A Manual for Creating Atheists

by Peter Boghossian

  The people in these societies did not rampage because we are not tolerant enough, or because they are asking for more tolerance. Mass hysteria occurred when people went on a rampage because their sacred text was desecrated by those who do not value it as a path to knowledge or truth.9 Yet many leftists interpreted this behavior as a call for more tolerance on our part—and many even publicly advocated censorship (Malik, 2012).

  There’s something else that’s disturbing about rampaging in the streets. Many leftists hold the idea that someone who does not live in one of these societies would only become upset at this behavior because they don’t understand these cultures and their epistemic systems. If people just understood other cultures then they wouldn’t be upset. Here, the idea is that there’s something intrinsic to one’s understanding that prevents one from seeing the matter clearly—as opposed to seeing something actually wrong with rampaging in the streets and killing people because religious sensitivities have been offended—and by extension something actually wrong with faith-based epistemic systems.10

  My own view is that people are not disturbed because they don’t understand why people rampage in the street, but because they do understand why people rampage in the street.

  Leftists, Feminists, and Resuscitating Classical Liberalism

  Today’s leftists cannot detect moral and epistemic imbalance because the invasive values piggybacking classical and social liberalism have robbed them of the opportunity and capability of making moral and epistemic judgments. What is going on in higher education today is the paradigmatic example of well-educated leftists withholding judgment, teaching others to do the same, and even somehow feeling sanctimonious as a result—as opposed to, just making well-reasoned matter-of-fact judgments.

  Most educators in American institutions today are academic leftists of the kind I’ve described—and even academicians who have not bought into this ideology wholesale have trouble sorting out the difference between respecting the value of the individual and making a critical judgment of an epistemology (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Jaschik, 2012; Kurtz, 2005; Rothman, Lichter, & Nevitte, 2005; Tobin & Weinberg, 2006). An unfortunate consequence of this is that many professors teach students to withhold judgments, especially moral judgments.11 Withholding epistemological critique is wrong and needs to end. What educators should be teaching students is how to make better, more discerning judgments: how to discern reliable ways of reasoning from unreliable ways of reasoning.

  I would be remiss if I did not mention the failure of contemporary academic feminism. Feminism is currently married to, or rather cohabitating with, academic leftism. Consequently, feminism has absorbed the same exogenous values that liberalism absorbed. Thus, there has been a tragic, catastrophic, and almost wholesale failure of contemporary academic feminism to speak out against the unbridled, ruthless misogyny of the Taliban, the horrific and wide-scale domestic violence suffered by women in Papua New Guinea, the sexual and physical violence common among Aboriginal women and girls in Australia, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

  If one were to abstract feminism from values like tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism as applied to the realm of ideas, etc., what would the results be? Would American feminists be more likely or less likely to criticize the treatment of women in other cultures? The answer is obvious. Feminism’s silence can be understood because it’s been tainted by a litany of invasive values such as multiculturalism and relativism.

  Faith

  Contemporary academic leftism is also faith’s unwitting ally. Contemporary academic leftists have bullied criticisms of faith off the table.12

  Multiculturalism and associated ideologies grant “diverse” epistemologies—especially faith processes—immunity from criticism. Multiculturalism buttresses faith-based processes from criticism by conflating race with culture, and by making attacks on faith and reasoning processes ethically synonymous with attacks on race, gender, and other immutable characteristics. Rational critiques thus become immoral actions.13

  Belying classical and social liberalism, contemporary academic leftism transforms the speech act of criticizing faith and faith claims into a moral problem—even a moral failure. Criticizing faith becomes unethical, immoral, hurtful, unnecessary, and unkind. By extension, individuals who offer these criticisms are themselves seen to be immoral, intolerant, divisive, cruel, and even hateful. This is an illegitimate and wrongheaded move.14

  Faith is not an immutable characteristic; people leave and switch faith traditions. It is not like gender or ethnicity. There’s even a word, “apostasy,” for people who have left a particular faith tradition.15 In some parts of the world the punishment for this is death (United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 2011a).16

  Shows of deference to the practice of murdering people who leave a faith tradition is a grotesquely misplaced use of the value of “tolerance” that Enlightenment thinkers trumpeted during the time of John Locke and Thomas Hill Green. This isn’t tolerance, but rather ideological blindness and moral cowardice.

  Hope

  Contemporary academic leftism has created a cascading social, moral, and epistemological catastrophe. It has undermined reason and rationality and created conditions for faith, religion, superstition, pseudoscience, and faulty epistemologies of all stripes to flourish. It is directly responsible for an entire generation of students disengaging their capacity for critical rationality—and consequently believing they’re better people as a result.

  I hope contemporary leftism will revert back to liberalism and be decoupled from relativism, subjectivity, multiculturalism, and the muddled thinking that emerges from extending dignity from people to ideas. Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and others have eloquently articulated the limits of new liberalism and the urgency to resuscitate classical and social liberalism so that it can again become a vibrant and effective change agent.

