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In this episode, Trent critically reviews Peter Boghossian’s “A Manual for Creating Atheists” and reveals the evils Boghossian says the new atheists helped create.
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Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Today I’m reviewing the good, the bad, and the downright ugly in Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists, and I’m going to reveal how the author now thinks there’s a bigger threat beyond religion. But before I share more about that, I just want to welcome you to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn, and if you want to help us produce new episodes, please subscribe to our channel and consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. Also apologize, I’m getting over a cold, which is why I might sound a little off in this episode.
I reviewed this book back in 2014, and I want to revisit it because the book does have some good elements that I agree with when it comes to discussions between Christians and atheists, or discussions between anyone for that matter. And that’s the thing. This book is not about creating atheists per se. Boghossian states to his goal this way. “The goal of this book is to create a generation of street epistemologists. People equipped with an array of dialectical and clinical tools, who actively go into the streets, the prisons, the bars, the churches, the schools, and the community, into any and every place the faithful reside, and help them abandon their faith and embrace reason.”
Epistemology is a discipline within philosophy that focuses on defining knowledge and figuring out how we know what we know. Rather than blindly shout a conclusion, like a street preacher, I guess, a street epistemologist helps others reliably acquire knowledge about the world. When it comes to that goal, he’ll find no opposition from me. I’m always happy when people double-check evidence and scrutinize the reasoning that they use to get it to a certain conclusion. I find one of the best ways to do that is to ask people questions. “What do you think? Why do you think that? What do you think helps to identify and examine the facts?” And the question, “Why do you think that?” tests whether sound reasoning is being used.
This is also called the Socratic method, and Boghossian seems to have firsthand experience with it. According to Portland State University’s website, where Boghossian previously taught, he earned a doctorate in education while developing Socratic techniques to help prison inmates increase their reasoning abilities, so they could see the error of their ways and hopefully commit fewer crimes in the future. Boghossian’s ability to use the Socratic method is on display in most of the chapters through sample dialogues between himself and people he says exhibit poor reasoning abilities. Boghossian also gives would be street epistemologists advice that I would give to anybody who’s learning apologetics.
For example, you don’t need an answer for every objection, and you should humbly admit ignorance when it happens. In Boghossian’s words, “You need to become comfortable in not knowing and not pretending to know.” I agree. In fact, when people ask me what to say in a conversation when they don’t know something, I tell them it’s fine just to say, “I’m not sure about that.” You can also say, “That’s a really good question. I know other people have looked into this issue more than I have, and since I want you to have a really good answer, I’d like to look into that and research it more and get back to you. What would be a good way for me to do that?” Remember, the path to the truth is a journey, not a race. So we can take as long as we need in our conversations to get there.
That’s why I enjoyed my conversation with Anthony Magnabosco several years ago here on this channel. Magnabosco uses Boghossian’s street epistemology as an atheist in order to engage in thoughtful dialogues with religious people. You can check out his interview on the channel for more about that. But Boghossian’s street epistemologists have a very specific mission just beyond helping people think more clearly. Boghossian writes, “Your new role is that of an interventionist. Liberator. Your target is faith. Your pro bono clients are individuals who’ve been infected by faith.” And that’s where the book starts to go downhill.
Let’s go to the bad parts of the book. Throughout the book, Boghossian says that the quickest way to make someone an atheist is to attack not their religion or their idea of God, but to attack their faith. That’s because faith, he says, is ultimately what grounds all religious claims. So if you can discredit faith, you discredit any religious conclusion, but what is faith? According to Boghossian, faith is belief without sufficient evidence, because if you had the proper amount of evidence, then you wouldn’t need faith. I’d respond by saying that religious faith is a trust in God, and generic faith is just a trust in someone or something. For example, we have faith that the laws of nature are uniform across time and space, even though we don’t have enough evidence to confirm that’s true. It could be different tomorrow. We also have faith in people and things, that they will act properly or tell us the truth. Most of what we know comes from the faith we have in other people reliably telling us things we can’t prove for ourselves.
Now, Boghossian denies faith as a kind of trust. He claims faith is actually a kind of knowledge, but that’s not true. Faith is the way people justify claims of religious knowledge. For example, a Christian might say, “I have faith in what the Bible or the church says,” or, “I have faith in what Jesus revealed to me in my heart.” In these examples, faith is just a trust in a certain kind of evidence that’s used to justify religious claims, be it testimonial or experiential.
