A Manual for Creating Atheists

by Peter Boghossian

  I briefly discussed a version of the Defeasibility Test in my 2012 talk at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) national convention.

  On Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher has a humorous response to what it would take for him to believe: Jesus Christ coming down from the sky during the halftime show at the Super Bowl and turning nachos into bread and fish.

  If I have a little more time, I simplify the following idea: Both the faithful and atheists lend their beliefs to identical propositions (2+2=4, apples fall from trees in a downward direction, the Earth goes around the sun, etc.). The faithful, however, also lend their beliefs to an additional number of propositions (bathing in the Ganges River can wash away sins, or Bahá’u’lláh was a messenger from God). What atheists believe is a subset of what (most) of the faithful believe. Obvious exceptions include the claims of creationists and other antiscientists, but in most cases, there’s nothing that an atheist believes that a religious person doesn’t also believe. The faithful just lend their beliefs to additional propositions.

  What you think is a good reason to motivate someone to action may not constitute a good reason for your subject. Conversely, what your subject thinks is a good reason may not be a good reason for you. A few years ago I stopped for gas late at night at a twenty-four-hour gas station. A young woman who was obviously on drugs approached me. She had open pus sores across her face and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She blurted out, “Can I have a ride? I really need a ride.” I responded by lifting up my shirt. (I have a large scar on my stomach from surgery.) I said, “I would give you a ride, but the last time I gave a woman a ride my wife stabbed me.” She looked at me and nodded as if this made perfect sense. Then she walked to the next car. To her, this really did make perfect sense. This is an example of “meeting people where they are.”

  Here’s another example: A friend of mine called me because her son wanted to get a large tattoo of a decapitated Jesus on his back. She wanted me to talk him out of it. When I called him on the phone he said to me, “Pete, I know my mom asked you to call me. It’s not gonna work.” I immediately responded by asking him if he was still smoking pot. He said, “Yeah, what of it?” I said, “Well have you ever considered the fact that you’d be an international criminal, wanted by law enforcement?” He said, “Dude, I think about that shit all the time.” I replied, “Okay, so let’s say they’re after you, the cops, the FBI, do you think it would make it more or less likely to identify you if you had a large tattoo of a decapitated Jesus on your back?” He never got the tattoo. Meet people “where they are.”

  Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he thinks that he doesn’t lack (Symposium 200a-b; Lysis 221d). That is, if one doesn’t think that one lacks a big nose, one doesn’t want a big nose. Similarly, if one thinks one has the truth, one stops looking.

  In the field of addiction, for example, the recent thinking is that an individual is not in a state of denial, but in a precontemplative state. I’ve heard speakers point out that even people who suffer from severe forms of alcoholism regularly, routinely, spontaneously choose to quit drinking and then just quit drinking. This happens every year among a large number (maybe a minority but still a large number) of alcoholics. Even seemingly incorrigible alcoholics who appear to be in the deepest state of denial spontaneously remit. In the transtheoretical model, this means that they were not in denial, but that they were precontemplative. (This is also how the Motivational Interviewers would frame the state of the individual.)

  CHAPTER 5

  ENTER SOCRATES

  10th Grader: “Do you think we should be allowed to get stoned?”

  Pete: “I dunno, what do you think?”

  10th Grader: “I think we should be allowed to get stoned if we want to.”

  Pete: “Hmm, why do you think that?”

  10th Grader: “Because we should have a right to do what we want to do.”

  Pete: “What do you mean by ‘right’?”

  10th Grader: “I mean something I should not have to earn, like, I should just get to do it, you know what I mean?”

  Pete: “I think so. So you mean you think you should have the right to do anything you want to do?”

  10th Grader: “No, not anything, if it harms people we shouldn’t have that right.”

  Pete: “And does smoking pot harm anyone?”

  10th Grader: “No.”

  Pete: “No?”

  10th Grader: “No.”

  Pete: “Nobody?”

  10th Grader: “No.”

  Pete: “What about yourself? Does it harm yourself?”

  10th Grader: “What do you mean?”

  Pete: “I mean is it physically injurious to you? Does it harm your body?”

  10th Grader: “Maybe a little bit, but not that much.”

  Pete: “But it does harm you, no?”

  10th Grader: “Yeah, I suppose so. But …”

  Pete: “So if it harms you, you shouldn’t have the right to do it, no?”

  10th Grader: “But a lotta stuff harms me and I’m allowed to do those things.”

  Pete: “But we are not talking about ‘a lot of stuff’ we are talking about the right to do something that harms you—your position holds that you should not be allowed to do that either.”

  10th Grader: “So you think we should not have the right to get stoned?”

  Pete: “I don’t know, but it’s not about what I think, it’s about what you think. And you seem to think that you should be allowed to do something that harms you and not be allowed to do something that harms you. Does that make sense to you?”

