Category: religiosity

Now The Atlantic touts religion—or rather, beliefs that don’t need evidence

March 27, 2026 • 9:30 am

I’ve been posting from time to time about how the mainstream media is suddenly touting religion and its benefits—a phenomenon I don’t fully understand. Now The Atlantic has joined the queue with an article by Elizabeth Bruenig, who’s written for the magazine for 6 years, and before that for the NYT, the WaPo, and the New Republic. She also has a master’s degree in Christian theology from Cambridge University.  All this means that she’s fully qualified to tout religion to liberals.

And in the article below she does just that, but in an unusual way.  She dismisses the need for any evidence for gods or specific religions, and takes the position that belief itself, however arrived at, is sufficient to warrant the truths of that belief. It’s bizarre, and another example of a supposedly reputable publication jumping the rails.

You can read the article archived below, or find it archived here.  (Thanks to the many readers who sent me this piece.)


Bruenig begins by dissing the New Atheists (unfairly, of course), and then segues into her Frozen Waterfall Moment: the epiphany that solidified her waning faith.

I grew up in a faithful Methodist household in deep-red Texas during the George W. Bush years, when the political sway of Evangelicals was at its zenith. At the same time, evangelists of a robust atheism—figures such as the biologist Richard Dawkins, the critic Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris—toured the country offending salt-of-the-earth Americans with their contempt for religious belief. It was hard for me to ignore that a number of their assertions were clearly correct: Young-Earth creationism, for instance, instantly struck me as absurd when I first learned about it from a history teacher in my public junior-high school, who confidently told me that the world is only a few thousand years old.

That wasn’t what my family or church taught, but Christians who subscribed to those beliefs were suddenly ascendant, and their thinking colored the country’s religious landscape. Meanwhile, the New Atheists were making hay of the fact that such faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery. Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding.

This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.

The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.

Note that at the same time she sneers at New Atheists for their “contempt” for religion, she notes that they also dispelled misguided beliefs in creationism, so chalk that up to New Atheism. In her case, the ephipany was more mundane than the three frozen waterfalls that brought Francis Collins to Christ: hers involved a wind blowing leaves into the sky.  And for some reason that made her think about a poem that is not at all about God, but (as far as I can see), the creative process of a writer and how that process is perceived by the poet and how it interprets reality. It’s an okay poem, but it doesn’t rhyme, so it’s really a bunch of fragmentary thoughts, as in Ulysses, but put into verse form. At any rate, when Breunig, the wind that blew the leaves around somehow blew faith into her soul.

Surprisingly, given Bruenig’s own contempt for the need for evidence to buttress one’s faith, she spends a long time describing a new big book that appears to make the same old arguments about the facts of science that point to God (fine-tuning, the Big Bang, etc.):

The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God. With this, they strive for the ultimate alchemy, transforming faith into fact.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s book is part of a burgeoning genre of apologetics that relies on relatively new scientific developments and theories, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, to make an ancient case. Their book, which has already sold more than 400,000 copies around the world, arrives at a time of both bloody religious conflict and rapidly collapsing religious belief, especially among the young and the highly educated. It joins other recent projects—including two new documentaries, The Story of Everything: The Science That Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe and Universe Designed—that propose the same tantalizing theory: that there is incontrovertible proof that a divine power created the cosmos, and that this evidence is mounting.

. . . [the authors] identify a series of scientific breakthroughs that helped undermine religious faith over the centuries, including Galileo’s heliocentrism, Newton’s clockwork universe,

The publisher says pretty much the same thing: scientific discoveries in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the “fine-tuning of the Universe,” and the incredible complexity of living organisms” (i.e., Intelligent Design) have dispelled materialism and naturalism:

Yet, with unexpected and astonishing force, the pendulum of science has swung back in the opposite direction. Driven by a rapid succession of groundbreaking discoveries—thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, theories about the expansion and fine-tuning of the Universe, and the incredible complexity of living organisms—old certainties have been completely overturned. Materialism increasingly has the appearance of an irrational belief.

