Category: atheist-bashing

Michael Shermer’s take on the question “Is New Atheism dead?”

February 16, 2019 • 10:45 am

The haters, shade-throwers, and draggers continue to publish articles saying that New Atheism is dead because the “self-appointed leaders” are all old white males who are alt-right-ish and bigoted, and because the movement itself, having failed to wed itself with social justice and embraced misogyny and conservatism instead, has driven away its adherents.

As I said yesterday, I think these accusations are arrant nonsense. I asked three of the surviving Horsepersons, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, as well as New Atheist Steve Pinker, to weigh in on the question “Is New Atheism dead?”, and I posted their answers yesterday. (All said “no”, but some say it’s simply moved on or been absorbed into mainstream discourse.)

As part of my non-assiduous but continuing effort to document atheists’ answer to the question above, I also asked Michael Shermer, who sent the answer below. He’s quite keen to tout the contributions of Vic Stenger, who he thinks should have been included in the Gang of Four. Michael:

There are actually a lot of “new atheists” out there besides the “four horseman,” not the least of whom is you! To the list I would also add the late Victor Stenger, not just because his book God: The Failed Hypothesis also made it on the New York Times bestseller list in 2007 around the same time as the others, but because he brought physics into the question alongside philosophy (Dennett), biology (Dawkins), neuroscience (Harris), and journalism (Hitchens). It was always a mystery to me (and to Vic too, as he revealed to me) that he wasn’t considered one of the club, although I suppose for journalistic style reasons the “five horsemen” didn’t have the right ring to it.

A lot of us in the organized skeptical movement had been writing on God and religion for many years before the so-called “new” atheists, such as the philosopher Paul Kurtz (see especially his magnum opus The Transcendental Temptation), who was one of the founders of the modern skeptical and humanist movements. And, most notably, George Smith’s 1974 classic Atheism: The Case Against God is still in print (by Kurtz’ publishing company Prometheus Books).

I have been defending atheism and religious skepticism since we founded Skeptic in 1992, both through the magazine and in my books, and have continued the tradition throughout my nearly 18 years as a Scientific American columnist, for example on the rise of atheism.

. . . and the death of God. 

One problematic aspect of the “atheist” label is that believers and “faitheists” (as you so effectively call atheists who believe in belief—for others, of course), is that we allow others to define us by what we don’t believe. That will never suffice. We must define ourselves by what we do believe: science, philosophy, reason, logic, empiricism and all the tools of the scientific method, along with civil rights, civil liberties, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and moral progress as a result of these components of our worldview, which might better be described as humanism or one of its variants: secular humanism, Enlightenment humanism, or as I’m now suggesting, Scientific Humanism, the subject of my final Scientific American column.

Defining ourselves by what we do believe prevents believers and faitheists from calling us “atheists” and then attacking whatever that word means to them, instead of what it means to us (namely, a lack of belief in a deity, full stop).

Sam Harris weighs in on “Is New Atheism dead?”

February 15, 2019 • 5:00 pm

Sam’s been busy, as I thought, but he did take the time to answer the question that I asked this morning: “Is New Atheism dead?”  His answer is below, and so we have three of the four living Horsepersons all answering “no”—along with Steve Pinker.

Here’s Sam’s take, which I’ll also add to this morning’s post so they will all be in once place. I’m putting this up separately because, without a separate email announcing it, nobody will see it as an addendum.

I’ve always been skeptical about the utility of identifying as an “atheist,” because it rarely seems helpful to heap the false assumptions that surround this term upon one’s own head. For this reason, I’ve never been eager to wear the label “new atheist” either.

However, there was something genuinely new about the “new atheism.” The publication of our four books in quick succession moved the conversation about faith and reason out of rented banquet halls filled with septuagenarians and brought it to a mainstream (and much younger) audience. The new atheists also made distinctions that prior atheists tended to ignore: For instance, not all religions teach the same thing, and some are especially culpable for specific forms of human misery. We also put religious moderates on notice in a new way: These otherwise secular people who imagine themselves to be on such good terms with reason are actually abetting the forces of theocracy—because they insist that everyone’s faith in revelation must be respected, whatever the cost.

The new atheism has not disappeared. It has merely diffused into a wider conversation about facts and values. In the end, the new atheism was nothing more than the acknowledgement that there is single magisterium: the ever-expanding space illuminated by intellectual honesty.

