Category: atheist-bashing

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.

The Free Press extols intellectuals who have found God, seeing it as a salubrious social trend

December 30, 2024 • 10:30 am

Not long ago I mentioned that The Free Press had published a weird piece extolling religion: an atheist beefing that she really missed the goddy parts of Christmas even though she wasn’t a believer. She needed to go to church. With that, I wondered whether softness on religion was becoming part of anti-wokeness, or at least that news site.

Now, with the publication of a new longer piece, The Free Press has buttressed my speculations. For this article not only names and tells the stories of a number of notables who decided to embrace religion (largely Christianity), but also implies that there are good reasons for them to do so.  Mostly it’s the “God-shaped hole in our being”: the dubious idea that humans have an innate—and perhaps evolved—need to find a divine being to worship and give then succor.  Indeed, several people (including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose embrace of Christianity we’ve discussed before) explicitly mention that religion is what gives their life meaning.

If that is the case, good for them. But of course many of us find meaning and purpose without religion. Indeed, as I’ve argued, people often don’t go out looking for meaning and purpose to their lives, but simply enact their lives in a way that winds up giving them meaning and purpose.  Those things can be found in children, family, friends, activities (be they physical, intellectual, or humanitarian) and so on.

The biggest issue with this article, though, is that it is completely devoid of any evidence for the truth of the tenets of religion. It’s touting faith as a balm for wounded souls, and, so the narrative goes, one should accept God to get cured–regardless of whether what you believe is true. Indeed, it quotes Andrew Sullivan on the advantage of not having to have good reasons to believe:

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.”

Well, I don’t find that “genius”. If your faith depends on believing that Jesus died for our sins, was bodily resurrected, and then became the only route to Heaven, then you bloody well better have good reasons for thinking that. It was the achievement of New Atheism to show that peoples’ reasons are not good ones.  If your eternal life (and its location) depends on believing the truths espoused by your faith, it’s salubrious to have chosen the right faith. But people don’t worry about that; they usually assume the faith they were taught as children.

Click on the screenshot below to read the piece, or find it archived here.

Here are the names in each of the “I found God” anecdotes. Excerpts are indented; bolding is mine:

1.) In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.

“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.

. . . .“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.

“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”

Has to be?  Why?  And of course if you find “meaning and purpose” in things like friends, family, work, and avocation, then that is a “sense of meaning” that doesn’t need the supernatural.

2.) 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.”

Again, we are supposed to believe that these important intellectuals might have missed out by neglecting God.  But the effects of religious belief give no evidence for the truth of its tenets.

3.) In February 2024, podcaster Joe Rogan, in a conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, said: “We need Jesus.” Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians.

Why Jesus? Is there evidence that he was who he said he was, and that believing in Jesus is the only way to heaven? Maybe we need Muhammad or Buddha.

Anyway, many of us don’t need Jesus.

Note the swipe at Dawkins. The article makes fun of New Atheists throughout; it’s almost like that contempt was ripped from Pharyngula. There’s even a section called “The Rise and Fall of the New Atheists”.  Well, New Atheists aren’t writing their books any more, as they’ve had their say, but the decline of faith in the Western world (not just the U.S.) is sufficient evidence that the anecdotes of this article go against a trend of decreasing religiosity.

4.) 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.”

It’s almost as if his social-media following validates his beliefs.  And again, why Christianity? How does Brand, who I thought was smarter than this, know that Christianity is the religion with the “right” claims? Why not Islam or Judaism?

5.) 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 certain Thiel is about the existence of God! But what is his evidence? And what is this evidence of a “plan for history” and a “plan for your life”?  Thiel is just making this stuff up, spinning his wheels.

6). 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.”

Note that Musk said he believes in the PRINCIPLES of Christianity, not the actual factual assertions of the faith. Do those beliefs include the principle that if you don’t except Jesus as your savior, you’re going to fry eternally? What about the principle that it’s okay to have slaves, so long as you don’t whip them too hard?

As for Jordan Peterson, what he believes about Christianity is so confused and incoherent that I cannot take his “religion” seriously.

There are more like this, includiong Paul Kingsnorth and Jordan Hall, but again, they are just conversion stories, and say nothing about the truth of Christianity. And for every believer cited I could dig up someone who either gave up faith or refused to adopt it, as shown by the growth of “nones” in America.  If it’s a war of anecdotes, the nonbelievers win (see below).

But we’ve neglected the prize specimen of conversion, former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was deeply depressed, and nothing worked to help her. Until she found Christianity.

7.) 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.

Well, yes, Christianity could make you resist Islam (note that religion is being divisive here), and if it cured Hirsi Ali of her depression, then I won’t fault her for accepting it, so long as she believes its tenets, which she says she does.  Here’s the debate between Dawkins and Hirsi Ali. The audience is clearly on Hirsi Ali’s side, but the existence of God can’t be decided by a vote, and of course atheists are generally seen with suspicion compared to lauded “people of faith”. I have always found it curious that it’s considered praise to say someone is a “person of faith”.  It could just as well be said that that is a “person of delusion.”

Another argument for religion adduced in the piece is that religion inspired great art, including all the religious paintings before artists discovered apples and flowers, as well as cathedrals and great music.  This is in fact true, for surely we would have no Notre Dame or Chartres without Christianity. (I’m not so sure about music and painting.) But again, Islam too has inspired fantastic architecture as in their many lovely mosques (e.g., the Taj Mahal), as well as painting, and music (well, until recently). But again, none of this attesta to the verity of the revelations given to Muhammad.

And let’s get back to Dawkins:

Dawkins underscored that he, like Sam Harris, is still very much an atheist. He did not see any contradiction in saying, as he had to Rachel Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio show, that he was “happy” with the number of Christians declining in Britain and that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”

“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.”

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.

I can’t agree fully with Richard about Christianity having bequeathed us a world we want to live in. We can’t run the experiment, but what kind of world would we have if religion had never arisen? We wouldn’t have cathedrals, but perhaps rationality and science would have taken hold a lot earlier, and surely a lot fewer people would have died in the many religious wars. (They’re still dying in droves, by the way: Jew against Muslim, Sunni against Shia, and so on.)

All I know is that I can’t force myself to believe, to condition my life, on something like this unless I know it is true. And because I see no evidence for a God, much less for the truth of any religion, I cannot force myself to believe.  I consider myself a cultural Jew, but my life wouldn’t be that much poorer if I was purely secular.  It is very convenient that believers say they don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, for they get to believe and don’t have to explain why they believe beyond “it makes me feel good.” Like this, from Jonah Teller, a New York Catholic priest:

Father Jonah thought that a new fervor, a more authentic connection to the faith, was emerging out of the loneliness of the last few years. There was a “genuine happiness” that he could feel at Mass, “an excitement, a love.”

