Theistic Overreach and the Audacity of Secular Humanism
Reflections on scientific progress and the will to disbelieve in God
Rabbi Nir Menussi writes in “The Will to Disbelieve” that atheism is faith-based because atheists are stubborn in resisting the overwhelming evidence for God’s existence as the universe’s creator.
Taking a page from existentialists like William James and Soren Kierkegaard, Menussi posits “the willful determination to turn a blind eye to something when evidence for it stares you in the face.”
But Menussi doesn’t seem to be aware that this willful determination to ignore disconfirming evidence is broader than the alleged anti-theistic stubbornness. In psychology, it’s called the confirmation bias, and it’s a universal weakness of the human mind.
Indeed, if we go through Menussi’s flawed presentation of this alleged overwhelming evidence for theism, we find the same bias at work in his will to believe.
Theistic arguments as rationalizations of children’s indoctrination
The philosophical and theological arguments that are supposed to ground religious faith and practices are beside the point. What’s plain isn’t God’s existence but the fact that religions are sustained by social processes such as parents’ indoctrination of their children, and the tribal instinct to rally around a unifying cause (as the sociologist Emile Durkheim showed).
Chances are high, for example, that Rabbi Menussi grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, and that’s why he believes that God exists and that the Hebrew Bible is sacred. It’s no coincidence that different religions flourish in different parts of the world: the theistic arguments are readily available in any library, but what’s not so easily passed around is the parents’ choice to indoctrinate their children into one religious culture rather than another.
It’s because in India most people choose Hinduism, whereas most Israelis pick Judaism, most Pakistanis Islam, and most Russians Eastern Orthodox Christianity, that different religions are rooted in different societies. Birds of a feather flock together, and parents turn their children into birds of the same feather, not with philosophical or scientific arguments, but with the purest known form of indoctrination, the exploitation of impressionable children.
The theistic arguments that religious people present are therefore rationalizations. Oh, there are exceptions because a minority of religious people convert from one religion to another or even from secularism to some religious viewpoint. For those converts, upbringing may be of secondary importance, and they may have been struck by some clever bit of apologetics or been led by some other, adult social pressure. But a large majority of religious people throughout history have believed and practiced first, only to delve into philosophical justifications afterward.
If that’s right, we would predict that those justifications would be relatively weak (compared, say, to actual scientific explanations), and that’s what we find in Menussi’s case. He thinks they’re strong, but that’s the confirmation bias at work. What he ignores is that the so-called overwhelming evidence against atheism is only a rationalization of the obvious social practice of indoctrinating children who are predisposed to obey their parents, no matter how ludicrous the orders may be.
Atheism as a sin
Before we turn to Menussi’s arguments, we should pause to reflect on why he would stoop to this line of criticism. After all, the criticism amounts to an ad hominem fallacy. If the evidence against atheism were so overwhelming, why not just let that evidence speak for itself? Why add insult to injury by speculating on a stubborn will to disbelieve? As Menussi says, “never underestimate the power of the Will to Disbelieve.”
The reason isn’t found in existentialism because that school of thought in Western philosophy casts plenty of doubt on theism. The upshot of existentialism — from Nietzsche to Sartre — is that our deepest beliefs are equally irrational as some choices we make to create ourselves and our meanings despite the underlying absurdity of our position as intelligent agents in an alien, inhuman environment.
Religious myths come off as fairy tales from that perspective, so existentialism hardly warrants any condescension to atheists.
No, the purpose of Menussi’s personal attack is to associate atheism with sin and thus to support the monotheist’s suspicion that God will punish outsiders. To be sure, Jews don’t excel in this form of propaganda since their scriptures don’t elaborate on the conditions of the afterlife. But just as the Israeli military depends on the United States, Jews can count on Christians to do their dirty work, since Christians are much more evangelical and speculative in carrying forward the Jewish frame of reference.
Christians emphasize belief over practice, so Christians contend that God won’t tolerate wrong beliefs. That implies that beliefs are chosen so that they can be morally assessed. The rejection of the idea that God exists, then, must be a sinful pose, an indulgence in vice, a stubborn hatred of God, since God would hardly punish disbelievers in Hell if his existence weren’t obvious. The rejection of theistic beliefs and practices must be morally inexcusable.
Once again, we can predict that Menussi’s theistic arguments will be feeble because what he really wants to ground is his monotheistic presumption that atheism is immoral, not just philosophically unjustified. When someone commits a crime, the government doesn’t lecture the wrongdoer but catches, tries, and punishes him or her. Menussi’s case against atheism as a will to disbelieve must be equally as irrelevant to his preoccupation, which is to demonize and lash out at the critics of religion.