  FAITH-BASED CLAIMS IN THE CLASSROOM

  “When one pretends to know things one doesn’t know in science, one gets laughed at.”

  —Matt Thornton, community activist

  All thirty students in your introductory philosophy class studied diligently for their midterm.17 After all the exams are submitted, you inform your students that you’ll grade their tests using a Ouija board—that is, you’ll place your fingers on the planchette and spirits will divine their ideal grade.

  What reaction would this evoke? Anger? Perplexity? Bemusement?

  There will, of course, be two groups of students who think that this is a fantastic idea: those expecting a poor grade will hope that a roll of the dice might yield a passing grade, and the small few who actually believe the Ouija board as a reliable mechanism for producing fair grades. Everyone else will be astounded and will likely say so.

  This situation is similar to one in which professors find themselves when critiquing students’ reasoning, except that the current academic climate prevents us from saying so. This climate has made educators petrified to call into question a specific unreliable reasoning process—not just any unreliable process. Faith-based beliefs occupy a unique, coveted role protected by a cultural, social, and intellectual sheath of impenetrability.

  In the soft sciences (sociology, philosophy, anthropology, etc.), if a student states that she believes a proposition because it comports with her faith tradition, that statement—and the process that gave rise to it—is treated as if it’s a legitimate knowledge claim based upon unassailable logic. It is taken for granted that faith-based claims are invulnerable to criticism and immune from further questioning.

  This intellectual rigor mortis is not allowed to occur across all disciplines. Again, in the soft sciences, questioning a student’s belief-forming mechanism is taboo, but in the hard sciences (mathematics, chemistry, biology, etc.) challenging claims and questioning reasoning processes are intrinsic to what it means to teach students to reason effectively.

  To render what using faith would look like as a justification in t
he hard sciences, let’s look at a hypothetical, in-class discussion between a biology professor and her student:

  Professor: [X] happens when the influenza virus infects a cell.

  Student: Well, that’s not my theory.

  Professor: What is your theory?

  Student: [Y] happens.

  Professor: Why do you think that?

  Student: I have faith that my theory is correct.

  This one word, “faith,” is the end to rational discourse.

  In the soft sciences, educators pretend that rational dialogue has not been interrupted. Invoking faith as a justification for one’s conclusions is treated as protected and even privileged speech. The default position is to grant the believer moral respect and social legitimacy.

  This needs to end. Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across all academic disciplines.

  Faith is a process of attempting to know the world that will decrease the likelihood of coming to true conclusions, or in philosophical parlance, using faith will not yield warranted belief. One way we know this is that different faith traditions make competing claims and these claims cannot all be correct—yet they can all be false.

  Unfortunately, both in and out of the academy, faith is not merely viewed as a specious epistemology. Faith is cemented to an implicit, underlying moral edifice that grants it moral currency, and cultural and social legitimacy. What’s particularly interesting is that the elevated moral stature of faith is not just operating in the minds of the faithful; in education it’s become institutionalized in such a way that others, even those who don’t use faith as an epistemology, are forced to buy into the sanctity of faith-based reasoning.

  It is considered impolite, uncouth, offensive, coercive, abusive, and even antidemocratic for a professor to correct students’ faith-based claims. Yet it is expected that a professor will point out and even reprimand students if they voice antiegalitarian or race-based claims. (This indicates that there’s nothing in the professor-student power/authority relationship that makes calling students out on certain claims inherently coercive or abusive; rather, there are social, cultural, and even political factors at play as to which claims should be subject to scrutiny. This is an obvious double standard.)

  Educators in the soft sciences should adopt a pedagogical stance identical to the stance that’s essential in the hard sciences: Give faithbased justifications no countenance. Do not take faith claims seriously. Let the utterer know that faith is not an acceptable basis from which to draw a conclusion that can be relied upon. Invite students to present evidence, arguments, and reasons for their conclusions, but absent these tell students that their claims will not be taken seriously: Back to the Kid’s Table.

  Just as we know using a Ouija board is not a reliable process for assigning fair grades, educators should stand with the fact that faith-based claims are not an acceptable basis for drawing a reliable conclusion.

  BEYOND RELATIVISM

  Introduction

  Cognitive, epistemological, and moral relativism are toxins that students trained in the humanities regularly consume in large doses. They’re taught to withhold judgments on different epistemologies, cultural practices, and moral systems. Consequently, their ability to make critical evaluations has been severely damaged.

  Before faith can be exposed as a faulty epistemology, it’s vital to disabuse people of the relativist notion that any epistemology is either just as good as any other—a bizarre and contradictory “egalitarian relativism”—or that epistemologies are impossible to judge.

  The purpose of this section is to teach readers how to disabuse others of epistemological relativism. First, I’ll briefly describe the teaching experiences that pushed me to develop an antirelativism pedagogical template. Second, I’ll explain the template educators and Street Epistemologists can use to help individuals overcome epistemological relativism (see appendix C).

