15 comments

1. Dee Posted about 22 hours later

   Wow, am I the first to dare...?

   Have you read any E. O. Wilson? I haven't yet but my better half tells me it's an interesting read and suggests to start with "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge".

2. Jordan Posted 1 day later

   No special insight but I wanted to share something. I was talking to someone yesterday about Christopher Hitchens and how odd it was that dying makes one seem more lovable to the media. Less than an hour later my girlfriend and I were watching Alan Jackson music videos and reminiscing about how hilariously awful he was. I decided to listen to "God Isn't Real" to fix what I had done to myself and then I remembered your blog. Seeing this post was curious.

   I guess I'll take a crack at this discussion, after all.

   The "certain omelette principle" comes close to a "possible worlds" scenario. An infinite amount of time and space leads to an infinite amount of possible scenarios in which an omniscient overseer would be necessary.

   One of the modern philosophers (I forget who) makes an empirical argument for God: There is nothing that humans can imagine that isn't based on elements that they are already familiar with in some way. It is impossible to imagine a color that you haven't observed. It is impossible to conjure anything that isn't based on your own empirical observation. God must be true, because nothing we know of allows for him to exist in the imagination.

   I don't support either of those arguments but they are interesting to think about.

3. Martin L Posted 4 days later

   Mr. Fulks,

   Big fan of your music.

   Not a big fan of Hitchens. I admit that I’ve only read small portions of his book; I was given it by a friend, and immediately came across such glaring historical inaccuracies, and so many misstatements of what it is that an intelligent theist believes, that it was clear that Hitches either doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time, or is purposely setting up straw men based on inaccurate statements to make his case. Frankly, I think he’s one of those types that takes it for granted that most readers don’t know enough about history and religion to take him to task. I think he’s rather a discredit to atheism.

   Also, much of his argument is utterly irrelevant to the question of theism. Whether theists believe silly things has nothing to do with whether theism itself is silly. A person may believe that, in a right triangle on a flat plane, the sum of the squares of the legs equals the square of the hypotenuse; that same person may believe that the moon is made of cheese. Someone doubting the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem can go on at length as to the stupidity of the belief regarding the cheesy moon, but it matters not. Similarly, it matters not whether Christians, Muslims, et al. believe silly things. Every person on the planet believes silly things. One could find atheists who believe in the power of crystals or in astrology, and that would have no bearing at all on the prudence of their atheism.

   Moreover, “the failures of prophecy and prayer as against the successes of the scientific method” also has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth or falsity of theism. I would not so readily dismiss the “failure” of prayer—if one goes to an AA meeting, one will likely find some folks who have some pretty powerful things to say about prayer. But again, it’s simply irrelevant. There is no inherent inconsistency as between theism and science at all—as evidenced by the fact that many of the world's greatest scientists were ardent theists. Compare Darwin (a dilettante as a scientist, frankly, an arm-chair dabbler who was fortunate to never have to actually earn a living) with Gregor Mendel, who assiduously ran repeatable experiments and made hypotheses that could be tested and retested, and proved or disproved. Mendel’s contribution to our understanding of genetics and evolution was far greater than Darwin’s (even if we allow that Darwin did not steal his ideas from Wallace). Mendel was a Catholic Monk. His theism obviously did not hinder his use of the scientific method. Similarly, Galileo stood on the shoulders of Copernicus, who was the first to speculate about a heliocentric solar system, and who was also a Catholic cleric. The notion that theism is in competition with science, or vice versa, only works if a fundamentalist uses revelation as a source of scientific truths. A very, very small percentage of rather nutty theists do this, to be sure, but there is nothing whatsoever inherent in the idea of theism that points in this direction. (For one thing, theism does NOT even imply revelation.)

