A Manual for Creating Atheists (5 page)

1. There are different faith traditions.
   
2. Different faith traditions make different truth claims.
   
3. The truth claims of some faith traditions contradict the truth claims of other faith traditions. For example, Muslims believe Muhammad (570–632) was the last prophet (Sura 33:40). Mormons believe Joseph Smith (1805–1844), who lived after Muhammad, was a prophet.
   
4. It cannot both be the case that Muhammad was the last prophet and someone who lived after Muhammad was also a prophet.
   
5. Therefore:
   At least
   one of these claims
   must
   be false (perhaps both).
   

It is impossible to figure out which of these claims is incorrect if the tool one uses to do so is faith. As a tool, as an epistemology, as a method of reasoning, as a process for knowing the world, faith cannot adjudicate between competing claims (“Muhammad was the last prophet” versus “Joseph Smith was a prophet”). Faith cannot steer one away from falsehood and toward truth.

This is because faith does not have a built-in corrective mechanism. That is, faith claims have no way to be corrected, altered, revised, or modified. For example, if one has faith in the claim, “The Earth is 4,000 years old,” how could this belief be revised? If one believes that the Earth is 4,000 years old on the basis of faith, then there’s no evidence, reason, or body of facts one could present to dissuade one from belief in this claim.
¹³

The
only
way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence.
There is no other way
.

THE DANGER OF FAITH

“No amount of belief makes something a fact.”

—
James Randi

The pretending-to-know-things-you-don’t-know pandemic hurts us all. Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities. Those who believe on the basis of insufficient evidence create external conditions based upon what they think is in their best interest, but this is actually counterproductive. In the United States, for example, public policies driven by people who pretend to know things they don’t know continue to hurt people: abstinence-only sex education, prohibitions against gay marriage, bans on death with dignity, corporal punishment in schools, failure to fund international family planning organizations, and promoting the teaching of Creationism and other pseudosciences are but a few of the many misguided conclusions wrought by irrationality.

The less one relies on reason and evidence to form conclusions, the more arbitrary the conclusion. In aggregate, conclusions that result from a lack of evidence can have incredibly dangerous consequences. The Taliban, for example, have rooted their vision of a good life on the Koran. By acting on what they perceive to be divine injunctions revealed to God’s Prophet, they think they’re creating a good life and a good society. They are not.
^14
15
Consequently, the conclusions they act upon—covering women and beating them, beheading people who have rival interpretations of the Koran or who act in ways they deem un-Islamic, perpetrating violence against females who seek an education, denying citizens basic freedoms, executing people for blasphemy—take them away from a good life. They’ve misidentified
the process
that will allow their community to flourish because they’ve identified and used faith, not evidence and reason, as a guide.

How do we know the society the Taliban created has not led to human flourishing? By virtually every modern metric: exports versus imports, literacy, economic aid, public health, life expectancy, infant mortality, household income, GDP, Happy Planet Index, etc. Afghanistan under the Taliban was an unmitigated catastrophe. It is not in anyone’s interest, particularly the people who live under their tyranny, to have created a dystopian, premodern, misogynistic theocracy.
¹⁶
(If you don’t think they created a dystopia, or if you’re a relativist and think they created a society that’s merely different, not better or worse, from Denmark, for example, then there’s nothing I can say to you. Nothing I write in this book will persuade you.)

The vast majority of people use faith to understand the world, to guide their actions, and to ground their institutions. Nation-states like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran adhere to Islamic law (sharia) as the basis for state law. This is a problem that would be unimaginable in its scope and severity were it not for the fact that we’re currently witnesses to this epistemic horror show, such as the beheading of homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, and apostates and radically disproportionate treatment of individuals based upon their gender.

Yet there is hope. Faith is slowly falling into disrepute. The forces of unreason are diminishing in number. Thousands of new Horsemen, Street Epistemologists, are emerging.

DIG DEEPER

Books

Sam Harris,
The End of Faith
(Harris, 2004)

Stephen Law,
Believing Bullshit
(Law, 2011)

John W. Loftus,
The Outsider Test for Faith
(Loftus, 2013)

Michael Shermer,
The Believing Brain
(Shermer, 2011)

Al Stefanelli,
A Voice Of Reason in an Unreasonable World: The Rise of Atheism On Planet Earth
(Stefanelli, 2011)

Victor Stenger,
God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion
(Stenger, 2012)

Lawrence Wright,
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
(Wright, 2013)

Videos

Peter Boghossian,“Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions: Just Say No!”
http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2012/02/14/Jesusthe-Easter-Bunny-and-Other-Delusions-Just-Say-No.aspx

