Category: atheism

How many atheists are there in the U.S.? A new paper says about 26% of the population

May 16, 2019 • 8:45 am

The estimate given in the title suggests a much higher number of American atheists than estimates from other studies relying on self-report (e.g., “Are you an atheist?”). Those self-report estimates range between 3% and 11% (the authors of the paper below define “atheists” as “people who disbelieve or lack belief in the existence of a god or gods”). The higher number from the present study could reflect errors or biases in how the authors derived their estimates, or (and I think this is a bit more likely) the fact that people’s atheism was estimated indirectly rather than by self-report.

Note that the paper, which you can get free by clicking on the link) is on Arχiv, so it hasn’t yet gone through peer review. Nevertheless, the results are interesting and it’s well worth reading. (It’s not overly long.)

I’ll try to be brief. The authors estimated the frequency of atheists among Americans by surveying people using two YouGov samples of 2000 people each. They also did their estimates using Bayesian techniques: seeing what proportion of atheists in the public was most likely to yield the survey results. The composite result was, as I said, 26%.

How did they indirectly estimate the proportion of atheists? They used a clever technique in which people were asked to list how many statements were either true or not true about them, with one list adding an atheist belief and the other missing it. The difference in the number of statements that people agreed or disagreed with in the two lists can be used to estimate the proportion of atheists. They also had a control question that you’ll see in on the second list, which should yield a 0% estimate of people who think that 2 + 2 is more than 13. The authors say that this indirect method of estimation has been showing in other studies to be revealing in that it gives a higher percentage than self-report, but only for socially sensitive traits which people don’t want to disclose in a direct self report. 

The authors also asked people directly if they were atheists, so they have an estimate of self-report.

This first group of questions yielded a Bayesian estimate of 32% atheists, with 95% confidence intervals of 11% and 54%, while the self-report (first question) yielded only 17%. You can see that the added question is in the third column and the participants aren’t supposed to say which statements aren’t true of them, but merely give the number. The difference between the totals in column 2 and 3 can be used to give a Bayesian estimate of the proportion of people who do NOT “believe in God”:

Some confirmation of the technique’s validity comes from analyzing the data from those who self-report being atheists in column 1. The Bayesian data from columns 2 and 3 give an estimated proportion of atheism of 100% of these people, so the self-report among those brave enough to disclose their atheism matches the indirect estimate.

Sample II used the same method, but couching atheism as a positive rather than a negative answer (i.e., you have to note whether “not believing in God” is true of you). There’s a control question about math in the third column.

This report yielded an estimate of atheism (comparison of first versus second column) of 20%, with confidence intervals of 6% and 35%.

The lower estimate in Sample II versus Sample I may, as the authors note, be attributed to the fact that in the second sample you have to note (indirectly) that atheism is “true of me”, which is more similar to a self report. And indeed, the 20% Bayesian estimate here is close to the self-report estimate of 17%.

Overall, combining both studies gave a Bayesian estimate of the proportion of atheists in America of 26%, with confidence intervals of 13% and 39%. The authors add that it is 99% certain that more than 11% of Americans are atheists (the Gallup poll estimate) and 93% certain that the proportion of atheists is higher than 17% (their self-report estimate). That means that about a third of atheists won’t disclose their nonbelief when asked directly. At any rate, the higher estimates from this study than in direct-question surveys suggests that there are far more atheists in America than believed: perhaps more than 80 million.

One weakness of the study is that the control question, which should show 0% of people rejecting the statement “I do not believe that 2 + 2 is less than 13”, actually gave an estimate of 34%. The authors note this, showing that they are careful about the data:

Without a doubt, this is our most damning result (cf. Vazire, 2016). It may reflect any combination of genuine innumeracy, incomprehension of an oddly phrased item, participant inattentiveness or jesting, sampling error, or a genuine flaw in the unmatched count technique. Fortunately, we were also able to assess validity in a second way. In Sample II, the unmatched count to generated an atheist prevalence estimate of almost exactly 100% among self-described atheists, but only 13% among all other religious identifications. It is unlikely that a genuinely invalid method would track self-reported atheism this precisely. Across two assessment attempts our validity evidence was a mixed bag. This perhaps suggests that future researchers should attempt to—as we were able in Sample II but not Sample I—include diagnostic self-reports alongside the unmatched count to assess validity. And, as the present estimates are only as strong as the method that generated them, they should be treated with some caution. In our view—given heavy social pressures to be or appear religious—the 11% atheism prevalence estimates derived solely from telephone self-reports is probably untenable. Does this imply that our most credible estimate of 26% should be uncritically accepted instead? Of course not. The present two nationally representative samples merely provide additional estimates using a different technique, and our model suggests a wide range of relatively credible estimates. We hope that future work using a variety of direct and indirect measures will provide satisfactory convergence across methods, and the present estimates are merely an initial indirect measurement data point to be considered in this ongoing scientific effort.