   It does not matter how silly a certain group of believers might be--their stupidity does not lend support to the "no God" proposition. There is only one argument in favor of atheism—“If there is a Good God, why all the suffering?” (The argument that there is no evidence for the existence of God turns out to rely on a very restrictive notion of what counts as evidence—even the scientists who believe in the weak force, the strong force, dark energy, dark matter, and unseen dimensions believe in things they cannot see; they reason from effects back to causes, and the theist who reasons from effects back to causes, as we do in science, has plenty of clues to point to.)

   Against the atheist’s argument based on suffering, the theist on the other side asks, “If this is no Good God, why all the beauty and order and joy?” The only rational question in the atheism/theism debate is, which of these two views has the better side of it?

   The theist has a point, as you suggest, that the explanation of the order is a challenge—but the analogy of the omelet misses the most important aspect of the matter. To have a reality in which there exist beings who are capable of self reflection, of rendering truths about the universe itself, is a very difficult thing to explain from an atheistic standpoint. The atheist says, in effect, “I am a conscious being capable not just of adapting in a mechanical way to a set of stimuli, but also capable of reflecting on data, and choosing of my own free will which conclusions I shall draw, and I believe that what conclusions I draw in my own head actually reflect real truths about the world outside my head, and indeed outside my galaxy.” That turns out to be a very difficult set of affairs to explain in an atheistic universe. If our brains are the product of random events, and are mere adaptive mechanisms that chance and random evolution have coughed up at this point in time, there is very little reason to believe that these organs generate actual truths about ultimate realities.

   One can throw in time and an infinite number of possible universes—but this does not solve the problem. One is told that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters will someday produce Hamlet—it turns out that this is not necessarily so. It doesn’t matter how many monkeys you have; for each monkey, the chances that he will type Hamlet are so infinitesimally small that it is impossible for any single monkey to do it. But the larger point is that Hamlet by accident is not Hamlet. Hamlet is not just a series of ink symbols strung along on pieces of paper. The product of a monkey acting at random is not at all the same thing as an intentional work of art attempting to express universal truths to fellow human beings. You can’t explain the jump from inert matter to a consciousness claiming to understand reality.

   (Some atheists have recognized the problem and have tried to deny the existence of consciousness and free will—which then makes it impossible for them to explain why they “chose” to believe their own theories, if they have no free will.)

   There have been extensive efforts to stretch evolution to solve this problem—and since few people understand evolution very well, it’s easy to use it as a sort of black box that generates easy answers, particularly if you throw in "billions of years" into the mix. It doesn’t work, though, as evolution doesn't tell us how a truth-telling brain might come about, but only an adaptive brain. A brain from evolution can tell us where to find food and how to flee danger. It might even tell us how to build a bridge over a river. But it cannot generate a brain that reflects upon experience to generate abstract truths about the origins of life. A considerable about of intellectual gymnastics has been invested in the attempt to show how skill with metaphysics and cosmology might be a positively selected evolutionary trait, but these efforts are mostly laughable and completely results-oriented.

   In the end, how do we account for the belief that our brains are machines that can discern ultimate truths? Not easily one. It’s not just an omelet that’s been produced, but a self-conscious omelet capable of reasoning about the nature of omelets. If you believe that we are beings capable of telling truths—even the truth, “there is no God”—that cannot be explained by any atheistic view. (As Chesterton said, “It is an act of faith to assume that our thoughts bear any relation at all to reality.”) The atheist can only shrug and say, “Hey, there’s lots we can’t explain.” But the problem is a bit like Epimenides' paradox about the Cretan who says, "All Cretans are liars." If what the atheist says is true, and there is no God, then what reason do we have to believe the atheist? Why should we believe that any statement generated by a being produced at random in a meaningless universe governed by chance actually has the capability to express real truths about the nature of reality?

   So, really, to be fair to the theist, his position is, “If there is no God, how does one explain a reality that has generated beings capable of explaining reality?” It’s a fair question.