 

Is New Atheism really dead? Four New Atheists respond

February 15, 2019 • 9:30 am

Three articles bashing New Atheism have recently been published (here, here, and here). I already criticized the Guardian piece, and am not going to waste my time on the others. After all, we know the tropes, which have been repeated ad infinitum: New Atheism used to be a lively and going concern, then four old white men (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris [who’s not old]) arrogantly proclaimed themselves leaders of the movement, with at least three of those men being bigoted and/or misogynistic, as well as adherents to the alt-right (Dennett manages to escape those labels). That, goes the narrative, drove people away from New Atheism, an egress that could have been avoided if New Atheism had properly aligned itself with social justice. Now, because of the fault of its leaders and its rejection of wokeness, New Atheism is dead.

I don’t agree with this narrative on several grounds. Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris never proclaimed themselves “leaders of New Atheism”. They became spokespeople for atheism because they all had bestselling books and were also eloquent speakers.  They are not bigots or misogynists, though I admit that Dawkins was sometimes hamhanded in his use of Twitter. And it’s not that I don’t call out misogyny or sexual misconduct when I’m convinced that it has occurred, for I’ve done that with one “big name” among New Atheists. Further, my take on New Atheism was that it wasn’t really “new”, but a revival of old ideas suggested (often vigorously) by earlier nonbelievers like Ingersoll, Mencken, Russell, and Sagan. The only “new” aspect was that it was a revival of atheism offered to a new generation, and perhaps had a more intimate connection with science than previous incarnations. (A reader below suggests, correctly, I think, that these ideas were spread more widely because of the rise of the Internet.)

Finally, I don’t believe that “New Atheism” or its proponents are more bigoted, sexist, or “alt-right”ish than any other group of educated people. In fact, I think they’re less so. Yes, of course there will be some atheists who are sexists or bigots. No large barrel is free of such bad apples. But, at least in my experience, I haven’t seen the pervasive bigotry that’s supposedly associated with New Atheism—either at meetings or among prominent New Atheists, some of them friends with whom I’ve spent a lot of time. Anecdotes simply don’t make the case that New Atheism is palpably afflicted with these problems.

Of course one bigot and one incident of sexism is too many, and we should always strive to call this stuff out and treat people equally, but I don’t see these issues as especially prominent in New Atheism, nor do I think that bigotry and conservativism have driven many people away from the “movement”—if it is indeed a movement. Rather, the New Atheists had their say in the four books, which all sold well, their publication lit a fire that helped promote secularism in the West and elsewhere, and that fire is still burning and consuming belief. New Atheism isn’t dead; it’s just becoming a mainstream idea. (I’ll add that I’ve never heard anybody say, “Well, I’m going back to religion because I didn’t like Dawkins’s last tweet.”)

When I looked at those three articles again, dosing myself liberally with Pepto-Bismol as a palliative, I decided to email four people and ask them, without responding to the articles’ accusations, to tell me if they thought that the thesis of the articles was right—that is “Is New Atheism dead?” I’ve gotten three responses (well, 2.5), and haven’t yet heard back from the fourth person. Here are the responses, which I have permission to publish (and thanks to the responders):

Steve Pinker was not one of the “Four Horsemen”, but he’s certainly seen as a prominent New Atheist. Here’s his response:

The entire concept of a “New Atheism movement” comes from defensive defenders of religion. I think of it not as a movement but as the overdue examination of an idea: Does a supernatural deity exist, and should our morality and politics be shaped by the belief that it does? For various reasons—the intrusion of theo-conservatism during the presidency of George W. Bush, the rise of militant Islam, an awareness of the psychological origins of supernatural beliefs, sheer coincidence—a quartet of books appeared within a span of two years, and pattern-spotters invented a “New Atheist Movement.” (I would not downplay coincidence as the explanation—random stochastic processes generate clusters of events by default.) Judged by degree of belief, the “new atheism” is not only not dead but it is winning: every survey has shown that religious belief is in steep decline, all over the world, and the dropoff is particularly precipitous across the generations, as compared to just drifting with the zeitgeist or changing over the life cycle. This is reflected in laws and customs—homosexuality is being decriminalized in country after country, for example. These trends are masked in the public sphere by two forces pushing in the opposite direction: religious people have more babies, and religious communities turn out in elections and vote in lockstep for the more conservative candidate. If the “new atheist” message of Christopher Hitchens et al. was “Atheists should have more babies,” or “Atheists should form congregations and vote en masse for the same candidate,” then yes, it was an abject failure. But if it is “The evidence for a supernatural being is dubious, and the moral norms of legacy religions are often pernicious,” then it is carrying the day, or at least riding a global wave.

