You mentioned in your email that the books you chose are not necessarily the best on atheism, but you consider them essential to understanding “the merits of atheism.” can you explain what you meant by that?
As you know, I started my books with the confessions of Saint Augustine, which I don’t think is on the list of all the best books on atheism. What I meant when I said that they are crucial to understanding the merits of atheism is that, although that was not his intention, reading St. Augustine’s confessions exposes the complete inadequacy of religion to answer the great questions of life, which they’re really no different now than they were when he was fighting them. how do you explain sin when there is an all powerful and loving god? The answer Augustine comes up with, as is the answer in Western Christianity and Judaism, is free will, which is a wholly inadequate answer. either god is almighty and therefore entirely responsible for everything that happens, or he is not, and there is no god in this sense.
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so this book is a good example of the inadequacy of religion. atheists don’t have to deal with the question why is there evil in the world, the answer is that we are responsible for it.
In your opinion, should everyone be an atheist?
I don’t even know how to answer that question. atheism seems reasonable to me, but should everyone be an atheist? I don’t know. to me that’s like asking, should everyone appreciate art? I would never establish a dictation like that. although religion seems completely irrational to me, it gives all kinds of people many things without the bad things that we have seen over the centuries in religion, and we see today in the ultra-Islamic world. I would like to see more atheists, particularly in the United States, which is the only developed country that is still heavily dominated by religion, and where fundamentalist religion still has a lot of influence. I think fundamentalist religions of all kinds, and most fundamentalist religions are monotheistic religions, Catholicism, Protestantism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are terrible forces in the world. i don’t like the fact that 25% of the people in my country believe the bible is literally true. that is not true in other developed parts of the world, it is only true in places where education is very poor. so the united states is an anomaly in that sense. I’d like to see all fundamentalist religions go down the drain.
One thing that was pointed out in a couple of the books you recommended is that atheism has a public relations problem. atheists are considered untrustworthy, atheism is still a dirty word, up to a point.
What you say is true, but it is not true in the entire developed world. the stigma attached to atheism in the developed world is very much an American thing. the Norwegians, the French, the Germans, and the English do not give atheism the pejorative connotations that Americans do. It is definitely true that in the United States the word atheist has a very negative connotation, although in fact the number of atheists is increasing. the number of unchurched people who say their approach to public affairs is predominantly secular is the fastest growing group in the US population. many of them do not call themselves atheists, because there is a pejorative attached to the word, but that is not true in europe. You can be an atheist and run for the highest public office in France, Sweden or Norway. you couldn’t do that in the united states.
I would say that even in England most people would feel more comfortable saying they are agnostics, and would not make a definitive statement that there is no god…
one of the things that is very useful about richard dawkins is that he speaks in a very direct language about this. As Robert Ingersoll, the person others in America called “the great agnostic,” said in the 19th century, there is no difference. The word “agnostic” was invented by Thomas Henry Huxley specifically because he was looking for a milder sounding word than atheist, which is a much older word and was always a pejorative word, well into the 19th century. what ingersoll said is that an atheist is an agnostic and an agnostic is an atheist. Of course, an atheist can’t prove there isn’t a god, because you can’t prove a negative. the atheist basically says that based on everything I see around me, I don’t think so. every rational thing i see and have learned about the world around me says that there is no god, but as far as proving there is no god, no one can do that. both the atheist and the agnostic say that.
By the way, I never participate in these debates, which are very popular in the United States, where people try to prove whether or not there is a god. it is complete nonsense. you cannot prove that there is a god. the test always turns out to be “the bible says so”. and you can’t prove a negative. you cannot prove that there is no god, any more than you can prove any other negative aspect of life. he can only say, “this seems true to me based on the evidence I see, not based on supernatural beliefs.” it is more reasonable for me, as it is for any atheist, to believe in things that are in accordance with what we know to be natural laws than to believe in things that contradict them. Carl Sagan said that if you are making an extraordinary claim, you need extraordinary evidence. let’s say in the case of jesus, that a god-man was killed and rose from the dead, you have to have extraordinary evidence. something written by people who wrote decades after they heard it from someone else, that’s not evidence.
but I never participate in discussions about this.
why not?
because you never get anywhere! And besides, unless you’re a raised atheist, people become atheists like I did, thinking the same things Augustine thought. without a doubt, one of the first things I thought of when he was a mature boy was “why is there polio? why are there diseases? if there is a good god why are there these things? the religious person’s response is “god has a plan we don’t understand.” that was not enough for me. there are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that it basically explains the relationship between science and atheism. but I don’t think people are really persuaded into atheism by books or debates or anything like that. I think people become atheists because they think about the world around them. they start looking for books because they ask questions. In general, people do not become atheists late in life, at age 50. all the atheists I know became atheists pretty soon. they became atheists in their teens or 20s because these are the ages when you’re maturing, your brain is maturing and you’re starting to ask questions. if religion doesn’t do it for you, if, in fact, religion, as it does for me, contradicts any rational idea of how to live, then you become an atheist, or whatever you want to call it, an agnostic, a freethinker.