The natural universe’s origin
But let’s examine those arguments. The “syndrome” of atheism, as Menussi calls it, is found in philosophical naturalism, in the view that there’s no room for supernatural explanations and thus for God. Menussi thinks that what drove out theism is this sinful stubbornness.
Instead, of course, it was the success of modern science that has been methodologically naturalistic. Science progresses by looking for natural causes, not miracles. That’s why the epistemic default shifted in the post-scientific period from theism to atheism, or from dogma and authority, magic and miracles, to skepticism, critical thinking, and experimental testing of feelings and intuitions.
Specifically, Menussi turns to the cosmological argument for theism. Atheists, he says, presume not just that everything that happens in the universe is natural, but that the universe itself happened naturally, as paradoxical as that may be.
Stephen Hawking, for example, explained the universe’s origin without resorting to a miracle. As Menussi puts it, “For years, science insisted that the universe had no beginning in time. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, evidence was suddenly found that it did.” Thus, Hawking portrayed ‘the universe as a completely closed, independent system — a kind of four-dimensional self-contained “sphere.”’
That gloss isn’t quite right, though. Talk of the universe “beginning in time” presupposes that time stretches beyond the universe that science explains. Instead, the finding after Einstein critiqued Newton’s models of space and time is that time is relative. Time isn’t a metaphysical entity but a physical one. Time “began” with the Big Bang (or with the cosmic inflation of our universe), but that beginning wasn’t an ordinary temporal event. Time and space were created by a prior stage of matter and energy, by one that would indeed seem “supernatural” to us. Like life, the natural universe evolved and is still evolving.
Menussi says that “the very existence of the universe, with all its unfathomable complexity, is one immense supernatural wonder.” But again, that’s only an expression of intuitive anthropocentrism. We think the environment and the physical conditions that suit us are eternal because we can’t live so happily without presuming that we’re the stars of our show. What science finds, instead, is that the universe wasn’t made for us; rather, we adapted to suit the environment that happened to obtain at some point and that allowed for that emergence.
The early universe was causally connected to the later one in the way that a girl is connected to the adult woman she’ll become. But in each case, the early stage is very different from the later one. The earliest stage of the Big Bang was practically timeless, which was Hawking’s point, because the physical conditions for time as we experience it, including the rise of entropy and macro gravity, weren’t yet cooked into being.
Naturalizing the supernatural
The fair question to ask at this point is how theoretical physicists can hope to scientifically explain any such timeless, practically supernatural event as the Big Bang (or cosmic inflation or the referent of whatever other model from theoretical physics you prefer). Aren’t these cosmologists just dancing around the question of theism?
The answer, as I understand it, is that no one knows how exactly the Big Bang happened, or what it means to speak of one, because we don’t yet know how to combine Einsteinian and quantum physics. The singularity or quantum fluctuation, which was the event of the Big Bang, was very, very small yet exceedingly powerful. Scientists can’t easily experiment on such an exotic state of protomatter, although they try to get close with atomic accelerators, and they resort to equally exotic mathematical concepts instead of experiments to model how that event could have happened.
It goes without saying that if theoretical physicists don’t fully understand the Big Bang, monotheists understand it even less. Saying that God did it by a miracle doesn’t explain anything. What that myth does is reassure us in our mammalian hubris, reinforcing our intuition that we’re all-important, that the universe might as well be just the Garden of Eden, as the Bible would have it, a garden designed just for us by a divine person who has all the answers.
Again, scientists found no such tailor-made garden, but rather a universe that’s preposterous and humiliating in its scope, that’s so vast and ancient we’d be foolish not to turn from intuitive myths to something as remote as exotic mathematics or cosmicist philosophy to begin to honourably naturalize or humiliate us. The alternative is to vainly humanize the inhuman cosmos, with fairy tales that trivialize the mysteries of how life could evolve from nonlife, and how human nature, with all its fantasies and childish mental projections, could emerge from — and be doomed to return to — the monstrous ashes.
In short, the cosmological argument is that supernatural explanations begin where natural, scientific ones must end, and that end is surely with the origin of the whole universe. And I’m saying that one of the fallacies there is that what we think of as “the whole universe” is only a stage in nature’s evolution. The so-called natural order is just the world as we see it today, and that world evolved from unimaginably early stages, just as the universe will evolve into even more terrifying states of being. Given dark energy, space will keep expanding until no two stars are causally connected and even the black holes dissolve, eventually leaving no light or order.