   As for the atheist, and his reliance on suffering, he asserts that a Good God would not allow suffering. But on what basis? It is typically assumed by the atheist that this is self-evident, but it is not. (Also, it goes without saying that it would not be a very “scientific” approach to the subject if the key foundation to the atheist’s worldview rests only on assumption.)

   On what possible basis do we know what a Good God would or would not allow? We have run no experiments that generate this sort of information. He have not put a God in a parallel universe into a test tube and run the data.

   It is not at all self-evident that a loving God would not allow suffering. A loving God might well allow suffering for lots or reasons--if that suffering was capable of being erased, for example. For all we know, maybe we shall wake up from this reality into one of those other dimensions we’re told to believe in by the scientists. The scientists also tell us that the vast majority of the energy and matter in the universe are “dark” energy or matter that we are not able to perceive—perhaps the child victim of cancer that you mourn in your song shall awake from the disease the same way you and I always wake up from nightmares with no lasting effect. Maybe the kid lives happily ever after.

   I have no idea whether this happens or not. The point is, the atheist, in order for his argument from suffering to work, must assert that earthly suffering is the end of the story, or this assumed inconsistency fails. For the atheist to assume that the existence of suffering is inconsistent with the existence of a Good God, he must necessarily assert that the kid with cancer shall never exist happily in some other dimension, and that the bad of the cancer shall never be recompensed for the child. How can one know this? Of course, one cannot. One must acknowledge that, in the end, we have no clue whether suffering is inconsistent with the existence of God.

   In the end, the position of the theist is much more rational. At least he doesn’t have difficulty explaining his own self-conscious, freely willing self. Moreover, his method, reasoning on the basis of the perceived nature of the universe to posit the existence of an ordering and creating fountain of reality, has a much more “scientific” and fact-based approach that the atheist who simply points to the dying child and asserts without any basis that no God would allow such a thing.

   I tried to be an atheist, but ultimately found that the internal inconsistency (considering my self a truth-generating being in a reality fundamentally governed by chance), and the lack of any real substantiating underlying the argument from suffering, were much less rational than the position of the theist.

   Thanks,

   Martin

4. Dan Holway Posted 5 days later

   Mr. Luther (above) seems to have settled the issue. Atheists have no good arguments (okay, one almost good one that is easily swatted away), and the theists are the rational ones.

5. Matthew Posted 5 days later

   Wow!!! All I can say is after reading all this, I have officially have my mind BLOWN!!!!!!!!! Very interesting to read these comments from people who are way smarter than me. Thanks though it was really interesting to get some ideas from other people on God or lack there of.

6. Dan Sampson Posted 11 days later

   This is an interesting albeit fruitless debate- neither side can actually PROVE anything in my opinion- so I'll add my insignificant thought.

   The lasted Steven Hawking book, The Grand Design, addresses some of the above issues from a more scientific and less philosophical manner. In short, Hawking co-author Leonard Mlodinow postulate that a Creator is not necessary for the Big Bang which is "a consequence" of the laws of physics alone. Further, the authors state the our universe of one an infinite number that simultaneously co-exist, aka the multiverse.

   Of course this makes no sense to me but the notion that the multiverse, universe, Earth, us can be explained by laws instead of miracles is very attractive. Why? Physics don't make moral judgments and don't have the baggage that most religious creation myths do; physics seem to have fewer all to human fingerprints.

   Whatever!

   Always enjoy the well written posts (from a guy who writes about Scrapple amongst other things) and the usually well written responses.

7. henry Posted 11 days later

   I think there is a normal human tendency to ascribe a supernatural cause to that which we cannot understand.
   Thus, ages ago, man would experience lightning or earthquakes or monsoons and attribute these things to the work of gods. In the 21-st century world, most natural phenomena have been explained by science. Natural causes for those events are all largely understood. There are a few big questions, though, which we can't quite wrap our heads around and answer - things like the fabric of reality in which the universe arose, and the seeming order contained within that universe, and how a conscious mind can arise from a physical brain. I think that to look at these sorts of things and assume they can only be explained by god is to lapse back into the usual human tendency to assume supernatural cause for otherwise unexplainable phenomena. However, as these are all natural phenomena, a natural rather than supernatural cause must exist; it may take centuries more thought to get to the bottom of some of these questions, and it's possible that there are some questions that the limited human intellect may not be able to answer fully, but I think it is certainly reasonable to assume natural cause for all seemingly unexplainable natural events.

