Are Atheists Hypocritical for Rejecting Faith-Based Evidence?

How religious and nonreligious beliefs are sustained

Eric Sentell is a Christian who writes for “Backyard Church,” an admirable publication that criticizes appalling forms of Christianity from a more reasonable Christian perspective.

And Sentell is frustrated by atheists like me.

As Sentell writes in “Why Atheists and Theists Can’t Agree,” he suspects that atheists are just ill-disposed to admitting that their worldview rests on faith, whereas Christians are more upfront about their similar kind of commitment.

After all, don’t skeptical philosophers and scientists subscribe to outlandish proposals by theoretical physicists about the Big Bang, quantum fluctuations, multiverses, and the like? How are those proposals more rational or less faith-based than saying that God did it? What’s the difference between positing a fluctuation in quantum chaos, on the one hand, and a creative idea in God’s mind on the other? Isn’t it a best guess in either case?

The problem, as Sentell sees it, is epistemological: atheists don’t accept the theist’s types of evidence. The deck is therefore stacked against Christians. The game is rigged. Prayer doesn’t count for the skeptic, nor does a feeling of the Holy Spirit, nor an appeal to mystery or an offer of love and acceptance. Only evidence that favours naturalism, materialism, and atheism is accepted from the outset, based on arbitrary, unfair stipulations or perhaps on an historic shift in institutional power.

Aren’t these nonbelievers, then, just engaging in more, late-modern persecution of poor Christians?

Let’s take this opportunity to examine the epistemological differences between these worldviews to clarify what’s going on here.

How Religions Spread

In his article, Sentell observes that, “No one ever became a Christian because that person lost the debate about God’s existence.” In other words, these academic, philosophical debates are useless for Christian purposes.

Likewise, though, folks don’t become Christian because of the types of “evidence” Sentell thinks the atheist hypocritically discounts. Most theists all over the world and throughout history accept their religion because they were indoctrinated into it as children. Evidence has had nothing to do with it. The rationalizations come years after the primary work of social inception has been done.

For example, just the other day I was visiting my brother’s family. I was pushing my five-year old niece on the swing and looking up at the tall tree they have in their backyard. My niece loves unicorns, so I told her that if there’s a unicorn living in her backyard, I bet it lives at the top of that tree where it’s safe and can’t be seen. And when it’s hungry, the unicorn climbs down at midnight when everyone’s asleep, and it looks for flowers to eat.

My niece went along with the story, of course, and not just because she has fun playing games or suspending disbelief. Without missing a beat, she added to the narrative, insisting that the unicorn is a “she,” not an “it,” and she sounded for all the world like she was confident there’s really a unicorn hiding at the top of that tree.

But does she really believe it?

That’s the wrong question because her brain and thus her mind are still developing. She doesn’t really believe or know anything, not yet anyway. What she does is practice forming opinions and trying out ideas. She’s learning all the time and playing is a large part of how a child learns — as is trusting implicitly in his or her elders. We instinctively obey and mimic our elders when we’re young because on our own we’d be doomed at that age.

As children we depend on our guardians, and we’re highly impressionable, which is why children excel at learning not just languages but everything from walking and tying shoelaces, to what tastes funny and how to be patient. Those are the formative years when our brain builds the foundational neural connections and has its most intense experiences that will constrain our adult character and thought processes.

There’s no mystery, then, as to why religions proliferate. Again, evidence and rationality have virtually nothing to do with it. Religious adults tell their children pleasing, intuitive stories and teach them rituals that give life meaning, and adults resist shaking off that upbringing because religions have the best stories — not the most rational or objective ones, to be sure, but those that feel right, that have the most stabilizing social effects, and that exploit our drive to project our human nature.

