The Only Winning Move

A friend sends the following:

(Found on Fussy)

Dnesh D’Souza is back up to his old tricks: misrepresenting Atheism rather than doing a Christian Apologist’s duty, which is recommending faith. This time, the springboard is an article in Discover (which, for reasons mysterious, D’Souza doesn’t link in his column). The gist of the article is that there are just “too many coincidences” in how the laws of the universe are set up. Basically, even slight changes in the laws of physics would make it impossible for the universe as we know it to exist, meaning that life would not exist (for example, if electrons weighed twice as much as they actually weigh, stars would burn out in a million years rather than billions, and life wouldn’t have time to evolve). D’Souza, predictably, takes this as evidence that there is a Creator - because how else can we explain all these “coincidences?”

Click on the link and take a look at the article and you’ll see that D’Souza is engaging in what we might call the Argumentum ab Advertismum - “Argument from Advertising.” The article isn’t really about the search for God, but is rather about the Multiverse Theory - you know, that theory that gave Spock a beard on Star Trek. The only reason there are references to God in the article at all is because the reporter inserts them there - presumably to sensationalize a dry subject to sell magazines (and no doubt it made a subscriber out of D’Souza, so hey!). The original reason for the Multiverse Theory - as the article itself makes clear if you bother to read it, actually - was to explain why the universe has a uniform temperature throughout. This is a problem for the Big Bang Theory, though not for other theories of cosmology. So the real motivation was to plug up some holes in the Big Bang Theory - not, as D’Souza wants his audience to think, to explain these “embarassing coincidences.”

The “embarassing coincidences” are generally “explained” by an appeal to the Anthropic Principle - which really just says that the question itself is misleading: if these “embarassing coincidences” hadn’t happened, then we wouldn’t be here to ask these questions. Some supporters of the Anthropic explanation have jokingly styled it cogito, ergo mundus talis est (”I think, therefore the world is as it is”). The point being that this is a truism; it is invoked to answer a pointless question.

The logical error being made here is obvious. For one to be troubled by why the laws of the universe are the way they are, then one first has to assume that they could have been otherwise. The problem is that it’s not clear what this means. At what point was the universe in a position to operate according to different laws than the ones according to which it does in fact operate? And according to what principle did the principles of the universe decide to be what they are? Of course, these questions are not nonsensical to religious people who have long postulated a framework for the formation of laws of reality. For them, the laws of the universe could’ve been otherwise if God had decided otherwise. Fair enough. But I don’t think you can reason that the other way. That is, it’s fair enough to say “because I believe in God, these questions are not nonsense.” But I’m not sure it’s fair to say “because I take these questions seriously, I must believe in God.” Starting without any prior prejudice on the question of whether or not there is a creator, it’s just as valid to say that the questions are nonsense. I don’t need to speculate on why the laws of the universe are what they are because my job is simply to document the laws of the universe and make predictions about its future on that basis. Once you start asking about why a framework of physical laws is one way and not another, you’re already outside the realm of science and in the realm of pulling things out of your ass (the politically correct term for this is “metaphysics”). So sure, one answer we might pull out of our ass is that God decided that the laws would be this way - but there’s no reason I can see why this explanation has any claim to prominence over any other product of one’s ass - say, the idea that there are infinite numbers of universes representing all possible arrangements of laws and we just happen to be in this one, one of the few we can plausibly inhabit. Or maybe that everything in the world is the product of minor perturbations on cosmic strings, whose composition we’re not allowed to ask about. In any case, the point is that once you start asking metaphysical questions like “great, we have these laws, but why not other laws?” you’re overreaching as far as “science” is concerned. It isn’t that they’re illegitimate questions, it’s just that they’re not scientific questions.

Now, if D’Souza wants to leap from here to “God created the world and made us all sinful until Jesus died on the Cross,” that’s his business, of course. He might even be right, for all I know. My point is just that he didn’t get there by reading a bunch of science books and then in a flash of insight saying “Of COURSE! It couldn’t have been otherwise! Every poorly-translated word of the Bible is true, by God!” Hardly. If you’re going to believe in Christianity, it’s going to be for reasons that are completely oblivious to what you did or didn’t learn in Physics class.

Well, my point is that I think people like Dawkins and Hitchens know that. The brand of religion that they’re arguing against in their books isn’t the idea that there might maybe be a Creator. They doubt it, of course, but they don’t rule it out. Nor do they have any problem with people saying “there might be a Creator, for all I know.” What they insist on is that bit I put in itallics - the “for all I know.” It isn’t idle religious speculation they mind, it’s religious certainty. It’s the kind of organized religion that claims to have answers about the nature of the universe so specific as to require that people go to Mass and eat bread together at least once a year on a highly specific day. The kind of arrogance that, for example, leads people to vote on political marriage questions based on what they think God wants - as if they even know there is a God, let alone His opinion on marriage.

The thing that’s offensive about every single column that Dnesh D’Souza has ever written is this presumption that a tie goes to the believers. Wrong. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Ties on religious questions - at least religious questions as a domain of communal knowledge - go to the non-believers. Tricking someone into thinking it’s strange that the universe is the way it is isn’t an acceptable basis for a worldview. Really, this technique is no different than convincing yourself that a perfectly familiar word like ivy sounds strange by repeating it 20 times slowly. I don’t know why we use that particular combination of syllables to refer to that particular species of plant, but I do know that it doesn’t matter. All that is required is that members of the same linguistic community agree on an appropriate combination and use it consistently. It doesn’t matter that it “could have been otherwise,” that indeed it is otherwise (in, say, Japanese). And so sure, if we sit around and repeat all the known laws of the universe to ourselves slowly over periods of years (say, as a Physics instructor), I guess they’re bound to seem strange at some point too. But just feeling it doesn’t make it so. The laws of the universe, like the combinations of syllables that make up words, are arbitrary. It doesn’t matter why they are one way and not another, the point is that they function consistently. If they were different, then the universe would be a different place, just like if English operated according to a different Phonology and different Syntax it would be not English but Some Other Language. Indeed, trying to trick someone into believing in God by saying that the universe, if even slightly different by nature, couldn’t have supported life at all, is putting the cart in front of the horse in exactly the same way that it would be to argue that Evoltuion has as its purpose the creation of Language by noting that even slight changes in human physiology would’ve made spoken communication impossible. It’s absurd. It’s true enough that the evolution of Language depends on a staggering number of what D’Souza would no doubt like to call physiological “coincidences,” but nothing about this leads anyone to the goofy supposition that Evolution has a “purpose.” Evolution is just a dumb global process. That it produced language-capable creatures is interesting, to be sure, but it’s hardly cause for wonder or amazement. That’s just how things turned out is all.

D’Souza is, of course, free to use whatever facts about the universe he likes to prop up his favorite superstitions on his own time. What I object to is this insistence on mischaracterizing the beliefs of others for the purpose of manipulating people to see things his way.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” What is striking about these slogans is the philosophy behind them. There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation.

