The Pathological Incuriosity, Ignorance, and Imperiousness of the New Atheists

And their modern internet atheist ilk

CLARIFICATORY NOTE: I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT EVERY ATHEIST THAT EXISTS ON THE INTERNET. I’M TALKING ABOUT THE SORTS OF PEOPLE THAT QUOTE HITCHENS, WATCH ATHEIST YOUTUBE CHANNELS, DON’T STUDY PHILOSOPHY, CALL THEMSELVES AGNOSTIC ATHEIST SKEPTICS, AND THE LIKE.

Writing about the New Atheists was convenient because it meant not having to construct straw men because they’ve more or less built themselves out of straw.

—David Bentley Hart

Imagine that you were very interested in pottery. You spent much of your time thinking about pottery, writing about pottery, and so on. You watched Youtube videos talking about pottery, joined Reddits that discussed pottery, watched debate about various different theories of pottery. It would be rather concerning if despite all this, you didn’t have even a basic familiarity with pottery—instead putting your fingers in your ears and tuning them out whenever anyone expresses a different view of pottery. It would be particularly dispiriting if you, despite being unable to even basically articulate the rationale for different theories of pottery, you insisted that those who disagreed with you about it were credulous morons, even as you tuned out their clear explanations of what they believed.

This is how I feel about the new atheists, and their modern internet atheist followers.

Dawkins notoriously, in his slapdash reply to Thomas Aquinas, spent only three pages addressing all of Aquinas’s five ways, before triumphantly declaring that they’d been disproved. That’s less than one page per way! And while that’s understandable for the fourth way :) it’s an absolutely ridiculous way to treat Aquinas’s work. Here’s his entire treatment of the first three ways (there are a few more sentences of rhetorical embellishment, but this is all of substance):

1. The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

2. The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.

3. The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God.

Now, Dawkins seems unaware that:

1. The thing Dawkins labels Aquinas’s “cosmological argument,” is presumably the third way. In this case, he gets it totally wrong; it’s about possibility and necessity and explanation, rather than that there must have been nothing at some time.

2. It would be surprising if the third way started with the supposition that nothing existed at some time, given that Aquinas didn’t think there was a time when nothing existed. He thinks that things began to exist with time.

3. Aquinas didn’t think that an infinite regress had to terminate. Instead, he thought that infinite per se chains had to terminate. A per se chain is a causal chain in which the later members in the causal chain depend on the earlier members. An example would be a person pushing a stick pushing a bowl—the bowl being pushed depends on the continued action of the person. In contrast, a per accidens chain would be a person having a son who has a son—the original person can be out of the picture and the operation still goes through.

4. Aquinas obviously didn’t think everything was caused. He didn’t think God was caused!

5. All of Aquinas’s arguments were cosmological arguments! They all proceed from a thing we observe and argue by regress that this points to God. Thus, calling the third argument “the cosmological argument,” would be a bit like calling it “the God argument.” They’re all cosmological arguments!

6. When Aquinas talks about “motion” he doesn’t mean physical motion but change more broadly. Dawkins doesn’t even realize that.

7. A more accurate description of the second way is something like: 1) some things are caused; 2) no causal chain is infinite or circular; 3) therefore, there’s a first cause.

8. Later in the Summa, Aquinas provides a more in depth explanation of why the unmoved mover must be God. The brief presentation at the beginning is just an overview, not a full explanation of how he gets the full suite of properties.

Now, I actually share Dawkin’s judgment that the five ways are abject failures. I think that the five ways are so bad, that they have basically zero force, and people should stop making them and move on to other more serious arguments. But crucially, if you’re going to act like you’ve debunked the five ways, you’ll need to give them more than five seconds of thought, and three pages of treatment.

What’s enraging about Dawkins on this subject is that he doesn’t know anything and he doesn’t care to know anything. He’s seemingly pathologically incurious. He didn’t see fit to, before commenting on a 1,000 year old argument, read beyond the first few pages written originally in a different language, containing terminology he didn’t understand, that provided only an intro to the argument and not a full explanation. He dashed out a two-page reply to three separate arguments, making at least eight huge mistakes. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about regarding Aquinas’s five ways, yet that didn’t stop him from blasting his opinions about them to literally millions of people. His extreme ignorance is why, when he crosses swords with serious people who know what they’re talking about, it goes about as well as Hitler’s invasion of Russia.

(This is what it looks like when a Richard does real philosophy).