I’ll admit I haven’t read this 500-page behemoth, whose summaries recycle the same old arguments for God from science, and I’m not sure I want to read it (you can see a critical review of its content archived from Medium), whose author (“Matthew”) confirms the impression I got from above, but adds that the book also throws in some theology. From Medium:

Yet what is strange is how much [the book] feels like a nostalgic throwback, it is reminiscent of the publishing fads of the 00s when New Atheism was in its peak and church book stands were full of books with titles like “The Dawkins Delusion” or “How Science Proves God” or whatever it might have been. The book even approvingly quotes Dawkins’ claim that God is basically a scientific hypothesis that we can prove or disprove, and the authors claim we should be able to look at science and find evidence of God, or at least we shouldn’t find evidence that contradicts the idea that there is a divine creator. Yet it is also far weirder than intelligent design rebuttals of atheists, the book goes beyond science, including lengthy chapters on the bible, the person of Jesus, the continued existence of the Jewish people, the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union and (sorry Substack) for some reason, the Fatima miracle.

I will be honest up front, I found the book to be absolutely mad, hamfisted and confused. It is error strewn, misrepresents various ideas completely, and in spite of being written by two Catholics claiming to be retrieving a more ancient worldview, it largely constitutes a clumsy argument for a God of enlightenment deism, making some absolutely eye wateringly odd claims along the way. As the reviews all seem to say it is extremely “readable” but mostly because it is presented as a skim over of topics in soundbites and quotes so that it reads like a print out of a load of powerpoint slides.

. . . More to the point, I find it hard to believe we are in an “intellectual paradigm shift” when the authors have offered what is essentially undigested quotes from wikipedia and a bunch of arguments that were in vogue nearly two decades ago. This book is the definition of singing to the choir, except by the choir it must mean a very particular set of Christians inclined to share the author’s theology but not inclined to know anything about the arguments.

You can read the rest of the review for yourself.  The fact is, though, that the quality and arguments of the book are irrelevant, for Atlantic author Breunig says that people don’t need no stinking evidence to accept gods and their natures. The argument from science, she says, is misguided (bolding henceforth is mine):

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.

In other words, it’s the “beauty and poetry of the world” that convinced Bruenig of the divine. Apparently she has overlooked the ugliness of the world: the cancers in children, the incessant wars and killings, the death of thousands of innocent people in natural disasters, and even humans’ destruction of the very beauty that inspires her. Is this evidence for Satan?

It’s quite bizarre to read about Breunig’s transformation into a believer, one who rejects science but still touts “objective evidence” for divinity.

She turned her Golden Leaf Epiphany over in her mind, and it is that epiphany—a purely emotional experience—that led her to see reality (OBJECTIVE reality) through a god-shaped lens. And she disses New Atheism again for its supposed claim that believing in gods makes one unsophisticated or dumb.  No, she’s wrong: the argument is that accepting theism means you’re credulous. Breunig:

 I began to ask myself what it would cost me intellectually if I were to choose to metabolize the experience as it had occurred to me. That decision came with several implications. If God is real, then perhaps other things—goodness, righteousness, beauty—that are usually dismissed as matters of subjective experience might also be objectively real. That prospect was much more agreeable to me than another consequential implication of electing to believe: that, as the New Atheists had so vigorously argued, theism meant putting aside any pretensions I had of sophistication or intellect.

As I explored this problem, I spent hours in my college library reading Saint Augustine, a foundational philosopher and theologian. Here I encountered another strange sensation: Every word I read felt like remembering something I had once known but somehow forgotten.

Oh dear God, St. Augustine, a man who was a Biblical literalist (something that Bruenig rejects). Like many early theologians, Augustine argued that the Bible could be read both literally and metaphorically, but insisted on the absolute truth of what’s in print. Augustine accepted instantaneous creation from Genesis, Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, and the whole Biblical mishigas. Bruenig ignores those parts, for she’s looking to buttress her incipient belief. (And remember that she concluded, apparently objectively, that God exists because of the feeling that swept over her when she saw the wind blow the leaves around.)  And so, after reading Augustine, she decided to accept an “objective” reality that didn’t need empirical support, and re-embraced religion:

And maybe the Christian Neoplatonists, Augustine among them, had some points as well. I contemplated this for a while before I realized that there wasn’t any sense in debating it with myself anymore. I knew what I felt, so I gave up and chose to believe.

Note that she has no evidence for Christianity, but chose to believe, even though she uses the word “objectively,” implying that other people would agree with her “choice”. (They don’t: Christians are in a minority of the world’s people.) At the end of her piece, Bruenig simply asserts that you don’t need anything but emotion to buttress your Christianity. In so doing she simply shrugs off all the arguments that have been raised against belief and says “faith is enough”, effectively immunizing her beliefs against refutation. (Bolding is mine.)