8. Reverend Ike Posted 11 days later

   What to say? Martin has certainly made a most excellent answer. I'm curious, Robbie, if you have read as many theist writings as atheist. A tour of Augustine's Confession is well worth your time.

   A telling point that is that "Lennox was straying into the "why" region into which science stoutly refuses to trespass." It is the "why" question that makes us human. Why do we seek justice and attempt, however feebly, to relieve suffering? Why do we love or sacrifice (or hate and hoard, for that matter).

   When you make the assumption that humans are born neutral and then rationally choose good and bad behaviors, you're already headed for a cul-de-sac. For the good die, and the bad die, and, absent an intelligent, loving creator, there is no purpose. You can live for a succession of moments, as the chick-lit writers would have us do, but those will all be forgotten, most likely long before the grave.

   Scripture tells us that we are born in sin - a state of unrighteousness before our creator God. The suffering and misery we experience (to varying and unfairly distributed degrees) are the fruits of unrighteousness. God is not observing neutral parties fumble through life and assigning points and demerits. He is, through Christ, saving his people from the just penalty of sin.

   I could go on and on, but I'm lazy. If you haven't already, read Romans, read Ecclesiastes, read Pilgrim's Progress. Take up and read.

   Thanks for inviting this argument on your board. You're one of the most brilliant artists and humans I've "met." Now, I've got to go to justinbieber.com to see his refutation of Selena Gomez' "First Base, Second Base" hypothesis.

9. Martin L. Posted 13 days later

   In re the above reference to Hawking's new book, what I find interesting is that these scientists like Hawking and Dawkins, who have training in one field, have so little trepidation about making assertions in fields they know nothing about. They get into the same sort of trouble Einstein did. He rejected quantum physics by making a theological assertion about how God behaves (refusing to believe that God 'rolled dice' with the universe, as he put it), and he proposed his idiotic cosmological constant merely to prop up his assumption that the universe had to be static. You see this frequently—scientists not being very scientific, and not applying rigor to their own discussions of larger issues.

   Hawking is not even as thoughtful about these things as Einstein was, and his fundamental errors are even more laughable. One thing that Einstein at least recognized, and Hawking seems insensitive to, is the limits of science and scientists. Einstein had to watch in horror as most of the best scientists in Germany signed up to help the Nazis. As he put it in an interview with Time magazine, “Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . . Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”

   Now, compare that with the trite formulation of Hawking: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

   What authority is he talking about, I wonder? As Stalin famously asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?” And science will win what? Is there a race here? Or some sort of competition?

   What most people fail to realize is that the big contests between religion and science that most people think about were in reality nothing of the sort. Galileo was not silenced by enemies within the ranks of the theologians; he was patronized and supported by the Church, for the most part. If you really look at the dynamic, you realize that where he got into trouble was with his fellow scientists who felt threatened by his theories, who had entire careers invested in the Ptolemaic system, and they’re the ones that brought him down.

   I digress--this latest silly non-scientific pronouncement from Hawking, wherein he asserts that the universe created itself out of nothing, is absurd: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

   [Why, pray tell, does Hawking capitalize Universe the same way that Sagan used to capitalize Cosmos, as if a common noun referring to a person?]

   Hawking is either too dumb at non-scientific things to recognize his simple mistakes, or he is trying to pull a fast one here and thinks the rest of us are too stupid to think logically: obviously his nothing isn’t nothing. His “nothing” is an entire set of finely tuned pre-existing physical laws that govern the interactions of all energy and matter. As one scientist/priest put it, “It has a specific constant associated with it and specific characteristics, and it has specific effects on mass-energy and even on space-time itself. This is a very curious definition of 'nothing'. . . . [Hawking] has clearly not explained why there is something rather than nothing. He has only explained that something comes from something.”

