Category: atheism

Sam Harris vs. Brian Greene on religion

December 27, 2024 • 12:30 pm

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

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

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

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

 

Sam Harris is still explaining why religion is bad

December 12, 2024 • 11:30 am

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Part 2 of the evisceration of X:

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

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

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

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

If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On to “sophisticated philosophy” and exegesis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawkins extols the courage of atheists

July 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vacuity of theology vs the substance of science:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The courage of atheism

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

And the moral courage:

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

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

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

July 5, 2024 • 10:15 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of secularism in giving us morality:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to the final topic:

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

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

and his last sentence:

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

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

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

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

Another critique of atheists for not filling the “God-shaped hole” that they produce

June 16, 2024 • 9:30 am

A while back, after New Atheism took hold, I remember somewhat of a backlash, mostly directed at the atheistic books of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett (they could also, with the possible exception of Dennett’s book be called anti-theistic). The New Atheists, so the plaint went, were angry and wanted to take away people’s toys, i.e., the comforts of faith.

In fact, this criticism mistook passion and argumentation for anger, as rarely did any of the Horsemen lose their temper.  This “anger” trope was so pervasive that there were tons of such articles criticizing New Atheism, many written by atheists who nevertheless saw religion as beneficial as a sort of “social glue”.  These people were called “atheist butters”, because of their arguments that included “I am an atheist, but . . . ” or, as Dennett called them, exponents of “belief in belief.” (Dennett also felt that free will, like religion, was a belief necessary for social cohesion.)

A counterargument for religion, one I have made, is that you can have perfectly well-functioning societies without religion and its detriments (e.g., divisiveness, proselytizing, terrorizing of children, and of course the trope of faith—the idea that one doesn’t need evidence for what one sees as true).  There’s no doubt that Judaism and Christianity are disappearing from the West, as we see from the rise of “nones”—and yet the world is morally and materially better off than a century ago, much less five centuries ago.  Here’s a new tweet from Pinker documenting it (and read his two big books on the subject):

Believers, especially Christians, respond to this progress by saying, “Well, Western values were taken from and built on Christianity, so even atheists have benefited from religion.”  But Western values are built on Enlightenment and humanistic values, which come from the rejection of religion. But we don’t have the controlled experiment of seeing what the world would be like had religion not arisen. Still, we do have an experiment, at least in the West, of seeing what countries would be like when they lose religion, and the answer does not support the societal benefits of faith. (I do agree that the lives of some people are improved by their faith. I’m talking about the net societal benefits, or lack thereof, of the institution of religion.)

In the end, religion, as opposed to other ideologies and superstitions, including Marxism and flat-earth-ism, still seems relatively untouchable, as if criticizing it is somehow distasteful. You can’t take away other people’s toys! (Hitchens’s response to that was “it’s okay if you play with your toys, but don’t try to make me play with your toys.”) I’m not sure why it’s considered as “angry” to criticize the tenets of faith (and faith itself); perhaps it’s because, for believers, religion has more far-reaching implications for their lives than does any other ideology.

But I digress. The article below, from Quillette, was written by Kushal Mehra, who was brought up as a Hindu in India. He’s identified as “host of the Cārvāka Podcast”, and has new book, Nastik: Why I Am Not an Atheist.

Mehra is a non-believer, but is still exploring religion. Yet he can’t comport the sacred texts of the Bible and Qur’an with their supposed message of love. Below he also gets in a lick at those Angry Atheists:

I felt a sense of bewilderment, as I struggled to reconcile the image of a benevolent, loving deity with the wrathful God that emerged from the pages of both books. God was constantly exhibiting rage, jealousy, and vengeance. For a while, I became one of those angry young atheists we all sometimes encounter on social media.

As I continued to explore and question, however, I sought out alternative interpretations of these texts, hoping to find a way to reconcile the conflicting images of God they presented. Growing up as a Hindu child, I was raised with a different understanding of the divine. Most schools of Hinduism, with their vast pantheon of gods (devatas) and goddesses (devis), and emphasis on the interconnectedness of all things, presented a more inclusive and tolerant worldview than I encountered in the Bible or the Quran.

So much for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s claim that the message of Christianity is “love”! It may have morphed into that after going through the liberal theological sausage grinder, but remember that the message of secular humanism is also love, and was from the get-to. No sausage grinder needed!

Here are few more licks at the Angry Atheists from Mehra, who seems to see himself as superior because he’s “questioning and introspective”, something, he says, that comes from “India’s ancient cultural traditional of religious tolerance.” (Well, Modi’s getting rid of that!):

Without getting into all of the interactions I had in these spaces, I will report that I am one of the few people (I know of) who’s been banned from atheist forums for not being sufficiently angry at religion. I’d believed that atheists were my people, but, in fact, our perspectives diverged—as their intolerance toward non-atheists seemed to mirror that of religious puritans.

