Retreating to Faith When Struck by Unarmed “Militant” Atheism

Why even “Backyard Church’s” easy-going Christianity is bad enough

There’s a relatively reasonable Medium publication on Christianity called Backyard Church. The website defends Christianity against the fundamentalists and right-wing hypocrites who’ve been giving the religion such a bad name in the US since white Evangelicals got into politics under Ronald Reagan or perhaps since the South used the Bible to promote slavery before the Civil War.

Atheists and secularists should cheer on such work. But the editor Dan Foster wrote and published an article criticizing atheists for having the audacity to think that Christians don’t have a leg to stand on. Ten arguments Foster assembled, which were supposed to show that Christian faith is rational. I found them obviously wanting and wrote about why that’s so.

A Christian writer named Eric Sentell has responded to my criticisms of those arguments, so I thought I’d reply to him. There’s not much in Sentell’s response that’s both relevant and substantive as a defense of Foster’s arguments. But we can also address the main question Sentell brought up, which is whether something called “militant atheism” goes too far as allegedly an ironic form of religious fundamentalism.

Dan Foster’s Argument by Suggestion

Sentell responds to only one of my ten criticisms of Foster’s ten arguments for Christian theism. This is the argument about causality, which is that there must be an uncaused cause to explain how we arrived at the present state of the universe. This cause, Foster “suggests,” is God.

If you’ve studied logic or critical thinking, you already know what my main objection was because you thought of it yourself. Foster’s argument as it’s stated is obviously weak since he merely tacks on the conclusion. He gives no reason to think this uncaused cause is God. He just suggests that the two are the same. That’s literally the word he uses, “suggest,” as if a suggestion counts as a logical relation between statements.

What would you make of the following argument, by way of parody? “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal. But I suggest that Socrates had three arms.”

Does that strike you as a logical argument or does the conclusion rather hit you in the face as an arbitrary addendum? Indeed, Foster’s suggestion — which he took wholesale from Aquinas, as the latter ended his “five ways” by saying, “This everyone understands to be God” — functions as a separate, one-line argument by assertion since it’s not related to the rest of the argument.

If you’re just going to make suggestions, why pretend you’re arguing at all?

An argument is a series of statements that are logically related to each other. Those relations make the argument valid and are what compel the rational audience members to agree with the conclusion, assuming they agree with the premises. But if you’re just going to suggest rather than demonstrate that the God people worship is the source of the universe, there’s no argument there to assess. There’s just a bald assertion, and assertions are cheap.

The Retreat to Faith

Sentell’s response to that objection is that all anyone can do is guess about the nature or identity of that uncaused cause. Atheists and scientific cosmologists are in no better position because, says Sentell, “All beliefs — religious, scientific, and cultural — depend on faith.”

Thus, I say in my response to Foster, “The universe we see evolved over billions of years from much simpler states, originating ultimately, as far as anyone can tell based on data and scientific theory, from a quantum fluctuation in a timeless state, somehow prior to the development of space and time.”

And Sentell says, “Why should anyone think the source wasn’t a person?” and “The bottom line is that we don’t, and can’t, know how the universe began with any certainty. We weren’t there, and science doesn’t know.”

But what annoyed Sentell most, I think, was my statement that “armchair speculation on the matter is asinine rather than being as reasonable as the scientific explanations which are methodically atheistic (naturalistic).”

Sentell thinks it’s all just speculation and a leap of faith. He puts his faith in a tame, secularized (liberal) version of Christianity, whereas, he says, “Militant atheism uses scientific knowledge to argue that we should place our faith in the non-scientific claim that nothing exists beyond the material world.”

How an Appeal to Faith Defeats the Point of Arguing

Is it just a flip of a coin, then, as to whether we should think of the ultimate source of everything in the universe as the divine person that monotheists worship? If it’s just a leap of faith, why call the resulting beliefs rational? Why think you’re demonstrating your religion’s intellectual respectability if you’re just going to respond to criticism by saying you’re entitled to your blind faith?