It wasn’t that complicated in the end. It was, he said, a kind of turning away from a radical atomization. “The world many people have grown up in is one in which you have the ability to be your own God,” said Father Jonah. “You should have it simply because you want it, whatever it may be. Or not have it, and that can include your own existence—a rejection of simply being.”

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.”

Father Jonah’s evidence is this: we exist, therefore God, and not just God but the loving Christian god. Does God love the Covid virus and mosquitoes, too, which also exist?

I am not going to go into detail about how faith is declining throughout the West, but here are some data from the Gallup organization. Click each graph to see the report

x

 

From Pew Research:

and from Open Culture:

Look as you will, all you will find is a continuous decline in religion in America over the last 100 years.  But it’s not just America: read the Wikipedia article “Decline of Christianity in the Western World.”

This trend, of course, is downplayed in the article, with only a brief mention about the increase in “nones” under the Hirsi Ali section, but that’s about it.  Yet given this trend, in 200 years believers in America will be quite rare. Religion will never disappear, of course, but its decline has been discussed by Steve Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now. with religion adduced as an anti-Enlightenment force throughout history.

But why is the Free Press running pieces like this?  I have no idea, and can guess only that Bari Weiss, the editor, is herself religious, a believing Jew. I would love to hear her discuss the reasons for her faith, and why she rejects Christianity as a personal religion. But I haven’t seen that.

ONE MORE POINT:  To those who think that societies can’t function well without religion, I have a one-word response: Scandinavia.

Hirsi Ali gets criticism of her newfound Christianity; responds

November 17, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Just recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced, after years of professing atheism (and rejecting her earlier Muslim faith(, that she’d become a Christian.  This was announced in an article in Unherd, but she also discussed it briefly on a video, both of which I posted.

Although she wasn’t explicit about what exactly she believed about Christianity, it’s clear that it has something to do with Jesus, for otherwise she’d be a Jew, and in her latest answer to her critics (below), she does mention Jesus, though  she remains silent on the crucial issues of whether he was the son of God, was reincarnated, or did miracles—or even existed!

She gave several reasons for her conversion. First, she said, it is only the values of Judeo-Christian western society that will enable us to stave off malign forces like Islamism and Putin’s authoritarian anmbition, as well as the threat of Chinese Communism.  She considered atheism to be “too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.”

But of course atheism simply doubts or denies the existence of Gods, and isn’t meant to help fortify us against our foes.  But it is connected with a philosophy that does: secular humanism, which can give us a ground for morality without any need to believe in the supernatural.  This is among the many good responses to Hirsi Ali’s arguments given by Michael Shermer in the article below on his Skeptic Substack (click to read):

Like Steve Pinker in Enlightenment Now, Shermer touts secular humanism as not only a good substitute for a god-based morality, but as a major factor responsible for moral and material progress in the last few centuries.  Shermer:

As for Christianity, since Ayaan has declared her fielty to that particular faith over all others, I will concede her point that on the three threats facing the West that concern her (and me)—(1) the authoritarianism/expansionism of Islamism, (2) China and Russia, and (3) woke ideology—Christian conservatives have a clearer vision than atheist (or even theist) Leftists about the threat that Islamism, China and Russia, and woke ideology pose to the West (including and especially the LGBTQ community that would not fare well under such regimes). But this is political pragmatism pure and simple—“Say what you want about Christian conservatives, at least they know what a woman is!” I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, but is it a basis for a worldview? I think not. We should believe things because they are true, not just because they are politically pragmatic.

Consider what’s on demand in Christianity—that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified, and was resurrected from the dead. (As the apostle Paul said in 1 Cor. 15:13-19: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. … And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”) Is that true? My first question is this: Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection as real, either in Jesus’ time or in ours? Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the same holy book as Christians do (the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament). They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think the carpenter from Galilee was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians, and still they reject them. That’s telling.

And this was my main objection to Hirsi Ali’s switch to Christianity, for, if she’s really a Christian rather than just a secularist adopting “Judeo-Christian values”, it more or less means that she accepts the truths of Christian doctrine, which are summarized in the Nicene Creed (son of God, resurrection, salvation, and so on).  Does she believe any of that? She doesn’t say.

Instead, she asks us to accept her Christianity as a response to personal insecurity: a Linus’s blanket of faith. Several readers and friends have said, “Why don’t you leave Hirsi Ali alone, as she’s not proselytizing, only choosing what brings her comfort—and what gives her “meaning and purpose”. As she said:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Of course the answer to that is that not only can you find meaning and purpose without God (it’s what you choose to embrace in your life, like children, work, music, and so on), but a religiously-based purpose doesn’t go far beyond saying, “My purpose is to adhere to the teachings of the church.” Hirsi Ali, who goes to church, implies that her beliefs are a work in progress:

Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

But if you put your beliefs out there, publishing them in a place where you know others will read them, then you open yourself up to criticism and discussion. Nobody doubts Hirsi Ali’s bravery: her books and her movie “Submission,” , the latter criticizing Islam’s treatment of women (which led to the murder of Theo van Gogh and Hirsi Ali’s need to use safe houses and personal security). But, like all of us, if she makes public statements of her beliefs, then she’s not immune from examination and criticism. That’s what Shermer did, and so does Richard Dawkins in a new post on his Substack (click below, and subscribe if you read regularly).

In the video above, Hirsi Ali argues that Dawkins, because of his love of liturgical music, “is one of the most Christian people [she] knows”  (48:18). Well, Richard couldn’t let that rest, and wrote a gracious letter to Ayaan which not only denies that he’s a Christian, but denies that Hirsi Ali is a Christian:

As you know, you are one of my absolutely favourite people but . . . seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more a Christian than I am.  I might agree with you (I actually do) that Putinism, Islamism, and postmodernish wokery pokery are three great enemies of decent civilisation. I might agree with you that Christianity, if only as a lesser of evils, is a powerful weapon against them. I might add that Christianity has been the inspiration for some of the greatest art, architecture and music the world has ever known. But so what?  I once got into trouble for extolling the beauty of Winchester Cathedral bells by comparison with the “aggressive-sounding” yell of “Allahu Akhbar” (the last thing you hear before the bomb goes off, or before your head rolls away from your body). I might agree (I think I do, although certainly not in its earlier history) that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. I might even agree that Christianity is the bedrock of our civilisation (actually I don’t, but even if I did . . .) None of that comes remotely even close to making me – or you – a Christian.

Indeed, as I (and Dawkins and Shermer) immediately recognize, Christianity is a matter of belief, not behavior, regardless of where you think your good behaviors come from. And so, Richard argues, if you act like a Christian and behave like a Christian (i.e., are empathic, nice, and altrustic), that is still irrelevant to whether you are a Christian:

But Ayaan, that is so wrong. How you, or I, behave is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what you believe. What matters is the truth claims about the world which you think are true.