I also covered this at length in my response to Matt Dillahunty’s slogan, claims aren’t evidence, so be sure to check out that episode on my channel if you want to go deeper on the topic. Boghossian, though, gives the issue a rather nasty spin when he defines faith as pretending to know what you don’t know. Here’s him using that definition of faith in one of his older talks on the subject.
Matt Dillahunty:
The word faith is in desperate need of being clarified. Currently, the definition that’s currently used is belief without evidence, or something like this, belief with insufficient evidence, belief on the basis of no evidence, et cetera. The definition I am proposing is pretending to know things you don’t know. In fact, pretending to know things you don’t know is nearly synonymous with the word faith. To be clear, I don’t mean everything that’s a case of pretending to know things you don’t know is a case of faith, but all cases of faith are pretending to know things that you don’t know. It’s definitive of faith that these are cases of pretending. Whenever you hear the word faith, just substitute pretending to know things that you don’t know, and the definition, the meaning of what faith is, will become more clear.
Trent Horn:
The use of the word pretending is pejorative and inaccurate. What’s the difference between thinking you know what you don’t know, and pretending to know what you don’t know? The first case would be a description of a mistake. You really thought the world was one way and it turned out to be different. The second case seems to involve a kind of deception, or at least a total disregard for evidence of any kind. It just doesn’t work though for common sense definitions of the term faith.
Consider this statement. “I have faith Brian will remember to pick us up.” That’s not the same as saying, “I’m pretending to know Brian will pick us up, but I don’t know he will pick us up.” In a discussion on Unbelievable? radio, Boghossian debated the Christian philosopher, Tim McGrew, and McGrew rightly pointed out that Boghossian strawmans the Christian position by using a made up definition of the word faith. Here’s part of their exchange.
Tim McGrew:
Two, you start talking about definitions of faith, and I found those really puzzling in a lot of ways. They’re nonstandard. I don’t know anyone, outside of you and perhaps your following online, who would define faith as pretending to know things you don’t know. So I found that a really puzzling start, and a lot of the work then is predicated on that definition.
Speaker 5:
Yeah-
Peter Boghossian:
Yeah. That’s the second definition. And Tim’s right, it’s [inaudible 00:08:20] chapter two. The primary definition was belief without evidence. And what I had said before, is that I’m really interested in how people use the word faith, and I’ve taught literally tens of thousands of students and talked to people at all walks of life, and this is exactly how they use the word faith, is unevidenced belief. I don’t think that my experience is unique, but we can certainly let the listeners reflect on their experience. Many, many people I’ve spoken to for whom this usage is very, very standard, not the pretending, but the belief without evidence, and literally billions of people use the word faith this way, and that’s what I wrote about, how people use the word.
Tim McGrew:
Yeah, well, I’ve got a whole bunch of problems with that. First of all, Pete says this is how billions of people use the word. Not in my experience. In my experience, maybe Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain used it that way as a satirical bit, as a joke, but here you’re taking a term with a reasonably well-established semantic range and you’re substituting for it a definition that no serious believer has ever endorsed or ever would. If we want to just have lexical definition, we can go to the OED, which is surveyed actual usage, and the primary definition there is complete trust or confidence in someone or something. I think that’s fine, and that goes back to a New Testament use of the word pistis as trust, which is a very common meaning for it throughout the New Testament.
Trent Horn:
Defining faith as pretending to know what you don’t know implies that people of faith are not sincere. A pretender knows they aren’t what they say they are, but people of faith are generally sincere. They may be sincerely mistaken, but they’re usually sincere. So, the main issue Boghossian must answer is actually this. Is the religious faith people have in certain internal or external evidences justified? Do they have a rational basis for holding their religious beliefs to be true? I’ll admit sometimes a religious person does not, but you need a really good argument to say a religious person is never justified in their religious beliefs.
Boghossian’s main argument for the claim they’re never justified, is that because knowledge acquired by faith arrives at contradictory conclusions, such as the Christian affirmation, Jesus is God, and the Muslim denial of that proposition, this means faith leads many people into error, so it can’t be trusted. But by that logic, reason is unreliable, because philosophers use reason and arrive at different conclusions about all sorts of things. All a lack of consensus proves is that some people make faulty inferences based on faith, not that we shouldn’t have faith in either religious testimony or religious experiences.