The Swinburne debate linked above was a bloodbath. While it was a four-person panel, and thus Dawkins and Swinburne only minimally clashed swords, Dawkin’s argument was roughly “God does lots of things—read your thoughts, perhaps become incarnate and rise from the dead, create the universe—so he can’t be simple.” Swinburne’s response was obvious: from God’s essential property—omnipotence—those others follow. Furthermore, you can’t deduce that a thing is complicated from the fact that it does lots of things, as even a simple atom attracts every other atom in the universe by the force of gravity. Dawkins had no response to this argument—that complicated effects don’t imply complicated causes—that refutes an argument he’s been making since before I was born!

Yet despite that, he regards religion as obvious delusion, the sort of thing so completely clearly wrong that only those made foolish by superstition could believe it. He treats religion with presumptuous disregard, not even a remotely plausible candidate for being true. Dawkins thus:

1. Treats religion and belief in God as obviously stupid.

2. Doesn’t know anything about arguments for belief in God.

3. Doesn’t care to learn anything about arguments for God.

In this way, he captures much of the modern online internet atheist movement. Pathologically incurious, confused, and smug. There’s something uniquely annoying about not knowing anything, not wishing to, all the while thinking anyone who disagrees with you is braindead.

For example, I recently debated a fellow named Godless Engineer (not his birth name). Now, GE was perfectly pleasant, and I enjoyed the conversation. But I think it was clear that he was out of his depth. On fine-tuning, for instance, after claiming that life could arise under different conditions with different constants, when I explained why that was wrong, GE immediately shifted to the multiverse reply to fine-tuning. When the anthropic argument came up, he was even more hopelessly lost.

Now, that’s fine. These are confusing subjects! It’s not easy to understand them. But if you don’t understand a subject very well, you shouldn’t act like those who disagree with you about it are hopelessly, basically confused. Godless Engineer talks constantly about philosophy of religion, never exhibiting the slightest indication that the question of God’s existence is at all difficult. If you don’t understand a subject well, you shouldn’t hold that the people who disagree with you about it are “totally incoherent.”

The comments on the video, represent the important and blameworthy tenets of internet atheism: they were filled with extreme incuriosity, confidence, snark, and ignorance. For example:

This person, for instance, who literally doesn’t know how to spell the word theist thinks that fine-tuning is as ridiculous as thinking 0+0=1. They think it’s debunked by the fact that you first need to prove God’s existence before using God to explain stuff. But that’s just confused probability theory, as any philosopher of statistics will tell you. We know that, say, Thales existed, because people wrote about him. His existence explains their writing. We didn’t need to first know that he existed to explain the writing about him—when positing some entity explains various phenomena well, that gives you a reason to believe in that entity.

Note, this isn’t esoteric knowledge. This is the response given every time people raise the confused “you can’t use God to explain stuff without first showing that he exists.” One who’d seriously studied the topic wouldn’t make such an error. Most of the comments involved simply trotting out popular, yet poorly thought-out objections, as if they settled the matter, as if it never occurred to the writer that a person might have considered and yet disagree with those arguments:

I’ve of course addressed the point about changing constants here. So has most everyone providing a sustained treatment of fine-tuning. But tragically, such people are quite averse to reading.

Many of them even rejected my claim that I used to be an atheist. This is particularly funny given that I was on record for years arguing for atheism on Youtube, and the videos are still up. Quite an imperssive psy-op.

(The comment “argument is composed of desperation and fail is a line.” As Aquinas thought objects were composed of essence and existence, livingexiled holds that they are composed of desperation and fail (even dumber joke in footnote).¹

Christians often say that if you leave the faith then you were never a true Christian. This is a ridiculous claim. But it comes from the conviction that their view is so mindblowingly obviously correct, that if you come to reject it, you never really got it. Many atheists seem to have the same view. Just as one never begins believing in Santa Clause after reflecting, one never begins believing in God through reflection.

Such people also, believing that no sensible person can be religious, conclude that insofar as any ideas invoked in support of God’s existence that are complex are just gibberish. Now, some things that you can’t understand are gibberish. I cannot understand what Deepak Chopra says, and that’s because he is saying gibberish. But others are not! You have to investigate them. Assume everything you don’t understand said in favor of God’s existence is bullshit is a very bad heuristic, yet a common one.

Now, it would be one thing if I was unnecessarily using technical language, or making weird metaphors the way Jordan Peterson does. You’d be right to dismiss me if I said in a strangled Kermit the frog voice “you know, the anthropic—man, that’s a hell of a thing—it represents the dragon of chaos in the archetypal metaphysics of Jung. And so it’s like, do I believe SIA—well what the hell do you mean by believe? And what do you mean by SIA? It’s like, it’s more real than real.”

