Debunking Ben Shapiro’s Debunking of Atheism

The fiasco of that salesman’s attempt to be philosophical

Photo by Gage Skidmore, from Flickr

Ominously, the audio-only presentation of Ben Shapiro’s “debunking” of atheism begins with him reading two and a half minutes of some tacky ads for his Daily Wire website, a crypto trading service, and a gas app.

Imagine a slick salesman who specializes in the kind of sophistry that’s standard in advertising. Now imagine this salesman plying his or her skills in discussing an intellectual topic such as atheism or morality. Can you picture the relevant sort of hackneyed, fallacious treatment of the arguments? Good, now you know what to expect from Shapiro’s “debunking” of atheism.

For the fun of it, let’s show why Shapiro’s discussion of atheism shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Atheistic anger and the advertiser’s sophistry

Shapiro begins by insinuating that atheists are only angry at God because they’ve “experienced enormous amounts of personal pain.” He says we have “a right to feel angry at God” because we necessarily lack God’s total perspective, so we’re bound to be sometimes confused in life. Even here, Shapiro says, religious people have an advantage over atheists because “struggle with God is a part of religion itself.”

In other words, if atheists are only struggling with trying to understand what Shapiro calls “the logic of the universe,” they can do that from within a religion. Indeed, says Shapiro, atheists deceive themselves by “pretending that the universe has no meaning at all.”

Obviously, the allegation that atheism is based on anger at God begs the question. God would have to exist for anyone to be angry at him. Shapiro resorts to the stereotype of the angry atheist, and this can be countered, say, by the Freudian stereotype of the religious person who acts like a child that invents imaginary friends, to deal with his or her fear of death.

Yet that level of discourse is juvenile and counterproductive. Again, it’s the kind of specious, manipulative distraction you’d expect from an advertisement that avoids logic and evidence at all costs and indulges in fallacious associations and bait-and-switch tricks.

Remember that all acts of salesmanship are deceptive. If a product were flawless, it would sell itself. When an advertiser must step in to sell the product, the product must have a downside which the advertiser is supposed to conceal with spin that highlights some dubious talking points. Likewise, there’s such a thing as religious apologetics because theistic religion is flawed and doesn’t sell itself, especially in developed countries in the modern age.

As for the point about whether the logic of the universe has meaning, atheism doesn’t entail it doesn’t, so that’s a strawman Shapiro’s dealing with. Atheism is just the denial that that meaning should be trivialized by positing that there are human-like, people-friendly deities at the universe’s helm. Here Shapiro is confusing atheism with materialism or nihilism, this being another dubious guilt-by-association maneuver that might come naturally to a salesperson’s skillset.

Does evolution undermine secular reason?

Shapiro turns to some specific atheistic claims, namely that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that religion corrupts humankind, and that science is opposed to the idea of a personal creator of the universe.

Regarding the first claim, Shapiro says the atheist needs God because evolutionary biology would undermine our confidence in reason, on the assumption of atheism. Without a deity to ensure that reason can help us understand what’s true, evolution would equip us only with traits that are useful in our struggle to survive. There’s no guarantee, then, that an evolved trait would allow us to uncover the objective truth.

Alas for Shapiro, that’s why scientists and philosophers, that is, those who are especially interested in objectivity don’t rely on the intuitions, emotions, and heuristics that are hardwired into the brain and that are direct products of natural selection. Instead, what happens is that we rely on exapted traits (mental processes that take on functions other than naturally selected ones), and on culture that emerges from our biological repertoire. Logic and the scientific method, for example, aren’t genetically determined or hardwired in the brain; instead, we invented them and discovered their utility by trial and error and by historical refinement.

As objective as logic and science may be, there’s still no reason to place absolute trust in them. Armchair logic, such as the kind Shapiro will indulge in in his hackneyed proof of a God, may be just a game, a playing with concepts that’s sometimes useful and sometimes not. And science deals with probabilities, not metaphysical necessities.

Shapiro says arithmetical truth that holds always and everywhere “bespeaks a truth beyond the merely material.” Here Shapiro conveniently ignores all the possible mathematical systems that have nothing to do with reality and that bespeak, rather, the game-like nature of mathematical evocations. Shapiro speaks as if math entails Platonism, but there are other, more deflationary interpretations of mathematical truth.

Grounding morality

Shapiro moves on to saying that God is a necessary hypothesis also because theism is needed to ground morality. Secular theories of morality such as utilitarianism, which says we should strive to maximize happiness, must “assume something about what makes an outcome good or bad.” Yet “the belief in any moral oughts requires us to believe unprovable truths and must descend from outside ourselves.”

Here, Shapiro’s gesturing to the naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought gap in logic, to the fact that prescriptions don’t obviously follow merely from value-neutral descriptions.

