by Lex Bayer
we can the answer the question, “How ought I behave?” by referring to the framework for forming beliefs of ethics.
(P91)
Acknowledgments
What a journey writing this book has been since we first put down on paper the simple question, “What should I believe?” We are extremely grateful for those who have helped along the way, providing support, advice, and thoughtful commentary.
Our largest thank-you goes to our editor, Dale McGowan. Dale has been a delight to work with. He has helped make our ideas that much more readable, accessible, and engaging. His dedication to our efforts and sincere interest in our message have been remarkable. We have learned so much from Dale about the craft of writing and storytelling.
Several other writing professionals have assisted in polishing the messages of the manuscript and contributing ideas at various times along its development, including Mike S. Malone, Lydia Bird, James O’Shea Wade, Barbara Egbert, and Bjorn Carey. Thank you for your contributions.
Several readers from the atheist, humanist, and agnostic community have read versions or parts of the manuscript at different times. Thank you to Peter Boghossion, Steven Wissing, Brentney Hamilton, and David Fitzgerald for taking the time to provide us with comments and insights.
Finding a publishing partner for two first-time authors on a controversial subject such as atheism took persistence. Many thanks to Sarah Stanton at Rowman & Littlefield for recognizing the potential of our book and embracing our message and vision. Thank you also to Tom Krattenmaker for the initial introduction.
We often worked on the book in coffee shops. Overhearing our discussion, patrons would frequently come over and share their opinions, which made us realize how important these issues are to so many people. As the book makes its way to press, we see this as the beginning of a dialogue with readers. You are welcome to join that dialogue at www.AtheistMind HumanistHeart.com.
Lex Bayer
A special thanks goes out to my brother, Ross. Thank you for countless Sunday brunches over the last several years spent engaging and debating the ideas of the book and being such a constructive sounding board. I am grateful for the time you spent reading, rereading, and commenting on so many different forms of the manuscript. In the section on logic, your input was invaluable. I still smile when I think of how much fun we had together in our sessions attempting to grapple with the myriad references and cross-references that make up the logic section. Thank you for embracing my crazy audacity of trying to wrestle such big metaphysical ideas into clear and precise statements. I learn so much from you every time we are together. Your mind can be even more rational than mine, and your heart . . . well, it is far bigger as well.
I want to thank my sister, Kelly, who is an inspiration to me in all things. Her support throughout my life is something I cherish dearly and a source of endless joy. I could not wish for a better sibling.
My mother has been a fountain of support over my lifetime. She dedicated much of her life to ensuring that, as a child, I had every opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed in whatever I did. I am ever grateful for her endless encouragement and resolve. She raised me to dream to do big things.
Candid feedback is something I value so dearly in life, and I am grateful to the people who take the time and emotional energy to provide it. Many friends were gracious enough to read versions of the book, provide comments and suggestions, or engage with me over certain ideas. Thank you to Tom, Dave, Kirsten, Adrienne, Julie, Jonny, Shelly, Onn, Sylvia, Joe, Atiya, and Vanessa. Several friends provided support, encouragement, and counsel along the way. In particular, I would like to thank Greg Smith and Adrienne.
It’s powerful to look back on one’s life and pay tribute to certain individuals who were able to change one’s life outlook in profound ways and enrich it forever. I pay tribute to my high school English teacher, Digbi Ricci, who instilled in me an appreciation for literature, language, and intellectual ideas. Indeed, it was Digbi who first quoted Chesterton to me on hearing that I was a nonbeliever. Little did he know the long-winded response he would evoke.
I owe a tremendous debt to the institution of Stanford University. What a remarkable, inspirational, and empowering place. Not only did Stanford fund most of my education but it broadened my mind in so many ways. As an incoming freshman narrow-mindedly focused on becoming an engineer, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of needing to complete mandatory requirements in the humanities and writing. I was looking forward to getting through these requirements as quickly and efficiently as possible. I had signed up for the history track, but in a stroke of luck I didn’t get my first choice and was forced to take the philosophy track instead. Little did I know how much the study of philosophy would grab my interest and resonate with me. Trying to make the most of my mandatory freshman writing class, I decided to write about my views on religion. There I discovered the value of open-ended writing as a tool for discovery, and it gave me the confidence to write more.
John Figdor
First, I would like to thank my parents, without whose support I couldn’t have completed this project. From reading to me from as early as I can remember to investing in my education and encouraging my intellectual pursuits to supporting me in my darkest moments, you’ve been the best parents I could hope for.