In my years of working out exactly what I believe, I have been relieved to learn that faith does not in fact demand the surrender of logic and vigorous intellectual inquiry—a case Bolloré and Bonnassies convincingly bolster with numerous testimonials from award-winning scientists. Still, to trust in the existence of God is to accept both the appearance and the possibility of being naive or delusional. No accumulation of promising developments in our analytical understanding of the world can delay confrontation with that essential fact. Having faith is a vulnerable thing.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s arguments are more likely to shore up the faith of wavering believers than to win new converts. This itself is no small thing. The authors may even be right about the growing evidence for the existence of God secreted away in the latest science. But their approach has a history of upsets. The only way to inoculate belief against that cycle of disruption is to treat faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.

It’s clear here that she wants to inoculate her belief against disruption (i.e., against disproof), and by arguing, “It’s true because I believe it,” she’s succeeded.  Well, good for her, but she’s not going to convince people who think that giving your life to Christianity and its beliefs of a divine Jesus who was also God, the miracles he performed, and the crucifixion and resurrection—you are donning the mantle of a superstitious belief system without a rational reason to do so. Remember, emotions and feelings are not part of rationality.

This whole essay could be summed up on one sentence:  “I believe because I want to believe, and I don’t need reasons (or rationality) to do so.”

Shame on The Atlantic for pushing this pabulum!

h/t: Jim

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

March 26, 2026 • 11:30 am

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

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

Here’s their intro (bolding is theirs):

Why did New Atheism fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.) The election of Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.) Rejection by the academic world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.) The response of believing intellectuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.) The “Elevatorgate Scandal”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.) Richard Dawkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the summary of the piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One question for readers:

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

This is a Gallup plot:

And a Pew plot:

If you adhere to a religion, how much of its doctrine (and factual assertions) must you accept?

March 14, 2026 • 11:18 am

Here’s an issue to ponder of a cold Saturday in March.  Many people with some intellectual clout (i.e., they’re not stupid) claim to be religious, and yet when you press them to find out exactly what they believe, they clam up or equivocate.  Some Christian academics I know, for instance, will mumble and change the subject if you ask them about the nature of the God they accept, or whether Jesus revived the dead, and then was crucified and resurrected.  To me this means either that they do not believe the tenets of their religion, or that they do but are embarrassed to admit it.

And yet, as I wrote in Faith versus Fact, I am hardly aware of any religions that do not make factual claims. Here, for example is one version of the Nicene Creed from the United States conference of Catholic bishops.  I’ve have bolded every factual claim:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

It’s almost all in bold. As Wikipedia notes: “On Sundays and solemnities, one of these two creeds is recited in the Roman Rite Mass after the homily. In the Byzantine Rite, the Nicene Creed is sung or recited at the Divine Liturgy, immediately preceding the Anaphora (eucharistic prayer) is also recited daily at compline.”

Likewise, Muslims accept the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad by an angel, Mormons believe that the angel Moroni hid the golden plates on which the book of Mormon was inscribed, and then revealed them to Joseph Smith. Hindus, in contrast, believe in many gods manifesting parts of one reality. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but do embrace things like rebirth and karma.

The point is clear, every religion depends on a set of core beliefs, and if you reject them you’re not very credible as embracing that religion. You can hardly call yourself a Christian, for example, if you don’t believe in the existence of Jesus as a divine being, and in his crucifixion, resurrection, and a form of God made human. (Remember, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”)

But now all sorts of people are publishing bestselling books about how they made their way back to religion after a period of nonbelief, why atheism is wrong because it can’t explain a fine-tuned universe, consciousness, and so on.  And yet these same people are willing to change their entire lives based on nonexistent evidence. Others say they don’t need no stinking evidence; they believe because it makes sense or resonates with them (this is why Ross Douthat is a Christian rather than a Muslim).

So here’s the question to ponder and discuss:

Can you really call yourself adherent to a given religion if you don’t accept the fundamental tenets of that religion?

Granted “fundamental tenets” is a slippery term, and people’s religious mileage varies, but when someone publicly professes that they are religious, it seems fair to ask them, “So tell me: which claims of your religion do you accept, and which do you reject?” For some reason, though, people treat religion as off limits in that way: they don’t have to answer you.

Pinker vs. Douthat debate: Do we need God?

March 12, 2026 • 11:15 am

The Free Press and CBS News (Bari Weiss is involved in both organizations) is hosting an ongoing series of “town hall” interviews and debates, the topic being “Things that matter.” The series is sponsored by the Bank of America.