Finally, here’s a table breaking down atheism (both self-report and indirect estimates) by sex, politics, age, and education. We see that the prevalence of atheism isn’t that disparate among any groups except “political affiliation”, but follows the familiar pattern of more atheists among males than females; more atheism among more highly rather than less educated people; more atheism among Democrats than among Republicans (note the 0% indirect estimate for Republicans!); and no difference between Millennials and baby boomers. Self-report is always lower than indirect estimates except among Republicans, which is a mystery. (The last column gives the probability that the indirect estimates are higher than the self-reporting estimates.)

The authors discuss the wider implications on the last page of their paper, noting that we can’t extend these estimates to the rest of the world because the degree of underreporting in the direct-question technique (the only one used) may vary, with opprobrium less in countries like Norway and Denmark, and greater in countries like Saudi Arabia. But the authors do speculate that there may be around two billion atheists worldwide, which makes the number of atheists higher than the number of Muslims (1.8 billion), but less than the number of Christians (2.4 billion) And their final paragraph gives the implications for the social acceptance of atheists:

Finally, the present results may have considerable societal implications. Preliminary research suggests that learning about how common atheists actually are reduces distrust of atheists (Gervais, 2011). Thus, obtaining accurate atheist prevalence estimates may help promote trust and tolerance of atheists—potentially 80+ million people in the USA and well over a billion worldwide.

Join the club! I’m referring to you, Andrew Sullivan!

And for dessert, you can have this new op-ed by David Leonhardt about the demonization of atheists in America (h/t: Greg Mayer):

h/t: Ginger K

The U of C discussion on religion with Reza Aslan and Dan Dennett

May 8, 2019 • 3:00 pm

In January I attended a four-person discussion on the “place of faith in our changing world”, featuring Reza Aslan, Dan Dennett, religious ethicist William Schweiker, and moderator David Nirenberg, interim chair of our Divinity School. To me it was frustrating, as speaker after speaker (except for Dan) mouthed Deepities about religion without once laying out what they themselves believed. It is indeed relevant, in a discussion like this, to lay out what you consider to be faith (nobody did that), and how you distinguish “good faith” from “bad faith” (to me, of course, all forms of belief without evidence are bad). No, it turned out to be a big love-fest, verging on apophatic theology.

Now the University of Chicago Magazine has published a short article on the debate, emphasizing the harmony between the speakers. Yes, there was a harmony, but, as I wrote in my piece, it was because none of the believers dared say what they themselves believed, much less essayed any criticism of religion. Dan had a few “words” with the odious Aslan, but nobody wanted to argue with Dan. And for good reason: they were all interested in showing the good stuff about faith, and how all religions are harmonious and wonderful, and wanted to stay away from any notion that religion poisons anything. Had they crossed Dan, he would have made mincemeat of them.

Here’s the article (click on the screenshot) with a few quotes, which I’ve indented:

. . . the speakers focused on something more tangible: the function, meaning, and future of faith. What is religion to us? [JAC: by “us”, the speakers didn’t mean “me”, as they studiously avoided discussing their own beliefs].

Organized by the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, the panel was composed of best-selling author and religious scholar Reza Aslan, atheist philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and theologian William Schweiker, the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics and an ordained Methodist minister. In terms of sympathy or antipathy for religion, it was two against one: Aslan and Schweiker are believers; Dennett’s preferred analogy for religion is a virus.