Dan Dennett is one of the “Horsemen”, and he answered briefly.

We have said our piece, and the tidal wave of those abandoning religion keeps rolling on, growing and spreading, without any need of further encouragement from us. That’s how reason works: once you’ve said something true and persuasive, you don’t have to keep saying it again and again.  Our critics keep writing books and articles by the hundreds that disappear without a trace after a few days, convincing few if any. We’ve gone on to other topics.

Richard Dawkins said he wasn’t keen on responding to all these attacks (though I didn’t ask people to respond directly), and so I asked him if he had any answer to the claim that New Atheism is dead. He simply sent me a figure showing the UK sales of The God Delusion between 2006 and 2018, noting that the recent trend seems to be a pretty straight line. That also seems true, he noted, for American sales, though he didn’t have the exact figures. I also learned that there have been 13 million downloads (3 million in Saudi Arabia alone) for an illicit pdf of the Arabic translation of The God Delusion.

Here’s the graph I got (crikey, I wish I could sell a million books in the UK!)

 

When I asked Richard if he wanted to say anything else besides showing that figure, he just noted that there were at least 22 books (which he calls “fleas”) that were provoked by publication of The God Delusion, and sent me a picture of some of the “fleas”—adding that the name comes from a line in a poem by W. B. Yeats: “But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?”

Ten of the 22 fleas:

My own take on the fleas is that they show that New Atheism was and is effective, and frightened the faithful into these many responses.  I’ll add that these books seem to have sunk without a trace: none, as far as I know, have achieved anywhere near the sales of The God Delusion.

So there you have it. I may survey some other prominent people associated with New Atheism and get their take as well. Watch this space.

But there’s one more question. Why do these atheist-bashing articles, which are all the same, keep appearing over and over again when New Atheism already made its mark and its major proponents have moved on to other issues? I’m not sure, and readers may want to weigh in.

I think some of the bashers are motivated by jealousy or hatred, others by the desire to get an article in a public place (liberal websites are always glad to bash atheism, even if nearly identical articles were published elsewhere), and some people may really feel that New Atheism is ridden with alt-rightism and bigotry, though I disagree. I invite you to respond below.

_________

Addendum: I heard this evening from Sam Harris, and has put his response (“no”) in a new post, but am adding it here for completeness. We now have all surviving Horsepersons weighing in, as well as Steve Pinker. Sam’s take:

I’ve always been skeptical about the utility of identifying as an “atheist,” because it rarely seems helpful to heap the false assumptions that surround this term upon one’s own head. For this reason, I’ve never been eager to wear the label “new atheist” either.
However, there was something genuinely new about the “new atheism.” The publication of our four books in quick succession moved the conversation about faith and reason out of rented banquet halls filled with septuagenarians and brought it to a mainstream (and much younger) audience. The new atheists also made distinctions that prior atheists tended to ignore: For instance, not all religions teach the same thing, and some are especially culpable for specific forms of human misery. We also put religious moderates on notice in a new way: These otherwise secular people who imagine themselves to be on such good terms with reason are actually abetting the forces of theocracy—because they insist that everyone’s faith in revelation must be respected, whatever the cost.
The new atheism has not disappeared. It has merely diffused into a wider conversation about facts and values. In the end, the new atheism was nothing more than the acknowledgement that there is single magisterium: the ever-expanding space illuminated by intellectual honesty.

 

The New Statesman interviews Dawkins, concentrates on his tweets instead of his books

February 4, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Although this New Statesman piece (click on screenshot) purports to be an interview of Richard Dawkins by George Eaton, it’s not really a series of questions and answers, but rather an indictment of Dawkins’s propensity to issue invidious or misconstrued tweets. (Of the 16 short paragraphs, seven are about his tweets.) In other words, it’s more or less a hit job on the man, but of course we’re used to that.