I am currently working on a book on the history of religious conversion. a conversion narrative is always like saul on the road to damascus. a voice comes from heaven, you fall off your horse, hit your head, and when you wake up you know that jesus is lord. that’s the classic sudden conversion narrative. not so with atheism. people don’t wake up one morning and say “oh god! I’m an atheist.” You don’t fall off a horse and wake up and say “oh there’s no god oh now I know.” No. it’s more of a slow questioning, if you were raised in religion, if those things make any sense.
Let’s go over the books. you’ve already talked a bit about him, but tell me more about st. agustin hippopotamus and his confessions.
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st. agustin is probably the most important father of the church. he is the person who most powerfully articulated the concept of free will when combined with an almighty god, a philosophy that makes man solely responsible for bad things, and god and the grace of god solely responsible of everything good. because there’s also this argument that historically runs through Christianity about grace and what enables people to overcome their bad human instincts. in the philosophy of augustine, which is the philosophy of the catholic church and much of christianity for a long time, it is only the grace of god. In other words, good things are attributable to God’s grace, bad things are not God’s fault. that’s basically it.
there were all kinds of early christians who were later dismissed as heretics who didn’t believe in free will in the sense that augustine did. this also meant that they did not believe in an all-powerful god and it is quite understandable why they were called heretics.
It was interesting to read this book because although one always hears about st. Agustín’s confessions, I personally had never read them.
yes, it’s one of those books that everyone talks about but no one has read. it is also a good book on abnormal psychology. when you read it, you realize that agustin was a brilliant and crazy person. it is written in the form of a letter to god and where the personal narration of the confessions ends is in a crazy place: agustin is still very disturbed because although he has taken a vow of celibacy (which was not necessary to be a christian, at that time you didn’t even have to do that to be a priest) still has wet dreams about women at night. An interesting thing is that Augustine also describes curiosity as the greatest of sins, but he is curious himself. he is very interested in the science of his time. so he comes up with a quite correct observation that your self-control when you’re asleep isn’t quite what it is when you’re awake. sleep puts a man’s mind in a different state, and he hopes that he will finally have enough grace from god that he won’t even have these wet dreams while he sleeps. that’s the hopeful note he ends on. if you don’t think this is a little crazy for a man in the 4th century, a case of hyper-developed consciousness…
The church father, one of the most important figures in the founding of Christianity, is really a psychological case too. and a brilliant man too. this wacky passage is preceded by a brilliant passage on memory in which he asks some of the same questions neuroscientists are asking today, but then goes off on a tangent. Agustín was a person with psychological disorders and a brilliant mind, which, after all, is not an unknown combination.
confessions is a book that everyone should read. is seminal, if you can excuse the expression.
okay, let’s move on to thomas paine. this is a man who was really isolated because of his atheism and died virtually alone. It’s a very, very sad story. tell me about the age of reason.
In a nutshell, this book criticizes the idea that any religious book was written by god. they were all written by man, and although many of them have excellent principles, they are principles that any man can discern through his own reason. you don’t have to have all these supernatural events. he specifically mentions the hebrew bible, the christian bible and the koran – the big three. these holy books were written by man, and can only be understood in terms of the period of history in which they were written. that’s what the age of reason is all about, but he lost all the positive fame of it. He was one of the most famous people in America for his writings, which galvanized the colonists during the Revolutionary War. he lost all of that as a result of writing the age of reason, and he dies alone. no church graveyard will allow him to be buried there. the only religion he really admired was the quakers and even the quaker cemetery in new rochelle new york would not allow him to be buried there. the age of reason shouldn’t be controversial today, but it isn’t in america, simply because there’s this 25% of americans who believe the bible is literally true and was written by god. that’s the strange thing. the age of reason was in the index of the catholic church forever when there was an index, but i don’t think anyone thinks about it much nowadays in europe. The idea that the Bible was not written by God is accepted by the vast majority of Christians.
but the pain doesn’t stop, does it? he is really emphasizing the contradictions in the bible, and how unpleasant god can be, as presented in the bible.