For that is the whole point. Christianity makes factual claims, truth claims that Christians believe, truth claims that define them as Christian. Christians are theists. They believe in a divine father figure who designed the universe, listens to our prayers, is privy to our every thought. You surely don’t believe that? Do you believe Jesus rose from the grave three days after being placed there? Of course you don’t. Do you believe Jesus was born to a virgin? Certainly not. Someone of your intelligence does not believe you have an immortal soul, which will survive the decay of your brain. Christians believe in a frightful place called Hell, where the souls of the wicked go after they are dead. Do you believe that? Hell no! Christians believe every baby is “born in sin” and is saved from Hell only by the redemptive (pre-emptive in the case of all those born anno domini) execution of Jesus. Do you believe anything close to that nasty scapegoat theory? Of course you don’t.

Ayaan, you are no more a Christian than I am.

That may be true, though Hirsi Ali still hasn’t stated what she believes, and it would be good if she did. But of course that would open up a whole can of worms.  I, for one, would like to ask her, “If you’re always linking Judaism and Christianity as the source of “Judeo-Christian values,” when why aren’t you a Jew?”  The repeated mention of Jesus surely means that she believe something about Christ in particular, though we don’t know exactly what beyond the dubious claim that he existed. But if she starts talking about miracles, crucifixion (some call it “crucifiction”) and resurrection, she loses a considerable amount of credibility among rationalists, for she’s believing in things based on what makes her feel good, regardless of the evidence.

Richard goes on to dispel the idea that there’s no meaning and purpose in life without Christianity.  You can read that for yourself, as the article is free.

Finally Hirsi Ali has answered some of her critics in this interview on Unherd with Freddie Sayers, but if you click below you’ll see it’s paywalled.  A friend sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote only briefly from it. You might be able to find the article archived, but that failed for me.

In the  piece, that I hope will be made public, Hirsi Ali argues that while Jewish and Christian religious schools should remain open, Muslim schools should be closed. This will of course get her in trouble with the First Amendment crowd, or those who believe in simple fairness.  And then she explains the personal reason she embraced Christianity (notice the reference to Christ):

FS: A lot of people were also questioning what appeared to be the practical argument for your faith decisions. The argument felt more like a justification of Christianity as a mechanism to resist cultural collapse; it was not so much a personal journey, not so much about your own faith. Is there anything that you would expand on there?

AHA: Yes, it is a very personal story. I don’t know to what extent it’s useful, but on a very personal level, I went through a period of crisis — very personal crisis: of fear, anxiety, depression. I went to the best therapists money can buy. I think they gave me an explanation of some of the things that I was struggling with. But I continued to have this big spiritual hole or need. I tried to self-medicate. I tried to sedate myself. I drank enough alcohol to sterilise a hospital. Nothing helped. I continued to read books on psychiatry and the brain. And none of that helped. All of that explained a small piece of the puzzle, but there was still something that I was missing.

And then I think it was one therapist who said to me, early this year: “I think, Ayaan, you’re spiritually bankrupt.” And at that point, I was in a place where I had sort of given up hope. I was in a place of darkness, and I thought, “well, what the hell, I’m going to open myself to that and see what you are talking about”. And we started talking about faith, and belief in God, and I explained to her that the God I grew up with was a horror show. He created you to punish you and frighten you; and as a girl, and as a woman, you’re just a piece of trash. And so I explained to her why I didn’t believe in God — and, more than that, why I actually hated God. And then she asked me to design my own God, and she said, “if you had the power to make your own God, what would you do?” And as I was going on I thought: that is actually a description of Jesus Christ and Christianity at its best. And so instead of inventing yet another new God, I started diving into that story.

And so far I like this story, as I explore it. The more I look at it, the more I — I don’t want to say I’m fulfilled, but I no longer have this need, this void. I feel like I’m going somewhere. There are standards that I have to live by that are quite high, and that’s daunting. But these are standards that I’d rather aspire to, even if I fail. Maybe the only human being who nearly achieved that was the late Queen Elizabeth! Trying to emulate her is this daily practice of hardship.

Based on this, people will say, “Well, Jesus is better than drink,” and it’s clear that she found Christianity after going through a dark night of the soul. But it’s still fair to ask, “What exactly is ‘Jesus Christ and Christianity at its best'”? as well as “Well, what do you really believe about Jesus and Christianity?”  “Do you care that its tenets are true?” And so on à la Dawkins and Shermer. She asks “for respect for her very subjective experience,” but while all of us respect Hirsi Ali as a person, there’s no requirement to respect someone’s beliefs—particularly when she has now written two articles about them and exposed their problems.

I’ll give one more excerpt in which Sayers tries weakly to pin her down about the evidence for Christianity. Here’s that Q&A:

Question 9: Do you believe that we were created by the Abrahamic God? And if you do, have you always believed that’s the case, and simply changed the flavour of that belief over time? If you don’t, is this more a sense of political pragmatism?

AHA: My atheist friends want to see evidence. You say, “Do you believe that God created…?” And then you say, “Well, have you got any evidence for God?” I want to sidestep that question by saying: I believe they are stories, and I choose to believe the story that there is a higher power. What that means I’m still developing, I’m still learning as much as I can. But I choose to believe in that story because the legacy of that story is what we’re living through. So yes, it’s partly pragmatic. And yes, it is partly personal and spiritual. And it’s a story I like because it’s a story that says: human life is worth living because it’s in the image of God. And instead of seeking a God somewhere out there who’s ordering you to do all sorts of things, God is something in you. That’s much, much more appealing to me than the story of: there is nothing there, you have no more value than mould. And that’s atheism. And I think if you tell people they have no more value than mould, then what’s the point?

Here Hirsi Ali explicitly sidesteps the question of evidence and avers that she simply likes the story of Christianity; it gives her solace.  But then, with the claim that “God is something in you”, and may not exist at all, we’re back to Richard’s assertion about why she considers herself a Christian.  If you simply aspire to be nice, caring, altruistic, and so on, then you might as well say you’re a secular humanist, because secular morality can simply be renamed “God in you,” apparently allowing you to say you’re a Christian.

As for atheism not giving us meaning and purpose in life, yes, of course that’s true. How could it, since it’s simply a disbelief in gods? But once again Hirsi Ali sees atheism as the only alternative to Christianity, completely neglecting secular humanism.  After reading the interview, I conclude that Hirsi Ali is in some kind of perplexing trap in which she renames the humanistic instinct “Christianity” and, over time, is learning how to refashion the “god inside her.”