As I reported, I found the discussion frustrating, and it shows in the article where I’m quoted below. Note, however, how Aslan and Schweiker deny any belief in the supernatural, although I’d like to see Aslan utter that at the Great Mosque in Mecca, or Schweiker mock the supernatural to his congregation (he’s an ordained Methodist minister). It all supports Maarten Boudry’s supposition that privileged academics like these are out of touch with what the average believer really thinks, and so speak of faith in polite and rarified terms. In reality, religion is causing all kinds of problems in this world (look at what’s happening with abortion right now, for instance), but you wouldn’t know that if you listened to the three speakers aside from Dennett.

From the article:

By the discussion’s end, there had been perhaps more agreement than one might have expected. All panelists took the position that private religious beliefs should be given no special weight in public discourse. “If your faith has certain precepts that you think are deeply important morally, your obligation is not to play the faith card but to explain [them] in terms that everybody else can understand,” Dennett said in an impassioned moment. “And the fact that it’s written in your holy scripture doesn’t count for anything at all.” Aslan and Schweiker quickly agreed.

All panelists were also happy to view religion as a part of history and culture, subject to the folly and myopia of any human endeavor. Indeed, the core of Schweiker’s philosophy, as he laid it out in response to an audience question, is that human thinking is “mediated through cultural and linguistic forms that develop through time. Our knowledge is always, therefore, deeply historical, deeply fallible, and deeply humane.” [JAC: note the Deepity here!]

None of the panelists seemed concerned that a neurological perspective might challenge human freedom. Are we the true authors of our actions? What if our “choices” are just the result of the ironclad laws of physics and chemistry operating within our brains? Dennett has worked to resolve this issue in print, taking a middle-road philosophical position called compatibilism. Aslan sounded more cavalier: “Actions and thoughts are directly caused by neural activity—and so what?”

So what?? So what? Because if there’s no free will, then the underpinnings of all Abrahamic religions, including Aslan’s own Islam, are destroyed. Go to Mecca, Dr. Aslan, and tell your coreligionists that. See if you survive.

It continues, mentioning my own frustrated question, which is accurate here because they recorded the discussion. (Apparently the recording is not available, nor does there appear to be a video.)

During the question period, ecology and evolution professor emeritus Jerry Coyne remarked on the high level of agreement among the speakers—enabled by their avoidance of specific doctrinal issues—calling the event a “secular love fest.” Coyne, an atheist activist, asked the two believers on stage, “Do you even care whether God exists or whether there’s an immortal soul?”

“Of course I care,” Aslan said. “But I also recognize that both of those statements are utterly, ridiculously unprovable.” Schweiker responded that faith, to him, is primarily a practical matter. “It may entail speculative and metaphysical beliefs, but I think most folks are religious because they’re concerned with how to orient their lives in certain ways.”

This is how academics talk about belief when they’re around other academics.

Kate Cohen: Don’t mix religion, morality, and politics

May 2, 2019 • 1:15 pm

There are two things that most of us have learned about religion and morality:

1.) People don’t really get their morality from religion—or at least most of it. That is, people don’t judge what is moral versus immoral behavior solely from the dictates of their faith, but rather from extra-Biblical sources that are antecedent to God’s wishes. There are of course exceptions: Christians often oppose abortion because they think fetuses have souls, and pious Muslims decree that homosexuality is a capital offense and women must be covered. But as Plato realized millennia ago in the Euthyphro Argument, most things are deemed “moral” or “immoral” not because they comport with the wishes of a deity, but because they comport with some extra-theistic versions of morality. If God, for instance, said that killing innocent people was good, not many folks would agree. (William Lane Craig is an exception, and he’s signed on to one version of that.) That’s because they think there are non-religious reasons to prohibit killing. All thoughtful morality is secular morality.

2.) When people say they get their morality from religion, they’re often picking and choosing from scripture, again taking those things that comport with a non-religious view of right versus wrong. That’s why most Christians reject the dictates of the Old Testament (approving of killing kids who curse their parents, as well as those who engage in homosexual acts or gather sticks on the Sabbath) in favor of the more comfortable statements from Jesus or the Ten Commandments.  Nearly all adherents to every Abrahamic faith chooses those aspects of scripture that conform to their own notions of right and wrong—those notions that derive from #1 above.

And so Kate Cohen, an atheist writer, takes religious politicians to task in her excellent Washington Post article (click on screenshot), pointing out the flaws of bragging that your political views are good because they align with religion:

Although we’re well aware of how Republicans use scripture to support political issues like anti-abortion bills and a brake on stem-cell research, I hadn’t realized that so many Democratic candidates also claimed their politics were grounded in faith. (Of course, very few politicians are open atheists, but at least Democratic believers, who presumably support the First Amendment, don’t have to flaunt their religion).