Gee, might that be because they are bus slogans? Because now that you mention it, I’ve never seen a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies some criterion of scientific validation either. Or a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies any criterion of philosophical validation, for that matter. But I’ve certainly seen a lot of religious billboards. Does this mean that religion has given up apologetics? That the Discovery Institute packed up and went home and stopped advancing the argument that God needs a place in the science books? Hardly. No one would be so absurd as to claim that all religious arguments needed to fit on the space of a billboard. And yet D’Souza wants to people to believe that Dawkins gave up the goat on all the arguments in his book - which isn’t even out of its first print edition yet, unlike, say, the Summa Theologica - on the basis of a billboard. Obviously not.

The surest sign I have, in fact, that Christians don’t really, in their heart of hearts, believe all the crap they say is that so many of them spend this much time gaming the referee rather than playing the game. If you ask a Christian questions about the presence of evil in the world, he will be happy to tell you that he doesn’t fully understand God’s Plan, but that this isn’t a threat to his worldview. Why, then, should the fact that scientists are unable to fully explain the universe be a threat to the scientific worldview? Christians never say. No Christian takes a billboard slogan put up by some other Christian as his entire profession of faith, and indeed most would be offended if I suggested that they did. Why, then, should we Atheists be presumed to stand and fall on the basis of what Dawkins puts on buses in London? To call it a “mischaracterization” of the debate would itself be a mischaracterization on the basis of understatment.

There used to be a time as recently as 50 years ago when Christian apologists were not this silly. There used to be a time when they read philosophy and science and put a lot of time and thought into coming up with intelligent, if flawed, arguments in favor of their worldview. What happened? Now what we get are these cheap jabs. God must exist because Physics can’t tell me why the universe is this way and not another. Really? Atheism is giving up its pretentions of rationality because I saw a pro-atheist billboard the last time I was in London that didn’t mention science. Honestly?

Come on.

Here’s Richard Dawkins in the Guardian talking about the possibility of atheist children:

In actual fact, though, he does take enormous care throughout the interview to be patient. Although he regards it as “clearly wicked” to call the child of Catholic parents “a Catholic child”, he quickly adds, “it’s equally wicked to say this is an atheist child. I would never say that.” He can’t help adding, “Of course, some people would say all babies are atheist, because they don’t believe in anything.” But when I ask if he’d say that, he considers for a moment before replying, “Well, I’m not sure that’s a very sensible way of putting it actually.”

I agree with him - this is a point that needs clearing up.

I like to refer to Atheism as the “default” position on religion. The justification goes like this: because religious beliefs flatly contradict daily experience and are not obviously true, the burden of proof falls on the believers. That means that in absense of a compelling case, people who are “confused” on the matter of God should assume that there is no such thing. Put differently, since adopting a belief in God would require one to radically alter his daily perception of the world to include things that he cannot be sure are there - probably through an act of will - then it is the sort of thing one should not do without a good reason. This might take the form of a really clever logical argument that most of us have never heard, but it’s more likely to be some kind of supernatural experience. Absent such a thing, there is no reason to apply one’s will to edit his perceptions, and so he should not. An Atheist is what you are if no one has given you a good reason to believe in God.

So what, one might ask, is an Agnostic? Yes, that’s the rub. I think Agnosticism as it’s currently understood is a bit of a problematic category. People who are in the habit of saying that they “don’t know” whether there is a God or not like to call themselves Agnostics - usually to stress that they are open to the possibility that it might all be real. But on this definition, it’s hard to see a substantive difference with Atheists, as all honest Atheists admit the logical possibility that there is a God, even if they think it hugely unlikely. So what need “Agnostic?”

Here I like to fall back on a little well-intentioned prescriptivism. Since “Agnostic” etymologically means “without gospel” - i.e. without a fixed set of beliefs on God - then I would prefer to use it to refer to those people who strongly suspect that there is a God (or supernatural presence of some kind in the universe), but don’t commit themselves to any specifics about this belief. So all those people who describe themselves as “not religious, spiritual” - they’re Agnostics. Also - all those people who honestly don’t know, but give it about a 50-50 chance - they’re Agnostics. One type of individual that is frequently lumped in with Agnostics but which I would prefer to classify Atheist is the type of person who believes that it is logically impossible to decide whether God exists. That is, maybe there is a God, but because one can’t prove it one way or the other (indeed, he believes that he can prove that one can’t prove it one way or the other), he adopts the sensible strategy of assuming it isn’t there. I consider this type of person an Atheist because they have reasoned their way out of any theological connection. It’s a philosophical commitment to living one’s life as though there were no God, even if it turns out there really is one. That’s gotta be Atheism.

I haven’t read The God Delusion, so I don’t really know where Dawkins draws his lines, but I think it must be somewhere similar because the way I understand the quoted passage above, it isn’t exactly fair to describe a child as an “Atheist” until that child is sufficiently mature and informed to make an idependent decision. This sort of speaks against the idea of Atheism as a “default,” and more of it as a firm position. That’s a bit uncomfortable for me because it skates dangerously close to the standard religious trap: of saying that Atheists are people who are certain that there is no God and, as such, are people of faith themselves. But however dangerously close it skates and however uncomfortable it makes me, I think it’s right. Atheism is not a “faith” - certainly not in the sense that allows religious people to exploit their specious technicality - but it is, I think, a conscious decision. It is a commitment to the idea that there is (probably) no God. It is not a blind commitment of the kind that would make it a faith, but it is a commitment.

Still, it was interesting to see it mentioned because I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about whether Atheism is a conviction or not. As I say, this is an area where we have to be careful, because too much admission that it’s a “conviction” buys you the same tired retort from the religious crowd that it’s a “faith like any other, but an empty faith.” Yeah, yeah. A conviction is not a faith, however. A conviction is just a belief about which one feels certain, though there is no way to properly test it. For example, it would be fair to describe my political beliefs as “convictions,” since there is no way I know to actually test Capitalism - certainly not in laboratory conditions. I come to that belief by starting with first principles, reasoning that the ideal political system will be Capitalist, and then looking at history and seeing confirmation for my conclusions in the way human events have played out. That is no one’s idea of a conclusive proof that Capitalism is the best currently available system, and so I cannot have a scientific certainty about my beliefs. But it is the best I believe anyone can do, and so I call my political beliefs a “conviction.” So it is with Atheism. It isn’t the same as faith, because what I haven’t done in either case is committed myself to believing in either despite evidence to the contrary, as religious people are in the habit of doing. If someone can show me conclusively that there is a God, I’m happy to change course.

The overall point, though, is that on reflection it might be a bit misleading to call Atheism a “default.” It IS the default in the sense that it’s the position one comes to when the people on whom the burden of prrof rests fail to meet it. But in social reality, where there is a huge amount of pressure to adopt a religious belief of some kind, it is better described as a conviction, since one pretty much has to reason his way out of a paper bag to get to it. So, logically a default, but socially a conviction in that social pressure renders it pretty difficult to adopt the logical default without having to explain oneself - and defend oneself against a lot of nonsense.