On the other hand, why Christianity rather than Judaism? Sayers doesn’t press the point, for Hirsi Ali would just say, “I don’t know what I believe about the literal truth of Christianity, and I don’t really care. I just like the story because it soothes me.”  And there is no answer to that save to say that “well, whatever floats your boat.” It would be delightful to know how Hitchens would answer this.

There are two more pieces that have just come out criticizing Hirsi Ali’s embrace of Christianity, but I won’t discuss them. Here’s a long one by Joseph Klein at Reality’s Last Stand (click to read):

And a shorter one by Freddie deBoer (again, click to read; h/t Steve):

deBoer, too, goes after Hirsi Ali for finding comfort in something for which there’s no evidence.  And Remember Victor’s Stenger’s claim that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence if the evidence should be there”? But the evidence is not there, and the priors that there is no God keep increasing. deBoer:

But as you’d expect, my real interest lies in this now-unremarkable acceptance of purely instrumentalized religion. Though their ends are not the same, Haidt and Hirsi Ali share the status of embracing religion purely as a means to those ends. We lack meaning, we lack community, in the past religion has (or so the story goes) inspired meaning and facilitated community. ERGO, we need religion! Is there a God? Was Moses his messenger? Was Jesus his son? (Excuse me, Son.) Was Mohammad his prophet? Are the Shaivites right about the three-headed dominion of the Trimurti, or do the Puranas describe only various forms of Vishnu? Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? To the religious consequentialists, this is all fine print. As I will not stop saying, in its own way this is a bigger insult to religion than anything Richard Dawkins could cobble together; it treats religion as less than wrong. Dawkins and those like him evaluate the truth claims of the world’s religions and say, no, these are not correct. Hirsi Ali is so busy marching towards Armageddon that she scarcely has time to get to know what the truth claims of Christianity even are. New Atheism, truly a dead letter in 2023, took religion immensely seriously. Those who instrumentalize religion do not, and they don’t even arrange themselves on a field of argumentative contestation where that fact could be pointed out.

. . . Why do religions comfort? They comfort because the stories they tell involve divine beings who know everything and who can, often, save us all from the horror of death. We live in a world of intractable and painful moral questions that we feel that we can never resolve; religion says that there are divine beings who know the right answers, and that’s comforting. We miss our loved ones who have died terribly; many religions say that we will one day be reunited with them, and that’s comforting. We’re terrified of death and the prospect of our inevitable non-existence, if we’re being honest; religions offer various ways in which we can escape that awful fate and thus, maybe, the fear. The point is that I get why religion is comforting and offers meaning and solace in a cold world, under the belief that God/gods are real. If you think God’s magic exists, if you think that divine justice exists, then yeah, sure, I get going to church. Sadly, divine justice does not exist because there is no old guy living in the clouds deciding what’s good and what’s bad and controlling everything and being everything but also letting pain and evil exist for some reason. If you disagree with me, though, I get chasing the certainty and the meaning and the belief. If you agree with me that there’s no God, though, and you still want people to go to church because eating bread and drinking grape juice together is good for our cortisol levels, brother… I don’t know. Why not urge people to get into Dungeons & Dragons instead? In what sense is that a less meaningful version of indulging a fantasy?

In the end, why does it matter that Hirsi Ali chooses to call herself a Christian because it fills the God-shaped hole that used to be filled with booze? It matters because she was an idol of many for giving up Islam because of its inimical consequences and poor treatment of humans, and embraced atheism because there was no evidence for Allah.  Didn’t she realize that there was equally little evidence for Judaism or Christianity?

It matters because others may also now reject atheism on the grounds that they find Christianity comforting, regardless of the lack of evidence for its tenets.

It matters because the rejection of rationality in favor of comforting stories means the withering away of our organs of reason. And that can only cause trouble in the world.

If you dispense with the need for reason, and choose to believe in what you find comforting or mentally compatible, then you open the Pandora’s Box of unreason that is the basis for at least one malign influence: wokeness.  Believing in God because it makes you feel good is not much different in believing that “sex is a spectrum” because it aligns with your gender ideology. One tenet of the Enlightenment is that if you’re faced with a choice of beliefs, you choose the one supported by the most evidence.  That’s also how science, one of the best products of the Enlightenment, works too.

***********

UPDATE: Now Andrew Sullivan has joined the critics. Click to see if you can read it:

Sullivan, of course, being a Catholic, is softer on faith than the critics above, but he’s still not so keen on the manner of Hirsi Ali’s conversion. One excerpt:

And Ayaan is right that Western elites have been far too sanguine about the collapse of Christianity in the West, and have overlooked its role in inculcating the virtues essential for liberal society to work. The God-shaped hole left by Christianity’s demise has been filled by the cults of Trump and wokeness, or the distractions of mass entertainment and consumption, in our civilizational heap of broken images.

All of which is well taken. But none of it is a reason for an individual soul to convert to Christianity. Such a person would be more suitable, perhaps, as Zohar Atkins writes, for converting to Judaism, which is more based on earthly goals and achievements. But for a Christian? Jesus rejected exactly that kind of Judaism (which is why anyone who uses the term “Judeo-Christian,” as Ayaan does, misses the entire point). Ross Douthat, in turn, notes the absence of supernatural magic in Ayaan’s vision, key to his view of Christianity, even in post-modernity. Shadi Hamid is even more dismissive toward what he sees as “political conversions”:

Dawkins replies to two challenges from Jordan Peterson

August 4, 2023 • 10:46 am

According to this post on Richard Dawkins’s Substack site, Jordan Peterson challenged him on Twitter to answer two questions.  Dawkins decided to answer both because, as he said below, he respects Peterson:

A colleague sent two challenges to me, posted by Jordan Peterson, suggesting I should respond. I’m happy to do so because I greatly respect Dr Peterson’s courageous stance against a bossy, intolerant thought-police whose Orwellian newspeak threatens enlightened rationalism. The hero of 1984, Winston Smith, was eventually persuaded by O’Brien that, if the Party wills it, 2+2 = 5. Winston had earlier found it necessary to stake out his credo. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”.

Yes, Peterson is gutsy enough to say what isn’t popular but often worth saying, though he’s also vociferous about some stuff that isn’t admirable—like his admiration of religion.  But you have to give him credit for not really caring whether his beliefs make him demonized. Click below to Read Richard’s answers.

The first question:

Richard begins his answer with a caveat:

My answer to the question is no if you include supernaturalism in your definition of a religion, and a dear colleague takes her stand on this distinction.  But the following three similarities are enough for me to justify a yes answer to Jordan’s question. The first of the three is characteristic of religions in general. The other two are kin to Christianity in particular.

The similarities are Heresy Hunting, Hereditary Guilt, and Transubstantiation. This is his example of the last one:

Similarly, in the cult of woke, a man speaks the magic incantation, “I am a woman”, and thereby becomes a woman in true substance, while “her” intact penis and hairy chest are mere Aristotelian accidentals.  Transsexuals have transubstantiated genitals. One thing to be said in favour of (today’s) Catholics: at least they don’t (nowadays) insist that everybody else must go along with their beliefs.

