A Manual for Creating Atheists

by Peter Boghossian

Let’s think this claim through as a person of reason and science might: Christians claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent—all knowing, all powerful, all present, and all good, creator of the universe and everything in it including us. Christians believe that we were originally created sinless, but because God gave us free will and Adam and Eve chose to eat the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we are all born with original sin as part of our nature, even though we did not commit the original sinful act ourselves. God could just forgive the sin we never committed, but instead he sacrificed his son Jesus, who is actually just himself in the flesh because Christians believe in only one god—that’s what monotheism means—of which Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just different manifestations. Three in One and One in Three. The only way to avoid eternal punishment for sins we never committed from this all-loving God is to accept his son—who is actually himself—as our savior. So … God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad!

A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.

1. Belief without evidence. “My definition of faith is that it’s a leap over the probabilities. It fills in the gap between what is improbable to make something more probable than not without faith. As such, faith is an irrational leap over the probabilities.”

If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway.

If one claims knowledge either in the absence of evidence, or when a claim is contradicted by evidence, then this is when the word “faith” is used. “Believing something anyway” is an accurate definition of the term “faith.”

2. Pretending to know things you don’t know.

“Atheist,” as I use the term, means, “There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe. However, if I were shown sufficient evidence to warrant belief in such an entity, then I would believe.”

A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.

Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world. For example, when someone says, “Jesus walked on water” (Matthew 14:22–33), that person is claiming to know there was an historical figure named Jesus and that he, unaided by technology, literally walked across the surface of the water. “Jesus walked on water” is a knowledge claim—an objective statement of fact.

If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. Believing on the basis of insufficient evidence cannot point one toward the truth. For example, the following are unassailable facts everyone, faithful or not, would agree upon: There are different faith traditions. Different faith traditions make different truth claims. The truth claims of some faith traditions contradict the truth claims of other faith traditions. For example, Muslims believe Muhammad (570–632) was the last prophet (Sura 33:40). Mormons believe Joseph Smith (1805–1844), who lived after Muhammad, was a prophet. It cannot both be the case that Muhammad was the last prophet and someone who lived after Muhammad was also a prophet. Therefore: At least one of these claims must be false (perhaps both).

The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.

DIG DEEPER Books Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Harris, 2004) Stephen Law, Believing Bullshit (Law, 2011) John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (Loftus, 2013) Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (Shermer, 2011) Al Stefanelli, A Voice Of Reason in an Unreasonable World: The Rise of Atheism On Planet Earth (Stefanelli, 2011) Victor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (Stenger, 2012) Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Wright, 2013) Videos Peter Boghossian,“Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions: Just Say No!” http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2012/02/14/Jesusthe-Easter-Bunny-and-Other-Delusions-Just-Say-No.aspx Peter Boghossian, “Faith: Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4WUFXvCFQ Jerry Coyne, “Why Science and Faith Are Incompatible: My Talk in Edinburgh,” http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/why-science-and-faith-are-incompatible-my-talk-in-edinburgh/ QualiaSoup’s YouTube channel, “UK Secular Humanist Discussing: Science & the Natural World, Critical Thinking, Atheism, Philosophy, Religion,” http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup The Atheist Experience, “The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. Every week we field live calls from atheists and believers alike, and you never know what you’re going to get!” http://www.atheistexperience.com Thunderf00...

Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he doesn’t think he lacks. That is, if you believe you have the truth then why would you seek another truth? For example, if your unshakable starting condition is that the Ten Commandments are the final word on morality, or that the Koran is the perfect book that contains all the answers you’ll ever need, or that all human beings descended from Manu, you stop looking. Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.

Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility. Faith immutably alters the starting conditions for inquiry by uprooting a hunger to know and sowing a warrantless confidence.

Socrates and Nietzsche prescribed a different kind of interpretative experience, one in which we’re not just finding and confirming our existing biases, but also attacking them. Whenever we have a chance to peek at our prejudices and see our own biases and underexamined assumptions, we have an opportunity to attack those assumptions and to rid ourselves from the presumption of knowledge. Examining and thoughtfully criticizing our biases, our interpretations, and what we think we know, is an opportunity for wonder to reemerge.

Trying to reason away religion would be like trying to reason away one’s social support, friends, hobbies, comforting songs, rituals, etc. This is why Street Epistemologists shouldn’t attempt to separate people from their religion, but instead focus on separating them from their faith. Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.

