human beings to keep their eyes fixed on their supernatural end and to desire the salvation of their fellow human beings? Mary’s assumption was a reminder of, and impetus toward, greater respect for humanity because the Assumption cannot be separated from the rest of Mary’s earthly life.

It’s fascinating to see how the theological mind works: in particular, the lack of interest in – indeed, the contempt for – factual evidence.

. . . The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy. For example, the Encyclopedia notes that ‘God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron, but as punishment kept them from the “land of promise”’. That banishment is viewed as a kind of metaphor for purgatory. More gruesomely, when David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, the Lord forgave him – but didn’t let him off scot-free: God killed the child of the marriage (2 Samuel 12:13–14). Hard on the innocent child, you might think. But apparently a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is purgatory, and one not overlooked by the Encyclopedia’s authors.

The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?

Richard gives a long list of things that science knows, pretty much with certainty even though all scientific truth is considered provisional. This is in contrast with theology, which of course has told us NOTHING about what’s true in the real universe. (This is why theology has no meaningful content.) I’ll just give a paragraph of our scientific truths; note that he even quotes Gould, not Dawkins’s BFF. But that quote by Gould is quite eloquent:

Let us by all means pay lip service to that incantation, while muttering, in homage to Galileo’s muttered eppur si muove,the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Facts in this sense include the following, and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the many millions of hours devoted to theological ratiocination. The universe began between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. The sun, and the planets orbiting it, including ours, condensed out of a rotating disk of gas, dust and debris about 4.5 billion years ago. The map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by. We know the approximate shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history. And we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future. We know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants.

Matter in the universe is non-randomly distributed in discrete bodies, many of them rotating, each on its own axis, and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict, to the exact second, when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur. These bodies – stars, planets, planetesimals, knobbly chunks of rock, etc. – are themselves clustered in galaxies, many billions of them, separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the (already very large) spacing of (again, many billions of) stars within galaxies.

. . . Who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which, synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State, detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton? This feat of measurement, with its profound significance for cosmology, is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth.

Novel additions to New Atheism (things that weren’t in the “Old” Atheism). I’ll give just one. Theologians and others argue about the claim below (some making the ridiculous argument that “God is simple”), but I think it’s a decisive blow against theistic and deistic religions:

But more important, even if we never understand all the steps, nothing can change the principle that, however improbable the entity you are trying to explain, postulating a creator god doesn’t help you, because the god would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation.’ However difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity, the spontaneous arising of complexity is, by definition, more improbable. And a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right. However improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, the theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.

The courage of atheism

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice. Emotion screams: ‘No, it’s too much to believe! You are trying to tell me the entire universe, including me and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef and the Andromeda Galaxy and a tardigrade’s finger, all came about by mindless atomic collisions, no supervisor, no architect? You cannot be serious. All this complexity and glory stemmed from Nothing and a random quantum fluctuation? Give me a break.’ Reason quietly and soberly replies: ‘Yes. Most of the steps in the chain are well understood, although until recently they weren’t. In the case of the biological steps, they’ve been understood since 1859.

And the moral courage:

[Atheism] requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality. You have company: warm, human arms around you, and a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts that applied science brings but also art, music, the rule of law, and civilized discourse on morals. Morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design – design by real, intelligent humans who actually exist. Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

These are short excerpts from a longer essay, but it’s not all that long, and, for me at least, the essay bucked me up, reminding me of the personal and societal benefits of atheism. Yes, you can argue for “belief in belief”: Dan Dennett’s phrase denoting people who don’t need God but think that religion is necessary to hold society together as a kind of community Velcro.  But as we can see from the well-run, moral, but atheistic countries of Europe, that claim is false.  And as for the riposte that, well, Western humanism is a product of Christianity over the ages (viz. Ayaan Hirsi Ali), I find that Hail Mary argument insupportable.