There’s an interesting post at UK Polling Report about a ComRes Survey intended to mimick an earlier Gallup Poll concerning demographic prejudices in US voting. This poll was done back when it seemed plausible that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee (thank God that didn’t come to pass!), and the question was how much of a liability his Mormonism would be. Gallup took the opportunity to survey people about a number of candidate descriptions - including age (72 and older - i.e. McCain), sexual orientation, religion (Islam was not included) and … atheism. It turns out that US citizens object to atheists more than anything - with fully 53% saying that they would not vote for an atheist for president, all other things equal. Gays and old guys were next in line - with 43% indicating refusal to vote for a gay, and 42% refusal to vote for someone … erm, John McCain’s age. Unfortunately, there are no data on Muslims, so we don’t know whether that religion is even more objectionable than Atheism, but aside from that possibility, Atheists are THE persona non grata in American politics. OUCH!

The UK Polling Report post points out that Britons are as likely to be racist as Americans - which is to say, barely at all. Equal numbers of Britons and Americans are uncomfortable with a black President/PM, and that number, at 5%, is encouragingly low. (Of course, that with the caveat that it’s right at the boundary of “acceptable,” and if the Bradley Effect is real this number is actually higher than it seems.) Similar numbers of Britons also don’t mind going public with their ageism, with about 43% objecting to the idea of a 70+-year-old PM. Sexism is somewhat lower in the UK - 7% of them objecting to a woman vs. 11% for us. There was a question about divorce on both surveys, but I decline to report on it because there were significant differences in phrasing. Where it gets interesting is with Atheism. While lower than in America, the number is surprisingly high in the UK as well: 20%.

One might not have guessed it, but not believing in God would appear to be almost as much of an electoral handicap for a potential leader in the UK as being Muslim or gay.

But therein lies the difference. We don’t have numbers for Muslims in the US, but the point is that gays are much more acceptable to US voters than Atheists. In fact, the profiles of voters in both nations couldn’t be more different. Minorities and women are - broadly speaking - acceptable in both places, but there similarities end. While a disturbingly large number of Britons object to Muslims and gays, they are still more tolerant of them (well, gays, anyway) than US voters. And while Britons are most concerned that their candidate not be too old - argubly sensible, given the demands of the job, though that of course should be judged on a case-by-case basis - Americans are most concerned that their President believe in some mystical sky bully. While it does matter to some degree which flavor of supersitious nonsense the candidate subscribes to (Catholics are marginally better than Jews; Jews are greatly preferable to Mormons), apparently any flavor is better than none at all.

So I hereby declare myself more discriminated against than any other minority group. That gives me unlimited license to guilt trip the government into buying me a house and a college education and giving me a job I don’t qualify for, AND it allows me to refuse to tip waiters. Ain’t America grand?

I wonder if there is a name for the rhetorical trick whereby you take your opponent’s basic accusation and cite it as evidence of a basic personality flaw - intended to make you look good by comparison. I guess this counts as a subspecies of the ad hominem (”playing the man and not the ball”), but it’s particular and galling enough that I hope someone has seen fit to give it a name.

One example I came across early in thinking about these things was in the “scholarly” Japanese response to Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Her 1997 book was only published in Japan last year, its publication having been stalled by nationalists who insisted on including “corrections” in the text. They got their way by intimidating the family members of serious historical scholars hired to review the book, and what eventually happened was that their refutation was published, but not the primary text. I purchased a copy of the refutation on its release in 1999 - which I still have and which I assume the image-conscious in Japan were hoping had disappeard entirely - and it’s replete with instances of this tactic in action. One of the ones that stands out is a response to a caption over a picture of a decapitated Chinese head resting on a military barrier. He has something in his mouth, which Change reports as a cigarette. That’s certainly what it looks like, though the photo is a bit blurry and it’s hard to be sure. The refutation notes that the “cigarette, if cigarette it is, was obviously placed in the man’s mouth by the American photographer as a joke.” The implication is that if Americans are callous enough to consider it a “joke” to place a cigarette in a decapitated man’s mouth, they have no standing to criticise the Japanese for whatever attrocities supposedly took place in Nanking in 1938. Well - fair enough that we don’t know how the “cigarette” got in the man’s mouth. What struck me about this is how it attempts to dodge the question of what the decapitated head is doing on the military barricade in the first place. It stretches credulity that the Chinese locals just found one lying about and decided to put in on a Japanese military bariacde. To what purpose? More to the point, to what purpose that would’ve been worth getting shot at? The Chinese at this point were hardly fighting a propaganda war. Neither, for that matter, were the Americans, who were mostly ignorant of the incident. The most likely explanation for the head being on the barricade is as a sick warning to the locals by the occupying Japanese forces. Of course, since we don’t know the circumstances of how the head got there (or really even who took its picture), it’s probably unfair of Chang to cite it as “evidence” that a massacre took place. All the same, the implication as to how it came to be there given in her book is much more plausible than whatever the Japanese scholars have in mind as a counterstory (they don’t say). Realizing this, they seek to sidestep the issue by using the rhetorical trick in question: using the very accusation that Japanese soldiers put it there as the basis of an unfounded ad hominem response. The photographer, who might have been American (but we don’t know), probably put the cigarette there as a “joke” (but again, we don’t know), and the fact that even one (alleged) American can think of this as a “joke” where we Japanese scholars are scandalized by such a suggestion means in turn that Americans as a whole are more callous than Japanese, ergo the Nanking Massacre never happened. It certainly goes down in history as one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard - but the fact of its not being stated explicitly lends it an effectiveness in the original text it does not deserve.

I came across a similar example today in Dinesh D’Souza’s latest column Why Bill Maher Made Me Laugh. It’s about Bill Maher’s film Religulous, in which Mr. Maher goes all Michael Moore on religious fanatics, with, I suspect, largely disappointing results. D’Souza is probably right when he says that “It is only in the company of obvious charlatans and simpletons that Maher comes off as the bright guy,” and that’s exactly why I don’t really have any interest in seeing his movie. It isn’t hard to find religious crackpots (they advertise themselves, usually), and picking on the mentally feeble is neither entertaining nor informative.

But D’Souza’s taking a cheap shot of his own, and that does interest me.

At times he says he is an agnostic, who simply holds the rational position that he doesn’t know what comes after death. But if you don’t know whether there is an afterlife, and even if you have no reason to believe in one, it hardly makes sense to attack those who hold a different view. After all, you yourself are in the dark and they might very well be right.

Well, that’s part of it. It’s true enough that Agnostics admit that they are “in the dark” about what happens after death, but that leaves unaddressed the more obvious issue of on what basis it is, exactly, that religious people claim to know what happens after death. To a cursory glance, after all, it seems inherently unknowable. Just because you yourself don’t know something doesn’t obligate you to respect anyone else’s best guess as to what the answer might be. Tie goes to the Agnostic, in other words - because the burden of proof is on the person making the claim of knowledge.