  10th Grader: “Not really”

  —Peter Boghossian, “The Socratic Method (or, Having a Right to Get Stoned)”

  “Often as a consequence of sustained Socratic dialogue, one realizes that one did not know something that one thought one knew.”

  —Peter Boghossian, “Socratic Pedagogy”

  The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how to use the Socratic method as a conversational intervention to liberate people of their faith. The Socratic method may sound complicated, but essentially it’s asking questions and getting answers.

  The Street Epistemologist can reason with unreasonable people—for more than twenty years I’ve made a career of doing just that. But you’ll need more than the broad strategies discussed in chapter 4 to reason someone out of the kind of beliefs they didn’t reason themselves into. Beyond faith-based beliefs, examples of other false beliefs include the groundless popular belief that driving a red car increases the likelihood that you’ll get a speeding ticket, or the untrue folk wisdom that going outside without a jacket will cause you to catch a cold, or the superstition that walking under a ladder is bad luck. In this section, I’ll explain the primary tool that I use to help free people who are doxastically trapped.

  The Socratic method is a powerful, no cost, dialectical intervention that can help people reason away their faith. Effectively used, the Socratic method can create moments of doxastic openness—moments when individuals become aware that their reasoning is in error. In these instances people become less certain, less sure, less confident, and correspondingly more open to alternative hypotheses and explanations. People become aware of their own ignorance. The Socratic method is like putting a tool into the hands of a believer who ultimately uses that tool to dismantle the scaffold of their own (false) belief.

  Socrates used his method as a guide to help people show themselves they didn’t know what they thought they knew.1 He exposed untrue beliefs, developed a sense of disquiet in his interlocutors, and elicited contradictions by asking pointed questions in an unthreatening way. These conversations forced people to substantively evaluate, and in many cases ultimately change, their beliefs. And this was all accomplished merely by asking a question, listening to the answer, then asking another question, listening to that answer, etc.

  This chapter begins with an explanation of the stages of the Socratic method, followed by a detai
led sampling of successful and unsuccessful Socratic interventions I’ve had over the years. Finally, I guide readers through Socratic techniques along with the supplementary treatment methods described in chapter 4.

  STAGES

  The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly (Dye, 1996). I’ll now briefly explain these stages and then show how they inform actual faith interventions.

  Stage 1: Wonder

  The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something: “What is justice?” or “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” or “Does karma govern the cycle of cause and effect?” etc. Wondering takes propositional format—words are used to capture one’s thoughts—and are thus expressed as questions. Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges. (See appendix B for the Socratic questions used in my study to increase prison inmates’ critical thinking and reasoning ability.)

  Stage 2: Hypothesis

  Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder. For example, one possible response to the question, “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” would be, “Yes, there must be. The universe is just too large for there not to be.” Another response could be a simple, “No.”2

  Stage 3: Elenchus (Q&A)

  The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis. The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false.

  Continuing with our previous example:

  Person A: “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” [Note: Stage of wonder]

  Person B: “Yes, there must be. I think the universe is just too large for there not to be.” [Note: Stage of hypothesis]

  Socratic Interlocutor: “Well, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, ‘We could be the first; someone had to be the first and it could be us.’” [Note: Stage of counterexample and beginning of the elenchus, which causes the epiphany of ignorance]

  In the elenchus, the Socratic facilitator generates one or more ways that the hypothesis could be false. That is, what conditions could be in place that would make the hypothesis untrue? Definitively stating there’s no life on other planets is not a counterexample because it simply states that the hypothesis is wrong, it doesn’t state how it could be wrong. This may seem like an issue of style, but in fact the interchange is critical to the process, because without a dialogue there can be no intervention. Simply put: both parties enter into an open discussion.

  Using the example of life on other planets, one condition to make the hypothesis false would be if we were the first intelligent life forms to arise. If it is the case that we’re the first intelligent life forms to emerge, then by definition this means there is currently no intelligent life on other planets. This is a successful counterexample because it calls the hypothesis into question—that is, it’s one viable explanation for why there could be no other intelligent life forms in the universe.

  Another condition that would call the hypothesis into question might be, “Just as it could be that we’re the first intelligent life form to have arisen, so too could it be that we’re the last intelligent life form.” This is a counterexample because it notes a possible condition that could make the hypothesis false. It is possible the universe was, at one point, teeming with intelligent life but perhaps there’s a “Great Filter” that either prevents or makes it exceedingly difficult for intelligent life to sustain itself (Hanson, 1998). The Great Filter possibility,3 or the possibility we’re the first intelligent life form to arise, calls the hypothesis into question.