Second, I have to thank all of my teachers, from my K–12 education in Scarsdale Public Schools to my professors at Vassar and Harvard Divinity School to my colleagues at Stanford. Philosophy is the practice of standing on the shoulders of giants. You are the giants who have allowed me to become the philosopher and religious studies scholar I am today. I would like to particularly thank Professors Doug Winblad and Jeffrey Seidman from Vassar’s Philosophy Department, Professor Alexei Klimoff from Vassar’s Russian Studies Department, Professor Dudley Rose from Harvard Divinity School, Professor Richard Parker (Christopher Hitchens’s college roommate) from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Professor Philippe Van Parijs from Harvard’s Philosophy Department.
Third, I would like to thank the authors who broke the silence and made it possible for atheists and humanists to write books such as this one: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens. I spent an enormous amount of my time at Harvard studying, learning about, and debating the material of these four authors. Their dedication to clarity of thought and their willingness to engage reasonably and responsibly with their critics has been an inspiration. Additionally, I’d like to thank Hemant Mehta, David Fitzerald, Greta Christina, Richard Carrier, James Croft, Greg Epstein, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein, Bart D. Ehrman, William Rowe, Peter Singer, Ron Giere, Galen Strawson, Hillary Bok, Judith Jarvis Thompson, and the late Douglas Adams and Jorge Luis Borges for all that I have learned from you.
Last, I would like to thank Rev. P. Washburn for my early education in religion and Rev. Jim Wallis and Rev. Arthur G. Broadhurst for reminding me that some humanists choose to call themselves Christians.
Notes
Introduction: Questioning Everything
1. “It is the custom on Erev Yom Kippur to ritually slaughter a white rooster during the morning ‘watch’ after Selichot, for then a thread of divine grace prevails in the world. We slaughter it to subdue the supernal severities, and take out its blood to ‘sweeten’ the severities. It is called Kapparah (expiation), as was the scapegoat. Each member of the household should have a Kapparah—a rooster for each male and a hen for each female. A pregnant woman should have three fowls: a hen for herself, and a rooster and a hen for the unknown gender of the child. . . . [I]n the second paragraph, turn the chicken around your head (for a total of nine rotations).” Machzhor for Yom Kippur, with English Translations (Brooklyn, NY: Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, 2004), 2.
2. From The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (Methuen & Co. Ltd, 19
37) by Émile Cammaerts, in which he quotes Chesterton and is regarded as the source of the Chesterton attribution.
3. Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life (New York: Ray Long and Richard Smith, 1932).
4. As an example from Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust by Bernhard H. Rosenberg and Fred Heuman (New York: KTAV Publishing, February 1991, 121): “The Zionists were responsible for the tragedy of the six million. The arrogance of nationalist self-destruction in trying to build a Jewish state caused the great destruction. The fact that so many Zionists were secularists, nonbelievers, only made matters worse. They violated the injunction to remain passive, refrain from interfering in the divinely preordained plans of redemption, and to await the miraculous coming of the messiah. Hence, the Zionists are guilty, and all the Jewish people suffered because of their sins.”
5. “God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend” (Job 37:5).
6. Some Christian apologists argue that it is impossible for God to do evil because God defines good by his actions. These Christians believe that God and good are identical, and that whatever God does, whether it is allowing the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust in recent history or killing every living thing that didn’t get a Noah’s Ark ticket, is moral just by definition. Plato neatly dismantled this absurd argument in his dialogue Euthyphro.
7. There are thirty-six chaplains listed on the Harvard Chaplains website, which can be found at http://chaplains.harvard.edu/people.
Chapter 1: Rewriting the Ten Commandments
1. A phrase made popular by the cosmologist and astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934–1996).
2. “I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7—I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” From Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51. In an interview on the television show Real Time with Bill Maher (April 11, 2008) Dawkins goes on to clarify that he would describe himself as a 6.9 on the scale.
3. “Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.’” Also: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” Both from Dawkins, The God Delusion. Dawkins promotes self-identification as an atheist with his “Out Campaign,” which includes atheist-branded apparel. See http://outcampaign.org.
4. “And the Lord said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.” Exodus 24:12, King James Version.
5. American Humanist Association, http://americanhumanist.org/Human ism/Humanist_Manifesto_I, http://americanhumanist.org/Humanism/Human ist_Manifesto_II, and http://americanhumanist.org/Humanism/Humanist_Mani festo_III.
6. International Humanist and Ethical Union, http://iheu.org/humanism/what-is-humanism. A lengthier version by the IHEU is “The Amsterdam Declaration.” See http://iheu.org/humanism/the-amsterdam-declaration.
7. Penn Jillette, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
8. George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion Books, 2005).
9. Christopher Hitchens, “The New Commandments,” Vanity Fair, April 2010.
10. Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations throughout this book are referenced from the King James Version of the Bible.