And here’s his familiar argument of why atheism is bad because it provides no substitute for religion, leaving that famous “god-shaped hole.” As Mehra sees it, that hole was filled by wokeness (bolding is mine):

By focusing on these Indian approaches to expressing religious doubt, I hope to make readers aware of the limitations of the “neo-atheism” movement that emerged over the last two decades, thanks largely to the influence of prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. While the movement has become popular, it also has created a vacuum of meaning and purpose in society. And since nature abhors a vacuum, it isn’t surprising that the resulting void has been filled by political and ideological trends that function as ersatz religious movements (such as the fanatical form of social-justice advocacy known as “wokeism”).  

There’s no doubt that if someone gave up a faith that comforted them, and had no community of like-minded believers to fill their need for a social group, they would feel bereft. And it may be true that, for some, part of that lacuna was filled by wokeness. After all, John McWhorter’s book was called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

But I’m not going to pin wokeness on atheism. The arguments of New Atheism didn’t include a plan to replace religion with a new system of belief. Rather, they were arguments showing that the tenets of religion, which are foundational beliefs, were not only empirically unsupportable, but generally harmful. They were meant to show that faith—belief without evidence—is not a good way to deal with life, especially when there can potentially be evidence supporting one’s belief. As the late Victor Stenger argued, the absence of evidence is evidence for absence if that evidence should be there.  And for religion, that evidence is simply not there.

And Mehra’s rationale for why religion is a net good:

Religion has long been a source of both solace and strife for humanity. And any discussion of its role in society—including a discussion among non-believers—should be informed by its status as a cornerstone of human culture, art, literature, and morality. Yes, religion has been used to justify wars, persecution, and discrimination, as well as the suppression of scientific progress and critical thinking. But it also promotes altruism and compassion, and gives people a framework for coping with life’s challenges and the inevitability of death. Scientific studies suggest that the religious impulse is deeply encoded in our evolutionary upbringing. It cannot be purged from our collective history simply by browbeating believers in books or YouTube videos, or by mocking them with clever memes or slogans.

First, I’ll reject the idea that “the religious impulse”—I’ll take “religion” to mean, as Dennett did, “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent whose approval is to be sought”—is “deeply encoded in our evolutionary upbringing”. To me this means that human DNA contains genes directly promoting belief in supernatural agents.  I know of no such genes. Yes, religion could be a byproduct of other evolved traits, like our tendency to obey authorities or look for agency, but that’s not the same thing.

Beyond that, we again have no evidence that religion is necessary for good and cohesive societies. My argument has but four words: “Northern Europe and Scandinavia”. Also, as religion vanishes from the West, our well being and morality increases.  As Pinker argues, religious belief was simply an impediment to societal well being, and the Enlightenment simply shoved it aside.

I’m not denying that humans benefit from social interaction with others. We are, after all, social animals who evolved in small groups, and I’m pretty sure that this is why people get lonely and even depressed without other people around.  It is also why people do tend to become part of groups, like book clubs, soccer fans, and yes, woke-ism. It is something that escaped Richard Dawkins when he argued with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

What I argue is two things. First, that religion is not the best form of “social glue”.  It is divisive, harmful to children, something that often demands to be forced upon others through proselytizing, and has many other detrimental effects you can see in the books of the Horsemen. I’d argue that secular humanism, if it’s really acted on by society and informed by data and reason, is the best form of social glue.

Second, I claim that people usually don’t seek an explicit “meaning and purpose” for their lives. Rather, they seek what they find fulfilling and like to do: having families, reading books, having a fulfilling job, and so on.  Then, post facto, you confect these into your “meaning and purpose”. If you’ve been brought up as an evangelical Christian or fundamentalism Muslim, then that becomes your “meaning and purpose. ” If you’ve been brought up without religion, but in a big family that makes you family-oriented, then having your own family becomes part of your “meaning and purpose.”  If you love to read and learn, then reading and learning become part of your “meaning and purpose.” Or, if you’re like me, you could answer the question of “what’s the purpose and meaning of your life?”, with “I don’t have one that I’m aware of.”

I’ve written two posts on this topic that you can see here and here. In the second link, 373 comments were addressed to this topic:

If a friend asked you these questions, how would you answer them?

1.) What do you consider the purpose of your life?

2.) What do you see as the meaning of your life?

I won’t go through all the comments, but, as I recall, few if any of the answers involved religion.

I don’t feel at all angry as I write this. The question of the value of religion is an intellectual question, but one with huge societal implications, and I find it absorbing. It’s foolish to dismiss atheism, New or Old, because its proponents are angry, and even more foolish to dismiss it because it doesn’t come with alternatives to religion. Atheism is simply the belief that there’s no evidence for supernatural beings that we must worship and brown-nose. Once we give up unevidenced beliefs, then we can figure out whether (or how) we need to fill that “God-shaped hole.” My own view is that, under secular humanism, the hole is self-filling.