Now here’s where it really goes off the rails:

By way of analogy, I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns. Maher’s agnosticism is clearly a pose. Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God. And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

Here it is again. Neither of us really know how the head got on the fence, but since your assumptions are a lot more plausible than mine, what I’ll do instead of addressing the issue is try to turn the fact that you bring it up at all into a moral indictment.

So let’s deal with this. First of all, as if it needed pointing out, the reason that no one makes documentaries denouncing unicorns is that the handful of people in the world who actually do believe in them grow out of it by age 18 as a general rule and never, ever seek to control anyone’s behavior as a consequence of their beliefs. To the best of my knowledge, there is currently as many as NO ONE advocating that we rewrite science textbooks to include reference to the possibility that unicorns might have evolved, possibly all of ZERO people setting off bombs in the name of unicorns, and the number of people pestering homosexuals for going against the Will of Unicorns is as high as NONE AT ALL. D’Souza is right that mere nonbelief in something does not motivate someone to write a book denouncing it, but then, Dawkins and Hitchens et al have never claimed to be writing these books just because they don’t believe in God.

Second, while it might be true that D’Souza doesn’t write books (though that point is debatable) or make documentaries denouncing Atheism, he certainly writes enough columns that qualify as denounciations. One of the more extreme is Atheism and Child Murder, in which he strongly implies, on the basis that Peter Singer believes in legal infanticide, that anyone who carries “Atheism” (as though it were a coherent belief system rather than a simple rejection of an unproven assertion) to its logical conclusion will end up believing in legal infanticide, as though Peter Singer were some kind of patron saint of Atheism. Whatever its logical shortcomings, it is nothing if not a brazen attack on Atheism which has, as its purpose, the hope of frightening off the curious. And even if we’re feeling generous and willing to let D’Souza off the hook on the technicality that his columns don’t fall into either of the categories book or documentary, there is no shortage of such material from other Christian apologists. The one making the rounds in the book category at the momentis Frank Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, and in the documentary category it is of course Ben Stein’s Expelled. And these are merely the most current in a long list of prominent examples stretching back decades in the case of documentaries and centuries in the case of books. It isn’t as though Hitchens and Dawkins are operating in a vacuum here. They’re not exactly turning the other cheek, but then they’re not the ones claiming that as a moral virtue.

Third, the fact that “God has rules that interfere with his sex life” is a perfectly valid reason for a non-believer to oppose widespread belief in something the existence of which has never been proven. In fact, I can think of few better reasons. It is much the same reason that D’Souza doesn’t waste his time opposing belief in unicorns, to put a fine point on it. If believers in unicorns existed in large numbers and sought to control something as fundamental to D’Souza’s happiness and self-actualization potential as his sexual behavior, he might not think he could afford the luxury of just letting them be. This is by far the most galling of all the religious intrusions into people’s lives - believers and otherwise. They act as though it is childish and self-serving to enjoy a fulfilling sex life tailored to one’s own needs, but the only basis for this attitude that I can see rests on their as-yet-unproven claims that (a) there is this unseen, unknowable cosmic entity who cares how people have sex and (b) they know what this entity wants. Of course, logically speaking I cannot completely rule out the possibility that these claims are true. But I am not obligated, nor should anyone feel obligated, to take these claims seriously if no proof is offered for them. In short - if D’Souza thinks he is in a position to restrict Bill Maher’s sex life, then I’m right with Bill Maher in thinking that he owes Maher a bit more of an explanation than he’s giving. Certainly it is disingenuous to talk as though it were just obvious that Maher’s sex life needs modulating on the basis that some undocumented Sky Bully said so.

The trick D’Souza is attempting to pull it this: he’s sidestepping Maher’s main point (that religious fanatics won’t leave him alone) by trying to paint him as hypocritical as concerns his Agnosticism and the stated aims of his film. Perhaps Maher is hypocritical about his Agnosticism. Not having seen the movie, I don’t really know, but I would point out that if Maher devotes most of his film time to spoofing Christians then that is certainly consistent with the idea that he’s motivated more by a desire to be left alone than he is by Agnostic Evangelism, whatever that would mean. Perhaps Maher didn’t make that point clearly enough for D’Souza, but I doubt he would deny it in an interview if asked directly.

The point is this: certainly I can agree that if you not only believe in the Sky Bully but also that He wants you to go out into the world and convert everyone, that you might feel some sort of moral obligation to pester people to think like you. But surely the burden of proof is on you. In fact, nothing in Matthew 28:19 seems to suggest otherwise. The Bible doesn’t say “go out into the world and throw a temper tantrum every time someone fails to be persuaded.” Nor does it say “if anyone finds you unconvincing, immediately launch a character assasination against that person.” The way I read it - admittedly with an unbeliever’s bias - is that it says what anyone versed in logic already knows: that the burden of proof is on the person advancing the theory, never on the person who has reason to reject it.

As an Atheist myself (I take it a step further than Maher: I am an Atheist about unicorns, and I am an Atheist about God … and about everything else that seems unlikely, carries no explanatory power, and is in any case not reliably attested, for that matter), I can say without hesitation that I am generally willing to leave religious people alone to do whatever it is they do. As D’Souza says, I do not know what happens after death, and they might. So fine - they are free to lead their lives in accordance of whatever knowledge they believe themselves to have. What they may NOT do is put the onus on me to accept their knowledge (and the lifestyle they derive from it) without making a convincing case. I do not seek to change them; it is they who seek to change me. That puts the ball in their court, and I’m really getting tired of hearing them whine that not every serve we deliver sets them up for a slam.

The head is on the fence. Someone put it there. It seems a lot more likely that that someone was Japanese soldiers than Chinese civilians. But I’m willing to drop it if you are, since neither of us really knows. What I’m not willing to do is accept, on the basis of my challenge to your frankly disingenuous attempts to pretend that there was no massacre in Nanking when there patently was, that I’M somehow the more deceptive and hypocritical of the two. And so it goes with religion. You guys started it by passing blue laws, and trying to put Creationism in school textbooks, and banning sodomy even between consenting adults, and All that Other Stuff that amounts to nothing other than attempts to control people’s behavior based on a theory for which you have been unable, for 2000 years running, to produce any evidence. If we raise a gun to defend ourselves against being mugged at gunpoint, it is hardly becomming to point to our gun as evidence of any inherently violent nature on our parts.

Yes, for what it’s worth, I agree that people like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins (and especially the odious PZ Myers) are behaving childishly. It would be far better for Atheists to just ignore Christians. After all, we’re not the ones with a burden of proof to meet, and releasing books and movies like Dawkins’ and Maher’s sort of draws and artifical line to hold when none is really there. More importantly, Atheism is not even a creed, let alone one that needs to be evangelized, and Dawkins and Maher muddy that point for everyone. But I do object to attempts like D’Souza’s to put us on moral equivalence. We are not morally equivalent. We are not the ones who tell you how to live, and we are not the ones who need to justify our beliefs to you. The burden of being convincing is on you. So start meeting it already if you really do have a basis for your beliefs, and stop with the ad hominem distractions. If you don’t want to explain how the head got on the fence, fine. But you’re going to have to at least address the issue of the massacre that took place nearby that is the most likely explanation for its being there.

