I consider Adam Gopnik a friend, as we have occasional email exchanges about the things that matter (e.g., food, atheism, and “other ways of knowing”), and I’ve taken him to my favorite Hunanese restaurant in Chicago. And of course I admire his writing: his book Paris to the Moon, for instance, is a witty and hilarious tale of his family’s five years in Paris.  His New Yorker articles, which span a diversity of subjects (how does he read so many books and synthesize them so adeptly?), are often wonderful, even if he did ruin my favorite restaurant in Paris by writing about it in the magazine, alerting tons of (shudder) visiting Americans to it.

So it is with some reservation that I want to discuss—and critique—Adam’s piece in the latest New Yorker, “Bigger than Phil: When did faith start to fade?” (free online).  My reservations are even larger because Gopnik gives this website (he calls it a “bl*g”) a nice shout-out in his piece. But since the New Yorker is such an important venue—in my view the best magazine for writers in the U.S.—I want to weigh in briefly.

The title of Gopnik’s piece, by the way, comes from a Mel Brooks skit:

Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man, asked to explain the origin of God, admits that early humans first adored “a guy in our village named Phil, and for a time we worshipped him.” Phil “was big, and mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands!” One day, a thunderstorm came up, and a lightning bolt hit Phil. “We gathered around and saw that he was dead. Then we said to one another, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!’ ”

At any rate, Gopnik’s point, though it’s swaddled (and almost hidden) in blankets of nice prose, is simple: although religion is disappearing, with it goes some beneficial things that aren’t recognized by atheists. Those include the “irrationality” of loving beauty, cats, and other things, and the notion that there is more to the cosmos that can be understood (perhaps even in principle) by science. In other words, Gopnik’s produced a very sophisticated essay defending what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief.”

The essay purports to be a review of two new books on atheism, The Age of Atheists: How We have Sought to Live Since the Death of God, by Peter Watson, and Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, by Mitchell Stephens. But, like all good book reviews, it uses the books as a launching pad for the reviewer’s own ideas. And while Gopnik and I agree on many things—foremost among them the lack of evidence for any tenets of religion—we disagree on the supposed problems with New Atheism and on Gopnik’s claims that a.) religion will always be with us and b.) religion, in the main, has some good stuff that atheism can’t replace. (One thing Adam doesn’t do is mention the problems with religion.)

Gopnik begins by reiterating the rise of the “nones” (people without professed faith) in America, and then argues that New Atheism is in effect superfluous, for it’s simply being strident about a trend that’s already happening on its own:

Only in the past twenty or so years did a tone frankly contemptuous of faith emerge. Centered on the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists were polemicists, and, like all polemics, theirs were designed not to persuade but to stiffen the spines of their supporters and irritate the stomach linings of their enemies. Instead of being mushy and marginalized, atheism could proclaim its creed. But why did the nonbelievers suddenly want stiffer spines and clearer signals? Why, if the noes indeed had it, did they suddenly have to be so loud?

This is wrong on two counts. Yes, those “polemics” were designed to persuade people, and have in fact been highly successful in doing so. (See Dawkins’s “Converts Corner” if you disagree.) Second, I attribute the sudden jump in frequency of the “nones” largely to New Atheism, along with the increasing use of the internet as a way for the godless to have a virtual community and see that they’re not alone.

Gopnik then goes through a brief history of atheism, in which he sees three peaks: one in the late 18th century before the French revolution, one in the late 19th century, and one now.  The “now,” of course, involves the New Atheism, and if it’s a peak, then Gopnik has to explain why it’s peaking at the present time. If that’s the case, then it’s not simply the result of a continuing trend.

He follows this with the parable of Phil as an indication that, as Gopnik says, “the need for God never vanishes.” But of course it does: it’s vanished in much of Europe, for example, and among many of the readers here.  There will, of course, always be the faithful, but it’s worth mentioning that there are societies in which the faithful are a minority. You can indeed live without God.

One of the best parts of Gopnik’s piece is his decrying of God-of-the-gaps strategies (e.g., the “fine-tuning” argument), and his frank admission that there is no evidence for religion:

And here we arrive at what the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.