Peter Boghossian, “Faith: Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know,”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4WUFXvCFQ

Jerry Coyne, “Why Science and Faith Are Incompatible: My Talk in Edinburgh,”
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/why-science-and-faith-are-incompatible-my-talk-in-edinburgh/

QualiaSoup’s YouTube channel, “UK Secular Humanist Discussing: Science & the Natural World, Critical Thinking, Atheism, Philosophy, Religion,”
http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup

The Atheist Experience, “The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. Every week we field live calls from atheists and believers alike, and you never know what you’re going to get!”
http://www.atheistexperience.com

Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel, “The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies,”
http://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t

NOTES

1. The Book of Alma is one of the books in the Book of Mormon. The complete title is “The Book of Alma: The Son of Alma.”
   

   Religious belief is very often defended through the use of clever semantics. There are some important things to note about these dodges. When a person of faith is questioned over one or more specific, illogical tenets of their belief, they often respond with, “Well, of course I don’t believe that,” leaving the Street Epistemologist at a disadvantage since the believer continues to profess their unaltered faith-based belief regardless. If pressed further, the believer will either respond with deepities or with a somewhat different version of “why” they continue to believe despite a lack of evidence. This entrenched position results in a cycle of indefinite repetition. My sense is that those who use meaningless words to protect their emotional ties to faith are engaging in self-deception. (This type of “conversation” is not twosided; it is a monologue masquerading as a dialogue.)
   

   The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them nonliterally. This type of cognitive disruption does not bode well in the search for truth.
   

   What nearly all
   sophisticated
   believers do is simultaneously deceive themselves while alternating between two stances: they absolutely don’t believe in
   that
   —of course he didn’t walk on water—while voicing unflappable conviction about
   this
   —the world was created by a higher power. When defending epistemically, they characterize the belief as not literally requiring the existence of a Special Person (“God loves us” means “Love is important,” “Love prevails in the end,” etc.), but then as soon as they have satisfied the epistemic challenge, they reframe the belief more literally (“God loves us” means “There is a Special Person who loves us”).
   

   I think this latter issue is far more important to address than critics of faith realize, and it is probably a more common phenomenon (not limited to intellectuals) than one might think. It is at least a part of what the believer is doing when replying to criticism by simply and mysteriously saying, “You just don’t understand.” The other part is, “You lack detailed familiarity with the culture, history, and theology of my religion.”
   

   This is a separate issue, and is often enough true, though the response to that is like replying to someone who points out
   Star Trek
   is fiction by saying, “You wouldn’t say that if you had the detailed and rich experience of being a Trekkie that I have,” which is, of course, absurd.
   

2. Hebrews 11 defines faith, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence [elenchus] of things not seen.” What is interesting is the use of the term “elenchus” in this passage.
   

   “Elenchus” in Homer (8th century) is variously: to put to shame, to treat with contempt, to question with the aim of disproving, with the aim of censure, accusation, to accuse someone and perhaps to convict him—oftentimes in uses where superior officers dress down rank and file soldiers. In courts of law the term is also used: to bring charges, to bring accusations, but also to bring proofs, evidence, to offer convincing proofs. Pre-Socratics like Parmenides (early 5th century) use it as Socrates does: as argument, scrutiny, cross-examination for the purpose of refutation or disproof.
   

   In Koine, the verb
   elencho
   is “I accuse, rebuke, reprove,” and also “I expose, I show to be guilty, I prove” (in the sense of putting the lie to a public statement). It’s in John 3:20; 1 Cor 14:24; Eph. 5:11, 13; James 2: 9. Souter’s Lexicon of the New Testament lists elenchus as “proof, possibly a persuasion” (Souter, 1917). This evidence points to a straightforward fact: in the Apostolic Age, the word elenchus expands in an important new context to take on the sense that is on stage in Hebrews 11, that is, people began using the word in a new way. They advocated, practiced, and helped make a success of using the word “elenchus.” Socrates used this term to indicate a rigorous process of argumentation by strict application of logic. In the new sense elenchus is used as conviction or persuasion or some other species of willing and satisfied affirmation—without argument—without going through the Socratic process of rigorous argumentation.
   

   Socrates earned the right to claim a conclusion from philosophical examination. The anonymous author of Hebrews writes instead that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction or persuasion (elenchus) of things not seen. If Socrates were to hear this phrase, I imagine he’d say, “This may be conviction, but it is not an argument, not a crossexamination and test by scrutiny, but is a jump without any justification—without proof, and without earning it. Where is the virtue in this?”
   

3. For more, see American mathematician James A. Lindsay’s, “Defining Faith via Bayesian Reasoning” (Lindsay, 2012). Lindsay provides a cogent analysis of faith using Bayes’ theorem.
   
