Are Atheists Overconfident in Reason?

Reason historically undermined itself and turned New Atheism into a futile sales job

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Theists are often naturally confused about atheism because they’re predisposed to belittle any threat to their core beliefs.

Yet those who aren’t religious can be confused about atheism too, not so much about the basics, but the philosophical implications of what it means to speak of the world’s godlessness.

Reason and modern progress

Take, for example, many atheists’ overconfidence in reason. Reason is supposed to show us not just what’s wrong with religion but how we should live, acting as a guide in life in place of God or a scriptural life manual. This progressive, humanistic narrative is as old as the modern Western Enlightenment.

We’re taught that the medieval age in Europe was ruled by religious dogmatism and brutal monarchies that oppressed the peasant masses, and that progress took off only when thinkers managed to free themselves from the Church and find independent rational answers to questions about how the world works.

That may be a simplification, but it’s essentially a fair characterization. Evidently, theistic arguments are specious and fallacious, as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and others showed. Scientific discoveries also showed that religious traditions were often just harmful and misleading prejudices.

The traditional, dogmatic way of interpreting the Bible was unilluminating and propagandistic precisely because it was uncritical. Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Feuerbach, and others started reading the Bible as critical historians to see what could be learned from a more objective approach to the texts.

Certainly, then, reason in philosophy and science goes a long way towards undermining the authority of the archaic religions.

The problem is that reason undermines itself too.

The irrationalism of the Old Atheists

This process began in modern philosophy with David Hume’s hyperskepticism, which he paired inconsistently with a positivistic disdain for certain forms of irrationality. Instincts or “customs,” as he called them, were fine aids in life, but this was a conservative judgment which the more pessimistic Schopenhauer trashed. In any case, Hume’s criticism of the naturalistic fallacy made his proto-social Darwinism arbitrary and inconsistent.

Just because we have a natural function to behave in a certain way, doesn’t mean that behaviour is in any way justified. The realm of natural causes isn’t the same as that of reasons, as the philosopher John McDowell would later put it.

Hume was inconsistent in his naturalistic philosophy. Although he defended induction as a natural habit, he thought books on metaphysics and theology should be cast into the flames for failing to be sufficiently logical or empirical. Yet the offending writers would merely have to tell a “just-so story” — like Hume’s about induction — positing in humans an instinct to prefer games and stories, and they’d have a perfect Humean defense of the disciplines that fall afoul of “Hume’s fork,” or his proto-positivism.

In any case, Romantic critics of religion, such as Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, carried the uncompromising spirit of modern criticism even further, turning philosophy against its method and idols. In his literary works, the early Goethe pioneered Romanticism by emphasizing the subjectivity of his characters, including their nonrational longings. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche maintained that the will is more fundamental than the conscious, rational intellect, while Freud reconstructed this will as the unconscious mind.

Existential critics of religion, like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, and Sartre, also rejected the modern paeans to Reason. For them, the existential problem is one we experience and can’t solve with a rational judgment, because the problem is that our freedom is absolute in that we alone can decide what we should do with our life and must take responsibility for that decision; otherwise, we live as inauthentic robots or objects controlled by others, and aren’t full persons.

Reason enables us to understand the environment and control it, but people are also inherently creative, and creativity is best when it’s emotionally inspired. Contrary to Kant, we can’t even control ourselves with our intellect without suppressing our nonrational side. The whole ancient and early-modern rationalist discourses about the need to tame “passions” or emotions with reason were embarrassing encapsulations of persistent patriarchal sexism.

And that’s the sort of criticism that was levelled later by the postmodernists and post-structuralists who cast doubt on all myths or “metanarratives.” Even logic to them was a “discourse,” a literary construct, a move in a language game, or a power dynamic that obscures its presuppositions and functions socially as propaganda.

Marx had earlier laid down an economic rationale for this line of criticism when he said that ideologies tend to serve the ruling class’s interests by providing excuses for the lower class’s material inequities and enslavement. Mind you, Marx was as inconsistent as Hume in this regard since he would have agreed with Hegel in thinking that history is a science and that societies unfold logically, which was itself a metanarrative.

Marx aside, you can add cognitive science as another blow to secular rationalism, since psychologists buttressed many of these criticisms by showing how our natural ways of thinking are heuristics that are rife with fallacious biases. These biases evolved to preserve our sanity and self-confidence, and to help us cope with the natural environment’s neutrality towards our welfare.

Throw in quantum mechanics and the failure of Hilbert’s program in mathematics, and you have a thoroughgoing scientific deflation of reason.

The validity of the critiques of reason

Now, these secular critiques of reason can be carried too far. For example, American progressives such as radical feminists and critical race theorists infantilize themselves by contending that there’s no such thing as rational decision-making, that everything we do is inevitably an expression of our irrational impulses and depraved schemes for domination. The only alternative is to be “woke” to that dark reality, in which case you fight for social justice by any means necessary.