Scientists try to wrap their minds around those “supernatural” stages in the most grown-up, rational way our species can muster, however deficient their cognitive powers may prove to be. By contrast, the monotheist seizes on a comforting fairy tale and runs with it, and that’s not good enough, not anymore.
Fine-tuning and the universe’s predominant lethality
Menussi thinks he has a trump card, though, in the fine-tuning argument. He puts it like this: “the laws of nature are exactly tailored to enable life in the universe to exist. If any one factor — for example, the force of gravity or the charge of an electron — were even a tiny bit different, life on our planet, or even the planet itself, could not exist.”
And he goes on like Donald Trump to luxuriate in this phony triumph: “here is an overwhelming piece of evidence that the universe was fashioned by an intelligent designer. Furthermore, it is evidence that cannot be explained away by something like the theory of evolution — for the simple reason that the universe is not another organism living within a certain environment, but the totality of environment itself!”
First, the concept of evolution is broader than Darwin’s theory of how species change their respective body types over time. The concept is just that of change, development, or becoming. You don’t need to think that the universe is like a life form adapting to a larger environment, although there are such scientific models, as Menussi points out, that appeal to a multiverse. Instead, you can think of a series of stages that “the universe” passes through, so the so-called universe would be a series of causally connected natural orders or eras.
Again, a fair question to ask at this point is how the stages could proceed in an orderly fashion from one to the next without following a series of higher, permanent laws, which might point to a designer or an architect of that evolution. The physicist Lee Smolin takes on this problem by positing that the natural laws evolve along with the universe. Time may be more fundamental than many physicists assume. Or perhaps the patterns we find in the universe’s stages are only byproducts that appeal to hyper-aware mammals like us, but that aren’t fundamentally meaningful.
This would take us into a discussion of what “natural laws” even mean anymore, now that science is no longer beholden to deism. The word “law” has social or prescriptive connotations that are at odds with science’s methodological naturalism. As I argue elsewhere, the answer might lie in recognizing the practical role of scientific explanations. Even the most objective scientific models are techniques of empowering our species at nature’s expense. Modern science isn’t value-neutral but secular humanistic and indeed evidently promethean or “satanic,” as the demonizing religions would have it. But more on this in the concluding section.
Second, as the physicist Lawrence Krauss observes, it’s wrongheaded to trumpet the fine-tuning of the universe. Notice how Menussi is careful to say that the conditions only make life possible, not necessary, and thus more clearly planned. Without those conditions, life would be impossible. Yet that applies only to life as we know it. Life as we don’t know it might be possible in unknown universes or indeed foreign stages of our universe.
Moreover, the unsettling fact is that life as we know it is practically impossible in most of the universe. What kind of benevolent, generous God would create a universe that’s so stingy in its capacity to host life? Why create a universe the bulk of which is perfectly lethal? Why does this life-affirming capacity seem to stand on such a knife-edge? Isn’t God all-powerful? Did he want to create a world that’s only superficially reassuring to life but that’s ultimately geared to achieve a goal that has nothing to do with life? Wouldn’t such a deity be other than a mere heavenly father figure?
No, under these circumstances, the sensible inference is that life’s emergence is accidental, not designed. Life happened to emerge here and now because the prevailing cosmic conditions enabled that outcome. And life as we know it adapts to those conditions, to the presence of water and the right kind of sunlight, for example, because outside of those rare, Goldilocks conditions, there’s only instant death that awaits in outer space and on other planets.
If Menussi wants to find solace in the physical constants that aren’t supposed to evolve or that seem arbitrary, that’s a God-of-the-gaps strategy. Conceptions in theoretical physics are constantly in flux, so that’s unstable ground for religion.
In any case, it’s meaningless to speak of the improbability of the universe’s initial conditions since no one understands those conditions well enough to do so. We can confidently say that the chance of rolling a six with a die is one in six because we can see that the die has six sides, and we understand what happens physically when you toss such an object onto a hard, flat surface. No one’s in the same position concerning the universe’s origin. No one has seen how a universe comes into being.
The mystery of the multiverse
Menussi thinks all these arguments so overwhelmingly favour theism that atheists are driven to something as “ridiculous” as the multiverse theory. As he puts it, speaking for the atheist, the fine-tuning “must be part of an infinite continuum of universes, each with its own slightly different laws of nature. It follows that the fine-tuning of the universe is not a wonder: Our universe is simply the only one in which there’s someone around to notice it.”
He adds sarcastically, “Where are these infinite universes, you may ask? Here comes the best part: The other universes are completely parallel to ours, and so will never come into contact with us. We simply have to, well, believe they exist.”