There are five reasons why otherwise reasonable people embrace absurd propositions: (1) they have a history of not formulating their beliefs on the basis of evidence; (2) they formulate their beliefs on what they thought was reliable evidence but wasn’t (e.g., the perception of the testament of the Holy Spirit); (3) they have never been exposed to competing epistemologies and beliefs; (4) they yield to social pressures; and (5) they devalue truth or are relativists.

In your work as a Street Epistemologist you’ll literally talk people out of their faith. Your goal is to help them by engendering doxastic openness. Only very rarely will you help someone abandon their faith instantly. More commonly, by helping someone realize their own ignorance, you’ll sow seeds of doubt that will blossom into ever-expanding moments of doxastic openness.

Street Epistemologists should set the realistic goal of helping the faithful become more doxastically open. Sow the seeds of doubt. Help people to become less confident in what they claim to know, and help them to stop pretending to know things they don’t know. In time, with more interventions behind you, you’ll hone your skills and increase your ambitions. Ultimately, in your wake you’ll have created not only people freed from the prison of faith, but also more Street Epistemologists.

DIG DEEPER Articles Brock and Balloun, “Behavioral Receptivity to Dissonant Information” (Brock & Balloun, 1967) David Gal and Derek Rucker, “When in Doubt, Shout! Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing” (Gal & Rucker, 2010) Book Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Sunstein, 2009) Videos Peter Boghossian, “Walking the Talk” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ARwO9jNyjA Peter Boghossian, “Critical Thinking Crash Course” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7zbEiNnY5M

Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition. The totality of this endeavor is indeed challenging, but a goal of the Street Epistemologist is to provide people with hope. Reason has emancipatory potential.

Attacks on religion are often perceived as attacks on friends, families, communities, and relationships. As such, attacking religion may alienate people, making it even more difficult to separate them from their faith.

Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem.

A solid strategy for lowering your conversational partner’s self-placement on the Dawkins’ Scale, and one that I repeatedly advocate throughout this book, is to focus on epistemology and rarely, if ever, allow metaphysics into the discussion. This is even more important in discussions about God—a metaphysical entity. In other words, focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).10 Instead of having a discussion about the actual existence of metaphysical entities that can neither be proven nor disproven, direct the discussion to how one knows that these alleged entities exist. (This may also avoid one of the most common retorts among uneducated, unsophisticated believers, “You can’t prove it not to be true.”)

By explicitly stating that having faith doesn’t make one moral, and lacking faith doesn’t make one immoral. I usually provide examples of well-known atheists most people would consider moral: Bill Gates (for donating his vast fortune to charity) and Specialist Pat Tillman (for abandoning an incredibly promising football career to give his life for his country). I then ask subjects if they can think of any examples of the faithful who are immoral.

SHORTCUTS Occasionally, when I’m pressed for time and can’t give my interlocutor a comprehensive Socratic treatment (for example, in line at the grocery store), I use two powerful dialectical shortcuts. First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”14 I don’t make a statement about a subject’s beliefs being incorrect; instead, I ask the subject what conditions would have to be in place for her belief to be false. When the subject is thinking about an answer it’s important to listen attentively. On occasion, simply asking this question can cause a moment of doxastic openness, particularly in people who’ve not reflected extensively on their faith. If the subject asks me to tell them what it would take for me to believe, I respond, “That’s a great question. I’d like to hear what you think first, before I tell you what conditions would have to be in place for me to believe.” This is also a reinforcing statement in which I reiterate the question. It also invites a response. Once they’ve given their response, I thank them. If they’ve asked me what it would take for me to believe, I’ll use a variation of American physicist Lawrence Krauss’s example in his debate with William Lane Craig: if I walked outside at night and all of the stars were organized to read, “I am God communicating with you, believe in Me!” and every human being worldwide witnessed this in their native language, this would be suggestive (but far from conclusive as it’s a perception and could be a delu...

The Transtheoretical Model of change states that behavioral change occurs in a series of stages. Precontemplation (not ready to change) Contemplation (getting ready to change) Preparation (ready to change) Action (changing) Maintenance (sustaining change) Termination (change completed)

In your interventions, one of the first things you should do is make a diagnosis by ascertaining the change stage of your subject. There’s no formula for how to do this, but you’ll likely have an idea within the first minutes of conversation. You can then, to borrow from the literature on addiction and health, “meet the patient where they are” (Blume, Schmaling, & Marlatt, 2000, pp. 379–384). Are they Precontemplative or are they Contemplative, or are they determined to do something? With experience, you’ll be able to make more accurate diagnoses and consequently tailor your treatments to the subject’s stage of change.