  “Well That’s Just True for You”

  When I started teaching critical thinking more than two decades ago, my attempts to undermine relativism were met with a common student refrain: “Well that’s just true for you.” Any argument I presented was either met with this this mantra, or with a similar utterance, “You perceive through your own cultural lens,” or “You can’t escape your Western, hegemonic, imperialistic, white male, situated perspective.” At first I was stymied by these responses. No matter what examples I presented, or what my reasoning was, I always met the same one-line “objections.”

  Over time—because of my experience teaching prison inmates, tens of thousands of students at colleges and universities throughout the country, and people on the street—I came to the conclusion that not only was this problem pervasive, but that it also made it impossible for me to teach people how to improve their reasoning. In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.

  For example, if I want to determine if I should visit an N.D. (Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine) to try a type of alternative medicine, or if I should visit a board certified M.D. to receive treatment based upon the paradigm of scientific evidence, I need to be able to develop some mechanism that I can rely upon that will lead me to the best answer to the question: which is better for my health? If I start with the conclusion that these are just different systems of medicine, and cannot be judged by the same metric, then I lose all motivation to formulate the mechanism by which I make a judgment. There’s no point in learning how to make more discerning judgments if what I’m judging cannot be judged, and if the mechanism by which I make these judgments is wholly subjective.

  For an educator, combating relativism is priority one. I spend the first thirty to sixty minutes of every class in a broadly Socratic discussion wherein I adhere to the template located in appendix C. I’ve made this process both simple and easy to use in hope educators and Street Epistemologists can readily use this tool in any discussion.

  Misconstruing Reality

  Pedagogically, it is possible to undo some of the damage students have suffered from contemporary academic leftism in thirty to sixty minutes. Depending on class size—this can be difficult with classes of more than one hundred students because it’s time consuming to field every student’s question—using this template as a model should help students escape relativism within the hour. In the five years I’ve used this template, I’ve yet to have a single student who (as far as I know) has not been disabused of epistemological relativism.

  Question 1: Is it possible that some people misconstrue reality? Most students will say “yes” or nod their heads. For those few who say “no,” or who look unsure, I ask, “If Fred thinks that two plus two is eighteen, and Sue thinks it’s forty-one, and if they both conceive of the operator in the same way, has someone misconstrued reality?” Not a single student will say “no.”

  Question 2: Do some people misconstrue reality? Question two moves from the possibility of misconstruing reality, to the fact that some individuals actually do misconstrue reality.

  It’s important at this stage that you do not provide examples—instead let students provide their own. Sadly, I had to figure this out on my own, but students relate more to examples given by other students, and much less to those given by the instructor. Fielding examples is usually the most time consuming of all of the stages; I spend about five to seven minutes eliciting and encouraging as many students as possible to contribute to this stage.

  There may be a few students—typically anthropology majors as their field is steeped in relativist dogma—for which this is a problematic concept. In these cases I’ll ask if anything is knowable, and then I’ll ask them to provide examples of things that are knowable and unknowable. Tautologies like those found in math and language (“A bachelor is an unmarried man”) are usually
sufficient for students to agree that some things are knowable. If this doesn’t work, then I bring up the fact that we’re having a conversation and even for them to disagree means that on some level they know what I’m talking about, thus meaning some things are knowable. This will usually propel even the most ardent relativist to the next stage and the next set of questions.

  Questions 3, 4, and statement 5: If one wants to know reality, is one process just as good as any other? So then are some processes bad? If so, this must mean some processes are good, or better. Now I provide my own examples.

  I avoid discussing faith. If faith does come up, I’ll say, “We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s just find unreliable processes that we can all agree upon.” I use blatantly unreliable processes like flipping coins and goat sacrifice. It’s very easy to get students to agree that flipping coins is not a reliable basis upon which they should make decisions—heads I’ll be a math major and tails I’ll be a dance major. I also elicit other processes that students think are unreliable.

  I segue into the next question by stating, “So if there are some processes that are bad, like flipping coins, that means that you can’t rely upon them. But in order for some processes to be bad, that must mean that other processes are good. By good I mean that one can rely upon them. As ‘bad’ is a relational word, it doesn’t make sense to speak of a process as bad unless there’s a process that’s good, right?”

  For those students who don’t think that “bad” is a relational word, I’ll discuss other relational words, like “stupid” or “delicious.” I’ll ask, “For someone to be considered stupid, doesn’t that mean there have to be people who are smart?” This is usually enough to carry the discussion forward. However, on rare occasions someone will get hung up on the word “bad.” I’ll explain that by a “bad process” I mean a process that takes one away from reality. If there’s still confusion, I’ll ask how they use the word “bad.” Their definition will usually comport with how I use the word “bad,” but if it does not, then I’ll borrow a line from Sam Harris and tell them that not only am I not sure how they’re using the word “bad,” but I don’t even think they know how they’re using the word “bad.” After a brief discussion about the word “bad,” I proceed to the next stage, with questions 6 and 7.