Response to Critics + Richard Dawkins New Piece

Plus more on religion's intellectual benefits

It seems my last piece on the madness overtaking the atheists and my musings about the “intellectual benefits of faith” resonated with many of you. As expected, of course, there were also detractors.

In this post, I will broadly address why I feel many of them are missing the point, and detail my “floor/ceiling” model a bit more, so you should read that first.

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To start, I will reiterate what we have to face: The exact opposite of what some predicted has happened. There is an illogical and unscientific ideology rippling through our public institutions, and atheists and agnostics are more likely to believe in it than the religious. Worse, they don’t just accept it without question, they are highly intolerant of dissent.

This isn’t just true of “movement” atheism, this is true of atheists more broadly:

Credit: Pew Research Center

There are many reasons offered for why this particular irrationality has gone far with atheists (atheists are confusing gender with LGBT rights, atheists are reflexively opposing the religions, etc), but all have troubling implications of their own: Are atheists only rational when the religious are irrational? Can atheists be more vulnerable to social pressure than the religious? Are atheists more likely to blindly support new and untested theories than the religious?

Meanwhile, they do not explain why a commitment to “reason” and a (supposedly) greater understanding of biological science seemed to have no impact at all in preventing the madness in this population.

The great Richard Dawkins recently wrote a piece in the Spectator which, although not addressed to me and focused on a related but different theory, unfortunately also highlights the refusal to face the problem:

“An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” …..How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational.”

…Except in this case, that may be exactly what has happened! We are encountering evidence that the thing that is too insulting to presume might be true for anyone appears to be happening, and to exactly the people one might suspect would be most vulnerable.

In other words, reality is giving us feedback.

When I was knee-deep in ex-Muslim activism I would frequently encounter Muslims who denied the violence inherent in Islam by asserting something like “Islam means peace”, as if that was the end of it, as if somehow our repeated exposure to Islamic terror was invalid because some Quranic verse gave occasional lip service to the virtues of coexistence.

But we instinctively know to mistrust such claims. We know that nothing is more real than, well, reality, and the phenomenon of Islamic terror demanded an explanation, not a rebuttal. Similarly, the submission of the anti-dogma/pro-reason tribe to clear absurdities must be directly addressed, not dismissed with a scoff or an appeal to the possibility of a brighter secular future.

To be clear, like Dawkins, I have no “God-shaped hole”. I have missed very few aspects of faith and for the most part, enjoy my life and mind much more without it. I have fought for a world where more people can be free to be like me. I also dismiss gender ideology precisely due to its irrational claims and denial of science.

So it should be clear that I’m not asking anyone to join a church, or give up on science or reason as a key tool in your analytical toolbelt. I am asking you to imagine that what is true for us may not be true of others. I am asking you to allow the feedback given by this situation to enter your mind, and to seriously grapple with it.

Religion as ceiling and as floor

Having said all that, I am not actually proposing the existence of a “God-shaped hole” as many of my critics presumed. (I am not commenting on the merits of that conception, I am saying that I am pointing to something different–an indirect benefit of faith that benefits reason).

From my last piece:

In the past, I had mostly thought about the “ceiling” that faith created–the ways in which religion hindered progress, scientific achievement and understanding. But now I think much more about the “floor” it creates, too. Perhaps without certain myths granting the power of the sacred to some fundamental truths (like the fact that there are two sexes), we would drift away from reality altogether.

This view does not contend that, on the whole, religion is a “better way of knowing the world” than reason or science–the floor exists, but so does the ceiling. Instead, it recognizes the vulnerabilities of reason to other pressures, and proposes a value in safeguarding certain precepts with extra-rational support.

Let’s start with the assumption that religions are interested in propagation and longstanding faiths tend to be good at propagation-via-procreation in particular. This is a process that requires behavior to pass a minimal standard of reality-acceptance, as reality-denial without any brakes can easily result in harm, if not death, to yourself and any progeny.

As religious convictions shape decision-making, we might assume that if a faith has coexisted with society for a length of time, it is unlikely to include or otherwise require its adherents to commit to ideas that lead them to catastrophically destructive consequences in the near-term.

And as these religions are competing with other ideological systems, we might also expect them to include some degree of the inverse: ideas that act as a prophylactic against the most self-destructive bad ideas that humanity has shown itself to be vulnerable to.

This is what I propose constitutes the “floor”.

Of course this doesn’t apply to any or all faiths; newer cults would not have had time to develop this floor, and are therefore disqualified. And as time goes on and we encounter new threats, we would expect an update-resistant floor to be less useful.

Further, the set of ideas that constitute the floor can themselves be untrue, or even irrational. Inherent truth value is not a good standard for a floor. The purpose of the floor is to thwart more dangerous irrationalities, however it can.

The cost of the floor, as I presume my readers are well aware, is the existence of the ceiling.

Happy weekend!