Notice how the apologist’s argument here is self-contradictory. Shapiro says that moral ideals must be based on something other than us to be grounded and true. Otherwise, he implies, they’re just expressions of our subjectivity. But Shapiro bases morality on God, another subject! Religious morality, therefore, is subjective since a person is supposed to have ordered it into being, just like we devise the laws that manage our societies.

The real difference, then, between atheistic and monotheistic morality, given what Shapiro says, is that atheists say morality comes from real people whereas monotheists maintain, in effect, that morality comes from an imaginary person.

In any case, as usual, Shapiro is only oversimplifying matters. All the secular theories of morality, from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to Kant’s duty-based ethics to Mill’s utilitarianism address the meta-ethical question of how morality can be grounded. Aristotle, for example, compares morality to biological functions, to the skills you need to flourish.

And what’s more grounded, secular morality that posits plain facts such as human subjectivity, our evolutionary role, and our existential predicament, or monotheism like Shapiro’s which posits a great, capricious mystery in the sky that commands us to obey him to avoid being punished? Naturally, rather than explaining anything to do with morality, theists only handwave with rhetorical tricks and fear-based distractions — just like advertisers do.

Freewill and the anomaly of our emergence in nature

Next, Shapiro says God’s necessary to account for human freewill. “How exactly do we make choices?” Shapiro asks rhetorically. “Trash God altogether,” he says, “and you can’t explain why you would believe in objective truth or morality or even your own ability to choose.”

But this is just handwaving and an appeal to a God of the gaps. Look at these mysteries, Shapiro’s saying. (And later, Shapiro appeals to the mystery of consciousness, which he says doesn’t make sense in the physical world.) God’s miracles alone can account for them, as though one miracle could help us understand another one.

Again, there are plenty of secular theories of freewill, including ones that are compatible with determinism. But the best response to Shapiro at this point would be to grant that personhood is apparently anomalous in nature. Somehow life evolved in a mostly lifeless universe, and simple life complexified and eventually became a species of rational, self-aware, autonomous people that generates art and science and tries to take over the world. Yes, that’s anomalous and sublime and awe-inspiring.

That’s precisely what’s wrong with theistic religions! They’re too naïve and small-minded to do justice to that anomaly of our natural emergence. Shapiro’s God is a mere humanization of the great mystery of why there’s something rather than nothing or why the universe produced living things and people with “souls.” Indeed, what’s more mysterious, the emergence of life when ultimate reality, God, is already alive, or that same emergence in a fundamentally lifeless universe?

Atheists are under no obligation to deny the existence of any mystery, anomaly, or awesome fact. Again, Shapiro’s strawmanning atheism to conceal the weakness of his position since theistic religion doesn’t handle any of these mysteries well.

The hollowness of armchair deductions

Shapiro proceeds to tackle the epistemological claim that “logic ought to forbid God or that belief in God is not merely unevidenced but irrational.” Shapiro tries to refute this by pointing out that there are “a bevy of logically consistent arguments offered on behalf of God,” such as Aquinas’s arguments for a First Cause.

Amusingly, Shapiro here reduces rationality to mere logical consistency. Suppose, however, I believe that two plus two equals five, based on this argument:

• (1) Two is my favourite number.

• (2) Adding together my favourite things can only produce more of my favourite things.

• (3) I hate the number four, but I love the number five.

• (4) Two combined with two can’t result in four but must result in something like five.

• (5) I can’t think of other numbers right now, so two combined with two must equal five.

Or there’s this simpler argument:

• (1) I say “two and two are five.”

• (2) What I say goes because I’m special like that.

• (3) Therefore, two and two are five.

These arguments may be consistent but that doesn’t make them rational because they’re grossly unsound, meaning the premises are dubious.

How theological rationalism begs the question

What Shapiro should reflect on, then, is that the armchair proofs conjured by Aristotle and theologians like Aquinas are only analyses of concepts. Just because we have concepts doesn’t mean reality has to fulfill those ways of thinking. Rationality is about using tools that are reliable guides to the truth. Consistency is one such guide, but it’s far from sufficient. We must also ground our concepts by ensuring that our premises are true. That requires careful observation, not just armchair logic chopping.

Take the proof Shapiro provides: All changes must be brought about by the actualization of a potential. The chain of such actualizations can’t be infinite but must originate from something that’s purely actual as opposed to having some potential that must be actualized by something else. That primary self-actualizer is God.

As far as we know, that kind of deductive, armchair reasoning is like my arguments for how two and two make five. All Aquinas was doing was laying out the implications of certain conceptual tools. Just because he can think with those tools, or model and filter reality with them, doesn’t mean the external facts must adhere to those tools’ limitations.