  A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a process of falsification. For example, through a window by a lake, you’ve seen one million white swans; nevertheless, this doesn’t mean all swans are white. No matter how many swans you’ve seen, this does not make the hypothesis that all swans are white true, it only means the hypothesis hasn’t been shown to be false (yet).

  A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis. (There’s an asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation.) For example, let’s look at the hypothesis, “All swans are white.” Yet, one day, standing in your yard is a black swan. In this instance, the hypothesis was shown to be false, independent of your experience of seeing a multitude of white swans.

  Regardless of the content of one’s beliefs, that is, whether or not one believes in reincarnation, talking serpents, or that Tom Cruise is God, all but the most severely delusional individuals will recognize some constitutive, fundamental mistakes in reasoning, like contradictions (a thing cannot be both X and not X) and inconsistency (incompatibility with other claims). The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia. A classic aporia, or puzzlement, being, “Everything I say is a lie.”

  Stage 4: Accept or Revise Hypothesis

  In stage 4, the hypothesis is either accepted as provisionally true, or it’s rejected. If it’s accepted as true then this ends the elenchus and immediately begins stage 5. If it’s rejected then another hypothesis is given and the elenchus begins again.

  If the interlocutor cannot overcome the argument made in the elenchus, then she is forced to revise her hypothesis. In our present example, if she cannot rebut the claim that we could be the first intelligent life to have arisen, then she needs to revise the original hypothesis, which was, “Yes, there must be.” She could, for example, offer a new hypothesis, “Almost definitely,” or she could offer no new hypothesis and state that she no longer knows with certainty.

  If the arguments that emerge from the elenchus cannot refute the hypothesis, then the hypothesis stands. It’s vital to reiterate that if the hypothesis stands this does not mean one has found eternal truth. This simply means the hypothesis is accepted as provisionally true.

  Stage 5: Act Accordingly

  As a consequence of the Socratic method, one would ideally act upon the results of one’s inquiry. Acting could be anything from changing one’s belief to taking a specific action. Stage 5 has less to do with the implementation of the method, and more to do with the consequences of one’s examination.

  ACTUAL SOCRATIC INTERVENTIONS

  I’ll now show how the stages of the Socratic method can come into play when administering Socratic treatments. I’ll examine actual conversations I’ve had with a broad spectrum of people in a wide variety of contexts and explain, statement by statement, techniques referenced in chapter 4. I’ve included a range of treatment outcomes, from immediately successful to completely unsuccessful.

  I note the failures here because most interventions aimed at removing faith are not an initial success. Sometimes, even after years of treatment, the faith virus is not separated from its host. Initial, comprehensive success is rare. I conduct multiple Socratic interventions daily, and as much as I try to help people shed faith, very rarely has someone abandoned their faith on the spot. What is common—and promising—is that people experience glimpses of doxastic openness as a direct consequence of Socratic discourse. Some of these moments are captured in the conversations below. (Remember that the goal of each intervention is to move the subject one step along the transtheoretical model, for example, from precontemplative to contemplative, or from action to preparation.)

  Finally, experiencing failures are important in your practice as a Street Epistemologist. There is perhaps more to learn from unsuccessful interventions than from successful ones—we learn from our failures, not from our successes. Some of the conversations detailed below may help to shed light on specific instances of doxastic closure, some may give
readers insight into how they could improve upon and tailor the intervention given their particular skill set, and others still can be seen as a snippet in the context of long-term treatment.

  Intervention 1: Doxastic Openness

  I had the following late-night discussion with a young man (YM) at a local gym. I was on a treadmill when he began walking on the treadmill next to me. A few minutes later he asked me about my MMA (mixed martial arts) T-shirt. From there the conversation turned to superstition in the martial arts, to many popular but false beliefs, and ultimately to religion. About ten minutes into our discussion he told me Jesus Christ came into his life.

  YM: He [Jesus Christ] touched me. At that moment my life was forever changed.

  This statement, “He touched me,” is the hypothesis. It is the statement I targeted for refutation. Note that at no point in this intervention do I deny the feelings he experienced. To do so would be counterproductive because we’re all infallible in terms of our tastes and feelings. What I target for refutation is the source or cause of these feelings and the resultant faith it engendered.

  PB: That’s really interesting. Can you tell me about that?

  I asked this question for two reasons. Primarily, I needed to make sure I understood the exact nature of the claim. I was virtually certain I did understand, but needed to be positive. It’s a good idea to ask someone to repeat or restate their claim. In Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this is habit 5, “Seek First to Understand Then to Be Understood” (Covey, 2004). Secondarily, I framed this in terms of a question because I wanted to make him more receptive to answering. I admitted my ignorance and asked him to help me understand. That is, I did not say, “Please tell me about that,” as this phrasing can be interpreted as a command with the word “please” stuck in front of it.