The supposed “god-shaped hole” in our psyche that can be filled only by Christianity

July 5, 2024 • 10:15 am

Several people, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray, have floated the idea that the malaise of the West is caused largely because the decline of religion has taken away our sense of meaning and purpose.  Hirsi Ali, for example, has written and talked extensively about how embracing Christianity alone can help stave off the forces that threaten to destroy Western civilization, and names three: Putin, Chinese Communism, and global Islamism. It is these forces that brought her to abandon atheism, embrace Jesus, and cure her depression.

Now I’m not sure how the rest of us can embrace Christianity and its tenets—Hirsi Ali, for instance, believes in the Resurrection—if we’ve already rejected them for one of the many reasons (for me, the lack of evidence) that people give up or reject faith. How can you force yourself to believe this stuff? Hirsi Ali apparently has, but I think she’s an outlier. As Nineteen Eighty-Four shows, it takes a lot of societal change and pressure to make people believe things that don’t make sense.

At any rate, the meme of the “god-shaped hole” in our lives—the supposed lack of purpose and meaning that accompanies atheism—appears to be making a comeback. But in earlier posts (here and here), I asked readers where they found their own “purpose and meaning”, and the near universal response is that we don’t get it from the outside, but make it ourselves. That seems about right to me. (For another critique of the “we need god to fill that lacuna” trope, see here.)

In the long Quillette article below, which is worth reading, author Matt Johnson looks at this claim in detail, and finds it severely wanting. It’ll take some time to read, but has a lot of ideas you may want to absorb. Click the screenshot to read.

Johnson’s quotes are indented, and I’ll give the topics bold headers (flush left):

The Problem: Liberalism and secularism are said to leave us groping around spiritually, looking for meaning. Johnson concentrates on The Christianity Solution, but also talks about  liberalism itself as a filler of The Hole.  I won’t deal much with the liberalism stuff, as Johnson assumes that many afflicted with Lack of Meaning are already liberals. Here’s Johnson on suggestions about what can fill The Hole.

There are different expressions of this belief. In an article for the Spectator, journalist Ed West discusses a phenomenon he describes as “New Theism”—an intellectual movement pushing back against the rising secularism in Western liberal societies. In a recent essay for Quillette, the historian and author Adam Wakeling describes this phenomenon as “political Christianity,” which he defines as the belief that “Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today.” Wakeling challenges both of these beliefs and argues that the “success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths.”

. . . New Theists don’t just believe that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the cornerstone of Western civilisation, they also argue that secular liberalism leaves people bereft of community and a sense of meaning and purpose. New Theists like author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative intellectual Douglas Murray, author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and historian Tom Holland all argue that the decline of Christianity will lead to nihilism, new forms of political tribalism, and a profound sense of spiritual emptiness in Western societies.

, , , New Theists believe traditional monotheistic religion is the only belief system that satisfies our need for meaning. [JAC note: Islam is also monotheistic, but you don’t see the New Theists touting Muslim belief.] In the absence of religion, Lefebvre says liberalism can serve this purpose. For [David] Brooks, just about any fervently held belief besides liberalism will do. All these beliefs share the conviction that Western liberalism has been hollowed out by the decline of religious faith. They don’t just seek to fill the hole in their own souls with religion or some other existential doctrine—they assume that all their fellow citizens share their spiritual yearning.

But if Christianity is a source of purpose, meaning, and solace, why is it declining everywhere? (In my view, it’s because if you’re getting better off materially and physically, as most of us are, the less you need a God to appeal to.)  Some data:

The New Theists, Brooks, and Lefebvre all agree that there’s a crisis of meaning in liberal societies. This view has become increasingly common as Western countries have gone through a period of rapid secularisation in recent decades. In 2000, 86 percent of Americans reported that they were Christian. Since then, the proportion has collapsed to 68 percent. Other indicators of religiosity have plummeted as well—while nearly two-thirds of Americans said religion was “very important” to them in 2003, 45 percent now say the same. Church membership was around 70 percent in 2000, but it’s now 45 percent. Since 2007, the proportion of Americans who say they’re atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” jumped from 16 percent to 28 percent.