The Socratic method is a powerful, no cost, dialectical intervention that can help people reason away their faith. Effectively used, the Socratic method can create moments of doxastic openness—moments when individuals become aware that their reasoning is in error. In these instances people become less certain, less sure, less confident, and correspondingly more open to alternative hypotheses and explanations. People become aware of their own ignorance. The Socratic method is like putting a tool into the hands of a believer who ultimately uses that tool to dismantle the scaffold of their own (false) belief.

Socrates used his method as a guide to help people show themselves they didn’t know what they thought they knew.

STAGES The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly (Dye, 1996). I’ll now briefly explain these stages and then show how they inform actual faith interventions. Stage 1: Wonder The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something: “What is justice?” or “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” or “Does karma govern the cycle of cause and effect?” etc. Wondering takes propositional format—words are used to capture one’s thoughts—and are thus expressed as questions. Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges. (See appendix B for the Socratic questions used in my study to increase prison inmates’ critical thinking and reasoning ability.) Stage 2: Hypothesis Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder. For example, one possible response to the question, “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” would be, “Yes, there must be. The universe is just too large for there not to be.” Another response could be a simple, “No.”2 Stage 3: Elenchus (Q&A) The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis. The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false. Continuing with our previous example: Person ...

YM told me of his experiences, what he’d gone through in his life, and what he felt. PB: That’s really interesting. But I have a question. How do you know the thing you felt was caused by Jesus? Four points to note: (1) Use of the passive voice doesn’t make Jesus the actor in the sentence as it would with the active voice, “How do you know Jesus caused the thing you felt?” If you construct your statement with the passive voice, the subject may be more likely to be open to alternative causes. (Active voice: Mary tuned a violin. Passive voice: A violin was tuned by Mary.)

YM basically went on to say he “just knew” it was Jesus and he felt it was true in his heart. PB: That’s interesting. But a lot of people feel some religious belief in their hearts, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, people who think the Emperor of Japan is divine. But they can’t all be correct. Right? I specifically avoided the word “you.” For example, I did not say, “So how do you know your belief is true?” This can be threatening, as it may be perceived as creating an uncomfortable environment by placing the focus on the subject personally as opposed to the hypothesis.

A pregnant pause is a very useful, nonthreatening technique, typically used in sales, to get the result you want. Often the uncomfortable silence will be filled by an answer; regardless, it allows the discourse to move forward, but if the dialectical space isn’t filled you can continue at your leisure.

It’s easier to elicit contradictions from responses that indicate certainty as opposed to ambiguity. Certainty requires overwhelming warrant—in other words, one needs an ironclad justification before one can claim one knows something as an absolute truth. Showing someone doesn’t have the necessary justification to warrant belief in a claim in which they’re certain is fairly easy. With subjects who are not suffering from severe doxastic pathologies, it makes for an effortless elenchus: all one has to do is find some condition that could possibly hold that undermines the truth potential for the belief in question. (For example: “All Asians are good at math.” To undermine this hypothesis all one would need is a single example of an Asian who is not good at math. However, refuting, “Most Asians are good at math,” is considerably more difficult.)

PB: What do you mean what do I mean? You assume the universe had to have a beginning. What if there was no beginning? (Pause) SG: I never thought of that. I was extremely surprised by this comment. He was about to try to convert others and yet he had not even thought of the most basic objection to his worldview? I was also shocked this point of doxastic openness came so early in the conversation. At this juncture I wanted to make sure he didn’t feel stupid,

PB: So the main argument for God was, “Look around you. How did this get here?” But we know there’s another possible explanation for what there is. So if the universe always existed, what would that mean? Here I use the word “we” to confer upon the subject the feeling that he is not alone, that we are equals, and that we as humans are all facing the same ultimate questions.

CHAPTER SUMMARY Socratic interventions are easy to administer, no-cost treatments that can engender doxastic openness and even separate faith from its host. The main way this happens is by helping expose contradictions and inconsistencies in subjects’ reasoning processes. When administering Socratic treatments, keep the following in mind: Be aware of the stages of the method. Don’t transition from one stage to another stage until you’ve exhausted everything you need to do in that particular stage. Don’t rush. When appropriate, incorporate strategies noted in chapter 4: be attentive to context, don’t develop adversarial relationships or negative tones, “roll with it,” divorce belief from morality, focus on epistemology and not metaphysics, target faith not religion, and model the behavior you want the subject to emulate. Develop a safe space for discussion, almost a camaraderie. At the conclusion of some interventions, subjects will be confused or even scared. In chapter 6, I’ll discuss how to deal with this and what goes in faith’s place.