But what if the street epistemologist encounters someone who has given a reason for the hope within, 1 Peter 3:15, and doesn’t just rely on a gut feeling? According to Boghossian, the street epistemologist doesn’t have to worry about those reasons, because as Boghossian puts it, “In the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one. Aquinas’s five proofs, fail. Pascal’s wager, fail. Anselm’s ontological argument, fail. The fine-tuning argument, fail. The kalam cosmological argument, fail. All refuted. All failures.”
I hate when people, especially philosophers and academics who should know better, do this. It often reveals an anti-religious bias in philosophy and other disciplines. The Catholic philosopher, Ed Feser, points out how in other philosophical issues, minority views are never totally written off. People are sympathetic to them and think maybe one day they could be suitably defended, but academics love to pronounce the death of any possible case for God. Besides, Boghossian doesn’t come anywhere close to showing these arguments have been refuted. His approach to this is embarrassingly bad.
I was excited to read that paragraph to turn to the footnote for that statement and see the evidence for such a dramatic claim, but when I got there I was dumbfounded. Aquinas’s arguments are just described, they’re not refuted. Boghossian neither critiques the arguments, nor even provides a reference to a critique, like Anthony Kenny’s book on the subject, or even the terrible critiques that Dawkins offers in The God Delusion. He just describes them and that’s it.
According to Boghossian, the late cosmologist and atheist, Victor Stenger, is said to have refuted the fine-tuning argument in his 2011 book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. But Stenger doesn’t refute the fine-tuning argument so much as he attacked its central premise that the universe is finely tuned for life. In doing so, Stenger went against other well-known non-theistic cosmologists, like Stephen Hawking or Martin Rees, who at least accepted the universe was fine-tuned for life, even though they don’t think God was the fine-tuner.
Also, Stenger’s own book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, has been rebutted by astronomers like Luke Barnes. That was the point I raised actually in my debate with Dan Barker many years ago. I knew that Barker would cite Stenger’s work against the fine-tuning argument for God, so I kept a copy of it in my podium and I noted how other competent experts in this field have rejected Stenger’s conclusions.
In regard to the Kalam cosmological argument, Boghossian simply says, “The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out,” and then calls this the death-knell of the argument. He makes this claim though without bothering to critique the scientific or philosophical evidence for the finitude of the past. He doesn’t even bother to reference somebody who has tried to do that.
I was hoping that chapter seven, which he calls Anti-Apologetics 101, would provide at least some solid answers to arguments in defense of the faith. But here too I was sorely disappointed. In answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Boghossian simply quotes Adolf Grunbaum, and says there’s no reason to think a state of something needs to be explained, but pure nothingness does not have to be explained. This just shows a woeful lack of understanding of the principle of sufficient reason, since positive states usually require explanations and negative states usually do not require them. While there are serious and thoughtful critiques of natural theology, Boghossian fails to make one. Distressingly, he doesn’t even seem to be aware of such critiques. The closest he comes is Victor Stenger’s book God The Failed Hypothesis, though I would say a book like Graham Oppy’s Arguing About Gods is far superior to it.
And now we turn to the ugly parts of the book. It’s one thing to be wrong, it’s another thing to have a nasty attitude about it. The anti-religious rhetoric in A Manual for Creating Atheists is truly over the top. For example, Boghossian says that if a street epistemologist doesn’t convince someone to give up his faith, then the person is either secretly giving up his faith while trying to save face, or the person is literally brain-damaged. In a chapter called Containment Protocols, Boghossian says we should stigmatize religious claims like we stigmatize racist claims. We should treat faith like a kind of contagious mental illness that should be recognized by medical professionals. We should read apologist’s books, but we should buy them used so they don’t make a profit. He also says, and I’m not making this up, we should promote children’s television shows where epistemic knights do battle against faith monsters. It’s like if the creator of the TV show Bibleman became an atheist, but he never got rid of his older corny approaches to media and entertainment.