A similar trend is sweeping Western Europe, which has seen significant declines in Christian belief. In Belgium, 83 percent of respondents to a Pew survey say they were raised Christian, but just 55 percent remain Christian. Many other countries have followed a similar trajectory: 79 to 51 percent in Norway, 67 to 41 percent in the Netherlands, 92 to 66 percent in Spain, 74 to 52 percent in Sweden. Every Western European country Pew surveyed followed this trend.

This is a problem, for why would people give up a belief if doing so plunges you into despair, anomie, and, say some, an abandonment of moral standards?   Of course the morality/Christianity connection is dubious, as plenty of atheists are moral, and plenty of them, including John Rawls and Peter Singer, have written about how we can get morality from secular rationality alone.  And you probably know the problems with asserting that morality comes from Christianity (especially the Bible). You have to cherry-pick the Bible to get a morality that we can hold today, ignoring things like acceptance of genocide and slavery, as well as Jesus’s command to leave your family to follow him.  Further, as Johnson points out, history shows that the Enlightenment and its accompanying moral virtues came from rejecting Christianity, leading us to. . . .

The role of secularism in giving us morality:

There’s a reason Holland redefines humanism and secularism as Christian concepts. Criticism of religion played a major role in the development of Western liberal democracy, a historical fact that’s difficult to reconcile with his view that the West is fundamentally Christian. The word “Enlightenment” doesn’t appear once in Holland’s attack on humanism. While he briefly mentions Voltaire, he only does so to claim that the Western tradition of criticising religious authority can be traced to Martin Luther rather than the progenitors of Enlightenment humanism.

It’s true that Voltaire and Martin Luther were both critics of the Catholic Church, but the Protestant Reformation launched a century and a half of religious bloodshed in Europe—one of the great episodes of religious violence that Voltaire reacted against. The Thirty Years War directly or indirectly killed as much as a third of Central Europe’s population. This was also a period in which people were routinely tortured and killed for being insufficiently pious, worshiping the wrong God, or conducting scientific research. It’s no wonder that major Enlightenment figures such as David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire were such stern critics of religion, nor is it a surprise that the American Founders consulted their arguments and determined that a secular republic is the best form of government.

In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—which laid the foundation for the First Amendment to the US Constitution—Thomas Jefferson condemned as “tyrannical” the idea that a citizen must “furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors.” Citizens’ “opinions in matters of religion,” he wrote, should in no way “diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

In fact, although many people attribute the rise of the Nazis to Hitler’s atheism, that doesn’t wash, as most Nazis were Christians. And there’s this:

Despite Nietzsche’s proclamation that God was dead in the late 19th century, there was no great movement away from Christianity in Germany prior to World War II. Immediately after the Nazis seized power in 1933—and less than a week after Hitler banned all non-Nazi parties—the German government signed a treaty with the Vatican. (The Catholic Church didn’t have an especially inspiring record on fascism elsewhere in Europe, either—Pope Pius XII supported General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and blessed his regime in 1948.) In a March 1933 speech, Hitler described Christianity as the foundation of German values. While it’s true that Hitler made this claim for political reasons and despite his own animosity toward Christianity, it demonstrates that he believed he had to appeal to the Christian faith of the German people.

Germany is the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation—one of the most significant events in the history of Western Christianity. It has as much of a claim to being a country forged by the Judeo-Christian tradition as any other in Europe, perhaps even more so. And yet, this rich Christian history and the presence of millions of Christians on German soil offered no bulwark against the descent into Nazism. New Theists attribute every Western achievement to Christianity and blame the West’s most cataclysmic failures on atheism. This is no surprise, as they have engineered a worldview in which everything moral is by definition Christian, and everything immoral is anti-Christian. But this obvious deck-stacking requires them to ignore the horrors of the distant past—the Crusades, the Inquisition, and 150 years of religious warfare in Europe—as well as the not-so-distant past.

