A Manual for Creating Atheists

by Peter Boghossian

  MISCELLANEOUS

  The following are less common defenses of faith, along with my preferred responses:

  Defense: “Atheism is just another religion. You have faith in atheism.” Response: “Atheism is a conclusion one comes to as a result of being rational and honest. Atheism is a conclusion that’s based on the best available evidence for the existence of God—which is that there is none. Atheism is not a religion. Atheism is not a belief. Atheism is, basically, the lack of belief in God(s). Atheists follow no creeds or doctrines. They engage in no particular set of behaviors.”

  Defense: “Much of modern science and practical mathematics is based upon mere ‘native preference,’ not on any rational proof. Faith is the same.” (For an interesting glimpse into this read French mathematician Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis, written over one hundred years ago but still pertinent.) Response: “Science has a built-in corrective mechanism that faith does not have. There’s been convergence across all fields of science on virtually all scientific theories since the eighteenth century. At any point in the future, do you ever think there will be convergence on specific faith propositions? I don’t, because those propositions are arbitrary.”

  Defense: “You should never say such things. You’ll offend people and they’ll think you’re a jerk.” Response: “What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens. My intent is not to be a jerk. I don’t buy into the notion that criticizing an idea makes me a bad person. A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person. We are not our ideas. Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity. I’m criticizing an idea because that idea is not true, and the fact that people think it is true has dangerous consequences.”

  Defense: “You’re just talking about blind faith. My faith is not blind.” Response: “There is no need to modify the word ‘faith’ with the word ‘blind.’ All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence. That’s what makes it faith. If one had evidence, one wouldn’t need faith, one would merely present the evidence.”

  Defense: “Atheism and secular humanism are as much a religion—and require as much faith—as any religion. Atheists and secular humanists love to equivocate on religious issues—claiming they are not religious and are free of religious bias—but they are no less religious or faithful than anyone else. They are not aware of their own faith and are blind to their biases. There is a saying: ‘There are no nonreligious people, only false Gods.’” Response: “Confusing atheism with secular humanism demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding as to what the terms mean. Secular humanism is a philosophy and a set of ideals; atheism is simply the lack of belief in a God or Gods. There is no dogma attached to nonbelief in a divine Shiva the Destroyer. And, as to the saying—it’s silly. To assert that people are incapable of letting go of belief in mythological fairytales without attaching themselves to some other form of worship is narrow-minded, condescending, pessimistic, and without evidential merit.”

  INTERVENTIONS

  I’ll now show how I’ve used these responses in two brief informal, dialectical interventions. The purpose of the interventions was to change targeted beliefs held by my interlocutors.

  The first intervention was with a colleague (JM) I bumped into on the street. The second intervention was with a friend of a friend (KP) at a party; we were discussing philosophy and faith. Both conversations begin in medias res.

  Intervention 1

  JM: What you seem to want to do is to take away everyone’s faith.

  PB: Yeah. Why is that a problem?

  JM: Well what the hell do you think? I mean what do you really think?

  PB: It’s not about what I think, it’s about what you think. Why is that a problem?

  JM: I’m not one of your students. Don’t answer a question with a question.

  PB: Okay. Here’s what I really think. I think I should be given some type of community service award for devoting my life to helping people learn to reason effectively. Now could you please answer my question? Why is helping people to abandon their faith a bad thing?

  JM: Because for the most part these are good, decent people. You’re taking good, kind, Christian people and you’re taking away something that they rely on.

  PB: Do you think the thing that they rely upon [faith], do you think that will lead them to the truth?

  JM: Of course not. No sane person could. But it [faith] not only makes them feel good, it also keeps them in check. What do you think would happen if you and X [a colleague] had your way?

  PB: What do you think would happen?

  JM: You know what would happen, that’s why you’re asking me what would happen. They’d be murdering and raping and who only knows what else.

  PB: So you mean that by taking away a bad way of reasoning the natural consequence is that people become murderers?

  JM: The reason that a lot of people don’t rape and murder in the first place is because of religion.

  PB: Well what about Scandinavia?

  JM: You people love to talk about Scandinavia.

  PB: Well?

  JM: Well that’s not the same.

  PB: The same as what?

  JM: The conditions there are not the same as the conditions here, and you know it.

  PB: I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean?

  JM: You know exactly what I mean. I mean they’re not analogous, and you’re making them analogous.

  PB: You mean if all other variables were held constant and the Scandinavians became more faithful, the murder and rape rates would drop?

  (Sigh and a long pause)

  JM: You’re impossible.

  PB: So are you willing to change your mind and agree that helping to rid large numbers of people from an unreliable process of reasoning will not have a detrimental effect on the society?

  (Sigh)

  PB: Well?

  (Sigh)

  Intervention 2

  KP: Do you trust your wife?

