An Atheist Meets a Theological Non-Cognitivist
A debate on Rick's substack with a fellow nonbeliever
Eric: Good article and a more serious tone by Rick Wilson. He just missed one perceived Demon in all of this—atheism.
Beneath it all, beneath the claptrap yawpings about Antifa, the Left, the “invasion” at the southern border, Obamacare, AOC, Aunt Nancy, and Liberal Media Bias, is one basic fear that underscores it all—the Death of their fake god.
What MAGA fears more than anything else is a healthy, independent mind. And Elon Musk, for all his douchey cool-bro tech-lord edge case genius Schtick is just another example of a wealth nepo-baby who also cannot take criticism from others who just might be more intelligent.
A healthy mind rejects god and unquestionable Uber-genius because it understands that both stand as midgets against the towering literary canon of The Origin of Species.
And now that any religious god from scripture has been shredded by the march of science, the MAGA base is forced to confront two basic truths. 1) There is no god. 2) Their parents, priests, and neighbors all lied to them. And now as they look back on their lives spent under the oppression of a lie and the fear of a flaming realm of fire and pain that never existed, the are furious at the people who had the courage and intellectual fortitude to break away from the knuckle dragging religious herd.
Beneath it all, this is what the Fox News, pro-life, Trumpian MAGA movement is all about. Using force to install a false god who allows these cowards to pretend to have a real one.
And if allowed back into power, it is they who will use violence to avoid facing their hangups about death.
Vote Blue No Matter Who.
It’s Trump or Democracy. You cannot have both.
Bob: Eric, with respect, as an agnostic I have to object to this. I have no positive belief in an anthropomorphic god but I have no idea why we're here as opposed to not here. I have no idea what happened before the Big Bang. Science can't answer these questions, either, because they can't be tested. Being agnostic, for me, is a nod to epistemic humility.
So it sets me on edge when I see atheism pushed into antitheism. Religion is just a justification system and there are many possible (including dogmatic positivism). I think it's simplistic to ascribe most of the darkness in the human heart to religion. I think bad people can use religion as an excuse and a cover, but the problem is more the bad people than the excuse.
Eric: Sure. I hear what you are saying. And you are correct to point out that science does not yet conclusively know what preceded the Big Bang. The most likely answer is that nothing preceded the Big Bang but this has not been proven yet. As far as bad people are concerned, science does not define that. Evil is a human construct. A vain, foolish assumption that right and wrong are universal values ascribed to to human worth. I see no such evidence of evil. Only a lack of cooperation where one group is ceaselessly trying to out compete the other. Agnosticism, sure. I understand where it comes from. Variations the try to balance religious minimalism with atheism is, I Think, just a way to come to grips with atheism slowly and in a less painful path of ultimate acceptance.
The reason I have such a problem with religion, and its minimalist variants, it because it disincentivizes cooperation amongst our species to solve major problems like climate change. Intelligent minimalists such as yourself, grant a nod to the religious extremists because you have the intelligence and humility to admit that you don’t have all the answers.
But the religious whose feelings you protect while noble in your humanity do not, deep down inside feel the same about you. They see you as an enemy because to them you are possessed by an invisible demonic force that does not exist.
MAGA are afraid of their fictitious god. They fear that if they do not eradicate you, then they will spend the rest of eternity burning in a realm they does not exist.
So to appease their fears, the justify murder and demonization of agnostics and atheists alike.
Bob: Eric, again with respect, no. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang because it is impossible to know what happened before the Big Bang. Any theory about it is not testable and thus scientifically vacuous. The human mind excels at analysis and synthesis; we can take things apart and put them together like nobody's business. It's less naturally inclined to holistic thinking. So there are some realms of knowledge that our human brains will simply never have access to. I think understanding the nature of consciousness is another one.
Now you called me a "minimalist" and I object to that. I'm a theological non-cognitivist, an ignostic. Tell me what you mean by "God" and I'll tell you whether I believe in it or whether it even makes sense. That means I'm a sliding-scale agnostic. I feel more doubtful about a belief system the more concrete it is, making me for all practical purposes an atheist when it comes to monotheistic religions. As we go up levels of abstraction, I am less certain. I haven't the tiniest clue how we came to be and suspect we'll never know. I respect the Anthropic Principle; it's a strong intuition even if it doesn't prove anything. So I can't be and never will be a hard atheist. I will never have a smug certainty that some kind of extra-creational force can't exist.
I really object to being characterized as an atheist who just doesn't know it yet; that's what Communists used to say about Socialists regarding Communism. I am very confident in my beliefs and I think science supports them more strongly than it supports hard atheism.
What I object to most, though, is lumping all believers into one bucket, as if liberal Episcopalians and Unitarian Universalists are tantamount to Pentecostals and Southern Baptists and as if all religious believers have the heart and soul of the Taliban. You are aware that not all religious sects / denominations make a huge deal about the afterlife, right? There are strains of religious belief that don't wish me dead and aren't socially toxic at all.