A few weeks ago the series included a episode of interest to many of us, a debate between Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat on “Do we need God.” These gentlemen should need no introduction, save to add that this debate probably arose because of Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, a book that he promoted widely (see some of my takes on it here). The video of that debate went online yesterday.

Here’s part of the website’s intro to the debate:

Today, nearly a third of Americans claim no religious affiliation, which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

But the story of religion in the West is much more complicated than simple decline. In the past few years, we’ve entered what feels like a religious revival, or at least a leveling off in the decline of faith. Even as our society becomes more technologically advanced, many people are searching more intensely for meaning, purpose, and moral clarity. In other words, the question of faith hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it is even more urgent.

For years, intellectuals predicted that as religion receded, society would become calmer, more rational, and more scientific. Shed religious superstition, the theory went, and we would inherit a more enlightened public life. Instead, many societies haven’t become less fervent so much as differently fervent—driven by conspiracy, tribalism, and forms of moral conflict that often feel almost cosmic in intensity.

The premise of our Things That Matter debates, sponsored by Bank of America, is simple but essential. We want to revive the tradition that has long made the United States exceptional: our ability to argue openly across deep divides while still remaining part of the same civic community. Disagreement does not have to mean contempt. And since religion is one of the most politically charged topics in public life, it felt fitting to begin here.

Where does morality come from without God? Are our ideas of human dignity, moral obligation, and human rights ultimately grounded in a transcendent reality—or are they products of human reason alone? Are the apparent benefits of religion simply the community and rituals it nurtures, rather than the truth of its claims?

To explore these questions, we brought together two formidable public intellectuals: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

You can hear the 57-minute debate by clicking below (I hope). It’s moderated by lawyer and commentator Sarah Isgur, who seems to be a secular Jew. It begins with summaries by Douthat and Pinker (about 4 minutes each), and then Isgur asks questions to Pinker and Douthat, questions that were clearly given to the debaters in advance (they have notes to answer them).

My take: Pinker wiped the floor with Douthat. Of course I’m biased, but Douthat’s arguments were lame, and he didn’t even dwell on the “science-y” arguments he made when touting his book (fine-tuning, consciousness, etc.). (Steve could have rebutted those, too.) Instead, Douthat says that “God self-evidently exists” and doesn’t rebut Pinker’s arguments showing the well-known negative correlation between religiosity of countries (or American states) and their well being. Douthat also makes quasi intelligent-design arguments, one of which is that our minds were created by God to help us understand the universe. I guess he doesn’t understand evolution.

Audience questions, chosen in advance, begin about 19 minutes in (the debaters apparently knew the selected audience questions, too). They’re interspersed with more questions from the moderator.  The best of her questions is at the end (55:15): “What is something that each of you would concede tonight—a point that the other made that you found compelling—that made you perhaps question some of your own positions on this?”

I would have preferred more of a slugfest, one in which Pinker and Douthat addressed each other, as they often do in Presidential debates (there’s a bit of that). This is all polite and respectful, but that detracts from what I like to see in a debate. But that’s due to the organizers, not the participants. And, sadly, there are no before-and-after votes. In my view, humanism won hands down over religion.

Dennis Prager in The Free Press: Morality can come only from God, so we should at least act as if He exists

February 20, 2026 • 9:45 am

With this article by Dennis Prager, the Free Press officially raises its flag as “We are totes pro-religion!”  In article after article, the site has touted the benefits of religion as a palliative for an ailing world, but you’ll never read a defense of atheism or nonbelief.  Here Dennis Prager, conservative podcaster and founder of an online “university,” touts religion as the only “objective” source of morality. I suspect the “we love religion” mantra of the FP ultimately comes from founder Bari Weiss, who is an observant Jew.

But Prager is wrong on two counts. First, religion is not the only source of morality—or even a good one. Second, there is no “objective” morality. All morality depends on subjective preferences. Granted, many of them are shared by most people, but in the end there is no “objective” morality that one can say is empirically “true”. Is abortion immoral? How about eating animals? What is wrong with killing one person and using their organs to save the lives of several dying people?  Can you push a man onto a trolley to save the lives of five others on an adjacent track?  If these questions have objective answers, what are they?

First, the FP’s introduction:

If you were to name the defining figures of the 21st-century conservative movement, Dennis Prager would surely rank near the top of the list. A longtime radio host and founder of digital educational platform PragerU, he is one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals, publishing more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civilization.