Rationalist proofs like these presuppose the principle of sufficient reason, that everything has a reason. Yet there would be no point in speaking of a reason unless we could understand it since there would be no difference between a reason we can’t understand and the lack of any reason. Saying that God has his “reasons” which we can’t understand is just handwaving and equivocating on “reason.” God’s “reasons” would, rather, be miraculous unknowns that are supposedly revealed only at the end of time. This is a bait-and-switch fallacy. We’re promised reason and given the opposite.

But the point is that the principle of sufficient reason begs the question in this case since the only reason why everything would have a reason that humans can comprehend is that God arranged it that way. This rationalism is hopelessly anthropocentric, assuming the principle is treated as having metaphysical rather than just pragmatic implications.

Shapiro takes himself to be refuting the notion “that it is illogical to believe in God,” but what he’s doing is equivocating on his terms. Consistency is only part of logic. Just because theists can argue consistently doesn’t mean they’re “logical” or “rational” in a broader sense.

Logic is a system of reasoning and judgment, and there are humanistic principles and values that ground the rational endeavour of reckoning with the objective facts. See, for example, Clifford’s dictum that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” Whether monotheists are being rational in assenting to those foundational values of critical thinking, then, is questionable.

Fine-tuning and the relativity of awesomeness

In response to the atheistic claim that “science killed God,” Shapiro appeals to intelligent design in the information present in the evolution of life, and to the fine-tuning of the conditions of the Big Bang.

Shapiro grants that the anthropic principle can deflate these types of design arguments since, as he puts it, “just because you won a lottery doesn’t mean you won because someone intended for you to win the lottery. Somebody had to win.” Likewise, maybe one thing just led to another accidentally or mindlessly, and we ended up here and now. Later, perhaps, all of life will be gone, and other things will have won the causal lottery, as it were.

Shapiro’s answer to this is that “that doesn’t answer the question. If you kept winning over and over and over and over again, billions of times, at some point you might suppose that somebody was cheating.”

The fallacy here is that Shapiro’s hiding the relativity of these numbers. Winning a lottery billions of times would indeed seem suspicious — relative to how lotteries tend to reward a variety of winners. But suppose you won a lottery billions of times, whereas others win the lottery trillions of times. Would it still look like the lottery was rigged in your favour?

The universe seems rigged to produce life in relatively infinitesimal pockets of space and time, while the majority of outer space is both lifeless and perfectly lethal to life. It’s as though life won the lottery billions of times, whereas lifelessness won the lottery quadrillions of times. Taking that cosmic perspective into account, the inference to an intelligent designer who favours life seems gratuitous and vain.

Also, if the universe emerged from an infinite quantum vacuum, there must have been endless chances to produce all kinds of universes, including some with life. The odds against life seem overwhelming but only within certain contexts, some of which may be due to arbitrary restrictions of the theist’s imagination. Who knows what the conditions were at the Big Bang? Who knows what the odds were? Odds are probabilities whereas the origin of our universe is at the fringe of our knowledge.

This, then, is another God of the gaps, another handwaving appeal to mystery to justify a super-duper mystery that somehow is supposed to rationalize Shapiro’s sanctimonious brand of libertarian selfishness.

The idols of monotheism

I’ll skip to what Shapiro calls “the deepest problem of atheism,” which is that atheism “cannot establish a moral framework. There is no way to bridge the gap between what is and what ought to be.” Moreover, while atheists can be good or bad, “atheism itself can make no self-sustaining moral claims on human beings.”

Far from being an unnecessary hypothesis, Shapiro concludes, we end up replacing “God in the human heart with gods of other sorts, from the state to the search for subjective authenticity,” and this “ends in the worst predations imaginable.”

I’ve already dealt with Shapiro’s point about morality, so on that front I’ll just add that as it’s stated, Shapiro poses a mere pseudo-problem. Of course, “atheism itself” can make no moral claims since atheism is just the theist’s focus on some people’s inclination to negate the talk of gods. Atheism is hardly the totality of any worldview; no one is just an atheist. Yet atheistic ethics would follow from a positive secular philosophy such as liberalism, humanism, existentialism, or even pantheism. Thus, saying that atheism doesn’t tell us what we should be doing is like saying economics doesn’t tell us how to tie our shoes.

As for Shapiro’s salesmanship on the question of idolatry, he doesn’t seem to have grasped the upshot even of his Judaism. Orthodox Jews are wont to take their rituals too seriously, whereas the upshot of Judaism is anti-theological. All creeds and rituals uttered or performed on earth are bound to be idolatrous, including the Orthodox Jew’s. That’s why Judaism ends in virtual secularism; in a wise, existential perspective on the absurdity of history’s reversals of fortune; and in a pragmatic, implicitly satirical take on religions, such as you find in Job and Ecclesiastes. It’s no accident that even in Israel and the US most Jews are “reformed” (modernized) or secular and functionally atheistic.

The monotheistic idolatries are indeed, though, as predatory as anything we can imagine, as is Shapiro’s libertarian worship of capitalism and America.