Hemant Mehta, who has long gone down the Woke Rabbit Hole, will be sharpening his knives when he reads that.

And the second question:

Part of Dawkins’s answer:

I see this accusation again and again in graffiti scribbled on the lavatory wall that is Twitter. Peterson’s tone is more civilised, of course, but the message is the same. We who have spoken out against the irrationality of religion are to blame for the rise of the irrationality of woke.

. . . I get the point, but I love truth too much to go along with it. I, along with Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, and others, are against all religions without exception. And that includes the cult of woke. To oppose one irrational dogma by promoting another irrational dogma would be a betrayal of everything I love and stand for.

Whatever else there is to admire about Peterson, his affection for religion, which may be of the “Little People” variety (e.g., “I am no believer, but religion is essential for everyone else as a social glue”), is not only an acceptance of the unevidenced, but a false belief that superstition is necessary for a good society (viz. Scandinavia). It’s also patronizing.

But it may be that Peterson really believes in, say, Christianity. I’d love to sit him down and ask him questions about whether he believes in the Resurrection, heaven, and so on, but I’m 100% sure that his answers would be so tortuous that you wouldn’t get an intelligible answer.

Does the ubiquity of prayer prove the existence of God?

January 10, 2023 • 12:30 pm

UPDATE: Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonized Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse).  This constitutes direct evidence against Brown’s implicit thesis. (But read the last paragraph of the NYT story I’ve linked to so you can see how the faith try to rescue God.)

________________

Of course not! The ubiquity of a belief doesn’t tell us anything about the truth of that belief.  Several hundred years ago the whole world believed that infectious diseases were caused by things like God’s will, or miasmas, or the Jews.

They were wrong.

Our species has grown up since then, because science, and science alone, has told us why those earlier beliefs were wrong. The problem is that science can’t disprove an equally unfounded belief in a deity. God is slippery, and smart theologians are paid to make him slippery, because they’d be out of a job if everyone was an atheist.

But that’s what the evidence says, so far as it exists, for we can make plenty of arguments against certain conceptions of God. The Abrahamic omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving deity, for instance, is disproven by the many innocent people who die of physical factors like earthquakes or cancer.  (Theologians have a number of magic tricks to get out of that argument.) As the late Victor Stenger said, “The absence of evidence is evidence for absence—if the evidence should be there.”  And certainly any god worthy of its name, who wanted people to obey and worship him, would make his presence unequivocally known. The evidence should be there.

It isn’t.  Using Bayesian analysis, the priors for an Abrahamic god are low.

But forget that. This article, from the conservative site WND, tries to argue that because most people pray (even atheists, they say!), it’s evidence for God’s existence, and atheists are out of luck. Click to read:

Michael Brown uses injured football player Damar Hamlin, who is recovering (though I doubt he’ll play ball again) as an example of the ubiquity of prayer. I saw this many times on television, even with news anchors on local news who send out “thoughts and prayers”:

Around the nation, in response to the life-threatening injury to Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin, people prayed. Hamlin’s teammates and coaches prayed. Millions of fans joined in prayer, tweeting their support. Even on live TV, sports commentators stopped in the middle of their broadcast to pray.

But this is only natural. During times of crisis, especially life and death crisis, people turn to God.

We know the situation is grave, we know we cannot change things ourselves, and we know that only God – an all-powerful being who cares – can turn the tide.

That’s why, at such times, people do not turn to atheism. They turn to God.

Even non-religious people pray. In fact, many agnostics and soft atheists even turn to prayer.

It continues, showing that the God they are talking about is, of course, the God of Christianity:

As expressed by Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, “It is interesting to me as a person of faith that we tend to go to that core place [at moments of tragedy], that we start talking to God and talking about talking to God.”

He added, “I just find that rather refreshing in an affluent culture that has so much that we tend to ignore God that something like this happens and it reminds us of our own mortality, and we begin to talk about praying and talking about God. … It speaks to the yearning deep inside of us.”

But to ask again, what about Orlovsky’s sports and media colleagues? Were they also happy with him praying on live sports TV?

Yes, many of them were positive on this as well. As one headline announced, “Dan Orlovsky Praised After ‘Beautiful’ Prayer for Damar Hamlin Live on Air.”

Among those quoted in the article were ESPN presenter Ashley Brewer and Super Bowl champion Ryan Clark.

In Brewer’s words, “This is amazing, I teared up watching this in my living room today. Proud to call you my teammate & brother in Christ.”

This is what happens when, as a nation, we are drawn into a life-and-death crisis.

This is what happens when, suddenly and unexpectedly, in front of our eyes on TV, the health and well-being of a relative stranger now becomes our personal concern.

This is what happens when we realize that we need help outside of ourselves.

People pray, and prayer is welcomed rather than ridiculed.

It’s not all that welcome on this website, because, being an atheist, I think prayer is useless. If it makes you feel better, or helps you meditate, go for it. But don’t think that anybody up there is listening and will help you. For if he was and did, there wouldn’t be kids dying of cancer all the time.

Now I don’t think author Brown is trying to convince himself of anything; he’s already lost to the delusion. Nor is he trying to convince his fellow religionists, who have also drunk the Kool-Aid.  I think he’s making fun of atheists by showing that we’re trumped by the ubiquity of prayer. And that wouldn’t bother us, he thinks, unless he thought that prayer’s ubiquity was evidence for God. People wouldn’t be praying all the time if they didn’t think there was really a god to pray to! Checkmate, you heathens!:

The reality is that we always need God. It’s just that, when all is well, we often forget about Him, putting our trust in ourselves and leaving Him out of our thoughts entirely. Many of us even become hostile to faith, doing our best to keep it excluded from public life. And then a crisis wakes us up as we recognize our own frailty and remember that death could be near at any time.

May we not forget these realities as life gets back to normal and, we hope and pray, Damar Hamlin makes a full and even miraculous recovery.

And may those who ignore or even scorn the idea of God think again. Eternity is always just one step away. Then what?

If the Bible is true – which I am 100% sure it is, personally – one day we will actually give account of our lives to God.

That is a sobering thought.