His latest book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” hits shelves next week. Drawn from a weekend-long lecture Prager delivered to 74 teenagers in 1992, it is a full-throated defense of objective, biblical morality at a time, he says, when more people dispute its existence than ever before. Though rooted in an earlier moment, the book holds new weight: In 2024, Prager suffered a catastrophic fall that paralyzed him from the waist down.

“A certain percentage of this book,” he reveals in the introduction, “was written by dictation and editing from my hospital bed. Were it not for Joel Alperson, who also organized and recorded the entire weekend, the book would not have been finished. We completed the book together. It is a testament to how important we both consider this work.”

Next week, our Abigail Shrier will interview Prager from his hospital room, so stay tuned for their full conversation. And below, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from his book, answering a question that many of us ask every day: In a world where profoundly evil things happen, how do we raise good people? —The Editors

I’m hoping that Abigail Shrier does not throw softballs at Prager, and asks him about “objective” morality and his evidence for God. But I’m betting she won’t: one doesn’t harass a man recently paralyzed from the waist down, and Shrier is employed by the Free Press.

Click, read, and weep.

At the beginning, Prager raises one of these moral questions, and argues that yes, there’s an objective answer—one that comes from the Bible (bolding is mine):

One of my biggest worries in life is that people these days are animated more by feelings than by values.

Let me explain what I mean. Imagine you are walking along a body of water—a river, lake, or ocean—with your dog, when suddenly you notice your dog has fallen into the water and appears to be drowning. About 100 feet away, you notice a stranger, a person you don’t know, is also drowning. Assuming your dog can’t swim, and also assuming that you would like to save both your dog and the stranger, the question is: Who would you try to save first?

If your inclination is to save your dog, that means you were animated by feelings. Your feelings are understandable, and as I own two dogs, I fully relate. You love your dog more than the stranger, and I do, too.

But the whole point of values is to hold that something is more important than your feelings. There is no ambivalence in the Bible about this. “Thou shalt not murder” is not for one group alone. “Thou shalt not steal” is not for one group alone. It is for every human being. Human beings are created in God’s image. Therefore, human life is sacred and animal life is not. You should save the stranger.

Unfortunately, those universal values are not what we’re teaching people today.. . . .

What? You can’t murder a dog? What if the drowning person is Hitler?  And aren’t five human lives on the trolley track worth more than one? What would Jesus do?

And what other Biblical values should we take literally? Should we levy capital punishment for homosexuality? Is it okay to have slaves so long as you don’t beat them too hard? Was it “moral” for the Israelites to kill all the tribes living on their land? Is it okay for God to allow children to die of cancer?  (Of course, sophisticated theologians have made up answers to these questions so that, in the end, they find nothing immoral in Scripture.)

When Prager says that our big problem is that feelings have replaced values, I wonder where those “values” come from. Apparently they come from God. But that raises an ancient question: is something good because God dictates it, or did God dictate it because it was good? (This is Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.) And if the latter is true, then there is a standard of morality that is independent of God’s dictates.

This is not rocket science. But Prager sticks to the first interpretation, adhering to the “Divine Command Theory“:

In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns people not to rely on their hearts. If you want to know why so many people reject Bible-based religions, there it is: Most people want to be governed by their feelings and not have anyone—be it God or a book—tell them otherwise.

The battle in America and the rest of the Western world today is between the Bible and the heart.

And Prager sticks to his guns, arguing that atheists and agnostics have no guidelines for morality:

Millions of people today are atheist or agnostic. If you are one of them, my goal is not to convince you that God exists. But I am asking you to live as if you believe God exists, and by extension, as if you believe objective good and evil exist.

Why? Because for a good society to maintain itself, we need objective morality. What would happen to math if it were reduced to feeling? There would be no math. Likewise, if we reduce morality to feeling, there would be no morality. In other words, if values and feelings are identical, there would be no such thing as a value.

Imagine a child in kindergarten who sees a box of cookies meant for the whole class and takes them all for himself. Most people would acknowledge that the child has to be taught that this is wrong. But if values were derived from feelings, this child would keep all the cookies on the basis of his personal value that whoever gets to the cookies first gets to keep them. It’s not as though this philosophy is without precedent. It has been the way many of the world’s societies have looked at life: “Might makes right.”

Again, this palaver appears in the Free Press, which apparently thought it worth publishing.