4. The exceptions to this are those people who are not pretending. These individuals are either delusional, or they’re victims of a wholesale lack of exposure to alternative ideas and different epistemologies. In the latter case, many people in the Islamic world fall into this category. For example, most of the people in Saudi Arabia are not pretending to know something they don’t know about the Koran. They’ve never encountered nor been given an opportunity to genuinely engage in competing ways of understanding reality. In a very real sense, they’re epistemological victims. Additionally, anyone reared by fundamentalist parents deserves credit for the exceptional struggle from indoctrination to enlightenment.
   
5. A recent move by apologists is to avoid the use of the word “faith” entirely, and instead to use the word “trust.” Given that the word “faith” is inherently problematic, I think this is an excellent strategy. The counter to this, however, is identical: “Without sufficient evidence how do you know what to trust?” If the response is, “There’s sufficient evidence,” then your reply should be, “Then you don’t need faith.”
   
6. In this vein, I’ve also heard faith defined as, “An attitude about things we don’t know.” When asked to spell out the nature of this attitude, it seems to be a kind of confidence or assurance or untroubled conviction, which in normal parlance is what we associate with the attitude of a person who has adequate justification for saying, “I know.”
   

   The problem with defining faith as “an attitude about things we don’t know” is that it functions in exactly the same way as an attitude about things we do know. From a critical perspective the question is, “How can an attitude that does not have sufficient justification to warrant belief work in the same way as an attitude that flows from actually having sufficient justification to warrant belief?” And the straightforward answer is: it cannot.
   

   Because people adopt this kind of attitude it’s therefore fair game to call them on this and say, “You are not justified in this assurance or conviction that you have. And the fact that you are not worried about it shows that you have not aimed your intellectual honesty at this attitude—in fact, you seem to be afraid or unwilling to do this—when the honest thing would be to say, ‘My faith is not like knowledge, it is not justified, but is something else … maybe (charitably) a choice.’”
   

7. An alternative definition of “atheist” is: a person who doesn’t pretend to know things he doesn’t know with regard to the creation of the universe.
   
8. Some noted atheists, like American historian Richard Carrier, view atheism as an identity (Carrier, 2012). Others, like Horseman Sam Harris, do not. My opinion is that self-identification as an atheist is a personal choice. (Personally, I’m more interested in balancing my home and work lives, or in getting a full night of sleep.)
   

   I am frequently asked if atheism is part of my identity. My answer is always, “No.” As odd as it may seem, given this book, my career, and my speaking engagements, atheism is not a part of my identity. My lack of belief in leprechauns is also not part of my identity. I don’t define myself by what I don’t believe or what I don’t do. I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t practice tai chi. The lack of tai chi in my life is also not part of my identity.
   

   I do not define myself in terms of opposition to other people: I don’t refer to myself as an atheist even though the vast majority of people do not consider themselves atheists.
   

   When friends who are atheists come to our home, we don’t sit around talking about the fact that there’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in God. We also don’t talk about the fact that we don’t do tai chi. I don’t identify as an atheist because nothing extra-epistemological is entailed by the fact that I do my best to believe on the basis of evidence. Neither my reasoning nor my conclusion about the probability of a divine creator means I’m a good guy, or I’m kind to my dog, or I’m a patient father, or I have an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, or I’m fun to have at a party, or I am good at jiu jitsu. If “good critical thinker” were to be substituted with “atheist,” then perhaps it would be clear that atheism entails nothing beyond the fact that one doesn’t believe there’s sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God.
   

   Whether a person is an atheist or a believer is immaterial with respect to morality, and yet, moral ascriptions are frequently made to atheists and to the faithful. For example, currently there’s a (hopefully) short-lived movement called Atheism+. Among Atheism+’s tenets are social justice, support for women’s rights, protesting against racism, fighting homophobia and transphobia, critical thinking, and skepticism (McCreight, 2012). The problem with this is, as Massimo Pigliucci writes, “a-theism simply means that one lacks a belief in God(s)… . That lack of belief doesn’t come with any positive position because none is logically connected to it” (Pigliucci, 2012). Many people try to make atheism into something it’s not. Atheism is not about racism, homophobia, or not practicing tai chi; it’s simply about not having enough evidence to warrant a belief in God. Atheism is about epistemology, evidence, honesty, sincerity, reason, and inquiry.
   

   Finally, perhaps because I don’t view atheism as an immutable characteristic, like eye color, I don’t consider it an identity. I’m willing to change my mind if I’m presented with compelling evidence for the existence of a God or gods. I can understand why many theists consider belief a part of their identity, as they often claim that they’re unwilling to change their minds. One may be more likely to consider something a part of one’s identity if it’s not subject to change.
   