One of the things that’s helpful about the age of reason, if you’re interested in the history of atheism, is that it really lays out the ground on which this battle was fought in the age of enlightenment. that’s really where the battle was joined. lays the groundwork with his exploration of the bible and who actually wrote it, and how he contradicts himself. he wasn’t the only one who did it, but he was the first to expose it to a great extent.
let’s talk about god deception by richard dawkins, which I have to say is a very funny book.
richard dawkins is so funny. One of the reasons for reading God’s Deception is that he will disabuse you of the idea, which is a common stereotype of atheists, that they have no sense of humor. you hear this over and over again. I am often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and these are often religious schools, not fundamentalist schools, but historically religious type colleges. and very often I hear: “oh, I was hoping you were small and dark-haired and wore glasses!” the image of the atheist woman is like what the image of the feminist used to be, someone too ugly to get a man. but part of it is also a lack of humor. people often say to me, “oh, you’re so funny”. “well yeah!”
Dawkins also explains a lot about why he disagrees with people who reconcile science and religion. I agree with him on this. in fact, I think they are irreconcilable. I know plenty of people who have reconciled them, but that’s only because the human brain has this amazing ability to believe two contradictory things at the same time. this is how people are able to reconcile science and religion. but they’re really hard to reconcile, and i think when you read dawkins he explains it very well, why when you say “i’m religious but i also believe in science”, you’re avoiding the question of the ways in which scientific reality is testable as per natural experiment conflicts with belief in events that contradict the laws of nature.
Yes, I have to say that until recently I thought it was okay to believe in science, but also to be religious. But after interviewing Jerry Coyne for this site and then reading Dawkins, I was forced to admit that the two probably aren’t compatible.
at some point it becomes a big inconsistency.
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Is it a coincidence that these two strident atheists are evolutionary biologists? Is it just because they’re thinking about where man came from and how he evolved that they’re more focused on this topic than the rest of us?
Well, I really don’t see how you could be an evolutionary biologist and not be an atheist. but the fact is that among top-level scientists there are some who are not. The head of the National Institutes of Health here in America is a devout Christian. That doesn’t stop him from being head of the NIH and believing in scientific medicine. I’m not saying there aren’t people who live with these two ideas, I’m just saying they certainly couldn’t, and I don’t think there’s any consistency in doing it. Richard Dawkins explains it very well, but I don’t call that being a strident atheist!
here is the exact analogy of someone who is religious but also “believes in science”. It’s like when we get married. We know what the divorce rate is in the Western world, but we all believe that it does not apply to us, that we are going to be in love “until death do us part”, just like the book of common prayer says. We know that a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, but when we take that step and get married, we are acting on another hope. I think people who are religious but not against science are doing the same thing. they are, in a way, covering all the bases. but it makes more sense to believe in eternal love, even though you know that in most cases it doesn’t last, because there can always be an exception. there really are some people who stay in love forever. but you can’t give me any proof that anyone has ever risen from the dead. I am always open. that’s why ingersoll is right about atheist being agnostic and vice versa: if you want to bring all the dear friends i’ve lost to death in the last 10 years to dinner tonight, and i’ll sit down and make spaghetti and we’ll all eat together, I will reconsider my position on eternal life.
what do you think about the criticism of richard dawkins and christopher hitchens, not necessarily the book of his that you have chosen, but god is not great, for example, that they blame religion too much? i’m in china right now, you have a lot of friends in russia, what about this argument that countries that have truly embraced atheism have seen some of the worst excesses of human nature? even if you don’t believe in god, don’t the teachings of, say, christianity, for example, love your neighbor as yourself, not help make the world a better place?
yes, of course. That’s why everyone was so tolerant in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, because they were Christians. I’m so glad you asked that question. the idea that some of the worst things happened in countries that were officially atheist, well, a lot of people never embraced atheism in the first place. the salient point of the soviet union, like hitler’s germany (which was not officially atheist), is that when secular ideology is treated as something that cannot be challenged and does not need to be tested, then it becomes a religion. Stalinist Communism was as much a religion as Roman Catholicism at the height of the Inquisition. why? it was a religion because its principles could not be questioned. and if they contradicted the laws of nature, they could not be challenged either. A whole generation of soviet biologists and agronomists was destroyed because stalin had a favorite biologist named lysenko, and lysenko’s basic belief was, and this went along with communist ideology, that you could change the species by changing its behavior, in other words, a new soviet man, or a new soviet cow, could be made genetically different by the teachings you gave them. the scientists who said no, and everything we know and have proven about science, including mendelian genetics, says it’s not true, went to the gulags and killed them. soviet science was two generations behind the west when it emerged from this era in the mid 1960s. so what i am saying is that in fact what is often used as proof that religion is good is proof that religion is bad, because religion doesn’t have to be called christianity, or have yahweh or jesus as its idol, it can have secular idols. . the characteristic of a religion is that no challenge based on evidence is allowed. Soviet communism fitted that model perfectly, and as soon as evidence-based defiance was allowed, it took only 30 years to collapse, which may seem long, but as historical time goes by it isn’t at all.