Since Noah hasn’t posted in weeks, I mostly find his blog useful as a way of keeping the excellent Briggs Blog bookmarked. It is a blog which, one might add, Noah recently defaced by alerting the pygmy swine at Pharyngula to its presence. A perfectly interesting internet survey was vandalized by these open-minded people open-mindedly perverting an honest attempt to gain some knowledge about the predicitve power of group gut feeling so that they could pat themselves on the back for being Obama supporters.

OK, I’m kidding about Noah, of course. He was just trying to recruit more ideological diversity to the survey to keep it representative. And I’m also kidding about the goons at Pharyngula being open-minded. I need to point that out because PZ Myres has apparently lost the ability to see the invisible quotation marks of satire.

Yes, you see, I went to Noah’s blog and, finding nothing new as usual, I went on my merry way to Briggs, which also contained nothing new. And having a modicum of time on my hands, I thought I might have a look at Pharyngula, where I haven’t been in months, since that’s also linked from Noah’s blog. And I’m truly sorry, but the low level to which discourse has sunk over there was honestly shocking to me.

Scrolling down the main page I’m treated to:

(1) A link to a site encouraging church pastors to get their flock to vote. I guess I’m not really sure why this is funny to Myers. I should think it’s par for the course that various interest groups encourage people to vote here in this election season. Yes, even those interest groups we find ridiculous, what with this being a democracy with free and fair elections and all.

(2) An assurance that the Discovery Institute’s latest texbook is propaganda and not science. As if anyone needed to crack the book to know that.

(3) A picture from Galapagos. Which is to PZ Myers sort of like Jerusalem is to Jews. And Christians. And Muslims. More on this in a bit. It was a nice picture.

(4) An entry entitled “Chicken” calling John McCain a - you guessed it! - for withdrawing from Friday’s debate. Clever, Myers! ‘Cause I bet McCain’s soooo dumb he really DOES think not showing up for any debates will help him win!

(5) Yet another link to an internet poll for his readers to trash. For someone who claims to find internet polling pointless, Myers certainly does devote a lot of column space to encouraging his readers to trash them.

(6) A bit about Nature’s election science policy poll - which Obama answered and McCain didn’t. Which certainly does make McCain look bad - but I wonder how commentary like this actual quote from Myers contributes to the discussion? “…in an attempt to be fair, Nature dug through McCain’s old speeches to charitably cobble up the kind of answers he might have given if a) he weren’t an incompetent old coot who can’t get his act together, b) he actually cared what the universe outside the right-wing electorate thought, and c) he wasn’t going to heedlessly gut science as quickly as possible if given the opportunity.”

(7) A celebratory bit about a new planetarium in Minneapolis - which is mostly impressed with itself because more is being spent in tax money on this planetarium than the completely privately-funded creationist museum. Which is like giving someone a 2km head start in a 5k and then being honestly impressed he beat you. Oh, and then, for no reason, commenting that John McCain probably doesn’t even know what a 5k is, as if it were somehow relevant to who won.

(8) A comic showing someone killing a pollster. Because who cares what the public thinks?

(9) A link to an atheist site in India. ‘Cause there’s atheists everywhere, apparently. Who knew?

(10) The one actually interesting entry - about a creative funding scheme for getting money to work on primates.

(11) The one in which he apologizes for a bone-headed link. Hey - it happens.

(12) A link to a Dr. Seuss inspired spoof of creationism. ‘Cause we’ve all got lots ‘o time on our hands.

(13) And the one in which he belatedly realizes that Roger Ebert’s latest post on Creationism was, in fact, satire. WHEW - finally here. M-kay - so it goes like this. Roger Ebert (to whom I should really think seriously about devoting a post category, honestly) recently shook up the internets by posting a Creationism Q and A that was - as it turns out - intended as satire. Which really should have been obvious to all but the most obtuse of readers. And of course, maybe it was…

Ebert 1 - 0 Myers is all I have to say. Have a look at the article and see for yourself if there aren’t “invisible quotes” interspersed all through it. Sure, it’s a bit more straight-faced than most satire in that it gives a fairly accurate set of answers from a creationist point of view. But for cryin’ out loud, it contains bits such as this:

Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?

A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: “Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.”

A question which contains the archaic phrase “even to the highest mountains” that is answered straight-faced with a quote from the Bible. C’mon - how does anyone miss that this is satire? In their wettest of wet dreams, of course, Creationists would like to see scientific questions answered with authoritative Bible quotes, but for their public face the show they generally put on is that Creationism is a “theory” the way Evolution (which they prefer to call “Darwinism”) is a “theory.” I.e. they pretend that Creationism is an honest and faith-neutral attempt at explanation … meaning that they avoid direct Bible quotes because that would give up the goat.

The question is - how did an intelligent guy like Myers miss this?

Answer - he’s long ago ceased functioning as an intelligent guy on this issue. He’s a child-man, really. And like most child-men, he’s really only able to function in an echo-chamber, where the boyz in his gang spray graffiti all over the locker rooms of the boyz in the other gang. What, indeed, was the point of the the infamous Communion Wafer gag? Was anyone honestly shocked that there were Catholics out there who got irrational about it? People who believe they’re eating Jesus in the form of bread every Sunday? This was surprising? To whom, I wonder… And then to trash the Koran - only not the real Koran (which must be in Arabic for Islamic fundamentalists) but just an English copy of it, thereby disingenuously exploiting a cowardly loophole while publicly claiming to be an equal-opportunity offender.

If all this sounds like kindergarten behavior to you, we’re on the same page. And so it isn’t surprising, really, that Myers would have a child’s sense of humor. Meaning that he can’t abide ambiguity. It’s got to be clear - with we the Good Guys doing the laughing and they the Bad Guys doing the being laughed at - for it to make any sense to him. And so of course Ebert’s Q and A is going to fall flat - because Myers, ultimately, lacks the strength of his convictions.

Here’s Myers on the inevitable comparison to Swift’s classic:

But Ebert is no Jonathan Swift. Imagine if, in 1729, there had been a number of letters to the editor by various authors proposing that Irish children be exterminated and eaten. Imagine that laws of that nature were being seriously debated in Parliament, and that one of the parties had made it a part of their platform. While the laws were being regularly defeated, opponents still had to stand up and seriously debate why it was unethical to eat babies. Imagine that a candidate for prime minister actually solemnly suggested that we ought to at least consider the merits of eating Irish children.