  PB: To do what? To fly a plane, no. To diagnose a basic medical condition, yes. [My wife is a board certified physician and professor of medicine.]

  KP: Well, I mean, you have faith in your wife.

  PB: Well that’s not the same as trusting my wife, right? Trust and faith are not the same.

  KP: Well, yeah, I mean, you do have faith in your wife, right?

  PB: No, actually, no. I don’t have faith in my wife. I trust my wife to do or not do certain things. I trust her to not abuse our children. I trust her to not pull a Lorena Bobbitt on me. But that has nothing to do with faith. Why do you ask?

  KP: I’m asking because you said that faith is always bad, you know. And I think that you have faith.

  PB: What do I have faith in?

  KP: Well, lots of stuff. [Motioning to my wife] Your wife. When you flick a switch the light will go on—

  PB: I have no faith. My life is joyfully devoid of faith.

  (Mutual laughter)

  PB: I don’t have faith that the light will go on when I flick a switch. I know it will both because of past experience and because of the scientific process that enabled that to occur in the first place. Why do you think that has anything to do with faith, or with unwarranted belief?

  KP: Because you don’t know the light will go on.

  PB: That’s true. The light could be burned out—

  KP: So you do have faith that the light isn’t burned out.

  PB: No. I hope the light isn’t burned out, but it’s always possible it is. That’s hope, that’s not faith. I don’t believe it’s burned out unless I see it’s burned out. And if it is burned out, then I’ll just replace it. And I know that replacing it will likely work because of my history with replacing bulbs. So I don’t need faith. Faith isn’t required at all. Or am I missing something? Is my reasoning in error?

  (Pause)

  KP: No
, I guess not.

  PB: So, can we agree that when it comes to my wife, or to flicking a light switch, we don’t need faith?

  (Long pause)

  KP: Yeah, I guess so.

  PB: Cool. So we now need to extend this further and talk about why we don’t need—shouldn’t have—faith at all. Faith, just say no.

  (Laughter)

  DIG DEEPER

  Books

  Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Hitchens, 1995)

  Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (Hitchens, 2007)

  Victor Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Stenger, 2011)

  Victor Stenger, God and the Atom (Stenger, 2013)

  Phil Zuckerman, Why Are Danes and Swedes So Irreligious? (Zuckerman, 2009)

  Video

  “Is God Necessary for Morality?” William Lane Craig versus (American philosopher) Shelly Kagan Debate, http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&client=mv-google&gl=US&v=SiJnCQuPiuo&nomobile=1

  NOTES

  To move beyond arguments in support of faith and focus on arguments in support of God’s existence, I highly recommend American author Guy P. Harrison’s accessible and clear 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (Harrison, 2008). I use this text in my Atheism class at Portland State University. I’d also recommend American mathematician John Allen Paulos’s Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (Paulos, 2008). In this brief book, Paulos rebuts classical and contemporary arguments for God’s existence.

  I usually avoid Lawrence Krauss’s argument that nothingness is unstable and that sooner or later something springs from nothing (Krauss, 2012). First, this argument bumps up against the limits of my conceptual understanding. Second, I don’t have anywhere near the grasp of theoretical physics I’d need to argue this position. Unless you have an intimate familiarity with the physics behind these ideas, I’d suggest not using this line of argument. Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, is important. However, the lines of thought contained here are much better in the context of a debate than for a Street Epistemologist.

  This is also the deathblow to the Kalm cosmological argument, which has recently become the darling of Christian apologists. The Kalm argument goes like this: Premise: Among that which exists, everything that has a beginning has a cause.

  Premise: The universe has a beginning.

  Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

  This is a version of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) teapot. Russell claims that there’s a small teapot, undetectable by telescopes, in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars. If you can’t disprove that such a teapot exists, do you believe it does exist? Personally, I’ve not had as much success with Russell’s teapot as I have with the example here. Perhaps it’s because people can’t wrap their mind around an object that we cannot detect floating in space, or because it’s easier to elicit a contradiction with an increasing number of substances found within a contained space. If you find Russell’s teapot to be more effective than my example, then use what’s most effective.

  When one does attempt to provide “evidence” for God’s existence, the usual suspects emerge, the most common of which are fine-tuning and complexity. Basically, the fine-tuning argument states that God(s) calibrated initial conditions in the universe to make it possible for life to emerge. Physicist Victor Stenger completely dismantles this in his superbly readable book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Stenger, 2011). The idea behind the complexity argument, sometimes called the “watchmaker argument,” is that just as the inner workings of a watch are too complicated to have arisen on their own, so too are the workings of the universe. The universe is just too complicated to have come into existence without a designer. Dawkins and others have addressed this idea in detail.

  My response, which I offer as an intervention to disabuse people of unwarranted belief, I owe to a colleague; I ask about tornados: “Have you ever seen a tornado? Do you think that God has his finger on a button and just designs these incredibly intricate natural phenomena?” The idea is that complexity can emerge as a natural result of a system and not as designed or orchestrated by an entity.