Now I’m no fan of Dawkins on Twitter. Though I know him and consider him a friend, I’m also one of his numerous friends who have tried to get him to throttle back when his fingers are on the Twitter keyboard.  Too often, as with the “bells vs. muezzin” tweet described in this article, his tweets will rile people up, even when, or so he says, they don’t express what he means. My response is that if you can’t say what you mean without it being grossly misunderstood, stay off Twitter. (Of course, there are many who have it in for Richard, and will find a way to go after him no matter what he says.)

I wrote to Dawkins once with the advice above, and I think that’s the only email I ever sent him that he didn’t answer. It’s not just me, either: as the article points, out people like Dan Dennett have also urged Richard to lay off the tweets—all to no avail. So be it; the man is stubborn.

Read the piece, and I’ll give a few excerpts and remarks below. The occasion of the interview is the issuing of a short book with the transcribed “Four Horsemen” conversation, a book that is almost superfluous in view of the video’s public availability on YouTube. (It does have a foreword by Stephen Fry and very short retrospectives by the three living discussants.) I’ve put excerpts from the article indented below, while my comments are flush left.

 

The tweets:

In the digital age, reputations made over decades can be lost in minutes. Richard Dawkins first achieved renown as a pioneering evolutionary biologist (through his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene) and, later, as a polemical foe of religion (through 2006’s The God Delusion). Yet he is now increasingly defined by his incendiary tweets, which have been plausibly denounced as Islamophobic.

Plausibly? That’s a knife stuck twixt the ribs! It goes on:

Dennett, an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, has since warned that Dawkins’s tweets “could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy”. The theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, another friend, has remarked: “I wish he wouldn’t do it . I told him that.”

When I put these judgements to Dawkins, he conceded: “They’ve probably got a point… I’m trying to be more careful to make sure that my sticks don’t have wrong ends.” He reflected: “The problem with tweets is that they’re too short. What I should have added, which I did in a reply, is that I love the [Islamic] call to prayer, it can be very moving, especially when done by a decent voice. But often ‘Allahu akbar’ is the last thing you hear before you’re blown up. Church bells are never the last thing you hear before you’re murdered.”

A new book:

Six years ago, Dawkins described Islam as the “greatest force for evil today”. Now, he says, nationalism is a better candidate, but he has not ceased his crusade against religion. In the autumn, he will publish a new book, Outgrowing God (“I think of it as atheism for teenagers”) and he hopes to write one for “younger children” too.

Is this not precisely the indoctrination he denounces? “I’m very keen to avoid that, of course,” Dawkins said. “The book will be loaded with, ‘Do you agree? Think about it for yourself.’” He remarked, without irony, that the reference by some non-believers to “atheist children” was “a sin” since “the child is too young to have made up its own mind”.

Eaton’s question sounds fair enough, but remember that when you indoctrinate children with religious belief, you’re indoctrinating them with lies. This book sounds more like a palliative or an inoculation against religion, so I don’t think it’s as bad as, say, The Child’s Book of Jesus. Is it really indoctrination to tell a kid to weigh the evidence for the religious views they hear? Well, I haven’t yet seen the book, so I pass on:

Brexit. Even Dawkins opponents must generally agree with his take:

Dawkins is aggrieved by Brexit (“I’m trying to learn German as a gesture of solidarity”), though he conceded with scientific modesty: “I don’t think I know enough to say much about the actual pros and cons of the European Union.

“What I feel passionately is that [David] Cameron should never have called that referendum. Cameron will be damned by history as one of the worst prime ministers ever for sacrificing the long-term future of the country for the sake of a petty internal squabble.”

He argued that, as with US constitutional amendments, a two-thirds majority should have been required for a binding result. “A simple 50 per cent majority is not good enough on an issue this important.”

Theresa May, he said, had “shown a quasi-religious impulse in her obstinate determination to see Brexit through because that’s what the British people want. It’s almost a kind of theological mantra.”

Dawkins is a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats and has unsuccessfully urged them to rename themselves “the European Party” as a means of detoxifying their brand. “I’m sorry that the Lib Dems are seen as having blotted their copybook by joining the Tories.”