In other words, he’s totally missed the point. The mechanism by which A Modest Proposal operates is by stating something outlandish in reasonable-sounding terms. To us in the 21st century, that’s about where it stops, and we get a good laugh out of it on that level. Because hey, who would seriously endorse cannibalism, eh? Eh? But then, these days who would seriously endorse half of the contemporaneous English Ireland policy? LOTS of things that went on in Ireland then seem outrageous by today’s standards, and Swift’s purpose was to carry the situation just over the line into absurdity. It functions not in the way the Myers takes it (apparently as a bludgeon over the head), but rather by obviously crossing the line but staying withing sight of things that seriously were being proposed. Which is exactly what Ebert’s commentary does, honestly. It takes things over the line by quoting the Bible as scientific authority, and it works BECAUSE we know that there are people out there on local school boards proposing things that aren’t too terribly far from that right now. Swift’s point in 1729 was to say “yeah, you guys aren’t SAYING cannibalism, but lots of what you’re doing isn’t too far off the mark.” Just as Ebert’s bit says “yeah, you guys aren’t SAYING ‘teach the Bible in school’ but the pseudoscience you’re proposing we do teach isn’t too far off the mark.” Swift says something like “look, if you’re going to propose something as inhuman as X, you might as well go all they way and actually eat people.” And Ebert says something like “if you’re going to make up a theory no scientist believes and pretend it’s actually the subject of controversy in Biology Departments, you might as well go all the way and have kids read the Bible in science class.” I admit, I laughed at Swift and not at Ebert - but then, Ebert is primarily a movie reviewer and is a satirist only second.

My point here is simply to say that there was a time when atheists were in a class by themselves on this topic. There was the religious world consisting of all its various flavors of superstition, and then there were atheists, who rejected all that. Recently, one of the favorite tactics of religious fanatics has become classing Atheism as a faith like any other. And those of us who are genuine atheists have to patiently explain to them that it isn’t a faith. I don’t wilfully disbelieve in God - I simply recognize that the burden of proof is on the believer and note their general failure to meet it. It’s the same mechanism by which I disbelieve in the Loch Ness Monster. Sure, it’s logically possible that there is such a creature, it’s just that it seems so hugely unlikely, and in any case no one has been able to show me that it’s there. And surely the onus is on them to show me that, rather than on me to believe in it until someone manages, for the first time in history, to definitively prove a negative. So it is with God. I will modify my worldview and behavior to accomodate such a thing when someone shows me it’s there - not before. That is not “faith” by any definition.

Unfortunately, people like PZ Myers give us all a bad name. They run around acting like religious fanatics, all in the name of supposedly doing away with this sort of behavior. And so it isn’t too much of a stretch for people of faith to accuse them of having a secular faith of their own. Because honestly, what else motivates someone to publicly desecrate a communion wafer? What is it meant to achieve? Because from where I sit it’s about as funny as picking on a retarded guy for slurring his speech. You get one cheap laugh, and then you realize it was a cheap laugh and you feel ashamed of yourself for exploiting another’s misfortune. And honestly, what else motivates someone to respond in such a petulant way when it’s revealed he’s been had by an obvious bit of satire? You get one rush of righteous indignation at Ebert, and it lasts about as long as it takes you to realize that you’ve only been had because you take yourself too seriously, and you laugh at yourself and lighten up a bit.

OR…

Maybe what you do instead is do nothing all day but knock at low-hanging fruit with a sledgehammer. We’re all different.

This is just great. Now, in addition to “homophobia,” we have as a proposal that there be “theophobia” too.

I suppose the author thinks himself clever for “reclaiming” a technique of the PC crowd. But if “homophobia” is drivel, then so too, obviously, is “theophobia.”

The word “homophobia” is language manipulation, no two ways about it. It’s what George Lakoff would call “framing.” Gay rights activists have “framed” the debate in such a way that disliking their lifestyle is passed off as an irrational fear. But in many cases it is neither irrational nor even a fear. Certainly it’s true that there are some irrational gay-bashers in the world, but the majority of us dislike homosexuality because we’re disgusted by it. It’s the same reason they do it, actually. If there’s a gene - or even a formative life experience - that renders one attracted to members of the opposite sex, then is it really such a stretch to imagine that there’s a gene - or a formative experience - that renders people sexually repulsed by the idea of intercourse between members of the same sex? Honestly, psychologists understand little to nothing about what homosexuality is or where it comes from; I think it’s a bit premature to dismiss opposition to it as a “phobia.”

Now, apparently, religious people are playing the same card. Simple opposition to religion is no longer to be tolerated. If you express a strong distaste for someone’s religious affiliation, you’re “theophobic.” It can apparently never be the case that simple reasoning led one to the conclusion that atheism was the way to go - rather, being an atheist is an “irrational fear.”

Here’s the definition from the article:

I have more frequently encountered less intense versions of what I will call “Theophobia” - the academic’s irrational fear of, or intense discomfort around, theist and, in particular, Christian, beliefs.

And what effects this meditation?

Just a few days ago, I was discussing a mutual friend with a former colleague. The latter was astonished by our mutual friend’s Christianity: “What’s up with that?!” he exclaimed, expressing bewilderment and even nervousness at the thought that a well-regarded - indeed, by academic standards, famous - professor could believe in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God.

Why not, I wonder? I fail to see anything “phobic” about this. Granted, I wasn’t there, so perhaps the friend went on to say some ridiculous things about Christians. But if he did the author doesn’t quote them, and in any case there’s obviously nothing wrong with being put off by anyone’s religious beliefs.

I think that even from a believer’s point of view, it must be conceded that non-believers will find religion offputting as a general rule. Consider where we’re coming from. True, we don’t understand everything about the world, but we’re aware that our generation understands a lot more than generations past. We take the sensible position that we can only speak to those entities that we’ve either (a) encountered ourselves in some meaningful sense or (b) have reason to believe in as a means of explaining the existence of things we have encountered ourselves in some meaningful sense. Point (b) addresses our belief in the existence of things like quarks. True that no one’s ever seen one, but there is a replicable process of reasoning over experiments that leads scientists to hypothesize their existence. No doubt there are entities in the world we’re unaware of at present, and granted that God could be one of them, but we don’t speak to those entities because there is no basis for dealing with things we have no reason to believe in.

There is simply no rational process that leads one to certain belief in God. God is not obviously manifest in the world - as should be clear from the fact that even religious people report struggles with their faith and the need to lean on fellow believers for encouragement. If God were obviously manifest in the world, witnesses to His Presence would hardly be necessary, after all. And yet, no shortage of major religions feel the need to proselytize. Ask a religious person how they know God is real, and they will invariably tell you either about some sort of supernatural encounter they had, or else they will talk about their feelings. In no cases in my life has any religionist ever offered me an objective reason to believe in God’s existence (at least, not one without numerous and obvious flaws).

In other words, belief in God is almost without exception predicated on experiences or feelings that are both extraordinary and subjective - hidden from the mass public. Surely in such a case the burden of proof is on those who believe? It’s worse than that, even. It’s that believers believe in things that flat-out contradict their daily experience of how the world works. It’s not like believing in quarks, which are observable (if only indirectly) and quantifiable, and affect the things we can see in predictable ways. No - religionists believe in a dimension of experience that is radically at odds with they way the world seems to work.

