Talking to an atheist...

What follows is an email I sent to an atheist who emailed me after I wrote a review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith.


Dear Mr Coupland,

Like many atheists I have spoken with – and like Sam Harris - you employ what I would call a ‘scatter gun’ method in attack and the ‘small target’ method in defence. By which I mean this: that you put forward arguments of differing nature across a range of fields, some of which are important and serious, some of which are red herrings and some of which are just (with respect) ill-informed. You attack Catholics as if they are fundamentalists, Protestants as if they are Catholics.

On the defence you posit atheism as not really asserting anything at all and so don’t feel you have a case to answer. Hence, to any suggestions that you might show some proof for your position, you don’t respond, since you claim you aren’t asserting anything.

Let me try to clarify: some of your arguments are philosophical, or have a philosophical position at the root - so, vis a vis ‘miracles’, you rule them out a priori whatever the evidence because of a philosophical position. Some of your arguments pertain to the Bible and the reliability of its sources. Some of your arguments relate to the morality of religious groups/ the church. And so on.

Now, I could answer in detail each of these, but I think I’d be wasting my time. Clearly anyone who cites Barbara Thiering as an authority over the vast majority of non-confessional scholarly academic opinion (the Jewish Oxford scholar Geza Vermes for example) is following a pattern of prejudice not ‘reason’. Because I think the real issue is not logical or rational but existential. Clearly, your religious upbringing has prejudiced you against Christianity and other religions. If you hadn’t had that upbringing, perhaps you would have been less likely to pursue atheism as an adult. This may sound impertinent, but of course it is the logic you use to characterize religious believers…

My contention is that atheism is as much a matter of ‘belief’ as theism is. Not that belief is bad: it is in fact something humans do all the time everywhere. We do not subject even very important beliefs to scientific scrutiny: that would be both laborious and unnecessary. We take many things on trust (or ‘faith’). Not that trust is ‘blind’ as you say it must be; not at all. It is just what we do all the time because we can’t know everything! We base our lives around the credibility of those we know and whose authority we trust. Generally I don’t ask my wife to take a cat scan to understand her mental states. When you believe the words of a guy with a M.D. and a white coat about your body you are exercising trust. We may of course be deceived, or have our trust misplaced; but that is a necessary risk that all humans take at both trivial and profound levels. We need to do this to be what we are. It is a false dichotomy to pit so-called ‘reason’ against ‘faith’.

Is atheism like this? Of course it is. It is existentially convenient for some not to believe in God, because it may justify their hatred of the church or religious people (and religious people have of course on occasion acted appallingly). It may underpin their politics or their ethics (it is no accident that atheism has been historically associated with libertinism). It may quiet their uneasy consciences. It may be that they want to sleep in on Sunday mornings. The atheist has to believe the impossible and the illogical: that the universe has no cause and no beginning. He or she has to believe that there is no life after death. He or she has to take the infinitesimal odds that life began from the primordial soup by blind chance. You have to believe that despite the deeply held sense that the majority of us have that some things humans (religious ones often) do are really profoundly evil, that this is nothing but a matter of power and that justice really only boils down to whatever it is we can enforce. And so on… Sure, I think you can take those odds, and you can believe atheism. But don’t call it other than what it is: a belief! Don’t be shy! Then, we can talk about which beliefs are more justified, more plausible or more likely. It interests me that you seem very happy to have faith in the authority of scholars whose credibility is highly dubious because it supports your belief (I can’t believe you seriously suggest the ‘Jesus wasn’t really dead’ argument – to put that forward really takes some believing!) I may be wrong, but I doubt you have checked all the evidence for yourself first-hand. But then it was you who said ‘don’t believe everything you read’… you must be a very busy man, what with learning all those ancient languages and visiting archaeological sites and deciphering ancient manuscripts and the like!

Ahh: you are now going to bring the tooth fairy out and dangle her in front of me (along with Santa Claus). This is the small target defence. Basically, you say, it is very hard to prove a negative proposition, even ones that the majority of us know to be obviously true (ie “the tooth fairy doesn’t exist”): so we ought only to accept those positive propositions for which there is proof and deny those for which there is no proof (ie “there is no positive proof for the tooth fairy, therefore she does not exist”). However: proving the existence of anything or anyone other than yourself is actually very difficult if you have such a high standard of evidence. Now, we can I suppose trust our senses to give us trustworthy data – but even this is not always the case. We know that people can have sense experiences of things that don’t exist – and we ordinarily class them as mentally ill. It is even harder when it comes to historical figures or people that you haven’t met. I take it you believe that I exist and do so along with Winston Churchill, Henry VIII and Julius Caesar though you have very little direct empirical evidence of any of us. And yet your proof for these beliefs is actually quite flimsy, if you compare it to the standard of proof you are demanding for the existence of God.

In addition, it is important to say that believing in God isn’t like believing in the tooth fairy at all of course. The difference is of course massive and obvious: the tooth fairy has no link to the way things are in the world. And very few people have ever claimed to have an experience of the tooth fairy. In addition, we might say, that it is part of the definition of the tooth fairy that she, like unicorns and Homer Simpson, is fictional. So it is commonly agreed by all that the type of existence she has is as a fictional or mythical entity as part of a game we play with children. On the other hand, the vast majority of human beings over history and across cultural differences testify to the existence of God in some form: they have posited (and continue to do so) that it was reasonable to believe from observing the way the world is that it was the work of a creator being of some kind. And many many people testify to having had experiences of God of some kind. The neurological data used to explain away religious experience that Harris introduces seems to me to be completely silly and typical of his arguments: he thinks by explaining a cause of something he has explained the entire thing away. This is a net full of red herrings… Now, truth isn’t democratic (thank goodness) of course. But if you are to assert something against the vast majority of the race in this way I think you do have to offer some kind of proof. Otherwise, stop being an atheist and be honest: you are really an agnostic.

Or, you could join Professor Anthony Flew, who after a lifetime of advocating atheism in public has decided that theism is the most defensible position philosophically (without becoming religious in anyway).