Death. Richard is 77, and it must be a bit galling to have interviewers ask an aging scientist how he feels about death. It’s bad enough to stare it in the face without having people hound you about it. But I like the response:

At the close of our conversation, I asked Dawkins how he viewed the prospect of death. “I find the idea of eternity and infinity frightening… Death is a general anaesthetic.” And what of his posthumous reputation? “I do derive great comfort from the thought that I’ve written quite a number of books and they’re very widely read and I hope that they will go on being read. I depart from Woody Allen’s remark: ‘I don’t want to live on in my works, I want to live on in my apartment.’”

In contrast, I adhere to Woody Allen’s remark!

How he wants to be viewed: This really should have been the centerpiece of the interview, for Dawkins’s books on evolution, as well as The God Delusion, are his enduring legacy. The tweets are the equivalent of evanescent journalism, and won’t be remembered:

Does he worry that some may first encounter him through his tweets? “That is a worry. I’d rather they read my books.”

For everyone that’s angered by one of Richard’s hamhanded tweets, there are a dozen people who have been enlightened by his popular works on evolution and some who have not only been “converted” to accepting evolution, but also deconverted from religion. Yes, people love to hate him using his Tweets as a rationale, but a lot of that is either jealousy or simple hatred of a man who wrote the best-selling book against religion of our age.

I’d recommend The Blind Watchmaker for its combination of great exposition and wonderful prose.

Articles you don’t need to read because you’ve already read them: New Atheism-dissing in the Guardian

February 3, 2019 • 1:45 pm

Good Lord, when will places like the Guardian stop publishing the same article over and over again? Do people ever get tired of dumping on New Atheism or, in this case, the “Four Horsemen”? I haven’t heard of author Steven Poole, a British journalist and author, but here he reviews a book I’ve already read, The Four Horsemen: A Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution.  And he uses his review to try to eviscerate Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. Click on the screenshot to read:


My own short review: This is a transcript of the well known “Four Horsemen” conversation that took place in Christopher Hitchens’s apartment in 2007. There is a full video that you can find here. What’s new is simply the addition of a foreword by Stephen Fry and, as I recall, short commentaries by a few Horsepeople. But the meat of the discussion is already on YouTube. If you want to buy the book, you’d be buying it for the forewords, and to me it’s not worth it. Caveat emptor.

Now about the review: well, it’s the same pap that all liberal venues put out about the New Atheists, including smarmy but untrue remarks like these:

Contrary to the book’s subtitle, the “atheist revolution” was not sparked by this cocktail-fuelled pre-dinner round of chat and backslapping, which took place in 2007. By then the participants could already salute one another for the impressive sales of their books, boast about how willing they were to cause “offence”, and reminisce about how brilliant they were when they befuddled this or that bishop with some debating point.

That’s not what these guys did, although I’ll admit that the “brights” thing was misguided. But I’ve hung around most of these guys a fair bit (Hitchens I met only once), and I’ve never heard anything like the kind of boasting and back-patting that Poole reports. Those things, like the dumb atheist-dissing in Salon, are just character assassination.

Then there’s the obligatory claim that that that 2007 discussion is “dated”, and maybe it is, but so what? To answer Poole’s title question, what happened to the New Atheism is that it won: it exposed a new generation to old arguments about atheism (and some new ones based on science), and thus helped with the increasing secularization of the West. Their books were best-sellers, and for a reason; it wasn’t the Dawkins haters who bought millions of copies of The God Delusion. Finally, none of the Horsemen write about atheism any more because they don’t need to: the ball is rolling and it’s going to suck up religion with it.

Poole then makes the familiar argument that New Atheism was not sophisticated about religion and also neglects the benefits of religion. But would we have algebra even if Islam hadn’t existed? Of course we would, although the word for it might have been different. Newton and Lemaitre: well, yes, some religious people made scientific advances, but in most cases religion had nothing to do with it, as nearly everyone in the West was religious two centuries ago (yes, I know Lemaitre is more recent). Was the Human Genome Project the result of Francis Collins’s religiosity? I doubt it, and the other contributor, Craig Ventner, is an atheist.

Poole goes on:

New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed. You will find in this conversation no acknowledgment of the progress made by medieval Islamic civilisation in medicine and mathematics – which is why, among other things, we have the word “algebra”. The Horsemen assume that religion has always been an impediment to science, dismissing famous religious scientists – such as Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who first proposed the big bang hypothesis, not to mention Isaac Newton et al – as inexplicable outliers. At one point Harris complains about a leading geneticist who is also a Christian. This guy seems to think, Harris spits incredulously, “that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus because you’re in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist”. Harris offers no reason why he can’t, except that the combination is incompatible with his own narrow-mindedness.