   And it’s much worse than that, if I understand the matter correctly. He is asserting that there is a law of gravity that existed in some sense prior to the self-generation of our universe filled with mass/energy. But this is either rhetorical sleight of hand, or a fundamental misunderstanding of what a scientific “law” is. There is no “Law” of gravity out there stamped on reality. This so-called “law” is simply a description that we have put on the interactions that we see among mass objects, and our understand of these phenomena might well change considerably in the future, causing this so-called “law” to change considerably to better reflect the data. The law is a simply a descriptive norm that was generated by the data. It’s like the law of voter turnout in national elections—it’s always lower in off-year elections. Now, planets may behave in ways that are more predictable than electorates, but that doesn’t mean that the “law” of gravity has any more independent reality to it than the law of voter turnout. It just means that the “law” of gravity is a more useful and reliable descriptive tool.

   Worse, to assert that this so-called "law of gravity" exists independent of matter/energy is a very strange assertion indeed. How could he say such a thing? Not only is there no evidence for such a strange assertion, but the very notion is idiotic. We speak of a “law” of gravity because all bits of matter perceivable by us display a gravitational field. This does not mean that gravity is or was “out there” waiting for matter to come into existence. The assertion that all of the laws of physical reality existed prior to the generation of physical reality itself is downright bizarre. It is like saying that the law of voter turnout in national elections exists independent of the existence of voters. It is like saying that the smell of coffee existed before coffee trees evolved, or that the sound of a piano predated the existence of pianos. Obviously there was no "law of gravity" around before there was any mass object around to have a gravitational field!

   This is really dumb stuff. I don't understand why these silly arguments against theism aren't immediately subject to the ridicule they deserve. My guess it that people are just intimidated by folks who are good at math, as if they must know what they're talking about if they're good at quadratic equations.

   Sorry to run on so--thanks, Robbie, for letting us comment.
   

10. Larry Sellers Posted 14 days later

    I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

    Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

    To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

    The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

    So it goes. In the end the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing—as, frankly, do all the books in this new genre—and I have to say I find this all somewhat depressing. For one thing, it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. In part, of course, this is because the modern media encourage only fragmentary, sloganeering, and emotive debates, but it is also because centuries of the incremental secularization of society have left us with a shared grammar that is perhaps no longer adequate to the kinds of claims that either reflective faith or reflective faithlessness makes.

    The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

    But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?

    I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds
    of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

    But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism.” Hume, for instance, never traded one dogmatism for another, or one facile certitude for another. He understood how radical were the implications of the skepticism he recommended, and how they struck at the foundations not only of unthinking faith, but of proud rationality as well.

    A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

    If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.

    What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

    The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments, as well as an ability to refute them. Curiously enough, however, not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this. And this is, as far as I can tell, as much a result of indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian. He scarcely bothers even to get the traditional “theistic” arguments right, and the few ripostes he ventures are often the ones most easily discredited.

    As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

    Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

    The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

    It is immaterial whether one is wholly convinced by such reasoning. Even its most ardent proponents would have to acknowledge that it is an almost entirely negative deduction, obedient only to something like Sherlock Holmes’ maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It certainly says nearly nothing about who or what God is.

    But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress. It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew. And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.

    But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?

    Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.

    To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely. He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.

    On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).

    In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?

    As best I can tell, Hitchens’ case against faith consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it turns out to be the major premise that is missing, so it is hard to guess what links the minor premise to the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out some of his arguments in traditional syllogistic style to see the difficulty:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a bastard, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.

    Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.

    Or:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: There are many bad men who are Buddhists.

    Conclusion: All religious claims are false.

    Or:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed
    smallpox vaccinations.