The sobering thought is that people who can actually think can be so deluded that they give their lives up to a belief that is totally lacking in evidence. (Brown even has a Ph.D.!) Another sobering thought is that people like Brown think that somehow the fact that lots of people pray means that God is up there listening. A third sobering thought is that Brown has not a scintilla of evidence that the God he’s so sure we’ll meet is the God of the Bible rather than the God of the Qur’an—or any other god. As for the possibility that there are no gods, well, fuggedaboutit!

h/t: Steve

Freddie deBoer disses New Atheism while attacking psychic phenomena and “hooey”

July 21, 2022 • 10:00 am

Well, let me clarify my title above.  In the article below on his Substack site, deBoer claims that he started his career attacking New Atheism, and he still sees issues with it, but now thinks he went too far, especially in light of the Vice article he cites. That article notes a rise of Internet scams dealing with supernatural phenomenon like clairvoyance and tarot cards, and he sees that the doubt about faith promoted by New Atheism could be used now to quash these other issues that victimize the credulous. But the so-called demise of New Atheism has deprived people of those tools.

Unfortunately, deBoer, whose writing I admire (but seems to be writing too much these days), still feels he to get in a few licks at Dawkins and Co., and I think those licks are gratuitous and unfair. Still, his call for a revival of skepticism and demands for evidence is absolutely the mark. Faith is faith, whether it involves pastors or psychics.

Click the screenshot to see deBoer’s piece:

There are, I think, six main reasons for the “backlash” against New Atheism, which I see as the reinvigoration of faithlessness by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens (Pinker was a player as well):

1.) People bridle at criticism of religion, especially when it is passionate and vigorous. Religion is sacrosanct, and seen by many as off limits to criticism.

2.) People accused the New Atheists of being strident and trying to wrest religion from believers.

3.) People were jealous of the success of New Atheist writings

4.) Because Muslims are considered “people of color,” opponents of New Atheism were especially critical of its perceived “Islamophobia.”

5.) The perception, often without evidence, that New Atheists were sexists or even sexual assaulters.

6.) The claim that New Atheists ignored social justice because they concentrated too much on addressing, analyzing, and attacking religion. These critics see “progressive social justice” as inextricable from New Atheism, and thus New Atheists were fighting a battle but ignoring a wider war.

In this article, deBoer seems to sign on to reasons 1,2, and 4, though he’s walked back his criticisms a bit: he says that by criticizing New Atheism’s concentration on the need for evidence, people have become susceptible to new forms of woo. That sounds good, though I don’t know if it’s true, and too much of his piece still engages in atheist-bashing.

(Regarding #4, New Atheists often concentrated on Islam because it was in their view (and mine) the most dangerous species of faith in today’s world, as Catholicism was in medieval Europe. I don’t see that as “Islamophobia”, if you conceive of that word as meaning “bigotry against Muslims”. But a “fear of Islam” could also mean “a worry about how that religion is sometimes used to oppress and kill people.)

First, deBoer cites the article below in Vice, which describes the “fake” psychics (they’re all fakes, of course, but there are some who pretend to be other people)—fakers who are now being attacked on social media. (All deBoer’s words are indented).

An actual story from Vice:

I’ll say no more about the Vice article as you can read it for yourself. I was more interested—and distressed—by deBoer’s criticisms of New Atheism, which wasn’t really a “movement” but a term invented to describe the rise of unbelief largely prompted by the authors named above.  Granted, deBoer has backed off some, but not far enough for me. The bolding is mine:

The first thing I ever wrote that got more than a couple dozen views, the piece that made the rounds in the blogosphere and in so doing kickstarted my writing career, was a piece of the type “I’m an atheist who can’t stand New Atheism.” Pieces in that vein became quite common over the years, but in 2008 it was still novel enough to attract all of that attention. This was an era in which the New Atheists still enjoyed a degree of cultural cachet, before the pomposity and shrill tone of so many in the movement curdled its public reputation, to say nothing of the accusations of Islamophobia. It was a different time. The basic contours of the piece still seem correct to me – atheism is almost certain factually true, and I am an atheist, but I have no interest in browbeating believers. I have no interest in converting believers into atheists, and atheism is not a movement. But not only would I not write that piece today, it’s one of very few pieces that I sometimes genuinely wish I had never published at all. Because the ground changed underneath us to such an extent that, well, millions of functioning adults proudly endorse astrology and other hooey in public.

Note first the attacks on New Atheism, but also his assertion that he wish he wouldn’t have written the piece not because he misunderstood or unfairly attacked New Atheism, but because his attack on the movement may have enabled people’s increased belief in woo. Also note, as I claim below, that deBoer is engaging in a form of virtue signaling here: not addressing the arguments of New Atheists but simply calling them names in a way that would appeal to atheist liberals soft on faith (“faithiests”).

Yes, the last sentence is true, though I’m not sure how much criticism on New Atheism enabled the rise of “hooey”. But I also think that deBoer is unfair by attacking New Atheists, especially the prominent ones, for being “pompous and shrill.”  In what way, for example, were Dawkins and Company “pompous and shrill”? Perhaps some of their followers were (actually, some surely were given their numbers). But both of those words could be replaced by “passionate.”

Notice that when New Atheists are accused of stuff like this, no examples are ever given. What is called “shrillness” as a pejorative term strikes me as a nasty word for “writing passionately and strongly,” which doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Were Hitchens or Harris—or any of the five people named above—”shrill”? I don’t think so.

Moreover, I doubt that deBoer would call anyone writing about politics with that same passion as “shrill”. “Shrill and strident” are usually reserved for those who criticize religion, not politics. And these are ad hominem terms, for what was really important about “New Atheism” was its arguments, not the tone of its adherents.

At least, though, deBoer recognizes that what New Atheism—as “antitheism”—was mainly about: demands for empirical evidence for what one believes. It was largely an attack on faith, and on faith that is of the most damaging kind. But deBoer can’t resist saying that some atheists are “annoying,” and again I don’t think he’d say that about politicians with whom he agreed.

He continues and begins to walk back his earlier opinions:

At some point in the 2010s, the backlash to New Atheism became so commonplace, particularly on the political left, that it seemed clear to me that we had communally missed the forest for the trees. That is to say, no matter how annoying some atheists must be, the most important question when it comes to atheism remains (and must remain) whether or not God is real. If God is real, that is the single most important fact in the universe. Issues of comity and messaging take a backseat to the existence of a divine creator, and there’s something strange about being more concerned with how we express our skepticism about such a divine creator than about its actual existence. And while many people who disdain New Atheists will admit to a casual atheism themselves, they’re far less animated and passionate about that atheism than about their hatred of the New Atheists. On a really basic level this seems to be a failure of priority.

He’s correct in the last sentence, but he’s hasn’t retracted his claims about “Islamophobia” or New atheist “browbeating believers” or “converting believers into atheists.” But, after all, if you are arguing logically and rationally against the existence of God, and are arguing with the faithful, what else are you doing but “browbeating believers” (I’d use the term “arguing with believers”; for “browbeating” is a pejorative word). And if you are making empirical arguments against a divine creator, then of course you are also, even if unintentionally, “converting believers into atheists.” Every argument for a moral, political, or ideological stance is an attempt at conversion—to change people’s minds. deBoer spends his time “browbeating Republicans” in a “shrill way”, and trying to convert those with whom he disagrees. How does he differ from New Atheists in these respects.