  The “God of the gaps” argument is the believer’s appeal to God as an explanation for whatever phenomenon we cannot explain scientifically. For example, if the scientific understanding of the day cannot explain lightning bolts, the believer will say, “God did it.” Once we can scientifically explain the mechanism behind lightning, the believer will move on to another phenomenon and attribute God as the cause of that phenomenon. The argument is referred to as the “God of the gaps,” because as our scientific knowledge expands the gaps close, and there are fewer and fewer places (phenomena) that can be attributed to being caused by God. Currently, intelligent design (ID) is a type of God of the gaps argument. The idea behind ID is basically, “You don’t know how life was formed and sustained, so it was God that formed life and sustains life.” Questions about origin of life present another God of the gaps–type argument, “You don’t know the process by which living organisms naturally arise from nonliving matter; therefore the cause was God.”

  It initially surprised me when people asked why I thought this was an extraordinary claim. It no longer surprises me as I’ve become numb from being asked so frequently. If rising from the dead was an everyday occurrence, and it was not just commonplace but expected that one would rise from the dead, then not rising from the dead would be extraordinary. We don’t live in a universe in which people rise from the dead either regularly or at all. Therefore, the claim that someone rose from the dead is a remarkable claim. When I state that rising from the dead is a remarkable claim that demands extraordinary evidence, I’m told that the Bible is a not just a reliable source of evidence, but that it’s also extraordinary evidence and thus constitutes sufficient justification to warrant belief. Here’s my response: “Suppose you heard a story about a woman who could walk through walls. Let’s also suppose that you were an investigator charged with figuring out if this was true. What would you do?” Basically, I encourage the person who believes the claims in the Bible are true, to use the same standards of evidence they’d use as a modern-day investigator: What are the names of the witnesses? Where did they live? Are they reputable? How many people witnessed this? Did you interview them directly? How do you know they were credible? What was their relation to the individual in question?

  If a seasoned Street Epistemologist asks these questions, many people will acknowledge that the Bible is not a reliable source that can justify belief in these extraordinary claims. The conversation will usually come back to having faith, which can then be targeted as an unreliable epistemology.

  However, in my interventions, instead of continuing the discussion about the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence that supports this claim, I talk about Muhammad riding to heaven on a winged horse. Specifically, I ask why they don’t believe that proposition on the basis of faith, especially given that there’s overwhelming evidence that Muhammad was an historical figure. Conceptually distancing oneself from a faith tradition often helps the subject examine what constitutes extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim. (This is a variation on John W. Loftus’s idea of the outsider test for faith.)

  Examples include the Anasazi, Easter Islanders, Mayan, and Norse Greenlanders. Among the reasons the Norse outpost in Greenland failed, for example, was because Norse religious teachings prohibited eating shellfish and other common, locally available foodstuffs. In short, religious dietary prohibitions (like Jews’ and Muslims’ prohibitions on pork) were the difference between success and failure.

  A brief but thorough summary, which unfortunately has no references, is Tom Bartlett’s “Dusting Off God” (Bartlett, 2012).

  What the faithful want, and w
hat they claim to know, is that the universe comes prepackaged with abstract qualities such as meaning and purpose. One problem with believing that the universe has these abstract qualities as built-in properties is that it abrogates our duty to create meaning in our lives. In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl discusses meaning that he and his fellow prisoners found when interned in Auschwitz. This book had a profound effect on my understanding of how we seek meaning in our lives. It helped me understand how radically contextual meaning is, how we create our own meaning and purpose, and how we can find meaning in every instant of our lives.

  The academic left tend to take a more pitiful view of the faithful while simultaneously becoming upset in response to questioning a person’s faith. They view attacks on faith as a type of intellectual hegemony and epistemological colonialism (see chapter 8).

  I often hear the simplistic, reductionist claim that there is a kind of equation between atheism and Nazism—for example, statements like, “Atheism leads to Hitler/Nazism.” There have been any number of similar claims made in various quarters: Nazism was an inevitable product of Darwin, or of Luther, or of the Versailles Treaty, or of Wagner’s operas, or of Nietzsche, or of Hegel. All of these break down under the obvious objection that there were plenty of atheists, Darwinists, Lutherans, objectors to the Versailles Treaty, Wagnerites, Nietzscheans, and Hegelians who did not become Nazis. These are all vacuous arguments from a historiographical perspective. Was Adolph Hitler an atheist? Hitler cannot be called a churchgoing Christian, but neither can he be used as an example of an atheist. Hardly the product of an anti-Christian childhood and upbringing, he attended Mass with his devout mother and was a choirboy, which he quite enjoyed. Indeed, the majesty and pageantry of the Church heavily influenced the staging in Nazi rallies and rituals.