    Conclusion: There is no God.

    One could, I imagine, counter with a series of contrary enthymemes. Perhaps:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: Early Christians built hospitals.

    Conclusion: “Religion” is a good thing.

    Or:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: Medieval scriptoria saved much of the literature of classical antiquity from total eclipse.

    Conclusion: All religious claims are true.

    Or:

    Major Premise: [omitted]

    Minor Premise: George Bernard Shaw opposed smallpox vaccinations.

    Conclusion: There is a God.

    But this appears to get us nowhere. And, in the end, I doubt it matters.

    The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

    Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

    Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

    For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

    Perhaps; perhaps not. Where Nietzsche was almost certainly correct, however, was in recognizing that mere formal atheism was not yet the same thing as true unbelief. As he writes in The Gay Science, “Once the Buddha was dead, people displayed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense and dreadful shadow. God is dead: —but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millennia yet where people will display his shadow. And we—we have yet to overcome his shadow!” It may appear that Nietzsche is here referring to “persons of faith”—those poor souls who continue to make their placid, bovine trek to church every week to worship a God who passed away long ago—but that is not his meaning.

    He is referring principally to those who think they have eluded God simply by ceasing to believe in his existence. For Nietzsche, “scientism”—the belief that the modern scientific method is the only avenue of truth, one capable of providing moral truth or moral meaning—is the worst dogmatism yet, and the most pathetic of all metaphysical nostalgias. And it is, in his view, precisely men like the New Atheists, clinging as they do to those tenuous vestiges of Christian morality that they have absurdly denominated “humanism,” who shelter themselves in caves and venerate shadows. As they do not understand the past, or the nature of the spiritual revolution that has come and now gone for Western humanity, so they cannot begin to understand the peril of the future.

    If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche’s unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling. For a short time I entertained the misguided hope that he might produce an atheist manifesto somewhat richer than the others currently on offer. Unfortunately, all his efforts in that direction suffer from the same defects as those of his fellows: the historical errors, the sententious moralism, the glib sophistry. Their great virtue, however, is that they are mercifully short. One essay of his in particular, called “Religion and Reason,” can be read in a matter of minutes and provides an almost perfect distillation of the whole New Atheist project.

    The essay is even, at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that “an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.” Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

    Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

    Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

    David Hart’s most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.
    

11. Dee Posted 24 days later

    "If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure." [Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge]

12. Martin L. Posted 24 days later

    EO Wilson is the perfect example of a knucklehead who thinks doing his work in his little tiny field entitles him to opine on the great mysteries of theology and philosophy. The guy's specialty is studying ants. That's what he did for decades, and he's not bad at studying ants. At making pronouncements on religion, his qualifications are . . . well, what does one learn about religion from studying ants? Not much, I suspect. I would expect that studying ants gives one insights into matters religious to about the same degree that studying pumpkins gives one insights into the Expressionist movement.

    And yet, why don't people recognize that the man knows absolutely nothing about religion or philosophy? Strange.

    I have rationally concluded that the universe bears the mark of a creator. I have also rationally concluded that atheism is self-contradictory, as in a Godless universe a being such as a human could not come to be that was capable of perceiving universal truths about the nature of creation. EO Wilson, after years of studying ants, states that my views on the existence of a creator are determined by evolution. I wonder how he knows this to be true. Is this because ants aren't religious and humans are? (For that matter, how does he know ants aren't religious? Does he speak with them?)

    So does this mean that an atheist is less evolved than a theist, or vice versa? Does this mean that an atheist believes there is no God because evolution made him conclude that? Is his God gene mutant or something?

    If I reach a rational conclusion about the likely existence of a creator, and I reach a rational conclusion about the structure of DNA, both of these mental events are reflected in neurotransmitters firing in my brain--and EO Wilson somehow knows that when my brainwaves shoot around impulses pertaining to the creator, the process is evolutionarily determined, but when the same brain cells fire impulses pertaining to DNA, evolution has nothing to do with it.