This is irrelevant, of course, to the point made by these four men: that religion is a melange of foolish and unsubstantiated superstitions, that it doesn’t belong in this era nor in any rational mind, and that, by and large, it is harmful. And even if it does some good things, it’s simply not TRUE and there are ways of getting those good things without having the bad things.

Poole’s review continues, with Sam getting the worst of it, as he always does, in the end being accused of flirting with the alt-right. That’s simply not true, as Sam is on the Left. He’s just not woke enough for Poole.

In the end, these men did us a big favor by acquainting a new generation with arguments about why religion is false and harmful. They are the Ingersolls of our generation; and each generation, indoctrinated with religion by parents and peers, needs to hear the arguments anew. What people like Poole are trying to do,  by discrediting the Four Horsemen, is to somehow justify and vindicate religion. Even if they be nonbelievers, they somehow can’t bear to say bad things about faith. But they are on the losing side, for in two centuries religion will have waned to a small band of superstitious holdouts. Or so I think.

Another religionist emails me, accusing me of reading only my own writings

January 1, 2019 • 10:00 am

The emails—most either annoying or downright pompous, keep coming in, inspired by my piece at The Conversation on the incompatibility of science and faith. With over 100,000 views and over 750 comments, that piece has legs—legs that have apparently kicked some believers in the tuchas. The email below, both annoying and pompous, came from a gentleman (and I use the term loosely) whose name will be omitted to protect the arrogant and delusional.

I will, however, let him know that I’ve posted it, and I’ll crowdsource the reply to you folks. I have a few comments (flush left); the email I got is indented.

And while I like readers to call me “Jerry” on this site, I don’t appreciate people I don’t know, who are about to take me to task, calling me by my first name. It’s patronizing.

Jerry

Would you agree there is only one truth, therefore there can be only one God for any legitimate faith to exist?  Even though it was 2000 years ago, there were witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus.  Is the witnessing of an event a fact or just faith?  Of course we were not there to personally witness that event but there are many events that we believe are true even though we weren’t there.

Answer: The question of “is there only one truth” isn’t clear even for science, as some questions, particularly those involving quantum mechanics, have multiple true answers. For example, is an electron a wave or a particle?

But when you get into nonexistent beings, then the answer to the first question is “no”. Hindus, for example, certainly consider their faith to be legitimate, yet has many gods. And even if there were just one deity (Muslims consider Allah to be identical to the Christian and Jewish god), the answer then depends on what you mean by “legitimate”. I suppose the writer thinks that there can be only one “legitimate” faith in the sense of being “a faith all of whose contentions are true.” But in that case Christianity is not “legitimate” because it depends on statements like the six-day Genesis creation and the existence of Adam and Eve as our literal ancestors—claims that have been scientifically disproven.

I suppose people have considered in detail what one means by a “true” faith, but for Christianity the minimum would be the beliefs that Jesus existed, was the son of God/God himself, was crucified, resurrected, and now will give us all eternal life. Plus he’s coming back!

This guy claims that there’s good evidence for the “truth” of Christianity because he takes the Bible as true. That, of course, is the sole source of “witnesses,” yet we also know of the contradictions in even the accounts of the Resurrection. Which “witness” is correct? (The gospels were of course written decades after Jesus’s supposed death, and not by witnesses at all.)

Personally, I’m skeptical of accounts that aren’t well attested by multiple independent accounts by contemporaries. I’m not even that sure that Socrates existed! But I’m even less sure that someone on whom Jesus was based existed, for there is only one account in history, and that’s all in the Bible, complete with contradictory accounts of Jesus’s life and death.

The chap goes on:

The belief in evolution requires great faith to believe something can grow out of nothing.  Most mathematical scientists are not atheists when they study the probabilities regarding evolution and creationism.  And mathematics are true scientific facts and not just speculation or theories.

Three comments. I don’t accept evolution based on faith; I accept it based on evidence. I don’t know how life began, but I do know that it originated about 4 billion years ago, that all living species descended from one ancient common ancestor, and that things evolved and branched, often via natural selection.  Finally, mathematics does not comprise “true scientific facts”, as the writer should know, and we don’t have any calculations showing that life could not have originated from non-life or that evolution could not have occurred.