I still fondly recall, for instance, my formative years. I wasn’t indoctrinated into an overbearing religion because I happen to have been raised as a Reform Jew in a relaxed, pro-secular family and society in Toronto, Canada. But my youth was as magical as practically everyone else’s. In the 1980s, I walked up and down Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, hitting the fast-food restaurants, the comic book shops, and the arcades, pumping the machines full of quarters, watching Pac Man, Galaga, and Street Fighter matches, and listening to the rock bands blaring from the speakers, to songs that today are retro.

That was part of my indoctrination, my upbringing. The environment forced itself on me, and I had to reconcile my young self to it. My world seemed especially magical and aglow when I was young because I had free time and few responsibilities, my life was ahead of me, and I was experiencing everything for the first time. That’s why I still have a fondness for synthwave and retro music that reminds me of those formative years.

If I’d been raised in India and brought up as a Hindu, I’d have grown up to have a fondness for Hinduism, for the Bhagavad Gita and for statues of Vishnu and Ganesha. Or if I were raised as an Evangelical Christian in Texas, I’d have emerged from childhood with a fondness for what Eric Sentell calls “Christian types of evidence.”

Instead, I’m nostalgic about my memories of sitting around my grandmother’s dining room table on Passover, reading about Moses and the ten plagues in Egypt, and listening to my elders debating philosophy, law, and politics over a feast of chicken, Gefilte fish, and matzah ball soup.

How did religious stories get started? We know the answer to that too, at least in its outlines (because archeological evidence of the earliest religions is naturally scarce). We know that religions evolved.

Early religions were animistic and shamanic. Then came polytheism to reflect the shift from nomadic bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers to sedentary societies and pronounced social hierarchies. And polytheistic religions morphed into more zealous, monotheistic ones. Throughout that history, entheogens offered a shortcut back to the magic of childhood wonder our prehistoric ancestors might have had before the civilizational indulgence in accumulating progressive knowledge.

The main point here, though, is that religions started from the most naïve, intuitive, childlike tales that turned all of nature into a society filled with talkative spirits, and from the shaman’s entheogenic insights. And religions became more exclusive and oppressive to suit the patriarchal, slave-driving kingdoms that emerged and that fought for human resources, land, and the king’s glory.

Science Isn’t Based on Religious Faith

Notice that this isn’t at all how scientific theories are sustained.

Parents don’t teach their young child quantum mechanics or the multiverse theory since the child’s eyes would glaze over. You’d have to humanize the story to interest a child. Children prefer to play and to feel comfortable in the world. We enable children to grow up well by providing a nurturing environment for them, one that affirms their productive impulses. We tell children myths and fables that teach them life lessons.

The Big Bang theory is no myth or fable. Scientific explanations are relatively objective. Again, we instinctively prefer to socialize, to read each other’s minds and engage with other people on a social level. I didn’t just objectify my niece, for example, by pushing her on the swing. I imagined what she’d like to hear, what her mind is like, and I told her the story about the unicorn in the tree.

As Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, we’re liable to overextend that “intentional stance” and to project mental qualities onto inanimate objects, a process called pareidolia. We humanize nature, asserting our anthropocentric bias. You can see that bias in action in the Anthropocene, as we consumers are preoccupied with “progressing” in terms of growing our economies, even if doing so has devastating long-term consequences for other species and for the planet’s ability to support life.

But science is an altogether different institution. Scientists are people with intuitions and subjective biases too. But science is a method for bypassing all of that, for suspending our humanization of the environment to enable us to grasp the possibility that the world out there is rather inhuman and indifferent to our preferences.

That’s what scientists have discovered, of course, by testing their hypotheses with experiments that incorporate careful observations and logical inferences.

And that’s what’s at the root of quantum mechanics and the Big Bang theory. To be sure, those are exotic fruits of science, which means they aren’t close to the roots of the tree of knowledge, as it were. Cosmology is conjectural even in science because those scientists are talking about far-flung times and places. We can’t easily test our guesses about how the universe started, which is why we build particle accelerators, exotic machines to sort through hypotheses about abnormal states of matter.