So again, just like with homo-”phobia,” we’re labeling something as a “phobia” that is neither irrational nor even a fear. As real as God and All That may be to believers, to the rest of us it’s superstitious nonsense. It’s a disconnected series of fantasies at absolute odds with how we observe the universe to work. If they want to believe in such stuff, then that is obviously their right, but nothing about exercising one’s rights means that anyone else need be comfortable with it.

An academic is someone generally employed to do critical thinking, not to simply take things at face value, or to believe everything he’s told. There are obvious psychological reasons why ordinary people may choose to believe in religion (or, what I suspect is much more common, not to question it). But for someone whose job it is to question things, it is a bit incongruous to cordon off a special set of patently irrational beliefs and leave them outside of one’s critical realm, no? In short, I should think that this fellow’s reaction is the normal and predictable reaction of an atheist academic to hearing the news that a fellow critical thinker holds religious beliefs. If this reaction is more potent in the case of Christians than other religions, then that is simply because the person so reacting probably grew up Christian himself and finds it even more difficult to accept that someone in his very situation can have failed to question the ambient religion. He knows considerably less about the experiences of adherents of other faiths is all.

Indeed, it’s probably a good time to point out that this is a contradiction in the article as written. On the one hand, the author wants to define “theophobia” as being particularly virulent in the case of Christian beliefs, but then he turns around and “explains” it by saying that

It seems to driven by unfamiliarity with anything except the crudest caricature of the object of horror, derived from distant rumors of bizarre and violent behavior in a strange faraway place (for homophobes, say, the Castro; for theophobes, perhaps Lubbock, TX or Colorado Springs, CO). Secular academics typically do not know many religious believers — especially not many overly devout Christians — and their isolation leads to the most naively lurid fantasies about what religious belief entails.

Actually, most academics in the US are likely to have encountered overly devout Christians on occasions too numerous to count. It’s overly devout Muslims and Hindus they’re unlikely to have met here, and so by this theory it should be those groups that are the special objects of “fear.” Oops!

And indeed, there’s a lot of dishonestly going on in this article.

Suppose one takes God to subsist rather than exist, as an intellectual construct akin to pi or imaginary numbers? What harm can come from guiding one’s life by the supposed judgments of the being that Adam Smith called “the impartial spectator” - a perfectly wise judge with perfectly accurate information about your motives and actions? I can think of worse heuristics.

The harm, as the author surely is aware, is that this “heuristic” is based on something that the believer has no reason to believe is real. Substitute “God” for “astrology” or “magic 8ball” and this point would hardly need to be made. Believers in tarot cards, after all, seem to think that shuffling a deck of these pretty pictures (and ONLY these pretty pictures) is somehow revelatory of the state of the universe - so this is the same kind of “heuristic,” no? And yet we don’t hesitate to react to this with bemusement because we can’t see any good reason why it should be the case that shuffling a deck of highly specific pictures should mean anything over and above that their order in the deck has changed! So it is with God. You can well pray to Him for advice till you’re blue in the face, but if He’s simply not there, then it’s all a silly waste of time. There’s nothing “phobic” about saying so.

I say that theophobia is irrational, because there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that religious belief as such has any more harmful consequences than lack thereof. True, religious believers have done some horrible things in the name of God. But there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that the body count attributable to religious belief is higher than the death toll from whatever ideology one wishes to ascribe to Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hutu Nationalists, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, or any number of other despots motivated by secular ideologies

True, but this isn’t the point. Something doesn’t become automatically acceptable for being “better than Hitler.” The fact that Hitler has killed more people than the Catholic Church surely doesn’t let the Vatican off the hook for its crimes? I should have thought that any belief system that has demonstrably led to a lot of irrational killing was suspect?

(Yes, I know Hitchens & Co. disputes that this string of despots killed for the sake of secular ideologies, mostly by gerry-rigging the definition of religion to include beliefs like Nazism. But, using the same looseness of definition, I can claim Stoics, Epicureans, even diehard Rawlsians — yes, there are such people — among the religious believers).

Fine, so claim Stoics and Epicureans as religious for all I care. Hitchens’ objection isn’t to the label “religion” per se, but rather to the irrational assertion that something is true which not only cannot be observed or verified but which is, indeed, at odds with daily experience. That Stoics and Epicureans do not fit his description should be obvious. But even if we concede that they do, I’m sure Hitchens would be the first to admit that there are levels to religion, and that some religious beliefs are more repulsive than others. Just as we can obviously admit that Clement Atlee was sincere and well-intentioned while Stalin was not and all the while deplore Socialism in general.

I do not wish to enter into the tired controversy about whether atheism or theism is more conducive to ethical behavior.

Good, then don’t - because that’s not the issue that’s under discussion here. I myself despise religion and yet am perfectly happy to admit that some of the kindest, most ethical people I have met are religious. Religion clearly motivates a certain number of people to do very good things, but so what? That which isn’t real isn’t real - and as I have also met kind and ethical people who are atheists I am none too worried about which avenue is more likely to lead to ethical behavior. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever asserted that atheists are incapable of morally degenerate self-delusion. Just as no one has, to the best of my knowledge, ever asserted that atheism automatically leads to moral superiority.

I want only to suggest that this controversy is tired precisely because there is no obvious answer to the question inspiring it. One can wrangle forever about the relative merits of theism and atheism without reaching any firm conclusion, which is precisely why it is irrationally phobic to have an intense fear of theism on this score.

Fine - but as far as I know, no one has any “intense fear of theism on this score.” This is a non-issue, so why are we talking about it?

How widespread is theophobia among academics? I cannot say for sure …

Fortunately, I can: it’s virtually nonexistent. I have never met anyone who I would characterize as having an “irrational fear” of religion. They object to it is all - and on sensible grounds that they are happy to explain to anyone who asks. It isn’t irrational, and it isn’t a fear - it’s simple bemusement that anyone intelligent would go around believing in a great sky bully no one has ever seen and whose existence, indeed, would require a radical revision of reality as we currently understand it. So thanks for playing, but this “theophobia” category is wholly unconvincing. Indeed, it’s pretty transparently a crudely manipulative attempt at deck-stacking. At least homosexuals have an excuse for trying this play: there were times in the recent past when they indeed suffered from a frightening and all-too-often violent level of discrimination. Religionists have primarily suffered such discrimination from believers in - what else? - rival religious factions. There’s a lesson there…

From a review of Paulos’ book Irreligion on eSkeptic:

An important question remains: Why has atheism and skepticism toward religion suddenly emerged as a question of great current interest, at least among the literate, in the past few years? Clearly something has happened to break atheists of their tendency to nurture their disbelief privately and to keep their opinions to themselves.

He’s referring, of course, to the recent proliferation of books like Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Where in the past atheists were content to go about their business in private, nowadays we’re public - beligerent even.

Levitt’s explanation is that

It seems obvious that politics has a lot to do with this, specifically the cultivation of the religious right as a phalanx of conservative storm troopers who are rewarded by conservative politicians by having their singular dogmas incorporated, as much as possible, into public policy. … Atheists, who, despite polls, have never been all that rare, have come to mistrust the notion that they can believe as they will, undisturbed, provided they remain discreet about it.