But wait! There’s more!

You might benefit from reading something besides your own writings.  The Case For Faith by Lee Stroble would be a good place to start.

Actually, the author’s name is Lee Strobel; get your names right, dude!

Of course I read more than my own writings. I read tons of theology, plus the Bible and the Qur’an (and some of the Book of Mormon) for Faith versus Fact. I’m absolutely sure I know a lot more about theology and religion than this benighted chap knows about evolution. It’s odd that believers don’t think they have to study evolution or science in detail before criticizing me for not knowing enough theology! If you say that you have to have studied both to pronounce on the incompatibility of science and religion, well, I’ve done my job and almost none of my critics have.

Good luck in your search for God.  He knows where you are.  I hope you figure out where He is before you must face the real truth.

If there is a God, I’ll repeat what Bertrand Russell said when asked what, as an atheist, what he’d say to God if Russell died and found out he was wrong: “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!” I’m sure God would forgive me, him being loving and omniscient and stuff.

As for this guy, I have contempt not for his belief, but for his certainty and his willingness to lecture me on why I should share his personal superstitions.

Feel free to respond to this person, and I’ll email him the link to this post and the comments.

Note added at 6 pm Chicago time: I’ve sent the link to this believer.

More emails from readers who question my philosophical cred

December 28, 2018 • 10:00 am

Emails from strangers about my science-versus-religion piece in The Conversation continue to pollute my inbox. I’ve put one more below.

How much do you have to study religion before you can say that Abrahamic religions are a.) often based on assertions about what exists and what is real and b.) adjudicate their truth statements in a manner completely different from how science decides what is (provisional) truth? Just look how many Americans believe in Heaven and Hell, and the evidence for that, versus why scientists accept the existence of viruses and bacteria, and the evidence for that. It’s a no-brainer.

I’d say that a moderate knowledge of religion and of religious people would suffice, but people like the one below, who sent me a petulant email, think that years of study are required to claim the two assertions above. This person, who apparently lives in Utah (a Mormon?) is wrong.  But here’s the email I got at 3:30 this morning (I have an early flight.) This person’s email is indented; my comments are flush left.

Hi Jerry,

I read your op-ed in the 12-27-2018 edition of the Logan Herald-Journal  

https://www.hjnews.com/eedition/

Not having heard of you until now, I checked out your bio at Wikipedia.org. There you’re described as an atheist, a secular Jew, and a metaphysical naturalist. I don’t question your credentials in evolutionary biology. However, please explain why you consider yourself an expert in analytic philosophy and metaphysics? For example, can you explain the difference between atheism-theism-agnosticism on the one hand and theological noncognitivism on the other? If theism is not false but empirically meaningless, then why wouldn’t atheism and agnosticism likewise be meaningless (i.e., neither empirically true nor false)?

This is the hurdle one must leap, apparently, to be able to write a popular essay on science versus religion. But I wonder if this guy knows as much about evolutionary biology as I do about theology and religion? Has he read On The Origin of Species? Where is HIS expertise. The fact is, though, that it doesn’t take years of study to make the points I did in my article.

As for theism being “empirically meaningless”, I never said it was, for there is potential evidence for assertions about God. It’s just that we haven’t seen any. In contrast, there is evidence for accepted truths in science. Atheism, the simple rejection of belief in gods, is based on the absence of evidence for gods, not the “empirical meaninglessness” of religion. This guy hasn’t read enough about atheism!

He goes on:

Your bio includes a quote by you taken from The New Republic in which you claim that “all scientific progress requires a climate of strong skepticism.” [My italics] Besides reading your above op-ed, I also viewed one of your lectures on YouTube. Both lead me to doubt your understanding of philosophical skepticism. Therefore, I suggest you read the following article by Keith Lehrer, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He’s clearly an expert on what it means to be epistemically dogmatic:

See “Why Not Scepticism?” Philosophical Forum, vol. II, (1971), 283-298.

(According to the author’s bio, this article is required reading in undergraduate courses on cognitive theory.)

Best wishes,
NAME REDACTED

Well, if I’ve made some major error about religion or philosophy, this person should tell me what it is. They never do (or when they do they’re wrong), but rather they almost always refer me to one or another article to read in the endless rabbit-hole that is academic philosophy and theology.

I stand by what I wrote.