The advice I would give atheists who are interested in this book, would be to model the Socratic approach Boghossian teaches, just don’t use his rhetoric when you’re talking to believers. For believers, I’d say that this is a good window into the attitude of popular, skeptic-based atheism. Knowing what’s in this book can help you explain to the street epistemologist you aren’t brain-damaged. Instead, you have good reasons to think that what you believe is true, and the street epistemologist should examine those reasons with an open mind and charitable attitude.
Finally, I think it’s interesting that many of the defenders of new atheism from the early 2000s have now turned against the woke ideology that other atheists hold today. Boghossian no longer works at Portland State University because he’s done things like attack absurd woke ideology. He even participated in a prank exposing the thoughtlessness of far left academic journals. I’ll show a segment from the reporter, John Stossel, that features Boghossian, but notice how Boghossian, previously in his book on atheism, his mentality in the late 2000 and early 2010s, is that we ought to stigmatize religious believers, we ought to have this aggressive approach. But I think now he probably regrets saying those kinds of things because woke ideologues use that same approach against others, and that’s something Boghossian definitely opposes. Here’s the clip.
Speaker 8:
I’ve now closely considered the revisions of your manuscript Dog Park.
Speaker 9:
It’s not Dog Park.
Speaker 10:
They’re laughing because they just pulled off a hoax.
Speaker 8:
And we’ll recommend its publication in Gender, Place & Culture.
Speaker 10:
They’d sent so-called research to 20 prominent journals in women and gender studies, race studies, sexuality, fat and queer studies, for this journal of social work.
Speaker 8:
We rewrote a section of [inaudible 00:17:57] as intersectional feminism and this journal has accepted it.
Speaker 11:
Think about if you did this to civil engineers with bridge building. They would’ve thanked us, because they’re driving over the bridges with their family, so they don’t want the bridges to collapse.
Speaker 10:
But the grievance study journal editors, instead of admitting that they’d published nonsense, criticized the hoaxers. “You clearly engaged in flawed and unethical research.”
Speaker 8:
That was our whole point.
Speaker 10:
A dozen of Peter’s fellow professors wrote an anonymous letter attacking him, and the school newspaper ran it with this cartoon depicting Peter as a clown.
“You’re part of the clown car of hoax writers engaging in fraudulent time-wasting anti-intellectual activity.”
Speaker 8:
Right. They just described their own discipline.
Trent Horn:
In a recent interview, Boghossian admits that atheists were mistaken when they thought that the death of religion would usher in an age irrationality.
Speaker 12:
Be unfair for me to say that the new atheists perhaps cleared a path by killing God again for these new religions, these new quasi religions, pseudo religions, to flourish.
Speaker 13:
100%.
Speaker 12:
Is there a link?
Speaker 13:
It’s absolutely true, and I think there was a Pollyanna attitude that many new atheists had that somehow we’ll bury God, borrow a turn of phrase from Nietzsche, and everybody’s going to be living in some rational paradise. Little did anybody know at that point, although the canaries in the coal mine were in the new atheist movement, in the skeptical movement, we started to see this in the very beginning, that what would replace it would be horrific. Look what the kind of things that we’re dealing with now. So the substitution hypothesis is when you get rid of the Abrahamic traditions or whatever is traditional religion in a country, something else will come in, so some other form of irrationality will come in and substitute for what was lost, because the default is you just have to believe in something.
Speaker 12:
Rationality or… religion? Doesn’t have to be irrational, does it? Or another worldview-
Speaker 13:
Well, it would have to be a worldview that wasn’t substantiated by the evidence, because that’s what substitutes it.
Speaker 12:
Uh-huh. Okay, so you’re fighting now, not just as you were fighting the universities, you’re fighting across the world to defeat these new pseudo religions. What are you going to replace them with?
Speaker 13:
Oh, that’s a great question-
Trent Horn:
Man is by nature a religious creature. If you take away the true religion, human beings will just invent their own false religion to replace it. I think that many atheists who are committed to the rigorous use of reason will see that dogmatism and uncritical thinking are not a religious problem, they’re a human problem. Hopefully this will encourage those atheists to accept elements of a kind of Christian realism they agree with. Like the biological reality of sex, or the failure of things like critical race theory and Marxism, and that can lead them to giving the most rational forms of religious thought a fresh look.
All right, I hope today’s episode was helpful and if you enjoyed it, definitely subscribe to our channel and like today’s episode. Thank you all so much and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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