That last part goes after a strawman. The multiverse idea is meant to make sense of the evidence in a mind-expanding way rather than an infantilizing one. With Copernicus, we learned that the Earth goes around the Sun, and with Newton, we understood that the laws of “Heaven” are the same as the terrestrial ones. The universe or the natural order we’re familiar with from our terrestrial dealings ranges far wider than we could have imagined. So if the universe’s scale has already astonished us, given our inherent state of childish naivety, why not up the ante and suppose the universe’s fuller scale makes for a higher order of astonishment?
In any case, while there may, rather, be some ways to indirectly test the multiverse model after all, the model follows mainly, as I said, from math, eternal inflation, quantum physics, and string theory, not religious faith.
Regardless, the multiverse may not help with the mystery of apparent fine-tuning, because the many universes wouldn’t affect each other. Likewise, when you gamble in a casino, the odds of winning at a game are the same regardless of how many times you play. The existence of other, stranger universes in a multiverse would have no bearing on why this universe was arranged to allow life to evolve.
The assumption is supposed to be that everything that could be real becomes real somewhere, so we should expect to find somewhere in the megaspace a universe with life in it. But this only raises the question of why life’s emergence is possible in that megaspace of universes. Who or what, we might think, allowed for that possibility?
Menussi wants to say that God’s will or character is responsible for that choice in decision space. But that doesn’t resolve the mystery at all unless “God” turns out to be just a name for the mystery itself, rather than a solution to it. If God is a living person, we don’t add to our understanding by saying that a living thing prefers for life to continue and thus creates a universe in which organic life evolves. We only thereby pass the buck or beg the question: What made God so cosmically crucial?
Transhumanism and atheism’s social role
Here we may approach some common ground. Remember that Menussi wants to make the choice between theism and atheism a personal one. He says the atheist wants to disbelieve, that it’s ‘easy to see just how ridiculous this solution [the multiverse] is to the problem of fine-tuning…Make no mistake: This idea stems from neither healthy skepticism nor free inquiry, but from the passionate desire to disbelieve in God. It is every bit as “religious” as religion itself.’
The atheist says, in turn, that science is objective and that atheism is rational, not faith-based or sinful.
But neither contention is adequate. Sure, science is as objective as very clever primates can make it, but that doesn’t mean our species is capable of perfect objectivity. We’re not machines. When we say we’re being philosophical or we’re interested in pure knowledge or theory rather than practical applications, we’re nevertheless not operating in a vacuum or a Platonic realm of abstract ideas, with our head in the clouds.
True, there are degrees here, and it’s possible to be relatively impartial or unprejudiced. Yet human impartiality is, as I said, our evolutionary or social strategy for dominating the planet. That’s why the progress of the Anthropocene accelerated with the advent of scientific detachment. We devised rational methods for circumventing our parochial biases, but those methods are hardly idle. Science and philosophy serve social functions. More to the point, those functions may be tragically antisocial and self-destructive.
Menussi wants to say that atheists have a sinful will to reject God. What an atheist should say is that he or she has, rather, what may amount to foolhardy confidence that unaided human nature can solve all our problems. What’s at issue here isn’t atheism itself but secular humanism, which even the ancient Greeks thought might be hubris or tragically flawed.
We try to understand and thus naturalize everything as much as we can, including even the origin of the natural order as we find it. But why? Of what use could such far-flung knowledge be? Why spend time and money modeling the early stages of the universe? Is such a secular pursuit fruitful? Of course, there may be some economic hope based on the fact that previous scientific discoveries seemed inapplicable at the time, but human ingenuity carried the day, and technological advances even outstripped scientific ones. Thus, we can infer that answers that may seem useless will prove revolutionary or progressive.
Yet that crass economic or materialistic incentive isn’t likely at the heart of it. What fundamentally is the will to disbelieve? It’s not, as Menussi would have it, a question-begging, arrogant, punishment-worthy contempt for the deity the atheist secretly knows exists. As we’ve seen and predicted, the theistic arguments aren’t overwhelming after all. Rather, they’re fallacious rationalizations of the social phenomenon of religion.
But what I’m reminding us of now is that science, philosophy, and secularism are also social phenomena. These are all processes heading towards different ends.
The so-called will to disbelieve in God is the will to grow up, existentially and historically speaking. It’s the impulse to bury humanity beneath the wonders of the transhuman, to put it in Nietzschean terms. By repudiating the fantasy of God, we strive even more to turn ourselves into gods. Theistic religions may have only ever foreshadowed that bizarre, terrestrial development.
To adapt the famous line from “Hamlet,” there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the theist’s petty theology.