A quote from Ricky Gervais:

Richard Dawkins concludes that both he and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are “political Christians” but not “believing” Christians

March 24, 2024 • 12:15 pm

In November I reported on an Unherd article by the estimable Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a piece called “Why I am Now a Christian,” that announced her “conversion” from atheism to Christianity. This took many people aback, as it seemed so counterintuitive.  Ali, as an opponent of Islamism, seemed like the least likely person to turn Christian. Her explanation was that Christianity and its values were the only way to stave off the tide of encroaching terror, corruption, Islamism, and despotism. As she said:

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I disagreed, as I think secular humanism can fight off those “formidable forces, too”, and the world is turning less religious as it is.

Richard is going to interview Ayaan soon on his Substack site, but he has just written about Hirsi Ali’s religiosity, concluding that she’s not really a Christian.

Click below to read:

Richard makes a distinction between three types of Christians, which also holds, I think, for Jews, and perhaps for other faiths as well.

I want to make a three-way distinction. You can be a Cultural Christian, a Political Christian,  a Believing Christian, or any combination of the three. People may disagree about which of these constitutes being “A Christian”. For me it has to be Believing Chistian.

I am a Cultural Christian, specifically a Cultural Anglican. I was educated in Christian schools. The history of my people is heavily influenced by Christian tradition. I like singing Christmas Carols, and am deeply moved by the sacred music of Bach and Handel. My head is full of Biblical phrases and quotations. And hymn tunes, which I regularly play by ear on my electronic clarinet.

I think Ayaan Hirsi-Ali (who is one of my favourite people in the world) is a Political Christian. She was brought up in the culture of Islam and is well aware of the horrors that that religion is still visiting on Muslims around the world, especially women. She sees Christianity as a relatively benign competitor, worth supporting as a bulwark against Islam. Just as most of us support a political party without agreeing with all its policies, because we prefer it to the alternative, a Political Christian may support Christianity without being a Believing Christian, because it’s better than the main alternative. Ayaan is a Cultural Muslim, and it is this that has driven her to be a Political Christian.

Believing Christians believe that there is a supernatural creator at the base of the universe called God. They believe a First Century Jew called Jesus is the son of God. They believe Jesus’s mother was a virgin when she gave birth to him. They believe that Jesus came alive again three days after he died. They believe that we ourselves have an immortal soul which survives our bodily death. They believe that God listens to our prayers.  I strongly suspect hat Ayaan doesn’t believe any of these things. She is not a Believing Christian.

Richard made a similar pronouncement in an earlier “open letter” to Hirsi Ali.

Well, we don’t know if Hirsi Ali’s really a believing Christian, as she doesn’t explicitly describe her beliefs in the UnHerd piece (true Christian ones are instantiated in the Nicene Creed). But we’ll know when she and Richard have their talk.  Apparently, she at least has what Dennett called “belief in belief”: a feeling that belief is good for society even if its tenets aren’t really true. Cultural Christianity (or Judaism, for that matter), doesn’t come with “belief in that belief”), as cultural forms of religion are merely forms of belonging to a community and don’t make assertions that others have to believe.

As I said I think Dawkins’s tripartite classification holds for Judaism as well.  I am a cultural (secular) Jew, but I don’t think we need to embrace the tenets of Judaism to make society better or more resistant to corruption. We simply need secular humanism.  And, of course, I don’t worship or adhere to what’s in the Old Testament, which I think was a purely human document reporting on a fictional world. (There is, of course, some historical truths in the Bible, but that’s about it.)

After considering whether he is a cultural Christian (Anglican) or political Christian, Dawkins decides he’s a Political Christian because he despises the actions and of believers like pious Muslims, and so concludes this:

If I were American I would vote Democrat because, in spite of their idiotic stance on the male/female distinction, they are hugely preferable to the Republican alternative. Similarly, if I were forced to vote for either Christianity or Islam as alternative influences on the world, I would unhesitatingly vote Christian. If that make me a Political Christian, so be it. I am perhaps as much of a Political Christian as Ayaan is. But does that make either of us a Christian?

And so he tells Hirsi Ali that they don’t really differ in substance.

The only disagreement is a semantic one. I am a Cultural Christian but not a Believing Christian, which, in my language means I am not a Christian. You, Ayaan, are a Political Christian, which in your language, but not mine, makes you a Christian. But we are neither of us Believing Christian. And this, in my language but not yours, makes neither of us Christians. So, dear Ayaan, let’s not agree to differ. Let’s agree that we don’t really differ.

Stay tuned for the discussion!

Hirsi Ali gets criticism of her newfound Christianity; responds

November 17, 2023 • 12:30 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***********

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

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

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

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