9. In an e-mail I asked American physicist and best-selling author Dr. Victor Stenger where he places himself on the Dawkins’ God Scale. Vic replied, “8. It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of knowledge. I have knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no God” (personal correspondence, August 15, 2012). For more on why he thinks this, see
   God: The Failed Hypothesis
   (Stenger, 2007).
   
10. Aquinas’ five proofs: (1) motion (as nothing moves itself there must be a first, unmoved mover), (2) efficient causes (something must exist that is not caused), (3) possibility and necessity (because everything that’s possible to exist must not have existed at some point, then there must be something that necessarily exists), (4) gradation of being (because gradation exists there must be something that occupies the highest rung, perfection) (5) design (because natural bodies work toward some end, an intelligent being exists to which natural things are directed).
    

    For more on Pascal’s Wager, see footnote 11 in chapter 4.
    

    Anselm’s ontological argument, from
    Proslogion II
    : “Thus even the fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be conceived is in the understanding, since when he hears this, he understands it; and whatever is understood is in the understanding. And certainly that than which a greater cannot be conceived cannot be in the understanding alone. For if it is even in the understanding alone, it can be conceived to exist in reality also, which is greater. Thus if that than which a greater cannot be conceived is in the understanding alone, then that than which a greater cannot be conceived is itself that than which a greater can be conceived. But surely this cannot be. Thus without doubt something than which a greater cannot be conceived exists, both in the understanding and in reality.”
    

    For more on the fine-tuning argument, see footnote 5 in chapter 7.
    

    For more on the Kal
    m cosmological argument, see footnote 3 in chapter 7.
    

11. One of my Arts and Sciences colleagues asked me, “If faith doesn’t have the earmarks of an epistemology, why call it an epistemology? For an epistemology to be an epistemology, must empirical evidence play a significant role?” What he was getting at was that with faith, because empirical evidence does not play a role (or as philosophers say, faith “fails to satisfy the conditions” of an epistemology), why call it an epistemology?
    

    There are many epistemologies, like rationalism and pragmatism, which do not rely upon empirical evidence. Descartes, for example, has a rationalist epistemology. For Descartes, reason by itself without any experience of the world is a source of knowledge. I don’t have to go out in the world—I can be a brain in a vat attached by electrodes to a computer, and just from the process of thought alone I can come to knowledge about the world. That’s basically a rationalist position. Hume, Locke, and Berkeley would deny that position and respond, “No, by itself reason can organize experience but it’s not a source of knowledge about experience. There’s only one source of knowledge about experience and that is empirical content, an encounter via the senses with the physical empirical universe.”
    

    Historically, Kantians are yet another school. Their position is that both rationalism and empiricism are correct in different ways. For Kant, concepts without experience are empty but experience without concepts is blind; knowledge is a combination of the organizing function of the mind and sensory input.
    

    Then there’s the pragmatist school, fallibilism, and also intuitionist positions that allow for different kinds of knowledge. All of these schools define knowledge slightly differently.
    

    Faith is an epistemology because it is used as an epistemology. It is epistemology as use; people use faith as a way to know and interpret the world. For example, approximately a third of North Americans think the Bible is divinely inspired, and more than half think it’s the actual word of God (Jones, 2011). It’s a common belief among Americans that angels or spirits guided the hands (depicted by Caravaggio’s 1602 “Saint Matthew and the Angel”), or whispered in the ear (seen in Rembrandt’s 1661 “The Evangelist Matthew Inspired by an Angel,” Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s 1534 “Saint Matthew and the Angel,” and Guido Reni’s 1640 “St Matthew and the Angel”), of the Gospel writers. Consequently, the faithful root many of their beliefs in the authenticity of the Bible. That faith is unreliable, or discredited, only makes faith unreliable or discredited, it does not entail that faith is not an epistemology.
    

    Part of the confusion on the part of those who don’t use faith to navigate reality is that they understand that faith is an obviously unreliable process of reasoning. Consequently, they either don’t view faith as an epistemology, or they don’t think others
    really
    use it as an epistemology. They view it as something else, something weird, something other, something personal, something malicious, perhaps even something redemptive.
    

    But at its root, faith remains an epistemology. It is a process people use to understand, interpret, and know the world.
    

    Faith produces knowledge claims. Claims that arise out of epistemologies unmoored to reason are exactly like other claims that arise out of other epistemologies—they are assertions of truth about the world. Faith claims may be endemically flawed, bizarre, or highly implausible, but they are still knowledge claims.