Thus, quantum mechanics and the multiverse model are up there at the top of the tree, hanging out on a limb. But are the models of theoretical physics therefore like my story about the unicorn living up there too? Is it just a leap of faith either way?

As Sentell says, while there may be some evidence for the Many Worlds hypothesis, “there’s also an explicit faith. We can’t observe the alternate universes. We presume that they exist.” Again, says Sentell, ‘if one can believe that a cosmic “egg” just existed and then just exploded into an extremely fine-tuned universe, then why can’t one believe that a Higher Power or Creator played some part in it?’

No, they’re not the same, though, because even the most speculative scientific models, the ones that have the least direct empirical support are connected to the tree of scientifically established knowledge. The connections are largely mathematical and methodical.

There’s a big difference in epistemic status between a child’s and a scientist’s beliefs. Children relish imaginative fantasies, and adults who’ve been indoctrinated into a religion during their formative years learn to love that religion.

Yet as much as a theoretical physicist might likewise be personally partial to her pet model, as a scientist she understands that if her model hasn’t been tested, it’s probability isn’t known. A model might begin as a guess, a hunch, or a hypothesis, and scientists treat mere hypotheses as such. They don’t think of a hypothesis as a known probability, let alone as a dogma or as an absolute certainty. On the contrary, science proper begins with the testing of that hypothesis, and the scientist is trained to allow her hypothesis to sink or to swim on its merits. She lets the facts speak for themselves whenever possible.

So the difference is that while scientists might write technical articles exploring an exotic model of how the universe started, or write a popular book to lay out the history of how we got to the present state of theoretical physics, scientific cosmologists don’t start religions based on these speculative models. Theists, by contrast, do — just like my giddy young niece could have started a club or a cult of the unicorn if she had the know-how.

The Atheistic Induction

Now there is a problem with the current state of theoretical physics, as physicists like Lee Smolin explain. String theory and other exotic models are too beholden to mere math. There may be an effective religion or metaphysical ideology guiding this work, after all, namely neo-Pythagoreanism, a presumption that the world is fundamentally mathematical or structural, and that the best math alone would reflect the facts without the need for empirical tests.

Again, the problem is that some theoretical physicists may be getting ahead of themselves. Physicists have learned so much about nature in the modern period that they’ve exhausted the low-hanging fruit, so they tackle the ultimate questions about the origin of the universe or about the foundational constituents of matter, questions that aren’t easily answered with experiments we can perform with our level of technology. Yet proud, overeager physicists don’t want to drop the ball: they want to progress despite that understandable lack of empirical support. Thus, they’re content with mere mathematical backing.

However that may be, it doesn’t justify Sentell’s assertion that we could just as easily say that God created the universe, as that a quantum fluctuation did so or that there’s a multiverse. Sentell writes, quoting in part from me, that atheists ‘reject — a priori, or as an assumed fact — any role for a Creator “somehow existing outside of space and time,” outside or inside the material universe.’

But as I explain elsewhere in response to another of Sentell’s articles, naturalists reject the theistic myth because of what is by now an obvious induction, that being a type of pattern recognition or a rational inference from many similar particulars to a broad generalization.

Thus, despite the paranormal reports of sightings of ghosts, fairies, and of life after death in near-death experiences, those sightings are vastly outweighed by the experiences of life’s embodiment. Every time you see an insect land on your arm, a squirrel run up a tree, or a fish swimming in the lake; every time you daydream or talk to your friends or family; every time you detect intelligence operating within a physical body, you lend further support to the generalization that there’s no such thing as disembodied life.

When an intelligent species observes trillions of life forms all having bodies, and how their life apparently dissipates with the demise of those bodies, the members of that species start to suspect that maybe all life is embodied and thus natural. And if there’s no free-floating, immaterial life, there’s no God, no personal creator who could have produced the universe from nothing when that creator lacked a created or evolved body.