Alas, by eschewing any sense of rational responsibility and personal agency, these progressives succumb to hyperfeminine vices, making them politically incompetent and unable to resist the more savage tactics of their “conservative,” hypermasculine (or acutely sociopathic) opponents.

Nevertheless, these progressive critics have a point. You need merely look at the abundant landscape of modern barbarities perpetrated by so-called rationally enlightened Europeans, Americans, Russians, Chinese, and their client states — from slavery and genocide to the world wars and secular dictatorships — to see that the modern celebration of Reason was largely hype.

Clearly, rational progress is possible in the sciences and their technological applications, but here the talk of “progress” is still myth-laden since technoscience seems to progress by demolishing the biosphere, thus rendering our long-term survival dubious. Regardless, these developments are called “progressive” in the Marxian sense because, in the meantime, the richest one percent use those advances to live like kings, not being so enlightened as to care about the prospects of future generations. For Marx, upper-class decadence is a necessary stage in the logical course towards a more utopian, communist state.

The truth here, then, lies somewhere in the middle. Reason does make our species exceptionally godlike, but the personal self is confined to its animal body. Moreover, reason didn’t fall from Heaven, but is an evolutionary adaptation and social exaptation that can be used to achieve progressive or regressive goals. The default goals may indeed be regressive since genuine progress requires more than logical rigor or scientific experimentation. Progress would be initiated by a creative vision of an inspiring, worthy, and sustainable unnatural lifestyle.

The scientism of short-lived New Atheism

You wouldn’t know there were such limits of reason from the tenor of the “New Atheist” repudiations of religion. At least three of the four once-leading new atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, excluding Hitchens) were scientists or anti-philosophical philosophers. That is, they were hangovers from the positivist movement in early analytic philosophy. They were scientistic ideologues who often implicitly dismissed philosophy along with theology for failing to live up to scientific standards of “progress.”

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The leading new atheists more generally were disproportionately scientists, so the battle lines between what CP Snow called the war between the “two cultures” in academia applied. Take everyone from Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss to Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking, to Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers. All of them were or are scientists and prominent new atheists who have been notorious for carrying science too far in dismissing philosophy, in addition to theology. Even New Atheist philosophers like Alexander Rosenberg have explicitly promoted scientism.

There are exceptions (as in nonscientistic New Atheists), such as the philosopher AC Grayling, but on the whole, New Atheism was skewed by the marketing strategy of using the prestige of science to bludgeon the savagery of religious fundamentalism. If the choice was between (1) a secular society that flourishes thanks to technoscientific advances, and (2) the Taliban, the choice was clear.

Moreover, leading New Atheists wanted to put a happy face on the movement, partly to sell their books and speaking engagements. See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ bus campaign slogan, “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” New Atheism was a shallow media creation and a business that had to be sold. And you don’t persuade a customer to buy something by regaling him or her with unpleasant truths, such as that reason isn’t God and is drastically limited.

If New Atheism had been a more thoroughly philosophical movement, like Old Atheism, there would have been no such preoccupation with salesmanship or rhetorical tactics. The philosophical goal is to tell the truth, period. The philosopher is obsessed with acquiring foundational knowledge, and although Plato said philosophers should rule from behind the scenes, using “noble lies” to placate the vulgar masses, his aristocratic cynicism and elitism are at odds with modern egalitarian humanism.

No, New Atheism as a humanist movement would have been discredited if its leaders unmasked themselves as Platonic elitists who spread sophistries like scientism for the hoi palloi while reserving for themselves the grim upshot of enlightenment.

Indeed, that’s just what happened to New Atheism. The movement split up into the runaway progressivism of the postmodern mobs of relativists and trolls who rule Twitter with their cancel culture and snowflake virtue signalling, on the one hand, and the hypermasculine intellectual dark web and incel cultures, on the other. In effect, the inheritors of the latter, nonprogressive subcultures adopt the unapologetic attitude of reconciling themselves to unpleasant truths, even if they do so from a macho standpoint rather than a philosophical one.

In any case, the atheist’s overconfidence in reason should be as embarrassing as the monotheist’s boasts about the supremacy of her creed. If the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic creeds were divinely revealed, and God protects the faithful, why did the latter two religions lose their political power so spectacularly in the modern period?

Likewise, if reason is our salvation, why did modernity repeat the savagery of the so-called pre-enlightened ages, and why did New Atheism itself splinter into a rabid mob of inept progressives and the dark web’s Old Atheistic irrationalists? And why did reason ironically undermine itself in late-modern philosophy and science?

If neither God nor reason will preserve us, what will?

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