    Okay, I don't mean to be disrespectful to those who enjoy reading Professor Wilson, but that strikes me as flat out silly.

    Does Wilson think that HIS views on the existence of a God have been rammed into his head by evolution, or just us lesser folks who haven't had access to the insights provided by intensive study of ants?

    Really, EO Wilson should stick to his ants, just like Hawking needs to stick to his black holes.

    The interest in the "evolution" of a so-called God gene, the notion that a person like me believes in God because evolution told me to, is one of those intellectual fads that is based upon not the slightest serious scientific evidence, but the silliest of conjectures, and the most laughable assertions. This from an article in the Science section of the New York Times last year (referring to Wilson and his theory): "It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group."

    So my conclusion as to the existence of God owes its origin to intense communal dancing and sustained rhythmic movement? (To the extent I ever engaged in such activities in my 20s, and I'm NOT saying that I did, God was not foremost in the minds of us intense communal dancers, as I recall . . . not that I have anything to recall.) The article continues, "A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view, that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000 years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. . . . Religion was. . . harnessed to vital practical tasks such as agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and harvested at the right time."

    Honestly, this reads like some satire in The Onion. There are two propositions here for the fair-minded among you to consider, mine and EO Wilson's.
    1. Whenever it was that humans gained the the ability to reason and became capable of making suppositions about the origins of the universe, they rationally hypothesized that its ordered nature reflects some ordered origin--i.e., a creator.
    2. Rhythmic exaltation built community cohesiveness, and this made people believe in God, which belief became a positively selected evolutionary trait because it helped people to remember when to plant seeds and pick the corn.

    You choose which seems the most plausible. Oh, wait. This is a question about God, right? Hmm. I guess you can't just choose which proposition makes sense. I almost forgot--you're not capable of choosing rationally about such things. You have a God Gene that tells you what to think. Glad that's settled. Now we can all get back to that communal rhythmic dancing we love so much.

13. Dee Posted 25 days later

    E.O. Wilson: The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans. Not that ants are in any sense much like humans, or any kind of a model for them; how could they be if all the colonies are females, and if they constantly are at war with one other? But the study of ants has informed science a great deal about the origins of altruistic behavior – that's what binds the colony together – and about the impact of a dominant animal group on the environment.

    Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years. So they're very interesting as subjects for ecological study, particularly about how abundant creatures affect the globe – which of course is something that we're doing – and therefore anything we can learn from that might shed light on the general principle.

    I'm just now reading Consilience. So far, I'm enjoying the book. I also read an interesting interview that was conducted about two years ago.
    http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/article903761.ece

    Hey Martin, your real name would happen to be Richard Lewontin? Ha! Naw, you probably consider him a knucklehead too. Cheers Martin, your posts are always an entertaining read.
    E.O Wilson isn't an atheist by the way.

14. Dee Posted 25 days later

    If we only knew where quarks came from...
    Trying to wrap my brain around the idea of the universe when it had zero size and was infinitely hot.

15. Dee Posted 2 months later

    Don't know if anyone revisits these blogs...but here you go.

    A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist

    Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

    Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

    Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

    This, is of course a spirituality issue, religion is a different matter. As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it. (Don’t murder anyone, doesn’t get a mention till number 6.)

    When confronted with anyone who holds my lack of religious faith in such contempt, I say, “It’s the way God made me.”

    But what are atheists really being accused of?

    The dictionary definition of God is “a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe.” Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6,000 years ago, historians have cataloged over 3700 supernatural beings, of which 2870 can be considered deities.

    So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say “Oh which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra?…” If they say “Just God. I only believe in the one God,” I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869.

    I used to believe in God. The Christian one that is.

    I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him.

    One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.

    I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing on the cross.

    I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God -– what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-­?fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­?fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

    But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

    Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

    Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

    But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

    So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f— you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine.

    “Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is -­? a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”

    You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.