There are other zingers against New Atheism, too. deBoer, while saying (admirably) that he probably went too far, still goes too far, saying that the demise of New Atheism was “self inflicted”.  His inability to stop dissing New Atheism, although he recognizes its central merit—demand for evidence—is seen in his last paragraph (my bolding).

Ultimately, I think we should work to restore attention to the supernatural claims themselves rather than to the social ephemera that surround them. Of course we should want atheists to be circumspect and friendly and to avoid empty provocation. The question is when this concern about manners overwhelms our fixation on the central questions at hand; the fact that Reddit atheists are annoying can’t make God real. And for the record I think there’s a way to live life that avoids a cloying scientism and witless literalism while still not permitting any lazy mysticism to find its way into your day-to-day practices. There’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to people believing things for no reason. I’m perfectly happy to say that I think we should restore a little stigma towards entertaining the idea that the date that you’re born (based on a largely arbitrary and human-made calendar system) dictates your mood, your love life, and your professional success. Maybe sometimes a little stigma is the healthiest option available to us.

So yes, here he admits that there’s too much woo, and the analysis of religion by New Atheists can also be extended to psychic phenomena, taro cards, and so on. But what is this “empty provocation” that deBoer speaks of? And the comment about “cloying scientism and witless literalism”—who, exactly, does that refer to? As most of us know, “scientism” is only used pejoratively, to criticize those who you think rely too much on science and evidence.  It would have been nice if deBoer gave us some examples of “cloying scientism” from some of the well known New Atheists.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the point of deBoer article is a good one: faith applies not just to religion, but to wooish hooey—to all “supernatural” psychic phenomena. But he devalues this point by his inability to resist getting in some unwarranted licks at New Atheism.

In the end, deBoer is doing with New Atheism precisely what he criticizes with ideology: he is trying to tarnish ideas he agrees with by using pejorative words and ad hominem arguments—all because he doesn’t like the way those arguments are expressed. That is what the Woke do! And he’s appealing to popular ideology by bringing up “Islamophobia”, “scientism”, and “shrillness” in attacks on religion. In other words, I think he’s engaged in signaling his virtue.

deBoer should be remorseful for his own athiest-dissing not just because it enabled the Rise of Hooey (actually, I doubt that it did), but also because it was unfair and misguided.

A writer for The Critic makes bizarre argument for why New Atheism is dead

June 17, 2022 • 9:15 am

Reader Daniel brought this article to my attention. It’s from The Critic; and when I asked about the site, Daniel responded:

It’s a print and online magazine – pretty big in Britain now, though quite a recent arrival on the scene. Nick Cohen has written for it I think – though it skews more right.

Nick Cohen is on the left, of course, but that’s irrelevant for this piece, which Daniel said was “very strange”.

In fact, “very strange” is a huge understatement. “Incomprehensible” is a better adjective: the piece is a total mess, conflating politics with atheism, science with politics, and with a thesis that’s simply made up, supported by wishes rather than evidence. Click to read it; it’s not long. (Reading time: Until you need a Pepto-Bismol.)

The thesis, that New Atheism is in effect dead, is hardly new: Salon regularly proclaimed it starting years ago. What’s new is Milbank’s explanation: that the “movement” has fractured, with one moiety moving Leftwards into progressivism and another moving to the Right, with both bits abandoning all the tenets that “New Atheism” had when it was started by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Dan Dennett. And those tenets were a trust in the power of science and rationality.

My first claim would be that “New Atheism” was never really a “movement”, but simply a rejection of gods in the tradition of Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Ingersoll, Mencken, Russell, and so on down to the atheists of our day. There’s a list of contemporary NAs too, and I’m on it, quoted this way:

[Coyne] confesses to impatience with the New Atheists, remarking: “[H]ow much is there to say about a movement whose members are united, after all, by only one thing: disbelief in divine beings and a respect for reason and evidence. What more is there to say?”

I don’t remember saying that, but I certainly don’t have impatience with New Atheists, but with those who characterize it as a coherent “movement.” It’s not even an ideology, but an absence of belief in gods. Now there are certain traits of some New Atheism that make them differ a bit from Old Atheists, the most prominent being its reliance on science and evidence as a reason to reject gods, and its vociferous antitheism (though not all New Atheists are that vociferous!) Yet even Old Atheists like Bertrand Russell had science-oriented objections to god.

But let’s grant that there is a group of people sharing this disbelief and also a respect for evidence. Is that form of New Atheism dead? I would say “no”: it’s been absorbed into the mainstream, with the result that the West is becoming ever more secular. The books of the Four Horsemen sold like hotcakes, and America (and especially Europe) became more secular. “Nones”—those who profess no formal religion—not constitute the fastest-growing “faith” in the U.S. No more “New Atheist” books are being written now simply because we don’t need any more. All the arguments have been made, and the books did their job.

On to Milbank’s muddled argument. He argues, correctly, that faith in reality, science, and materialism is characteristic of New Atheism. But, he argues, Left-wing “New Atheists” have transmogrified into full Wokies, having given up science for the “feelies”.  Have a look to see how he conflates “New Atheism” with “The Left”, though most Leftists wouldn’t call themselves New Atheists:

The great battles, we were told, were between moderate, rational liberals who just wanted to agree on objectively observable facts — we knew how old the earth was, and it wasn’t created 8000 years ago; we knew the climate was changing, and that humans were causing it. It was wild-eyed religious conservatives who put ideology before observable reality. But insisting too hard on the importance of genetics today gets you drummed out of academic institutions by the left, not the right.

Not that the left has wholly given up on the imprimatur of scientific authority — you will find scientific expertise wielded on behalf of the climate or trans rights or drug policy on a regular basis. But there has been a clear rhetorical and conceptual shift. Where once the left stood for cool-headed rationalism, taking the emotion out of how we punish criminals or police drugs, and asking “what works?”, it now embraces an ideology of “care”. Peer-reviewed papers are as likely to take on board the “lived experiences of victims” and “indigenous ways of knowing” as they are data-driven approaches. Environmental policy is less “2 minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock” than it is “how do I lower my carbon emissions as a vegan who likes holidays to Thailand?”

He’s talking here about the Progressive Left, not those who were (and are) New Atheists. Not only is Milbank a bad thinker, but also a bad writer.

Here he refers to the “old” New Atheists like Hitchens:

Anyone who had the ill fortune to cross swords with this type quickly discovered their curious bushido. The warriors of atheism would deploy strange sophistic arguments, saying for example that there were no atheist beliefs — or for that matter a thing called “New Atheism”. An atheist was “just someone who didn’t believe in God” (despite all being identical stormtrooper-like clones). Above all, they would never, ever, ever stop arguing with you. Having the last word was a way of life, a matter of honour.