I couldn’t have said it better myself! And yet Gopnik still sees a need for religion, or a need for the numinous—it’s the “Little People” argument.  Yes, religion is a delusion, but that delusion has its benefits.  In fact, he claims, atheists avail themselves of the same benefits as do believers: we all are united in our need to believe in irrational things:

What’s easily missed in all this is something more important: the clandestine convergence between Super-Naturalists [those who, according to Gopnik, “believe that a material account of existence is inadequate to our numinous-seeming experience” and Self-Makers [straight naturalists, including nonbelievers]. Surprisingly few people who have considered the alternatives—few among the caucus who consciously stand up, voting aye or nay—believe any longer in God. Believe, that is, in an omnipotent man in the sky making moral rules and watching human actions with paranoiac intensity. The ayes do believe in someone—a principle of creation, a “higher entity,” that “ground of being,” an “idea of order,” an actor beyond easy or instant comprehension, something more than matter and bigger than Phil. And they certainly believe in some thing—a church, a set of rituals, a historical scheme, and an anti-rational tradition. But the keynote of their self-description typically involves a celebration of mystery and complexity, too refined for the materialist mind to accept. Self-Makers often do an injustice to the uncertainty of Super-Naturalists, who, if anything, tend to fetishize the mystery of faith as a special spiritual province that nonbelievers are too fatuous to grasp, and advertise their doubt and their need for faith quite as much as their dogma. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” not “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” is the Super-Naturalists’ anthem these days.

Well, that’s not bad, although Gopnik goes badly wrong when claiming that surprisingly few people believe in God as “an omnipotent man in the sky making moral rules and watching human actions with paranoiac intensity.” Has he listened to the likes of Ken Ham, Rick Warren, William Lane Craig, or any Southern Baptist? Does Gopnik know the statistics showing that between 70% and 80% of Americans (and a high proportion of Brits) believe in a personal, interventionist God, as well as in Satan, angels, heaven and hell? How can he possibly think that the average believer sees God as a “ground of being”? It’s time for Gopnik to leave Manhattan and head for the rural South.

But then comes the inevitable claim, unworthy of Gopnik, that materialists have faith, too! It’s the same claim we hear from accommodationists, theologians, and other “believers in belief”:

But, just as surely, most noes believe in something like what the Super-Naturalists would call faith—they search for transcendence and epiphany, practice some ritual, live some rite. True rationalists are as rare in life as actual deconstructionists are in university English departments, or true bisexuals in gay bars. In a lifetime spent in hotbeds of secularism, I have known perhaps two thoroughgoing rationalists—people who actually tried to eliminate intuition and navigate life by reasoning about it—and countless humanists, in Comte’s sense, people who don’t go in for God but are enthusiasts for transcendent meaning, for sacred pantheons and private chapels. They have some syncretic mixture of rituals: they polish menorahs or decorate Christmas trees, meditate upon the great beyond, say a silent prayer, light candles to the darkness. They talk without difficulty of souls and weapons of the spirit, and go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve to hear the Gloria, and though they leave early, they leave fulfilled. You will know them by their faces; they are the weepy ones in the rear.

Really? Having a Christmas tree means you have faith? And it’s simply wrong to think the “nones” all go to church, stand in the back, and weep at the music. How many of us do stuff like that?

And indeed, maybe few people are rationalists in every aspect of their lives, but some people are more rational than others. In fact, it’s impossible to be rational in matters of the heart, if for no other reason than in issues of love or friendship, or of avocations or penchants, we are conditioned by our genes and environment to like what we like, and no amount of rational consideration can change that. I love sweet wine like Sauternes, and others can’t abide them. Is that a “rational” decision? Is the person with whom we fall in love someone we’ve considered “rationally” as the best possible mate? No, because we’re driven by things over which we have no control—not only our evolutionary heritage—the source of the hormones we call “chemistry”—but our background, over which we had no control. But such emotions and likes are far from “transcendent meaning”! When I listen to music, it’s not a “private chapel,” nor a pretense that I know something I don’t.  And my love of a rare steak is not a “faith” or a numinous belief.

Throughout the piece Gopnik errs, I think, in mistaking instinctive likes and dislikes with religious faith. Yes, both are “irrational,” but they’re irrational in different ways.  Our penchants and loves are the result of our experiences and genes, and often not the result of reflection but simply instinctive feelings, while one can indeed reflect on whether the tenets of one’s faith are correct. It’s possible for me to reject (often influenced by others) the tenets of Judaism, but not my liking of a Chateau d’Yquem or the music of Smokey Robinson. In fact, I can’t even defend my love of Sauternes against someone who simply doesn’t like sweet wine.