Yes, certainly that’s part of it. But I would argue that there’s another dimension as well - namely that religion is itself on the decline, and atheists sense the weakness. It’s the old paradox of the dog that attacks. It attacks because it feels threatened, but also because it thinks it can win. If it’s sure it’s beat, what it does instead is roll over on its back and expose its tummy.

If atheists are barring their teeth these days, it’s because we’re increasingly under attack and increasingly likely to win. And in fact, the reason we’re under attack is because we’re increasingly likely to win. Let me explain.

Leaving aside the undeniable role that religion played in the Progressive and Temperance movements, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Levitt and Paulos are right that religion wasn’t always as much of a pushbutton issue in American politics as it is today. If true, that doesn’t necessarily imply that religious idenitifcation is on the rise. Quite the contrary - it might be that religionists are flexing their muscles now because they know later will be too late. In fact, this is exactly what I believe is happening.

Where does the Religious Right come from? I would trace its evolution in something like the following fashion. First there was the Cold War. The US found itself pitted against the Soviets in a global power structure, and it needed a way to explain to the population what was at stake. “Socialism” worked OK as an argument, but it had lost its teeth as a scare tactic a bit after the New Deal. The US had government-partnered unions, the US had welfare programs, the US had been through rationing and had regulated industries, etc. To anyone paying attention, we were no longer much of a “model” capitalist state - and that went with double helpings for our allies in Europe. The best we can do on that front is say “yes, we agree with a certain amount of government economic planning, we just think the Soviet Union takes it way too far.” Convincing, but not terribly inspiring. But religion worked nicely. Church attendance was an important part of most people’s lives in the 1950s, and telling them that the godless commies were coming to shut all that down actually was scary. That isn’t to say that “defense of freedom” didn’t play a role. Joe McCarthy is illustrative here - obviously. (There was a “red scare,” but there was an equal backlash once it was exposed as a hoax - although, we now know McCarthy wasn’t exaggerating by as much as we thought at the time.) That’s just to say that religion was an important part of the Cold War mythology, and so it took on an importance in American life that it hadn’t had before. It was, after all, during the 1950s that “In God We Trust” became the national motto, and “One nation, under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Religion was good propaganda.

The Religious Right as we know it today arose to defend these gains against the counterculture of the 1960s. The counterculture was perceived as anti-patriotic, so the typical “pigeonholed” response was to complete the paradigm and swing as far the other way as possible. Atheism remained on the sidelines. It is often said that opposites are actually similar in all ways but one. A hot poker and a cold poker are still pokers. And interestingly, just as the US and the Soviet Union’s ideological differences were smaller than perceived in the 1950s, so were the ideological differences between the Religious Right and the counterculture. After all, if hippies rebelled against Christianity, they certainly didn’t mind religion. The Beatles got the ball rolling by twisting themselves into knots and playing sitars for Vishnu, and everyone else followed suit. Religion was trendy … so long as it didn’t involve regular church attendance.

Much like radical Islam profits from the westernization of Arabia, evangelical Christianity profits from the secularization of America. It became a political force in response to the counterculture. But it didn’t take it long to figure out that it could win most of those people back. Christianity, after all, lends itself pretty well to the hippie worldview. Not the suits and pews, of course, but then those were never very Christian to begin with. Evangelicals and the counterculture eventually met in the middle. They both agreed that traditional religion was insufficiently spiritual, overly structured, and ultimately insincere. Meanwhile, in the background, traditional religion quietly died.

The genie was out of the bottle in more ways than one. Unleashed to defend religion’s role in public life, the Evangelicals ironically ended up helping to kill the institutions that sustained that role. And so they were here to stay as a permanent political force long after hippies turned into soccer moms and lawyers. Increasingly desperate, they became increasingly active - complaining about everything from Dungeons and Dragons to rap music to gay marriage to dusting off the old complaints about mean ol’ Charles Darwin. And they discovered, much to everyone else’s chagrin, that they were a voting block.

But just because something is noisy doesn’t mean it’s strong. Evangelicals have been successful at getting politicians to pepper their speeches with references to “God.” But are they saving America from a secular fate? Even they say no.

And so that’s the paradoxical environment in which atheists find themselves today. We’re publicly more threatened than they have been in years, even though we’re actually winning the fight. Atheism has chosen to bare its teeth and fight back, for once. Hence the endless string of sneering titles from the likes Dennet, Dawkins and Hitchens.

I would like to politely suggest that atheists are taking the wrong approach. Rather than barring our teeth and warning everyone that the sky is falling, let’s just let religion go off to die in peace. Thanks to the hippies and the evangelicals, church has ceased to be a relevant institution in our daily lives. We can comfortably not go and still get jobs, still raise kids, still be friends with our church-going neighbors, etc. It has never been easier to be an atheist. True, the Religious Right wants to end abortion and reintroduce God-based education into our schools, but does anyone honestly think they will succeed? Creationism isn’t going to kill anything that isn’t already dead. In fact, I think it’s rather hypocritical of scientists and atheists to only now start taking an interest in public education. Public education has sucked in these United States for a very long time already; creationism is a symptom rather than the culprit. And abortion? Would it really be so terrible if a wrongly-decided Court decision were overturned, allowing the Court to get back to the business of reading the Constitution and deciding whether laws violate it or not? Whether or not you agree with abortion rights (and I do very much support abortion rights), there is nothing in the Constitution that justifies Roe v. Wade. Better would be to overturn it and let the states get down to the business of tailoring abortion regulations to fit their constituencies. The overwhelming majority of states will prefer to keep the status quo, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from passing a national abortion law legalizing it everywhere in the Union. Christians can’t hurt us. Which is why we’re fighting back, of course, but also why it’s ultimtately ineffective.

Getting angry at the Religious Right only gives it something to do. It inflates its sense of importance beyond what reality will bear. If we want to kill off religion (and I do), then there are really two strategies we could follow. We could ignore it and hope it will go away (it will eventually for the most part, if not completely), or we could calmly refute it and go about our business. I’m in favor of doing both as the situation warrants.

Yes, by all means, let’s have books explaining why the rational arguments for God are all faulty. But let’s not write these books the way Dawkins and Hitchens do. Dawkins and Hitchens only ever alienate people. You don’t win people over by trumpeting how much smarter than everyone else is you think you are. The people we’re aiming to win over are the undecideds. What we have to do is convince them that there’s really no decision - that they don’t have to worry about this issue because it isn’t an issue - that the burden of proof is on the believers. And we have to do that all while respecting that they were giving religion serious consideration before we came along. “Be sensitive,” in other words. If Levitt’s review is to be believed, that is exactly what Paulos’ book does.

Dawkins and Hitchens and their ilk give religion too much credit. I don’t see the point because I honestly don’t think religion will last. With each passing generation, the world gets less religious than it was before, and that is as inevitable as it is good.