What Prager doesn’t seem to realize is that an atheist can give reasons for adhering to a certain morality, even if in the end those reasons are directed towards confecting a society that (subjectively) seems harmonious.  For example, John Rawls used the “veil of ignorance” as a way to structure a moral society. Others, like Sam Harris, are utilitarians or consequentialists, arguing that the moral act is one that most increases the “well being” of the world.  But even these more rational moralities have issues, some of which I raised in my questions above. The systems adhere largely to what most people see as “moral”, but they are not really “objective”. They are subjective.

But adhering to the word of the Bible, and twisting it when it doesn’t fit your Procrustean bed of morality, is palpably inferior to reason-based morality. Indeed, the fact that theologians must twist parts of the Bible so that, while seeming to be immoral they turn out to be really moral, shows that there’s no objective morality in scripture.

Does Prager even know his Bible? Have a gander at what he writes here:

That’s precisely why the Ten Commandments outlaw stealing. Because stealing is normal. The whole purpose of moral and legal codes is to forbid people from acting on their natural feelings.

Consider another example, this one far more serious. In virtually every past society, a vast number of women and girls have been raped. In wartime, when victorious armies could essentially do what they wanted, rape was the norm, with few exceptions, such as the American, British, and Israeli armies. Only men whose behavior is guided by values rather than feelings do not rape in such circumstances.

Both of these vastly different examples prove the same thing: To lead good lives, people must first learn Bible-based values, mandated when they are children.

Has he read Numbers 31? Here’s a bit in which, under God’s orders, Moses and his acolytes not only butcher a people, but save the virgin women for sexual slavery (my bolding, text from King James version):

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.

3 And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the Lord of Midian.

4 Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to the war.

5 So there were delivered out of the thousands of Israel, a thousand of every tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.

6 And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand of every tribe, them and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war, with the holy instruments, and the trumpets to blow in his hand.

7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.

8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.

10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.

11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.

12 And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.

13 And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.

14 And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.

15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?

16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.

17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

I suppose that Prager thinks that not only atheists and agnostics lack moral standards, but that’s also true of all the non-Christians of the world, as morality not based on the Bible is evanescent at best:

Again, you don’t need to believe in God. But deciding between right and wrong is essentially impossible without a value system revealed by God. If there isn’t a God who says pushing little kids down—or raping women—is wrong, then all we have to go by are feelings, and then doing whatever you feel like doing isn’t wrong at all.

We’re not talking about theory. We’re living in a country where every few minutes a woman is raped, every minute a car is stolen, and every few hours a human being is murdered. The people committing these crimes don’t act on the basis of biblical values; they act on the basis of feelings.

This is not a wholesale indictment of feelings. Feelings are what most distinguish humans from robots. Feelings make us feel alive. Without feelings, life wouldn’t be worth living. But feelings alone are morally unreliable. Guided by feelings, every type of behavior is justifiable: If you feel like shoplifting and act on your feelings, you’ll shoplift. If a man is sexually aroused by a woman, he will rape her. And, of course, if you have deeper feelings for your pet than for a stranger, you’ll save your dog and let the stranger drown.

If we rely solely on feelings, everything is justifiable. And a society that justifies everything stands for nothing.

So much for Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, who march along with us atheists thinking that nothing is immoral.

This is not only stupid, but it’s not new, either. It was Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel who said, “Without God, everything is permitted.”  Prager (and by extension, the Free Press) is making a Swiss cheese of an argument here, one that’s full of holes. If Abigail Shrier doesn’t dismantle it in her interview, I’ll be very disappointed, for I’m a big admirer of her work. And she’s way too smart to buy into Prager’s nonsense.

Here’s Prager’s new book:

There isn’t a revival of religion in America

February 17, 2026 • 9:55 am

I was sent the article below I mentioned the ubiquitous claim that there’s a religious revival in America, supposedly because people are experiencing a loss of “meaning and purpose.” The return to religion, as the MSM and some liberals like to say, is because filling the “God-shaped hole” in our souls with religion will help set this cockeyed world aright.

But is there a religious revival? I’ve been dubious. All the evidence for it I can see is the slowdown in the continuing rise of religious “nones” (people without formal affiliation to a church) in the last few years. Here’s a graph showing that as documented by the Gallup organization:

That is not a revival but a plateau, like the one we had in the mid-1980s.  And that plateau turned again into a rising cliff.  Likewise, the Pew organization found that the fall in the proportion of Americans identifying as Christian has also plateaued:

And again, that’s not a burgeoning of Christianity, unless you count a 1% increase from 2024 tio 2024 as a “revival”.  There may be a slowdown in proportion of “nones” (as documented below, atheists seem to be holding steady), but this is hardly reason for religious people to cheer—or confect rah-rah articles and books about how religion is back.