Chapter 2: The Paradox of Belief
1. Though often credited to Bertrand Russell, the story predates his birth in one form by more than forty years. It is credited to the Rev. Joseph Frederick Berg in Theodore Parker’s Great Discussion on the Origin, Authority, and Tendency of the Bible between Rev. J. F. Berg, D.D. of Philadelphia and Joseph Barker of Ohio (Boston: J.B. Yerrington & Son, 1854), 48.
2. Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, “Every Planar Map Is Four Colorable,” parts 1 and 2, Illinois Journal of Mathematics 21, no. 3 (1977): 429–90, 491–567.
3. Georges Gonthier, “Formal Proof: The Four-color Theorem,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society 55 (2005): 1382–93.
4. Does the fact that Ockham’s razor is being used as a guide mean that it is necessarily a source belief? No, it is merely a guiding principle. If Ockham’s razor can be later deduced from the source beliefs as a derived belief, the system can remain coherent, and no contradiction would exist. We’ll see in later chapters whether the system proposed validates the use of Ockham’s razor.
5. Another major problem here is that the assumption itself (that the consequences would be terrible) is often demonstrably false.
6. The philosophical term for such a view is “realism.”
7. While we believe that there is an external reality, it doesn’t particularly matter if we are correct about the ultimate metaphysical nature of that reality. For example, it could be the case that we are all minds in a computer simulation of the universe (as popularized in the film The Matrix), and that there is no actual “external” reality beyond the structure of the simulation itself (meaning reality is a matter of bits and bytes instead of atoms and molecules). Even if this were the case, we would find ourselves in the same position we are in now. Ultimately, our senses are our only mode of access to reality, whether that reality is properly external or a computer simulation.
8. The comedian Tim Minchin cleverly mused about such a scenario in his beat poem “Storm.” The poem portrays a dinner party guest named Storm who confronts Minchin by declaring, “You can’t know anything. Knowledge is merely opinion.” Minchin’s desired retort is “to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave, of a morning, when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door or a window on the second floor.” http://www.timminchin.com/2011/04/08/storm.
9. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 2nd ed., introduction by John Skorupski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10. This is the fundamental concept of the philosophical school of thought known as empiricism.
11. This is the traditional list of five senses. Our bodies have additional physiological senses that would be included in a more complete list of biological senses. Examples include the ability of our inner ears to perceive balance or detect acceleration and senses in the skin that can detect temperature.
Chapter 3: The Reasoning behind Reason
1. David Hume discusses this example about the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2. Like the table example in chapter 2, this example is discussed extensively in Bertrand Russell’s work The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1953).
3. This concept is referred to in philosophy and statistics as Bayesian probability.
4. The Innocence Project, “Eyewitness Misidentification,” http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php.
5. A rough estimate of the world population over the last two millennia times 365 days per year of seeing the sun rise times the average lifespan in years.
6. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
7. Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
8. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
9. Jeneen Interlandi, “An Unwelcome Discovery,” New York Times, October 22, 2006.
Chapter 4: Beliefs about the Unknown
1. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (Berkeley: University of Calif
ornia Press, 1960), 398.
2. The Pepper’s Ghost effect is an optical illusion that depends on plate glass and mirrors. It causes objects to seem to appear or disappear, or to transform or morph into other objects. The best-known examples are the illusory ghosts in the Haunted Mansion ride in Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
3. California Lottery, http://www.calottery.com/Games/MegaMillions/How ToPlay/FAQ.htm.
Chapter 5: The Assumption of a God
1. Or, put differently, is God all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good?
2. Thomson Reuters, Inside the iPhone Patent Portfolio, September 2012.
3. Michael Jordan, Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, 2nd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2004).
4. Lynn Foulston and Stuart Abbott, Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009).
5. Some religions do make predictions about the future that can then be assessed for accuracy. Alas, none of these predictions has so far turned out to be accurate. Unfortunately, few religious leaders follow the example of Vietnamese cult leader Hon-Ming Chen, who predicted that God would appear on channel 18 across the United States at 12:01 a.m. CST on March 25, 1998. When the time came and went with no appearance by God, Chen denounced his own beliefs and told his followers to abandon him.
6. This idea was satirized brilliantly in the television show South Park. In episode 10 of season 4, several thousand people die and arrive at the gates of hell. Surprised to be in hell, one person asks: “Well, who was right? Who gets into heaven?” The hell director responds: “I’m afraid it was the Mormons. Yes, the Mormons were the correct answer.”
7. Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 19, 2011.
8. Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010,” 2012.