What you object to is a religious tendency. I object just as strenuously to that tendency but I also don't conflate all religious belief with it.
Eric: I think all religions that teach in belief structures that cannot be proven are a form of child abuse. Christianity, Islam, Judaism are ways in which savvy individuals know full well that the easiest way to control someone is to get them while they are young. And then—brainwash them.
I do cast religious faith of all denominations into the same sausage grinder. The variants we have are just ways to make the more extreme versions of religion seem less pernicious.
The religious among us are by far the most violent among us.
And there is no such thing as hard atheism, sir. There is only atheism. And so you say that you believe that there will always be entire realms of knowledge off limits to man? Well, I disagree. If we manage not to destroy ourselves or this planet then, over time, we will have access to all realms of existence and at the end of it, science will show there is no go. Because that’s what it shows now.
And religion is the only socially acceptable form of child abuse that is not only still allowed. It is worshiped and monetized.
Bob: Flavors of atheism exist including what I informally called "hard" atheism; if you don't believe me, fire up the 'pedia. But you're beyond even hard atheism, which is the dogmatic assertion that God cannot exist (which is untestable and thus unscientific), you're an antitheist with a conspiracist view of religion.
Need I remind you that the Abolition movement was led by northern preachers, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend, that the civil rights movement was led by Southern black churches, that Mohandas Gandhi was a devout Hindu? And I hate to use this argument because it's beloved by wingnuts, but that all Communist regimes, which were uniformly abysmal to their citizens, were doctrinally atheist?
Science has disproved various aspects of religious doctrine but it has not "disproved" the existence of God because, once again, you cannot formulate that question in a way that it can be tested. You're certainly entitled to believe that some time in the future if we don't blow ourselves up we'll have access to all realms of knowledge. But all it is is a belief, on the same epistemic level as religious belief.
Dogmatic atheists are only the flipside of dogmatic religious believers.
Eric: Yes, you are correct: all of those leaders of social change were people of faith. But it’s a false corollary. Their abilities to enact social for the benefits of a greater good did not come from god. It came from the good natures of those individuals themselves. To ascribe the actions of good people to a divine entity actually makes human beings themselves incapable of good deed without a fake being in the sky.
And not all communists are atheists. And not are socialists are atheists either.
And more people have been slaughtered in the name one Christ and Mohammed than atheism.
I can tell that you grew up in a family of god believers. One of the ways I know is based upon the numbers. If you grew up with family members who believed in god, you are 92% likely to adopt those same beliefs.
This is true across all denominations of hokum. And no one can point to one single reason why faith is so good for all us, that the costs of its deceptions, manipulations and bloodshed make it worth its costs.
Bob: Eric, you're essentially making my larger argument, which is to separate the good and evil in people from their religious beliefs. You're also making inappropriate and dogmatic assertions about who you think I am while knowing very little about me so let me 'splain. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family but we weren't at all churchy and I left the Church the nanosecond after I was confirmed, so like my hero Frank Zappa I consider myself an "escaped Catholic." I can be every bit as anti-clerical as you without also being a dogmatic atheist, which you surely are. Some of the most fiercely anti-religious people were raised in the faith and are anti-religious precisely because they reject their upbringing. So 92% me no 92%'s ;)
Karl Marx was a dialectical materialist who famously called religion "the opiate of the people." It was very hard for Communist regimes to completely repress religion in the developing world but all Communist regimes are doctrinally atheist. And I really wouldn't split hairs over atrocities, which are absolute and cannot be compared. Pol Pot didn't need "God" to unleash auto-genocide on his people. The Nazis slapped something they called "Positive Christianity" (with Jesus as the original oppressed Aryan) on their regime, but it was entirely cynical, needing to placate the churches. Some of the most important resisters to Nazism were men of faith, particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The SS elite fancied themselves Norse pagans. Stalin certainly didn't need "God" to starve Ukrainians and commit atrocities which rivaled the Nazis.
As a nonbeliever, I have a sociological understanding of religion, where shades of doctrine are less important than the way people behave to each other. But shades of doctrine can also be important. It is highly significant we have Pope Francis now, the most socially liberal Pope the Church has had in centuries, and not the arch-conservative ideologist Pope Benedict. There is absolutely nothing socially threatening in the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and the Unitarian Universalists, neither of which even believe in the afterlife. My understanding of religion is very close to the atheist Sigmund Freud's, as a projection of the conscience onto the community.
None of this is to remotely argue that religion is somehow essential for the morality of a community or that atheists are somehow more immoral than believers, something which I categorically reject as a moral intuitionist. My objection to dogmatic or "hard" atheism is philosophical, based on the science epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. What we can concretely know is what we can demonstrate. And we cannot demonstrate why we are here as opposed to not here. Ergo, we'll never know if we were created by an extra-creational force.
Eric: You know Bob, you’re an interesting guy. I live in New Jersey. Let me ask you, where do you live in the world?
Bob: Thanks, Eric. I live in Philly now but I was born outside Philly, was raised in the north Jersey suburbs and lived most of my adult life in central Jersey.