Sentell therefore has as much disagreement with Foster as he does with me — at least on the surface. Foster took himself to be arguing for theism. He presented ten arguments. But if Foster’s religion is based on a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a shot in the dark, a futile attempt to wrap the human mind around cosmic matters we can’t hope to fathom, he shouldn’t have pretended his aim was rather to show that Christians aren’t “morons,” as Foster put it, since they’ve got oodles of rational supports such as these ten arguments Foster trotted out.

Notice how Sentell’s point here is the same as what I said in my article’s concluding section:

But if all Foster wanted to do was to show why Christians can “relax” about believing in God, as his title suggests, he needn’t have bothered with the pseudorational enumeration of arguments. He could have chalked up theistic belief to a matter of “faith” and been upfront about the irrelevance of the belief’s rational status.

Sentell’s appeal to faith is consistent with that conclusion of mine. That’s evidently why Sentell stopped after this meta defense of Foster’s argument from causality, saying that “the rest doesn’t matter.” It’s not just that the other nine arguments don’t matter, though, since evidently none of them matters for Sentell, given his appeal to faith.

Sentell is implicitly conceding that none of Foster’s ten arguments works. How could they when we don’t know what we’re talking about when we turn our attention to such ultimate philosophical or theological questions? As Sentell puts it (with my emphasis), “We’re all making our best guesses based on the evidence available and our trust in the methods of gathering and interpreting said evidence.”

I suspect the theistic arguments don’t matter to Foster either, which is why his presentation of them is so lackadaisical, as my article demonstrates. Foster would rather preach about which kinds of Christianity are authentic. If we were to interpret his ten arguments charitably, we’d have to suspect that his heart can’t be in arguing for his religion’s philosophical merit.

The problem with philosophy and science, from a Christian standpoint, is that these methods are relatively objective, which means that appealing to faith isn’t good enough in those disciplines. (Not even Kierkegaard merely appealed to faith. He argued and explained why existential truth is subjective.)

Common Ground in Existentialism

Sentell says he’s read some of my writings, but apparently he hasn’t read that far into them. That’s fine in one sense since we’re obviously free to read or not to read whatever we like. But if you’re going to respond to someone, you’d be well served to know who you’re dealing with.

As it happens, I’m not the wannabe hyperrational atheist Sentell takes me for. I’m an “old” atheist, as opposed to a new one, which means I appeal to existentialism and I make a broad philosophical case against not just exoteric religion but the delusions that support unbecoming forms of secular tribalism.

I’ve written articles with titles like “Mass Hallucination and The Dream of Waking Life,” “Saturated in Fiction: Consensus Reality as a Web of Stories,” and “The Strangeness of Ultimate Truth.” I’ve argued for pantheism, pragmatic epistemology, and the reality of the religious, entheogenic experience.

Indeed, I recently put out an article on why proof and thus certitude is irrelevant to atheism. Proof is part of math and of games that operate in a stipulated, artificial framework. Thus, proof has no bearing on the human mind’s attempt to understand what’s real in the world beyond itself. Consequently, I’d say God’s existence is highly improbable, not that I’m certain about any farfetched philosophical or cosmological question.

So there seems to be some common ground here.

Alas, Christian apologists can’t afford to go all the way with an existential appeal to faith. If we’re all just taking shots in the dark, how could God justify punishing anyone for rejecting the Christian’s shot in the dark? If there’s no such punishment, the New Testament can’t be taken at face value. That way lies something like subversive Gnosticism, which the Church rejected for being incompatible with the aim of building a sustainable Christian institution.

Mass movements need to dumb things down for most of the members. Thus, if you get to interpret Jesus’s talk of Hell as a metaphor, you don’t have divine revelation and you don’t have a Christian religion. What you have instead is a fiction and a fan club that must sit side by side with millions of other fictions and fan clubs. Welcome to postmodern Christianity!

The sad truth is closer to what I say in my response to Foster, which is that the Christian apologist wants to have it both ways. She wants her religion to be rational enough to impress intellectuals, but irrational enough to enable her to evade objections by appealing to faith, church tradition, or revelation.