The article below from the ARC News, in fact, argues that there is no revival and that any data supporting that scenario is very thin. Click to read.  Note that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is associated with Jordan Peterson, and is designed to give coherence to modern conservativism. That makes the article even more interesting!

Click to read (the author, Maggie Phillips, writes for Tablet):

The article is rather scattershot in both scope and writing, but it does cast a cold eye on “revival” scenarios. I’ll give a few quotes:

The Harvard Catholic Center wrapped up 2025 with huge news: the number of potential converts coming through its doors had doubled from the previous year. According to The Wall Street Journal “Free Expression” newsletter, the HCC is “booming,” dynamic proof that the kids are looking for something to believe in. The WSJ was only the latest to buy into the hype of a new American religious revival. Vanity Fair says twentysomethings are taking communion at a D.C. dive bar. The New York Post reported that in Greenwich Village, the number of adults interested in converting to Catholicism had tripled since last year. Similarly, the National Catholic Register reported that Newman Centers for Catholic college students are packed, signaling a “golden age of campus ministry.” Christian research outfit Barna says reading the Bible is back, with Millennials and Gen Z leading the charge. And that’s not all—Barna also says Gen Z now leads in church attendance. Over at The Free Press, the “Faith” section is explicitly dedicated to covering what it matter-of-factly calls “the new religious revival.”

But it’s hardly clear that this talk of religious “revival,” while nice wish fulfillment for many, is backed up by the evidence. The Harvard Catholic Center revival consists of eighty students. With Harvard’s graduate and undergraduate population of over 24,000, many thousands of whom are Roman Catholic, that’s a pretty capacious definition of “booming.” The tripled number of conversion candidates in Greenwich Village comes to a modest 130. Now, in the grand sweep of history, eighty new Catholics in Cambridge, Mass., is not nothing. And 130 more practicing Catholics, especially converts in first blush of religiosity, will make a difference to the spiritual life of Greenwich Village, or at least certain apartments there. But is something stirring in the hearts of young Americans outside of college campuses and trendy urban enclaves? Are we actually on the threshold of a new Great Awakening? Probably not. As religion demographer Ryan Burge (who teaches at the Danforth Center, which produces Arc) never tires of pointing out, accounts of America’s great religious revival have been greatly exaggerated.

“About 25 percent of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend,” Burge wrote recently in Deseret News. “If that rose by even three points—a small but noticeable increase—that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago. That’s hard to imagine, given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide.”

Here’s a tweet from Burge showing only two changes among the four cohorts: those who believe in “some higher power” have increased 8% from Boomers to Gen Z, while in the same period those who believe in God with “no doubts” (the dark yellow bar on the far right) have fallen a full 17%.

The article also notes that we see a plateau, not a rise, in religiosity:

In fairness, numbers showing both Christianity’s steady decline and the exponential growth of the religiously unaffiliated “nones” seem to have slowed, or even halted, for now. But the same religious outlets with optimistic headlines about the great American youth revival seem to have forgotten their previous handwringing about the rise of the nones. A leveling-off of decline does not a revival make. After all, across the United States, thousands of churches still appear poised for closure.

In the end, the evidence for a revival happening now is inconclusive:

A national religious revival would suit both the religious, worried about decline and its consequences, and the secular, worried about theological mission creep into politics. And in a tale as old as time, a religious revival also suits grifters and opportunists. But unlike the recent Asbury revival, people can’t even agree that one is happening, at least all that much. It’s Schrodinger’s religious revival, at once happening and not. What it means, if it means anything at all, remains to be seen.

It’s paragraphs like the last that I find confusing. Yes, a religious revival would suit the religious and its touters like Ross Douthat, but why would it suit secular people.? If we’re “worried about theological mission creep into politics,” then why would be heartened by even more religious people?

Still, when you hear someone being gleeful about how America is now becoming more religious, simply ask them for their evidence.

**********

I was just sent this article from Utah’s Deseret News that argues the same thing (click to read):

A couple of quotes from author Ryan Burge (again):

. . . . as someone who looks at data on American religion nearly every day, I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents. In reality, many casual observers are overinterpreting some short-term shifts in survey data.