So the culprit is the thrust of human experience, not some antireligious a priori bias.

The paranormal claims are also subject to various doubts. For example, there are often simpler explanations of the phenomena: instead of a ghost making the noise, maybe it was the wind blowing through the trees, and instead of life after death, maybe the near-death experience shows us that the dying brain goes through a final daydream, mixing up DMT-infused dreams, memories, and the imagination.

A Difference in Epistemologies?

Are there, though, fundamentally different epistemologies at work, one for atheists and one for theists? Are atheists being unfair and hypocritical in denying the validity of the Christian’s supernatural evidence?

Not really, because the theist applies the same natural epistemology in rejecting the validity of opposing religions, and in coping in mundane ways with natural reality, and because the atheist distinguishes between untested hypotheses and articles of faith.

The atheist emphasizes that we should tailor our degree of belief to the degree of available evidence. The more overwhelming the evidence, the more confident we can be, and different disciplines deal with different kinds of evidence and arguments. Science deals with probabilities, mathematics with stipulated necessities, and philosophy with conceptual clarifications and with educated guesses that help The Great Conversation along.

See how tricky this can be when Sentell writes that atheists like me “can believe in unobservable parallel universes branching off quantum wave functions in our universe every nanosecond because it seems to reconcile some problems with the standard model of quantum mechanics. But they can’t believe in an unobservable being, entity, force, Higher Power, or Creator because that’s just rubbish” (my emphases).

That’s some sleight of hand there, because “belief in” is a euphemism for trust. You believe in a person, but you don’t believe in your toothbrush’s ability to brush your teeth, not unless you’re anthropomorphizing the utensil. Properly speaking, you believe in people, because trust is emotional and socially sustained, whereas more broadly, you believe that certain, possibly impersonal facts obtain. The important point here is that trust is emotional and subjective, whereas propositional knowledge can be objective.

Thus, far from trusting in quantum mechanics, I understand that that theory consists of a set of mathematical tools for making precise predictions, tools that work in that sense despite the lack of any understanding of why they do. And I understand that there’s some evidence for the Big Bang theory, such as the background radiation and the motion of galaxies, and I defer, to some extent, to the scientific experts who have earned that deference because of the technological applications of their work. I therefore believe that the Big Bang occurred.

But precisely because I’m not religious, I don’t make an article of faith out of that belief. I assign the Big Bang some degree of probability. I don’t claim to be certain about it or about any other part of theoretical physics. My confidence in those conjectures is far from absolute. For reasons set out by David’s Hume’s discussion of induction, I think natural explanations of the universe’s origin are more plausible than supernatural ones, largely because the latter are empty or are embarrassingly naïve, anachronistic, and anthropocentric.

Learning to Live Humbly with Doubts

As I explain in “Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation,” this talk of “natural” explanations of the universe is paradoxical. If nature is whatever can be scientifically or rationally explained, and everything that can be so explained is part of the natural universe, how can you have a natural explanation of the whole universe? Wouldn’t you just be extending nature’s known range rather than getting outside of and behind nature?

Conversely, if you were positing something supernatural, how could you be explaining anything, as opposed to telling a tall tale?

There are some scientific cosmologies that get around this paradox, such as a cyclic model that envisions an endless series of Big Bangs and of universes that recreate themselves from the ashes of the former ones.

But we should recognize here what may be a genuine epistemological difference between theists and atheists. Theists want final, absolute answers. They don’t like the fear or the doubt of not knowing. Specifically, they want a life plan, a rule book for how to live, and they want one that’s final and absolute, that gives us no excuses for living the wrong way.

Logic and observation can’t provide those things. After all, no one observed how the universe or life originated. So theists resort to other bases of belief, namely to emotions, intuitions, parental conditioning of children, and anthropocentric biases. Theists tell stories that are so comforting, you could start a religion around them, and you could go to war defending them. You could die for your favourite divine characters because you believe in them, and you feel at home with the myths, priests, and temples that propagate that religion.