But I don’t. I try to speak as plainly as possibly. It’s hard to talk about the anthropic argument plainly, and I’ll have to mention—and define—some technical terminology like the number Beth 2. But explaining something complicated often is difficult, and you won’t get it immediately. The internet atheists always, in response to complexity, assume that you’re speaking gibberish.

For example, beneath Robin Collins’ masterclass showing in a debate with a fellow named Tom Jump, the comments exhibit the same sort of extreme overconfidence, fantastically confused objections, and assertions that Collins—perhaps the leading expert on fine-tuning—is just using fancy words to gibberate.

(I can’t think of any disanalogy between some arbitrary random value that you pick as your favorite and the values that are needed to have life at all!)

Here’s a summary of the Collins debate. Robin—someone who I’ve spoken to on various occasions, and would consider a friend—presented the fine-tuning argument. Tom replied that while you can build in to your theistic hypothesis that God would want to create a finely-tuned universe, you can also build into your atheistic hypothesis that there’s a disposition to make a finely-tuned universe.

Collins replied that you could do that, but it would be arbitrary. In contrast, it’s not arbitrary to think a mind would want to pursue something good—and bring about a finely-tuned constant—because when you come to see something is good, you’re disposed to bring it about absent a contrary psychological inclination. This has been a very widely held philosophical thesis, and so long as it’s not wildly implausible, it makes it not wildly implausible that theism would produce finely-tuned constants. Thus, the simplest kind of a mind—one totally rational and without limits on power—would bring about the good, and therefore a life permitting universe.

He then gave an analogy. Suppose a big lottery is carried out, and the winner is the lottery commissioner’s son. While it might be by chance, you should think it’s likely rigged. Same with the constants. In contrast, if there’s no special reason to think the lottery is rigged in favor of some particular person, while you could hold it’s rigged in their favor, that wouldn’t be rational. If John has no special relationship to the lottery commissioner and wins the lottery, you shouldn’t think it’s rigged.

Because the hypothesis that there’s an ultimate mind gives some reason to think they’d pursue the good, it’s non-arbitrary—it’s like explaining why the lottery commissioner’s son wins the lottery by rigging. In contrast, the hypothesis that there’s no ultimate mind gives you no reason to expect any constants over any other ones, so it’s highly surprising that they end up being “rigged” in favor of the life-permitting ones.

The other thing that was remarkable was that, despite claims of gibberating, Robin was actually very clear. He doesn’t use big words, he attempts to break things down into simple components. But because he made points that might be hard to grasp if you’re strenuously convinced that he’s been lobotomized, and listen to his debate while doing something else—checking your phone perhaps or playing a video game—commenters claimed he was bloviating. The heuristic is always “if I don’t understand something while paying minimal attention and Starcraft 2, it must be Deepak Chopra adjacent nonsense.”

Now, I don’t really care what Youtube commenters say. But if one want to see what internet atheists of the Dawkins-Hitchens ilk believe, it’s helpful to look at the things that they say. And when they do that, the takeaway is depressing.

They don’t know anything but make fun of those who do. They assume, despite their basic ignorance, that if you disagree with them, you’re a moron. They think that because of their unearned confidence, they don’t even need to do research to see if their position is supported by arguments. It is rather like creationists who know nothing about evolution but see fit to mock it, all without bothering to learn anything about it.

The new atheists represented the height of this. Now, they weren’t all bad; Dawkins is brilliant when it comes to biology; Dennett is a competent philosopher, albeit crazy; Hitchens was a great writer and good journalist; and Harris is pretty good at philosophy and quite ideologically reasonable (being pro effective altruism, for instance). I even recommend his substack! But they treated arguments for the existence of God with undue unseriousness, and as a result, got their asses kicked by the likes of Craig and Feser.

If you’re going to be snarky, you better bring the receipts. If you’re going to spend your time mocking those with an alternative view, and you haven’t looked into the view, and you don’t care to look into the view, but you act like your dissenters are all morons, then it is you who are being the moron.

If you’re one of these people, I believe you can do better! You probably studied all sorts of complicated subjects in school—chemistry, math, and so on. You don’t have to turn your brain off when approaching a field of genuine complexity, and viciously belittle those like Robin Collins with more knowledge about fine-tuning in their pinkey finger than you’ll have in your life.

Appendix: The God delusion delusion

I hadn’t read the God delusion before this article. But reading it in preparation for this article left me disturbed by its shockingly poor quality. I’ve already discussed Dawkin’s “treatment” of the five ways, and I’ll skip his discussion of the ontological argument. Dawkins criticizes the argument from beauty:

If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents. It is simply assumed to be self-evident, which it most certainly is not. Maybe it is to be seen as yet another version of the argument from design: Schubert's musical brain is a wonder of improbability, even more so than the vertebrate's eye. Or, more ignobly, perhaps it's a sort of jealousy of genius. How dare another human being make such beautiful music/poetry/art, when I can't? It must be God that did it.