An excerpt from Cohen’s piece:

I’m an atheist. I have bemoaned the fact that my country’s motto is “In God We Trust,” that elected officials are sworn in on holy books, legislative sessions begin in prayer, and big political speeches seem predestined to end with the phrase “God Bless America.” I think religion and government should be kept far apart. But if I ruled out all the self-proclaimed Christians in the race, I would lose a lot of great candidates. Cory Booker told a CNN town hall that “Christ is the center of my life”; Kamala D. Harris announced her candidacy “with faith in God”; Elizabeth Warren taught Sunday school and quotes the Gospel of Matthew.

That [Pete] Buttigieg is a Christian doesn’t concern me. But he’s not just a Christian; he also publicly advocates a reemergence of a “religious left.” He argues that Democrats should not be afraid to use religious traditions “as a way of calling us to higher values.” As he told Bill Maher, “When I go to church, what I hear a lot about is protecting the downtrodden, and standing up for the immigrant and being skeptical of authority sometimes and making sure you look after the poor and the prisoner.”

He told The Post that he wants to “remind people of faith why the same things that are being preached on Sunday apply to the policies that we’re making on Monday morning.” In other words, use religion as a tool for political persuasion.

It’s time to stop pandering to the faithful by parading how your beliefs support your politics. The reasons why can be seen in #1 and #2 above: your morals are antecedent to scripture, and if you buttress your liberal principles with faith, then you are susceptible to conservatives who buttress their more repugnant views with faith. After all, you can find any morality you like in the Bible. And even the Qur’an, filled as it is with hatred and xenophobia, can also be parsed as a “document of peace.”

It’s so refreshing to read stuff like this:

Here’s the thing: People bring their morality to their religious texts; they don’t get their morality from them. After all, how does Buttigieg decide what’s important in the Bible and what should be ignored, underplayed or dismissed as vestiges from another era? What does he measure each message against? His own innate sense of morality.

When Buttigieg argues that Democrats should be able to use religious traditions “as a way of calling us to higher values,” he means “higher” as in lofty. He’s not saying those values — compassion, justice, humility — are higher than the traditions themselves. But they are. Because those religious traditions also include the “values” of exclusion, patriarchy and tribalism. And, yes, even the “value” of homophobia.

The higher values that Buttigieg embraces — values I, an atheist, share — exist not because of religion but independent of it. Can he find Christian tenets to express those values? Sure. Could that help him urge “people of faith” to move their politics “in a certain direction”? Maybe.

In the second sentence above, Cohen distills the Euthyphro argument for the layperson. Kudos to her, and to the Post for publishing something by—horrors!—an open atheist.

Just don’t ask me how to pronounce “Buttigieg”. I can spell it but I can’t say it, and I’ve NEVER heard it pronounced on television.

An ID advocate, lacking scientific arguments, claims that atheism saps life of meaning

May 2, 2019 • 8:15 am

Intelligent Design (ID) advocate David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, spends a lot of time attacking me on the Discovery Institute Website Evolution News. It’s almost an obsessive animus, for he regularly trawls this site looking for ammunition. But I pay little attention to the man.

First of all, his criticisms of me have nothing to do with science, but are recycled tropes about how horrible atheism is. That’s because Klinghoffer and his ID cronies have no scientific ammunition against evolution, and so are reduced to ad hominems about evolutionists or criticisms of unbelief or moans about the destructive effects of accepting evolution. He also beefs endlessly about my “tone”.  Sorry, but Liars for Moses—or Jesus—don’t deserve respect. Klinghoffer is irrelevant in any serious scientific discourse.

In the end, it’s almost amusing how desperate people like Klinghoffer have become. It’s now twenty years after the ID “Wedge Document” was leaked, with its timeline proposing that within two decades they would make ID and anti-materialism the dominant paradigm in science. Ultimately, their goal was to bring Jesus into the public schools, although I suppose that even Orthodox Jews like Klinghoffer can piggyback on Christianity. But they’ve failed at both endeavors, and so are reduced to flailing about in their pages.