By contrast, atheists learn to live better with doubts. Atheists are humble enough to recognize that maybe it’s hubristic to think that the entire universe should answer to our inquiries or that we’re equipped to answer every question that pops into our head. Maybe our imagination outstrips our power to reason because we weren’t made to be perfect, robotic knowers of all facts. Maybe we evolved to eke out a living like all the other animals, to make the best of sometimes dire circumstances. Maybe we imagine ideal scenarios because we’re not content with the suboptimal reality we endure.

But perhaps we can live with these self-doubts, and with the humiliating world picture that emerges from them. Perhaps the best we can do in understanding the nature of the universe is to objectify it, to push reason and technological empowerment as far as they can go, to test our guesses, to not make a dogma out of a mere probability, and to recognize the difference between a story that makes you feel safe, and a nonfictional model that relates something of the impersonal facts of nature only by not childishly humanizing them.

At one point in his article, Sentell asks rhetorically, ‘What if understanding is not the point? What if calling it “God” is about surrendering to the mystery?’

But the second question should be thrown back at Sentell. By objectifying nature and by not projecting human mentality or intelligent design onto natural processes, scientists are the ones who are more deeply appreciating the universe’s sublime mystery. Theists trivialize that mystery by personifying it, by giving the “first cause” a name and a gender and an obsession with sex or with shellfish.

The Christian’s “Evidence”

Lastly, I’d like to respond to Sentell’s conclusion that,

Atheists and believers will never agree on God’s existence. But maybe, just maybe, believers can offer love and acceptance and thereby heal some of the pain many atheists have experienced at the hands of organized religion.

What better way to show God’s existence than to bring His Kingdom to earth.

Indeed, atheists suffer not just from religious outrages but from being atheists, because the natural truths hurt. There’s no afterlife, no guarantee of justice in life, no guardian angel, no divine life manual, no cosmic purpose in life, no world created just for us, and no fairy-tale ending of universal affairs. Philosophical knowledge is antithetical to happiness for naïve, selfish primates like most of us, which is why philosophy is much less popular than the more vapid entertainments.

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, though, God is dead as a story-telling device. You can still tell stories about God, of course, but those stories will lack power in our late-modern zeitgeist. Consequently, the old religions will seem lame, which is why atheists like me often sneer at Christian proselytizers. I treat such sermons with the same contempt I’d have for a mediocre movie, poem, or novel.

But suppose Christians didn’t make a hash of it and practiced their faith in such a way that the world dramatically improves as a result. Suppose Christians could convince everyone to live in peace and harmony. Would this tremendous benefit count as evidence that the Christian narrative is true?

The analogy here would have to be with scientific theories that are likewise partly secured by their practical applicability. It’s a question of making and of building on testable predictions. If the theory were true, you should be able to do such and such in the world, to take advantage of that posited mechanism or process.

Likewise, Christianity would posit certain things such as God, a Son of God, demons, immortal spirits, an afterlife, miracles, and divine revelation, and Sentell’s claim would be that if those things are real, we should be able to do such and such because of them. We should be able to pray, for example, or to call on the power of God to help us build a better world.

The point of contention, though, should be clear. How probable would the technology be if the underlying scientific theory were false? What are the chances that we could build computers, for example, if our model of electromagnetism were way offtrack? The lower the chances, the more confidence we can have in the theory, given the success of the technology, because the two would be tightly connected.

Similarly, how probable would social progress be without Christianity? Could we learn to live in peace and harmony even if atheism were true and Christianity were an empty fairy tale? Would Christianity’s truth be the only available way of explaining social progress? In short, would such progress be miraculous?

If there’s no such exclusive connection between Christianity and social progress, if atheists could explain the progress just as well or even better, the analogy falls apart and Sentell’s insinuation turns out to be baseless. I leave it to you to figure out whether that’s so.