There’s more, but the New Theism has also made a claim that renders the “god-shaped-hole hypothesis” worthless, making it untestable. And that claim is this: “Well, even if atheists are moral, and find meaning and purpose outside Christianity, the morality and purpose they have derives from the fact that the West was Christian for many years.”  Using this argument, you can attribute anything good in the modern world to Christianity. But good things have happened in non-Christian countries, too, including India and, of course, Israel.

Johnson touches on this untestability, but I’d like to see more written about it by others.

For Holland and other New Theists like Peterson, the secularism of early liberals like Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Jefferson is a mirage—no matter how ferociously they criticise Christianity, they’re inescapably Christian. Just as Holland says Christianity is responsible for liberalism, human rights, and even secularism, Peterson credits Christianity with “Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.” Peterson says the “fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner.” He even argues that it isn’t possible to be a genuine atheist and live an ethical life.

Note how Peterson asserts that Christianity still “governs every aspect of the individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner.”  Can that be disproven under the views of the New Theists? If you think that America, for example, is built on Christian values, then why doesn’t the palpable rejection of religion by the Founders, as they drew up their plans for American government, disprove it? No, it can’t be disproved because the New Theists are, like Hirsi Ali, True Believers.  If they’ve found meaning in Christianity, then somehow it must also undergird all of our lives, and the lives of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founders. (If they thought Christianity was an essential social glue, why did they explicitly leave it out of government?) Of course they can always make up untestable claims to support that: the Founders were raised in a milieu of Christianity!

Which brings us to the final topic:

Where do we get meaning and purpose?  Of course there are real people who claim (and mean it) that the meaning and purpose of their lives comes from Christianity.  And some of them will be right, but there are also a lot of “nones”, and I haven’t seen them running around killing, raping, and stealing. Further, the countries of Northern Europe, like Sweden and Denmark, are almost completely atheistic (though people go to church for ceremonial reasons), and yet they are some of the most “moral” countries in the world.  The New Theists, of course, will attribute this to these countries’ “Christian background”. But ask any regular Joe or Jill (not the Bidens!), or any Dane or Swede, what the purpose or meaning of their lives are, and see what they say. Johnson hits the nail on the head when he avers this:

There’s an assumption at the heart of liberalism: purpose is what we make it. While many of liberalism’s critics insist that there must be some top-down source of purpose in contemporary democratic societies, this contradicts essential liberal principles like freedom of conscience, self-determination, and pluralism. But the idea that there’s no fundamental source of purpose or meaning in life can be destabilising, which is why it has always generated such powerful resistance.

and his last sentence:

. . . Liberal ideas and institutions like the rule of law, property rights and contract enforcement, and freedom of expression and conscience deserve much of the credit for the health, prosperity, and autonomy we enjoy today. The one thing liberalism can’t provide, however, is a sense of meaning and purpose—that’s up to us, and the responsibility of making our own meaning is a small price to pay. For many, it isn’t a price at all.

It sure isn’t a price for me. I never worry about whether my life has “meaning and purpose.” I just do the things that I find fulfilling.

Although I’m absolutely confident that Christianity and Judaism are on the way out, for the time being New Theism is having a bit of a resurgence with the popularity of people like Peterson and Hirsi Ali. You can see this in the tremendous applause that Hirsi Ali got when she had a discussion with Richard Dawkins about her newfound Christianity.  Dawkins’s claim that for him the value of life was empirical discovery and science couldn’t stand up to Hirsi Ali’s claims that we need Christinaity as a bulwark against the Dark Forces that besiege us.  This doesn’t comport with the rise of nonbelief and the growth of “nones” (those who embrace no formal religion). How those lacking belief nevertheless can wildly applaud those who find meaning in Christianity can, I think, be attributed only to what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief.”  That is, of course, the view that “I don’t need religion, but society needs it as a form of social glue to keep us together.” This is also known as The Little People Assertion.

That claim, in centuries to come, will be proven wrong. Unfortunately, none of us will be observing it from above!