Reasonable Induction versus Wild Hope

In any case, as far as I go with the philosophical deconstruction of both theistic and atheistic metanarratives, dubious conventions, and vain conceits, it’s clear to me that philosophy and science aren’t based entirely on arbitrary leaps of faith.

When I studied analytic philosophy at the graduate level, I took courses in the philosophy of science, and I visited some science departments. I watched the physicist Paul Davies give a talk to a packed audience. One of my brothers is a nuclear engineer.

Thus, I suspect that if you walked up to a theoretical physicist or a cosmologist, standing there in the laboratory, and you said to that person that scientists are just making their “best guess” in excluding God as an explanation for the universe, that wouldn’t go over well.

What the scientist would say, in so many words, is that she sticks with natural explanations because they work, meaning they have technological applications and are rigorously well-defined. These explanations are based, therefore, on induction and on a practical preference for what works, not on religious faith.

True, as David Hume and Rene Descartes pointed out, when we assume that the future will be like the past or that we’re not just brains in vats being fed stimuli by a clever demon, we’re not exercising pure logic. We can’t prove that science can answer all empirical questions best, that everything is natural or material, or that the world is really as it seems to our senses and to our modes of understanding.

What we can do is go with our experience, which is different from going with our gut. When Stephen Colbert ridiculed George W. Bush for going with his gut and for putting “truthiness” before truth, Colbert’s satire didn’t apply equally well to philosophy and to science. There’s a big difference between being a Trumpian bullshitter (to use Harry Frankfurt’s term) and a philosopher who’s arguing in good faith.

The philosopher and the scientist recognize their limitations. Their endeavour is the humanistic one of advancing as far as we can on our two feet, because we tried it the other way for millennia and didn’t get far. We tried deferring to monarchs and to the self-serving dogmas of priesthoods and propagandists, and civilizations were largely stagnant.

The Scientific Revolution changed the default assumptions and made us all humanists, even liberal, back-peddling or “deconstructive” Christians like Foster and Sentell. Even the antimodern fundamentalists and terrorists are either hypocritical in depending on modern progress or they make themselves pariahs.

Again, I’m no propagandist for modern progress. I understand that anthropocentric progress may kill us all because of our disastrous ecological impact, that consumerism is infantilizing, that economics is a pseudoscience, that the hype for secularism is often scientistic and therefore self-refuting, that social power is distributed through dehumanizing dominance hierarchies, that happiness and knowledge are antithetical, and so on.

And contrary to what Sentell suggests, I’m not opposed to all armchair speculations. I write philosophy, so I understand that philosophers typically resort to conjecture at best because of the nature of their concerns.

What I said in the reply to Foster is that I wouldn’t pretend a speculation is the same as a scientific theory. Philosophical questions aren’t treatable by scientists. If science can answer a question, the question isn’t philosophical, so we should side with what scientists say on that matter. What’s “asinine” is the failure to recognize the progress that scientific cosmologists have made in clarifying empirical questions of space and time that used to be resolved just by telling fictional stories called “creation myths.”

If Sentell contends, for example, that we can only exercise faith in saying the first cause is or isn’t a person, the problem is that it’s not so simple. Of course, none of us were there when the Big Bang happened. But we have been there when all known life forms have been animals whose life depended on their physical bodies. So that’s another induction rather than a pure leap of faith.

True, there are also some reports of ghosts and of near-death experiences of paranormal phenomena. Do we just roll the dice, then, to decide whether to believe that ghosts and disembodied consciousness in an afterlife are real?

No, we do roughly as Hume said and we weigh the evidence and assess the probabilities (the mathematician’s standard of proof or of certainty being irrelevant). We weigh the alleged sightings of ghosts against all the natural experiences of embodied life. If you had a penny for each instance of those two kinds, and you placed those pennies in two piles, which pile do you think would be larger and more secure? Wouldn’t only the naturalist’s pile more closely resemble a mountain?

