UPDATE: Some people in the comments are indulging in various psychological speculations about Eric’s motivations, health, etc. That is simply not on here, and I’ll delete posts like that. We must take the man at his word that he is leaving for the reasons given below, and then engage those reasons. Please avoid personal comments.
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The former Anglican priest Eric MacDonald—I say “former” guardedly, as he never officially left the priesthood—taught me a lot about theology, for which I’m very grateful. But now he has finally parted company with New Atheism, and announced that decision in a long post on his website Choice in Dying:”In which I take my leave from the New Atheism.” Much of the post consists of exchanges Eric had with either me or other commenters on this site, and perhaps you’ll be familiar with some of it.
I’ve put below the two crucial paragraphs in which Eric summarizes his reasons for fleeing New Atheism:
However, as time went on I found myself at loggerheads with much that sailed under the banner of the New Atheism, finding its conception of religion so contrary to anything that I would have said about my faith in earlier years that I find myself no longer able to associate myself with this movement. Much that new atheists say about religion is simply so much straw. Of course, it does apply to the fundamentalists and some evangelicals (two separate points of view), but some Christian theology is so much more sophisticated than this as to make much new atheist opposition to religion sophistical. Some of that theology may simply be composed of what have come to be known as “deepities”, though that classification seems to me to have arisen because of the unwillingness of atheists to engage with what theologians and other religious believers have to say in defence of their worldview. And that it is an opposition of worldviews is, I think, something that has been lost sight of.
I think some of this comes out in the following conversation. There seems to be a belief that theology must simply be delusional, because there is no objective supernatural existent corresponding to the word ‘god’ — or at least that no “slam-dunk” arguments can be produced for such an existent. Consequently, it has become fairly normative to believe that religion has to do with “confected” entities, and religious thought itself not only delusional but even pathological. (Boghossian — in his book on making atheists — repeats the accusation that faith is pathological in his book so often that one is reminded of the George Orwell’s 1984, or the common practice in the Soviet Union of placing dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. There is a deeply threatening aspect to the belief that those whose ideas you oppose are somehow mentally ill, or victims of pathological ways of thinking in need of a cure.) I do not think this is true, even though I dissent from much that is said in defence of Christianity. Empirical science is not the only source of truth or understanding. Indeed, I believe that the new atheism is quickly attaching itself to beliefs that are as dogmatic and irrational as many religious dogmas, and to a kind of ideological certitude that may be as dangerous as the ideologies of the past that caused so much harm in the course of what Robert Conquest has called The Ravaged Century.
I find the first reason odd because, when I was beginning to read theology, Eric made a number of valuable suggestions for readings in Sophisticated Theology™, but always added that he doubted that I’d find anything substantive in it. For he didn’t, and, sure enough, I didn’t, either. Now, however, he seems to have changed his mind, and implies that there is something substantive in such works—and that we New Atheists are simply too obtuse or blinkered to detect it.
But there isn’t anything substantive. Before you can discuss the nature of God, however deep and nuanced your discussion, you have to provide rational arguments for the existence of a God. No theologian, however sophisticated, has done that to my satisfaction, and I’ve read a lot of them. Absent such convincing evidence, theology simply becomes academic speculation about the nature of an unevidenced being.
Further, Eric doesn’t seem to realize that many New Atheists, including many on this site, were former believers and are in fact quite aware of even the most sophisticated theological arguments. I’m always impressed at how much knowledge there is about the arguments of people like Plantinga, Haught, Richard Swinburne, or even C. S. Lewis. It’s almost as if we have no right to even discuss God until we have precisely the same knowledge of theology as does Eric.
But that is theological Whack-a-Mole. I, and others on this site, have really tried to engage the arguments of those Sophisticated Theolgians™ who have promulgated and defended their worldviews. But what can you say about someone like, for example, Alvin Plantinga, who simply asserts that it is “reasonable” to believe in God as a “basic belief,” because the Christian God has endowed us with a special sensus divinitatis to detect divinity? That’s a supposedly sophisticated argument, but fails on two counts, both of which we’ve discussed. (What about those who don’t have that sense, or whose sense tells them that another religion is true? And what do you say to the argument that because it is not irrational to believe in a God, that therefore one must take it seriously? You can say the same thing about UFOs or any unevidenced supernatural or paranormal phenomenon) Most believers hold their beliefs because they think they’re based on something true about the universe; but so long as those believers cannot adduce evidence for that truth that convinces the rest of us, we needn’t take them seriously. There are no “slam-dunk” arguments against fairies or Bigfoot, either, but grownups don’t take them seriously—for the same reason we New Atheists don’t take God seriously. Empirical investigation is not about “slam dunk” arguments, but about the best explanations for phenomena.
As for “other ways of understanding,” I claim that Eric was never able to produce a single “way of understanding” truths about our universe that didn’t at bottom rest on empirical evidence and reason. The examples he gave—history, archaeology, and so on—use precisely the methods of science to fathom truth. So if by “understanding” Eric means “apprehending what is true about the cosmos” (after all, he says “truth or understanding”), let him list the truths apprehended by “other ways of understanding.”
Finally, I don’t consider religious people mentally ill, but there’s a case to be made that they are delusional—delusional in the same way that people are deluded about homeopathy, UFOs, or the Loch Ness Monster. All of those believers are victims of a delusion in the sense that the Oxford English Dictionary uses the word “delusion”:
a. Anything that deceives the mind with a false impression; a deception; a fixed false opinion or belief with regard to objecting things, esp. as a form of mental derangement
The part I agree with here is that religious teachings do give people false impressions (though not usually promulgated by others intending to deceive), and proffer fixed false opinions or beliefs with regard to obecting things. I wouldn’t go so far as to call religion a “mental derangement,” but it’s certainly a deviation from the kind of things that people accept as “true” in their daily life. It is accepting things of the greatest import for one’s life without sufficient evidence for so doing.
We see not an iota of evidence for a god when there should be such evidence, and therefore can provisionally assume that a god doesn’t exist—or, at our most charitable, can suspend judgment on the issue. (Most skeptics, however, don’t “suspend judgment” on the existence of Xenu, Thor, or Bigfoot). Therefore, a firm belief in an unevidenced God—and most Americans do have such firm belief—is a delusion, based on wish-thinking and a “false impression.”
In claiming that New Atheists are obtuse in understanding the real meaning of religion, and that there are other ways beyond science of apprehending truth (but refusing to specify which truths are apprehended), Eric has now allied himself with the religious community he supposedly abandoned. I am very sad about this “deconversion,” and don’t really understand the reasons, but we have clearly failed to engage his apostasy. My one suggestion for him, should he be reading this, is to engage not us, but the former ministers who form the private community of the Clergy Project. For it is there one can find other ministers, many once deeply engaged in faith, who decided to leave it all behind. Surely not all of those can be accused of misunderstanding religion!