DIG DEEPER Articles Peter Boghossian, “How Socratic Pedagogy Works” (Boghossian, 2003) Peter Boghossian, “Socratic pedagogy: Perplexity, Humiliation, Shame and a Broken Egg” (Boghossian, 2011b) Books Guy P. Harrison, 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian (Harrison, 2013) Platonic Dialogues Plato, Euthyphro Plato, Meno (focus on the discussion with Meno’s slave) Plato, Republic (particularly Books I, II, and III)

The Muslims will tell you to repeat the name of Allah until you come to believe. The Christians will tell you to open your heart to Jesus to find true belief. These are easy answers that bend you in the direction of your initial starting point. This isn’t the case with reason. When you form beliefs on the basis of evidence, no conclusion will be guaranteed. Everything will be up for grabs. There’s no book that can teach you how to do this; it is not just a skill set, it is an attitude. So, my suggestions: Be genuine and sincere with yourself and with others.

It begs the question: is it better to pretend we know an answer to something we don’t actually know, or is it better to simply be honest and say, “I don’t know?”

The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out.3 This by definition casts doubt on a creator. No faith is needed to posit that the universe may have always existed.

DIG DEEPER Books Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Hitchens, 1995) Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (Hitchens, 2007) Victor Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Stenger, 2011) Victor Stenger, God and the Atom (Stenger, 2013) Phil Zuckerman, Why Are Danes and Swedes So Irreligious? (Zuckerman, 2009) Video “Is God Necessary for Morality?” William Lane Craig versus (American philosopher) Shelly Kagan Debate, http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&client=mv-google&gl=US&v=SiJnCQuPiuo&nomo bile=1

In other words, think of objectivity like this: if everyone—including you—were to disappear, the universe would continue to be what it is. What is, is, independent of your beliefs. But in a world in which subjectivity is given primacy, there are no objective truths—what’s true is just true for you.

In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.

Question 1: Is it possible that some people misconstrue reality? Most students will say “yes” or nod their heads. For those few who say “no,” or who look unsure, I ask, “If Fred thinks that two plus two is eighteen, and Sue thinks it’s forty-one, and if they both conceive of the operator in the same way, has someone misconstrued reality?” Not a single student will say “no.” Question 2: Do some people misconstrue reality? Question two moves from the possibility of misconstruing reality, to the fact that some individuals actually do misconstrue reality. It’s important at this stage that you do not provide examples—instead let students provide their own. Sadly, I had to figure this out on my own, but students relate more to examples given by other students, and much less to those given by the instructor. Fielding examples is usually the most time consuming of all of the stages; I spend about five to seven minutes eliciting and encouraging as many students as possible to contribute to this stage.

Questions 3, 4, and statement 5: If one wants to know reality, is one process just as good as any other? So then are some processes bad? If so, this must mean some processes are good, or better. Now I provide my own examples. I avoid discussing faith. If faith does come up, I’ll say, “We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s just find unreliable processes that we can all agree upon.” I use blatantly unreliable processes like flipping coins and goat sacrifice. It’s very easy to get students to agree that flipping coins is not a reliable basis upon which they should make decisions—heads I’ll be a math major and tails I’ll be a dance major. I also elicit other processes that students think are unreliable.

I segue into the next question by stating, “So if there are some processes that are bad, like flipping coins, that means that you can’t rely upon them. But in order for some processes to be bad, that must mean that other processes are good. By good I mean that one can rely upon them. As ‘bad’ is a relational word, it doesn’t make sense to speak of a process as bad unless there’s a process that’s good, right?”

Questions 6 and 7: Is there a way we can figure out which processes are good, and which are not? At this point, the foundation has been laid. Once we’ve discussed what we mean by “reliable,” “good,” and “bad,” very few people maintain a type of relativism in terms of processes that take one toward or away from reality. I ask students their ideas about how to discern good processes from bad processes. Regardless of their responses, I’ll ask them how they know the selection criteria they invoke will enable them to discern what’s a good process and what’s a bad process. With very little prodding, students will come to the conclusion that processes that rely on reason and evidence are good, while all other processes are bad.

Notice that I did not write, “If they still don’t get it.” When teaching, it’s important to frame issues not in terms of student understanding, but in terms of your explanation. For example, I’ll often say, “Am I being clear?” as opposed to, “Do you get it?” This places the burden of clarity on me, and students are more likely to volunteer and engage issues if they don’t think that the instructor believes they have a problem understanding the material.