The Terror of Unarmed Militancy

As interesting as this all may be, none of it addresses what Sentell mainly wanted to say, I think. What bothers him and Foster, too, is the specter of so-called “militant” atheism. What offended Sentell was my tone in speaking of the theist’s asinine armchair speculations. Sentell thus offers this advice to all those claiming to be certain about divine or ultimate matters: “please don’t advocate that others join you, and certainly don’t do so with the arrogance and condescension of a fundamentalist.”

Again, Sentell strawmans my position when he says I speak of certainty in philosophy. But Sentell will observe here that if I don’t at least presuppose certainty, I have no basis for writing with such conviction or as if philosophical issues were ever so clearly settled. This conviction makes me “militant,” according to Sentell, which means I’m in the same camp as the religious fundamentalist.

Yet this is just a misuse of language — which shouldn’t be surprising here because the mere meme or slogan, “militant atheism,” has been routinely spread as theistic propaganda.

My atheistic advocacy consists only in my writing articles that hardly anyone reads. I don’t bomb buildings or picket churches. I don’t vote for raving lunatics. I don’t reinforce my views by adding social pressure to them at temples or clubs. I’m no cultist and I don’t belong to an organization that used to kill people for committing thought crimes. On the contrary, I learned to think for myself by going through much schooling in a field that’s explicitly, self-consciously opposed to dogmas and to thought control.

The word “militant” means “aggressively active or combative in support of a cause” or “engaged in warfare.” Again, I only write articles to speak my mind in a public forum like Medium where this is encouraged on humanistic grounds that go back to the agora of ancient Greece. Sentell is merely repeating the confusing meme that someone can be “militant” just by making forceful arguments.

This reminds me of what CNN’s Wolf Blitzer likes to say when he hears a vigorously worded talking point. “Strong words,” he’ll say. What I wish someone would tell Blitzer and the safe-space-seeking Millennials, too, is that there’s no such thing as a strong word. All mere words are weak. What’s strong is a punch to the face, a stab in the back, or a gunshot to the gut.

Let’s not lose all sense of philosophical perspective, shall we? Let’s not abuse language in Orwellian fashion by saying that asking someone out on a date is as bad as raping the person or that writing an article with effective rhetoric and logic is as aggressive as militancy or as combative as war.

The Persecution Complex

I therefore dismiss Sentell’s charge of “militant atheism” as an implicit recognition of my rhetorical skills and as a sign that our postindustrial consumer cultures are decadent and overprotective.

But it’s worth pointing out that so-called conservative Christians would relish the chance to distract from their hypocrisy by jumping on the least sign of atheistic advocacy as evidence of the “persecution” of Christians. This is the only way these Americanized “Christians” can seem to have anything to do with Jesus, by crying crocodile tears and making a melodrama of their alleged Christ-like suffering as they bemoan how atheists decline to treat them nicely or how the US government oppresses them by following the Constitution and not showing preference to any religion.

Sentell isn’t one of these Fox News pseudo-Christians, I take it, yet he resorts to a similar gambit. He, too, decries this mirage of “militant” atheism, alleging that showing any sign of certainty or of knowledge in philosophy is as toxic as fundamentalist zeal. Sentell equates an author’s forceful presentation of what he claims to know, with a zealot’s failure to understand that all knowledge rests on faith.

So while Backyard Church is just trying to clear up confusions about the content of Christianity, what Foster calls “some very noisy atheists” are out there condemning all traces of theism as archaic, superstitious, and childish nonsense. Thus, even the progressive, secularized, First World Christian consumer can seem longsuffering and Christ-like in relation to these nasty atheists.

One question, then, for these progressive Christians is whether they’re sure they want atheists to back off.

How Liberal Christianity is Bad Enough

Now, putting aside the semantic confusion about “militancy,” let’s consider whether it’s “arrogant” or “condescending” for an atheist like me to harshly criticize Christianity.

The first problem for Sentell is that by effectively conceding that Foster’s ten arguments are weak, by not seriously engaging with my criticisms of them, Sentell gives the game away. How could I be arrogant or condescending if what I wrote is correct, if the ten arguments are feeble, if I demonstrated they’re such, and if the Christian who comes to Foster’s defense seems implicitly to agree with those demonstrations?