The same issue comes up in the generous praise Gopnik bestows on this site:

If atheists underestimate the fudginess in faith, believers underestimate the soupiness of doubt. My own favorite atheist blogger, Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, regularly offers unanswerable philippics against the idiocies of intelligent design. But a historian looking at his blog years from now would note that he varies the philippics with a tender stream of images of cats—into whose limited cognition, this dog-lover notes, he projects intelligence and personality quite as blithely as his enemies project design into seashells—and samples of old Motown songs. The articulation of humanism demands something humane, and its signal is disproportionate pleasure placed in some frankly irrational love.

I appreciate the shout-out, I honestly do, even if I don’t perceive the “soupiness of doubt” on this site (not a “blog”). But is my posting of LOLcats really equivalent to what creationists do when they impute a divine designer to seashells? There is evidence against the latter, but I make no claim for the transcendence of cats, and surely readers must know that I don’t see them as having the same complex emotions or motivations as do humans.  To say that the incursion of kittehs, food, and music into this site is equivalent to the irrationality that pervades religion is to mistake “irrationality” (i.e., a love of something that comes without deliberation) with “faith” (a belief in empirical propositions for which there is no evidence). While they’re similar, in that faith is irrational, they don’t converge in all respects. And that, I think, is Gopnik’s main mistake. So eager is he to take the middle ground that he conflates the human emotions of atheists with the delusions of religious believers—and so sees a convergence of the twain.

A few final remarks. First, Gopnik sees the nucleus of New Atheism to be evolutionary biology:

And here we may come at last to the seedbed of the New Atheism, the thing that made the noes so loud: the broad prestige, in the past twenty years, of evolutionary biology. Since the Enlightenment, one mode of science has always been dominant, the top metaphor that educated people use to talk about experience. . . With the great breakthroughs in understanding that followed the genomic revolution, evo-bio has become, insensibly, the model science, the one that so many of the pop books are about—and biology makes specific claims about people, and encounters much coarser religious objections. It’s significant that the New Atheism gathered around Richard Dawkins. The details of the new evolutionary theory are fairly irrelevant to the New Atheism (Lamarckian ideas of evolution could be accepted tomorrow, and not bring God back with them), but the two have become twinned in the Self-Making mind. Their perpetual invocation is a perpetual insult to Super-Naturalism, and to the right of faith to claim its truths.

I don’t think that evolution is the “seedbed” of New Atheism—after all, that form of atheism took off before Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and most of its proponents are not evolutionists. The seedbed is not evolution but science.  If there’s one thing that unites most New Atheists, it’s that they are deeply respectful of the methods and accomplishments of science. And that has fed into the driving questions of New Atheists to believers—something that truly is New in New Atheism.  It is the incessant tendency of New Atheists to ask, What is the evidence for your hypothesis of God? What reasons do you have to think that you’re right and that adherents to other faiths, or nonbelievers, are wrong?  The hallmark of New Atheism is the questioning of the tenets of religion on empirical and rational grounds, and the refusal to privilege or respect faith itself—for faith is belief without evidence. That hallmark comes not from evolutionary biology, but from science.

Finally, Gopnik notes the negative correlation between religiosity and increased prosperity, something that is evidenced both over time within a country (i.e., the US), and among countries at a given time (the most socially successful countries are the least religious). But Gopnik sees this as an insoluble mystery:

Yet the wondering never quite comes to an end. Relatively peaceful and prosperous societies, we can establish, tend to have a declining belief in a deity. But did we first give up on God and so become calm and rich? Or did we become calm and rich, and so give up on God? Of such questions, such causes, no one can be certain. It would take an all-seeing eye in the sky to be sure.

That sounds good, but it’s wrong.  There are indeed ways to parse out the causal nexus here. For instance, we know from time-series analysis in the U.S. that religiosity goes up shortly after an increase in the inequality of personal incomes, but not vice versa. That implies—and there is other evidence as well—that becoming “calm and rich” comes first, and then the abandonment of God.  Sociologists may not have “all-seeing eyes in the sky,” but they have the statistical tools to descry the causation within the correlation.  And besides, if we first give up on God and then become calm and rich, that itself implies that religion was holding us back.

In fact, I find it odd that Gopnik wrote an entire piece on the problems with New Atheism, and the social benefits of religion, without mentioning the immense damage that religion does to our world—even in the U.S., where Catholics and Christian Scientists warp or even kill their children.  But of course it’s a characteristic of mainstream media in the West to avoid at all costs pointing out the evils and harms of faith.  It makes readers uncomfortable.

h/t: Chris, formely known as “Occam”