Here’s one example (click on screenshot). It’s a very short read:

Klinghoffer quotes author and radio host Eric Metaxas, who himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, where Metaxas said this:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it. But what we does is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

Klinghoffer adds:

Ugly indeed. To which Carlson agreed:

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

And so to the question that Klinghoffer thinks will flummox and destroy Darwinists (my emphasis)

Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?” It’s a good question to ask the next Darwinist with whom you have the opportunity to chat. Or the next theistic Darwin-appeaser who soothes us with the assurance that there is nothing terribly corrosive about the evolutionary perspective.

This is bizarre, and the rebuttals come easily to mind. The idea that being an atheist turns you into an amoral hedonist, too self-absorbed to even have children, is ridiculous. Nonbelievers may have fewer kids than, say, Mormons or Orthodox Jews, but it is the custom of those faiths to propagate. Nearly all of my atheist friends have kids.

Beyond that, the article is circular in its implicit assumption that because true meaning and purpose can come only from accepting God (and presumably following God’s Plan), then without God you are without purpose. And this is somehow supposed to be a reason for us to accept God, even though he doesn’t show himself these days.

And that’s a crock. In one of the most popular threads that ever appeared on this site, “What’s your meaning and purpose?“, I asked nonbelieving readers to tell me what they considered the purpose and meaning of their own existence. Almost all respondents (there were 373) found their meaning and purpose in their jobs, their avocations, their children, and so on, and not in worshiping a fictitious deity. The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.

The idea that without God life has no meaning is patronizing, bogus, and wrong, and refuted by simply looking at the many atheists (or atheistic areas like Scandinavia) for which lack of meaning and purpose is not an issue.

Worse, Klinghoffer, Metaxas, and Carlson’s views boil down to something like this: “Believe in a god, even if there’s no evidence for one, because without it life has no meaning.”

But can you really force yourself to accept fiction solely on the grounds that it gives you a purpose? I can’t, and I doubt that most readers can. You’re either brainwashed from the get-go, and thereby get an automatic meaning, or you accept that there’s no evidence for a God and come to terms with it—just as we come to terms with our own mortality. As Plato recognized in the Euthyphro Dilemma, people really do get their morality (in Plato’s case, “piety”) not from God’s dictates but rather from non-goddy considerations—in other words, secular considerations.

This is why I find Klinghoffer and his ilk so ridiculous. They’re supposed to be supporting Intelligent Design, but since they can’t do that, they blather on about how Darwinism and atheism turn adherents into selfish, amoral nihilists. But there’s as little evidence for that as there is for ID itself.

A philosopher at the NYT writes about the incoherence of most people’s theism

April 8, 2019 • 12:00 pm

It’s surprising that the New York Times would publish an atheistic op-ed showing that most people’s notion of God is incoherent, but the piece below (click on the screenshot), is actually Unsophisticated Atheism in at least part of its argument. And the parts that aren’t weird are old and familiar arguments.

Well, perhaps believers need to hear arguments about God that have been repeated to previous generations, explaining why Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, attacks the claim that God can be omnipotent. He first trots out the old bromide “Can God make a stone so big He can’t lift it?” and then asks, “Can God create a world in which evil does not exist?” The first question is barely worth arguing, but the second is. And, as has been pointed out many times before, the existence of moral evil in the world, while explained by theologians as necessary for the action of free will (NOTE: it’s libertarian, you-can-do-otherwise free will this argument uses), does not explain the existence of physical evils like the suffering of animals, the diseases like leukemia that kill children, tsunamis that sweep away the innocent, and so on. As I’ve said before, the existence of physical evil is the Achilles Heel of Abrahamic religion and the death knell for the idea of an omnibenevolent God. Only through tortuous and unconvincing logic can you explain why God allows little kids to get leukemia.

And there’s no reason God couldn’t have created a world in which people can choose freely, but always choose to do the right and moral thing. Free will and The Best of All Possible Worlds are not logically inconsistent.

But here’s the bit that gets me: God couldn’t be omniscient because if he were, he’d be touched with evil. Or so Atterton maintains:

. . . if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

What about malice? Could God know what malice is like and still retain His divine goodness? The 19-century German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was perhaps the first philosopher to draw attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”

. . . It might be argued, of course, that this is precisely what distinguishes humans from God. Human beings are inherently sinful whereas God is morally perfect. But if God knows everything, then God must know at least as much as human beings do. And if human beings know what it is like to want to inflict pain on others for pleasure’s sake, without any other benefit, then so does God. But to say that God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others is to say that God is capable of malicious enjoyment.