Now, it’s true that if you go to your standard Baptist grandmother and ask “why do you think there’s a God,” provided her answer involves beauty, it won’t be the sort of thing that can be nicely put into premises and a conclusion. But loads of people have given quite formal arguments from beauty. See, for instance, my friend Apologetics Squared’s excellent video on the subject and most importantly, his hilariously devastating yet kind response to Godless Engineer.

For example, Richard Swinburne—you know, one of the most famous philosophers in the world—makes in his best-seller The Existence of God a version of the argument from beauty. His argument: the natural world is very beautiful, and this is very valuable. Theism predicts this more than naturalism; while you can give an evolutionary explanation of this, it’s still likelier on theism than on naturalism.

Another version of the argument from beauty that’s popular is the argument from knowledge of beauty. Suppose we grant beauty is objective. Well, there’s a puzzle about how we know stuff is beautiful. The fact that some object is objectively beautiful doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that can move atoms in our brain. Thus, it’s a mystery how we come to know that it’s beautiful. Theism can explain this.

Now, I don’t find these super persuasive. But if you have a section addressing the argument from beauty, you might want to, you know, address the argument from beauty.

Dawkins’ next section is on the argument from personal experience. It includes the hilarious line “George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).”

Now, Dawkins has a few objections to the argument from personal experience. First:

Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humour them but don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them

But the fact that people have experiences of a certain sort and are wrong doesn’t mean having the experience of X doesn’t give you evidence for X. Indeed, to think that the external world exists, you must trust your experience of it. It’s at least a bit surprising that literally billions of people have powerful experiences of a being provided that being is non-existent.

Second, Dawkins notes, “The human brain runs first-class simulation software.” Humans are full of errors, and often attribute agency when there is none. But again, the fact we often make errors in thinking that there are agents when there are none doesn’t tell us that perceiving an agent isn’t evidence that there is one.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that there’s was a goblin in the basement. He may have escaped. When he’s in the basement, he can cry out and inform people that he’s there. Lots of people near the basement report hearing a goblin. They’re say to me “yep, it sounds like there’s a goblin, he’s saying gobliny things throughout all hours of the night, like ‘I’m a goblin,’ and ‘I have various properties typical of goblins’ and ‘I know what I am is spelled similarly to the word goblet, but the resemblance ends there.’” Sure, it could be that they’re hallucinating having heard the story. But it’s at the very least some evidence that the goblin is still there.

Dawkins last argues that there must be mass hallucinations because of the Fatima affair when, in a religiously charged context, people said they saw the sun move. He says that they must be hallucinating, because we know the sun didn’t move. Now first of all, even if mass hallucinations can happen, it’s pretty surprising if hundreds of millions of people all have religious experiences of a non-existent God—many more than, say, have experiences of a unicorn. The fact that some method is fallible doesn’t tell us that it isn’t evidentially significant. Second, those who believe in the Fatima miracle don’t think God miraculously moved the sun, but that he miraculously changed the perception of the people at Fatima.

Thus, all of Dawkins’ objections to arguments from personal experience fail completely.

After this, the errors just continue. He objects to Lewis’s liar, lunatic, lord argument by saying, “A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken.” But this is one of the options that Lewis considers. Lewis claims that if you think you’re God—the all-powerful creator of heaven and earth—and you’re mistaken, then you’re a lunatic.

Next, he objects to Pascal’s wager on the grounds that “Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy.” But the kind of faith many think is needed for salvation doesn’t require belief, but something more like hope and devotion. In addition, one can do many things that raise the likelihood of their belief, like reading Christian books, making Christian friends, reading my EPIC post on the anthropic argument, and going to Church.

But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility?

Well, you should also be kind. But the reason to think that believing in God raises your likelihood of eternal reward is that there are about a billion Christians, many of whom are smart and reasonable and believe that your faith in Christ affects your postmortem fate. A 1/100,000 chance they’re right makes belief in God have high payout.

I could go on through the rest of the book. Hopefully, however, the point is clear. Dawkin’s “devastating polemic,” is anything but. None of it should do anything to convince anyone who’d previously given the topic even a bit of thought.

1. But one who has desperation must get it either from its own principles or from another. Therefore, by regress, there must be a purely desperate desperator that imports all desperation to desperate things.