Granted, it’s possible to speak the truth but to do so in a rude, insulting, or aggressive manner. We can even speak loosely of a combative piece of writing. As I said, I agree with most of what Backyard Church publishes because what it publishes are criticisms of the most off-putting forms of Christianity, namely the literalistic, right-wing, politicized, nakedly hypocritical ones.

The second problem, though, is that Foster and Sentell still call themselves “Christians,” and Christianity happens to be arguably the world’s worst religion. Presently, Islam is more destructive because that religion still rules the Muslim world, whereas modernity terminated the Christian monarchies. Nevertheless, if we look with a moral eye at the historical records of the world’s religions, Christianity is at the bottom. Christianity is anti-spiritual because its institutions persecuted the purveyors of Christianity’s esoteric message. You need look no further than the genocidal Albigensian crusade against the neo-Gnostic Cathars.

Christianity disgusts me, you see. I’m sorry for being so blunt when some readers of this may be Christians, but that’s what I’m dealing with here. I studied Christianity at some length, I’ve compared that religion to Eastern ones and to secular worldviews, and my judgment is that Christianity’s impact on the world is disgraceful and revolting.

I understand that Christianity championed the little guy, whereas pagan cultures entrenched unjust social hierarchies such as patriarchy, monarchy, and slavery. But Christianity was only accidentally moral, and in practice the churches turned themselves into pretzels to be workable in what the priesthood effectively recognized as God’s apparent absence.

In the New Testament, Jesus emphasized extreme morality because he thought the world was going to end soon. There was no need for long-term social planning or for humanistic progress since God was about to take care of everything by wiping away the world and judging the quick and the dead. Christian morality is therefore based on a failed prophecy.

If the Christian idea instead is to renounce worldly standards and to treat each other as equals before God, because we all face the inevitability of our individual deaths (even if the whole world isn’t going to end at once), we don’t need Christianity to tell us that. Entheogens did the trick in every part of the ancient world. All the world’s religions entail that we’re equal in that sense, that we must all reckon with the great mystery. Everyone has always known we’re going to die, no matter what we do or how much power we’ve enjoyed.

What distinguishes Christianity is that it hides in plain sight that message of our equal dignity as wrestlers with existence, so the message is more easily missed. As the historian Elaine Pagels explains in The Gnostic Gospels, by historicizing its Son of God character, the orthodox church inserted itself into our affairs as the intermediary, using the lineage of popes to align itself with Jesus who was above us all, so that Christians had to bow to Jesus by bowing to the Church.

Rather than divorcing themselves from that racket and siding with the atheistic humanists or with Eastern or perennial philosophies, Protestants relativized the Catholic’s foundational con. Protestants may each take themselves to have a direct pipeline to God through faith, but in place of the Church, Protestants idolized the Bible. So the question became one of ascertaining who has the right interpretation of scripture. Christian cliques proliferated, each sermonizer claiming to have the true creed.

I’m appalled by Christianity, then, not just on philosophical grounds but on spiritual ones (which I prefer to call “existential”). The problem is that traditional Christianity is in the way of a more authentic, philosophically respectable religion (as Anthony Kronman shows in great depth in Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan).

Now, am I supposed to shut up about all of this or pretend I’m alright with what really disgusts me? This isn’t a question of the need for tolerance, as one commenter on Sentell’s article put it, since I tolerate Christianity by only writing about it. That’s part of the liberal tradition, to think for ourselves and to speak our minds, but to extend everyone else the same courtesies. The question, rather, is whether I should muzzle myself in my writings, and treat Christianity with kid gloves, censoring myself and pretending the situation isn’t as egregious as I see it.

I’m afraid I can’t do that because my allegiance is to philosophy, not to fads of political correctness or to pampered consumers’ sense of propriety.

Sure, Foster’s and Sentell’s religion is inoffensive compared to the derangements of white Evangelical Republicans. But liberal or progressive Christianity is still Christianity and that’s bad enough when the post-Nietzschean zeitgeist calls for more from us to survive the onslaughts of scientific and technological advances.