However, this cannot be true if it really is the case that God is morally perfect. A morally perfect being would never get enjoyment from causing pain to others. Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.

I don’t really get this. You can understand what it’s like to sin without being a sinner yourself; all you have to do, if you’re God, is say, “Okay, let me be imbued with the feeling that somebody gets when he kicks a dog.” That doesn’t make God a dog-kicker, someone who enjoys kicking dogs, or in any way sinful—at least in my view. If God were omniscient, he’d know what it would feel like to sin without having sinned himself.

Now there’s another issue not discussed: if God knows everything, then he knows how we’re going to decide to act. Doesn’t that obviate the libertarian free will beloved of religionists? You might say that it doesn’t, but if libertarian free will means anything in a theistic world, it has to be a choice that is made without the knowledge of God. Otherwise the concept of eternal reward and punishment have no meaning, and we’d be a bunch of Calvinists whose fate is already known to God.

But I don’t believe in either God or free will, so I leave this vexing questions to the theologians.

Dawkins’s Darwin Day lecture for Humanists UK: “Taking Courage from Darwin to Fight the Hubris of Faith”

February 18, 2019 • 9:15 am

Reader Michael called my attention to Richard Dawkins’s Darwin Day Lecture to Humanists UK (HUK). Richard is introduced by Humanists UK President and evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts, who was the moderator when I gave this lecture a few years ago. Richard’s lecture was just posted today, and as I write there are only 194 views. I’ll watch it as I write, and give any thoughts I have.

I was glad to see that Richard limned evolution and religion in an antagonistic light, which is what I did when I talked. After all, this is a talk to humanists, so it’s not hubris to do that, much as accommodationists like to argue that people can have their Darwin and Jesus too.

Ten minutes in, I was surprised at how hard Richard went after theology and religion, and especially after Islam and its obsession with “religious control-freakery” such as breast feeding. The audience likes it, of course, as they’re all a bunch of nonbelievers, but I don’t yet see any connection between the criticisms of Islam and Darwin.

The connection came at about 14:15, when Richard contrasts the certainty of theology with the doubt that’s endemic to science. “We don’t know” is his mantra here, and we should use it more often. At 17:30, he suggests a humorous Gendankenexperiment of the kind he’s famous for: he imagines what science would look like if scientists acted like theologians, operating from faith and revelation instead of evidence. (Note the mention of “SJW State University.”)

A quote:

“It isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths: it’s as though they just don’t care about truth, aren’t interested in truth, and demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations such as metaphorical, symbolic, and mythic significance—or simply what feels good.”

Later on, he explains why he’s proud to be a product of evolution—a product with a flexible brain that has vouchsafed to us our ability, unique among animals, to understand our origins—and many other things.

Richard also argues that “the atheistic world view has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage.” To explain that, he introduces the “deep problems” that science might not answer, but that theology can’t, either: these include the “deep problem of consciousness” and the question of “why are the laws of physics as they are?” This leads to his conclusion (40:28) that science (and atheism) help kick ourselves out of the emotional reaction that the “big questions” defy naturalistic explanation—that they defy the scientific assumption that the whole universe arose and evolved through mindless naturalistic processes. As he says,

“However improbable a naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, a theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.”

He then returns to Darwin as a good fount of courage to seek naturalistic answers to the Big Problems. After all, it was Darwin who, abjuring supernatural explanations, tackled the long-standing problem of life using purely naturalistic methods—and solved it!

In the end, Richard’s lecture is his version of “Faith Versus Fact,” and though it’s independent of my own ideas, I was pleased to see that he’s banging the same drum about the intellectual vacuity of theology as contrasted to the productive wielding of “the empirical attitude” that underlies science.

This lecture is also paean to the virtues of atheism, which won’t please religionists, theologians, and faitheists. Yes, New Atheism makes a brief comeback in this lecture.

If you’re a nonbeliever, you’ll find the last three minutes heartening, bracing, and eloquent. In the last 13 words, he connects atheism with social justice, though that won’t placate the SJWs who are always throwing shade on Dawkins.

At the end, Alice presents Richard with a “Darwin Day medal.”

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).