Sorry, but it’s the religionists who wouldn’t stop arguing. After all, for the one book on atheism by Dawkins, The God Delusion, there were about a dozen responses by believers—responses Richard calls “fleas”. And what is this with “stormtrooper-like clones”? That’s just a slur, and a hyperbolic one.

It’s clear that Milbank mainly dislikes the New Atheists because they were hard on religion, though he won’t admit it. He’s particularly nasty towards those who criticize the oppressive tenets of Islam (I guess he never heard of New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Here’s he’s talking about the dissolution of New Atheism:

But there were always tensions. Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in particular were both strongly associated with hostility towards Islam — a feature of right wing politics. Dawkins was more of an equal opportunity offender, but his rhetoric against Islam was scarcely less ferocious. The very male and rational world of New Atheism was never a fully natural fit for the rising influence of sociological disciplines steeped in subjective emotion, postmodern philosophy and a strong sympathy with (often highly religious) ethnic minority groups.

This, he says, explains why New Atheists on the Left became woke. And yes, some New Atheists became woke, but not any of the famous ones I read (have you read the three remaining Horsemen lately?), but I’m not aware that this hypothetical change made them believers. How many of them re-embraced God after they got woke?

So, after mistakenly saying that New Atheism split between Leftists and Rightists, with both fractions abandoning what characterized the genre (yes, people got less vociferous, but that was simply because everything had been said), Milbank calls out the Atheists on the Right, too:

Much of what New Atheism embodied has now migrated rightwards. The young rationalist male of today is watching Jordan Peterson videos and listening to the Joe Rogan podcast. Dawkins himself is now an “anti-woke” figure. The people that are most furiously applying evolutionary psychology to human relations today are incels — with concepts like “hypergamy”, “assortative mating”, “alpha” and “beta males” popularised online by lonely young men looking for explanations as to why they can’t get a date.

As a movement, New Atheism has fractured and lost its original spirit. Its afterlife on the right sees it allied with pseudo-mystical Jungianism, veneration of the nationalist mythos, outright neopaganism and strategic alliances with religious conservatives. Another portion has moved leftwards, embodied by the “I Fucking Love Science” woke nerd of today. Where once nerd culture was marginal, it is now the dominant commercial force, and it is forcefully allied not with rationalism, but progressivism.

Incels? What does that have to do with New Atheism?

This is bogus.  I’m a rationalist male, as are many readers of this site, and from what I read I don’t see much love for Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson (Peterson, by the way, happens to be religious). As far as I can see, the New Atheists of yore haven’t moved rightward, but stayed where they were politically, but reacted (rationally) to the irrational rise of Wokeness on the left and the rise of the insanity of the more extreme Right.  To characterize New Atheists (who, after all, are still with us) as advocates of Jung and Jordan Peterson is, as the Germans say, “Wahnsinn.”

I want to give on more quote from Milbank just to show what a bad writer he is, piling one slur atop another. Here he’s saying what happened to Left-wing New Atheists, of which I’m one:

The nerd of yesteryear railed against the hysterical right blaming D&D for satanic ritual murder (yes, really) and accusing violent video games of inspiring school shootings. Now however, the Rick and Morty-watching, comic book convention-attending, board game-playing geek is an enthusiastic supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, and bearded, pot-bellied podcasters take breaks from reviewing the latest superhero franchise to pontificate about police violence and women’s representation. His heroes are not Dawkins (though there’s lingering affection and shared canon there), but Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s not religious, but he’s a gentler sort of atheist, one who can spare a tear for the plight of Palestine and cheerfully celebrate his friend’s tasteful same-sex ceremony in a suitably enlightened Evangelical church. Science, this sort of character can assure you, is firmly on the side of every progressive cause and opinion.

He’s talking about Wokeism here, and conflating it with New Atheism. Is there any reason to believe that New Atheists are more prone to become Wokies than are gentler “old-style” atheists, or than believers? Moreover, the atheists I know do NOT use “science” as a reason to buttress progressivism. Rather, they (and I) see positive changes in morality as a result of philosophical and moral thought. “Is” does not tell us “ought”, and although science can be used to buttress moral stands, it does not tell us, for instance, that same-sex marriages are absolutely fine. Moral considerations do that.

At the end of his piece, Milbank goes completely off the rails and argues that all the New Atheists have now become solipsistic, selfish materialists. And he adds another sympathetic comment about religion. Get a load of this!:

New Atheism is dead, but the materialism that underwrote it lives on more powerfully and subtly than ever. The curious sort of pugnacious integrity has gone, replaced with a far more pragmatic and amorphous spirit appropriate to the age of liquid modernity. The New Atheists were perversely very concerned with questions of metaphysics and epistemology, whereas a newer generation of materialists of both left and right are concerned only with power, not capital “T” Truth. In many respects the neoconservative and New Atheist moment of the 2000s was, however perversely, the last gasp of idealistic, traditionally religious politics that prioritised truth over power, and imagined that society was united by a shared rationality and sense of the common good. But they also served to destroy the civilisation of which they were the final embodiment — and have left only sophistry and cynicism as their legacy.

That paragraph is a mess, and not even wrong. For here Milbank he conflates two forms of “materialism”: one being a form of greed and desire for money and “things”, the other being “materialism” as naturalism: the view that all things must obey the laws of physics, and that there is no divine intercession.  The claim about new atheists being concerned with power and not truth is pretty much a lie.

Here’s a diagram Milbank gives (click to enlarge), supposedly showing how New Atheists have changed their views about science from a method to ascertain truth to a method to confirm what you already believe:

A lot of New Atheists were scientists or science lovers (see this list), and I don’t know any who have moved from the left to the right diagram.

In the end, Milbank’s article is a bunch of slurs against New Atheists, who don’t deserve (or warrant) this kind of attack. But we needn’t take it seriously because he can neither think nor write.

I think “New Atheism” is a bit of a cyclical phenomenon. The arguments against gods are made, and people either accept them or reject them. Given the movement of the West towards secularism, we have more of the former than the latter, and society becomes more secular.

From time to time, after people haven’t been exposed to the arguments for disbelief for a generation or more, they need reminding, and we’ll get a resurgence of atheism. And the ratchet will click once more towards secularism.

People like Milbank or the writers at Salon love to proclaim that New Atheism is dead, but it still refuses to lay down. The only thing missing are the best-selling “New Atheist” books, which were a passing episode that won’t be repeated for a while. In fact, maybe, when the U.S. becomes as secular as Northern Europe, they need not be repeated—at least in the West.  Those who still need New Atheist books and arguments are the hyperreligious and largely Muslim countries of the Middle and Far East.

h/t: Daniel