Let’s move on to your next book, 36 Arguments for God’s Existence.
This is a novel. It is about a professor who has written a book about atheism and how religion and atheism manifest in everyday life. shows the thought processes of atheism and religion, what they have and do not have in common. One of the things that’s interesting about it is that the author, Rebecca Goldstein, grew up in a highly orthodox Jewish Hasidic home, and this background comes through in this book in a way I won’t reveal. but it is a very funny book and there are very few novels with atheist characters that are presented in a positive or interesting way, so I think anyone who reads it will enjoy it. Rebecca Goldstein is absolutely brilliant and, I might add, one of the few writers on atheism, which is another issue we can talk about another time.
she is a philosopher, is she trying to present the philosophical arguments for atheism?
yes, but they are wrapped around a story. the philosophical arguments for and against atheism are all in this book, but they are not presented as philosophy, they are presented as part of a novel and a romance. it’s also a romance novel.
lastly, do you want to talk about the book mortality by christopher hitchens? I think a lot of people expected him to turn when they found out he was dying.
oh for the love of god! For everyone who was a prominent atheist – Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll – these rumors always circulate, which became his deathbed. the reason i recommend mortality to everyone is that one of the things that atheists always ask about, and i think that’s a fair question, is how can you survive the terrible things that life throws at you, if you don’t believe in a life beyond. death. Well, I think this book, which are essays on his year and a half of dying and living with cancer, are among the best things he wrote in his long and prolific career. they directly address what I think is the main reason for the survival of religion, which is not the desire to live a better life, but our fear of death, our fear of extinction. what all religions offer, whether it’s the western religion with the idea of life after death or the eastern religions with different forms of reincarnation, is a way of saying that we don’t die, we don’t become one with nature . it’s very strange in a way, when you think of the old common prayer book service, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, because that, of course, is the way a person of science also views death. it then goes on “in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our lord jesus christ”, so atheists differ.
one of the things that christopher inevitably does as someone who is dying is talk about why life is worth living. the fact that there is, so to speak, a deadline, highlights the importance of what we do on earth in the finite time we have. we don’t get a second chance in heaven to talk to our loved ones. if there is no life after death, far from making moral choice less important, it becomes more important because this is all there is. when you read these essays on mortality, this idea is not explicit, but it is implicit in his entire discussion of how he dealt with the diagnosis of an inevitable fatal illness in the short term.
I think mortality is an important book for another reason because there are a lot of people who say “well I don’t care, even if atheism is more reasonable, religion offers comfort in suffering”. i think what christopher’s book does is it shows that atheism can also be a comfort in suffering. I personally feel very strongly about this. i lost a partner to alzheimer’s disease five years ago and i thought back to when he was first diagnosed and the years he lived with her, when he was still able to do things. I thought if I was a religious person I wouldn’t put up with this, if I thought there was some design where there was a god that would do this to human beings I would be beside myself. Believing that death is the end and that there is no divine plan is the only thing, in my opinion, that makes you capable of living with this type of thing, which happens because it happens in nature. some of us will die very badly, losing what makes us human, our brain. this, in my opinion, is much easier for an atheist to handle than a religious person who has to come up with all these twisted ideas about how a loving god must have a plan. So leave me out of that plan, my God! and i think christopher’s book offers that.
Personally, I think the idea that I might meet the people I love after I die is less bleak than accepting that I never will.
Just because it’s less grim doesn’t make it more true. there are all sorts of things i believed in as a kid that are less grim than the reality of life, like if you lose a tooth, the tooth fairy will pay you some money for it. I agree, if it were true that we could meet and have fun with our loved ones in heaven after we die, it would be less somber, although I don’t know. What if you love more than one person in your life? you would have to design an afterlife so that there is no jealousy, because if all the people you loved in your life were there, it would probably be a problem. then you would have to design a heaven where people don’t have human passions, like jealousy.
but this christian idea that all this suffering is intrinsically worthwhile because of this reward in heaven: tell me what kind of comforting belief is it if what you’re believing is a design to live and die in which the most horrible thing is the senseless suffering is justified by saying “everything will be alright when the last trumpet sounds!” I find that vision, of a ruler of the universe doing that, much darker than the reality, which is that all things that live die. we have our time on this earth, we have to use it in the best possible way, because it is limited. I don’t find that gloomy at all.
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