The General Social Survey, for instance, reported a steady rise in the “nones” between the early 1990s and 2020. In 2018, the figure was 23%, rising to 28% in 2021. The two most recent estimates are slightly lower — 27% in 2022 and 25% in 2024. Similarly, the “headline finding” from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey was that both the decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated have paused in recent years.

But neither of these surveys suggest any real resurgence in American religion, for one simple reason: generational replacement. Every day, older Americans die and are replaced by young adults turning 18. This process unfolds slowly — almost imperceptibly — in the short term, but over five or 10 years, it can produce profound shifts in the overall landscape.

. . .People of faith will rightly say that true revival can’t be predicted or modeled — that it’s a movement of the Holy Spirit, not a statistical trend. And that’s fair. No regression equation can capture the divine.

Still, as Carl Sagan famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As it stands now, there’s nothing extraordinary in the data, however much we might wish it were so.

A New Yorker writer “loses faith in atheism”

February 15, 2026 • 10:15 am

Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortedned to simply this:

“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning.. This is why I became a theist.”

So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could?  But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism.  The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.

Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine,  is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book

You can read his article for free as it’s been archived. Click below if you want a lame justification for theism:

Beha, considering nonbelief after he gave it up in college, decided that there were two forms of atheism: a scientific form and a “romantic” form. Quotes from his article are indented below, though bold headings are mine,

Scientific atheism

Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.

Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

Of course I don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses. The answer to that blockheaded objection is that yes, that’s right, but only the scientific method construed broadly (i.e. empirical work with testing or replication) actually WORKS.  If you want to establish where typhoid comes from, and then prevent it or cure it, then you must use a secular, empirical method: science.

Now Beha admits that this world view does “work”. But then he says it has problems. Fur one thing, it doesn’t give you meaning, nor, he adds, does it explain consciousness:

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Here the man is deeply confused. Of course subjective experience is “real” to the subject, but it’s very hard (“the hard problem”) to figure out how it arises in the brain.  And denying that consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain (and elsewhere) is just wrong.  We know it’s wrong, for we can affect consciousness by material interventions like anesthesia and psychological tricks, so the phenomenon must, unless it comes from God, be “material” in origin.  Here Beha seems perilously close to Douthat saying that because science can’t explain consciousness, there must be a god.

Romantic atheism

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.

Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

But romantic atheism also fails to give us “meaning,” and Beha desperately wants and needs meaning!

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt.

Once again we see Beha desperately looking for a world view that gives his life meaning—and happiness. That much is clear from not only the above, but from other stuff.

Beha wants “meaning”, and that meaning must come from faith (Some quotes)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

. . .After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.

I’m not sure how “faith”—Beha is curiously reticent to tell us what he actually believes—is supposed to provide us with an “absolute foundation”, unless you become a traditional theist who thinks that God interacts with you personally and that it is this God that gives your life meaning. But he won’t say that in clear, explicit terms.  One hallmark of the new “liberal” religion is that it’s both fuzzy and slippery.

Beha goes on to argue that “liberals” (aka people who don’t buy Trump) adhere to both forms of atheism, but, in the end, to ground not just life but also society requires theism, for theism is our only source of “rights”:

Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

. . .Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

“Our status as creatures of God”?  How does he know there is a God? Is it because science can’t explain emotions and other subjective experiences—that we don’t understand consciousness?  In the end, Beha apparently thinks there’s a God because it makes him feel better, and gives his life meaning.

Well, good for him! But there are plenty of us who derive “meaning” as a result of doing what we find fulfilling and joyful (see this interesting post and thread).  I, for one, never pondered the question “what must I do to give my life meaning?”  That meaning arose, as for many of us, as post facto rationalization of doing what we found to be fulfilling.

At any rate, this is a curiously anodyne essay, absolutely personal and not generalizable to the rest of humanity. It is the story of a journey, but one that ends with embracing a god for which there’s no evidence. Excuse me if I can’t follow that path.

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

Beha, clearly flogging his newfound theism, has a guest essay in the Feb. 11 NYT, “My conversion to skeptical belief” (archived here), which emphasizes that his beliefs are inextricably intertwined with doubt, and so he repeats what many believers have said before. An example:

In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.

What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.

Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.

. . . To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.

What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend.

Of course the worldview of humanism could yield the same results, except you needn’t ground your acts and beliefs in a Sky Daddy. Why must actions be somehow grounded in the supernatural instead of in a philosophy that you should be kind and helpful to your fellow humans?

h/t Barry