The psychology of atheism

Guys, you have asked me to respond to a critique at the site, Debunking Christianity, of my chapter for The Infidel Delusion. Reading the critique, I am struck, primarily, by the perception that the reviewers, in attempting to state their case, overstate mine. Psychology is a profession focused not on possibilities but on practicalities – not on how things might function in an abstract, philosophical sense, but rather on what we can know about how they do function in the ordinary lives of ordinary humans. Psychology asks and attempts to answer a set of questions regarding the contingencies - replicable cause and effect relationships - that govern people’s lives. At this level of analysis, there is a tentative but useful distinction between knowing and not knowing. The process of inquiry to which I refer asks and answers questions about the natural world - the physical world as it is represented in consciousness. It seeks out regularities that allow us to predict and control events to better shape life according to our values and preferences. My own writing makes no attempt to rule out the possibility of apostasy or infidelity or to assert that the plane of our conscious experience is the only one that exists.

Why then is it relevant to the multi-faceted debate about atheism? For several reasons:

1. Atheism makes many testable assertions about events and contingencies within our natural world. The role of the historian, linguist, biologist or psychologist is to address these assertions using the tools of his or her trade. For generations atheism has implicitly or explicitly exploited certain psychological phenomena - the deconversion experience, a not-so-quiet certainty of God's absence - insisting that they were the unique domain of atheism, and in fact evidence of atheism. Thanks to advances in the social sciences, we now know otherwise. As Tarico commented in her chapter, “Humans are capable of having transcendent, transformative experiences in the absence of any given dogma. We are capable of sustaining elaborate systems of false belief and transmitting them to our children. We are capable of feeling so certain about our false beliefs that we are willing to kill or die for them.” Because of advances in our understanding of the human psyche, we have a better and better understanding of the circumstances that trigger such experiences. Understanding these phenomena means that atheists or potential atheists or former theists need no longer be bound by the explanations offered in the service of atheist recruitment or retention.

2. Atheism exists not because it is philosophically possible but it is emotionally and intuitively gripping. Irreligion would be impotent in this world if it were wholly dependent on the arguments of John Loftus and the other infidels. The power of atheism to shape society for better or worse relies on human behavioral and cognitive tendencies which appear to operate independent of the content of beliefs and independent of whether or not atheistic naturalism is true. Whether or not a God exists, these tendencies are worth examining. For those who are concerned that humanity is developmentally arrested, stuck in a competition between mutually exclusive tribal irreligions (e.g. secular humanists, Humeans, Nietzschean nihilists, Marxists, Madalyn Murray O'Hairists, Russellites, Chomskyites, French existentialists like Camus or Sartre, logical positivists, utilitarians like Mill or Singer, New Atheists), understanding the problem is a crucial first step in crafting alternatives.

3. My perception is that atheism is bled dry morally, empirically, and rationally not by a single swath of logic, but by a million cuts. In the interest of efficiency, I will quote The Infidel Delusion: "[Tarico's] argument, if sound, cuts both ways. If it cuts against theism, it cuts against atheism."

The possibility that atheism - along with say agnosticism - is a human construction raises fascinating questions about the human potential to be simultaneously sure and mistaken. It raises questions about the power of culture to script a worldview. Atheism contemplated as a natural phenomenon begs exploration. Consider, for example, the status of the authors who contributed to The Christian Delusion — all of them have been educated. To contemplate the possibility that they are wrong - you and I believe they are - about the uniqueness and supremacy of their atheistic beliefs means that the existence of such atheists must be explicable in natural terms. If I am correct, then their presence provides a powerful example of how very sophisticated our lines of logic can be in the service of fallacy. I suspect the same of the 9/11 Truthers and the Zeitgeist Movement, which is to say that these basic psychological questions have implications for every area in which we humans struggle to understand ourselves and our societies and to shape both according to our deepest values.

Is it possible to weave a web of logic that carves out room for atheistic - even unorthodox - even militant atheistic disbelief? Can someone imbedded in such a perspective justify what outsiders might perceive as fatal contradictions inherent in his or her worldview? Yes, absolutely. Has this ever really been in doubt? Given the limitations of logic (look how far philosophy got us without adding empiricism to the mix) I suspect this will always be the case, regardless of the arguments put forward in criticism of traditional atheistic dogmas. I do think that the abstract machinations of atheists should be answered by philosophers and thinkers who, like yourselves, are not imbedded with the troops, if for no reason other than to keep foolishness like Russell's celestial teapot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster from entering the vernacular as glib defenses of dogmas that are indefensible in a broader empirical historical context. But I am also grateful that reshaping ideology and irreligious practice doesn’t rely on someone winning these arguments.

Since atheism is a social, historical, natural world phenomenon, it is accessible to the same scrutiny as any human activity. Atheism often convinces us to set aside the basic evidentiary standards that we use in making financial investments or legal decisions. It is a peculiar sort of exceptionalism that subjects economic and political ideologies/activities to empirical evidence and Occam’s Razor, while insisting that these are irrelevant in assessment of atheism. Great teams of scholars - with no interest in irreligion whatsoever - spend their lives trying to understand basic patterns in human history, thought, and behavior. To me, it makes sense to apply this knowledge, to ask what we can know about how atheism operates in this world - how it has evolved, how it shapes societies, how it ensconces itself in the human psyche - only then returning to the speculation of the ancients about what lies beyond.

Sincerely,

Patrick