Deconstructing the Atheists

When we are casting about for reasons to believe in something--anything--it's a natural inclination to find what people who are smarter than we are believe and go with that. 

This is totally natural. Homo Sapiens is a social animal. This is what social animals do. The strongest lead the herd, or the pack, or the flock. It also makes pretty good sense. We do this on a daily basis, and we do it for good reasons. When we're in trouble with the law, we go to a lawyer, because lawyers know more about the law than we do. When we're sick, we go to doctors, because they know more about our bodies than we do. When we're doing our taxes, we go to accountants, because they live, eat and breathe that stuff. 

Thus, it's only natural that, when we start grappling with what Bill Maher, one of my heroes, calls the Big Questions, we should seek out the opinions of people who are smarter than we are. And since lots of really, really smart people--Oxford biologists, neuroscientists, brilliant polemicists, etc.--are atheists, lots of people jump on that bandwagon. 

But way too few of us think about the atheists themselves. Many people don't really consider their arguments seriously, or think about why they're atheists, or even if they're atheists at all. 

My own personal Really Smart Herd Leader is Noam Chomsky. He's someone whose towering intellect and moral authority captivates me. If we need a Herd Leader to follow, he strikes me as a pretty good one. I probably like Noam Chomsky better than a straight man ought to love any other dude. 

Chomsky appears on the Celebrity Atheist lists a lot, and there's no doubt he's one of the leading lights of secular humanism. Certainly nothing that he's ever said would lead anyone to think he's religious in the least, or believes in God (which are two different things altogether, as I've argued in a previous post). 

But Chomsky is a linguist. The greatest one who ever lived. And he is, thus, more attuned to the subtleties and nuances of language than probably anyone before or since. And he is very, very cagey about whether or not he's actually an atheist. When asked, his stock answer is, "I don't even know what an atheist is. Can't answer the question, I'm afraid. What is it that I'm not supposed to believe in? Until you can answer that question, I can't tell you whether I'm an atheist, and the question doesn't arise." 

Furthermore, Chomsky, as a recent profile in the New Yorker pointed out, is "ambivalent about evolution. He is enough of a conventional scientist to acknowledge its power as an explanation for most biological phenomena, but he resists applying it to language." 

Which is not to say that he believes in the six days of Creation. But it may indicate that he allows for more possibilities than the godless, random, unguided process that atheists think evolution is. And Chomsky, who possesses one of the most incisive brains ever to grow in a human skull, is no fan of what's called, "The New Atheism", the flurry of books and articles by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, et. al. 

"I'm not impressed with it, frankly," he says. "And I don't think they address the concerns, feelings and commitments of seriously religious people. Yes, they do address the concerns of people who think the world was created ten thousand years ago, but they're not going to listen to these arguments -- not in the arrogant form in which they are presented. I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in heaven -- that's none of my business ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science."

Now, this may have something to do with the long and rather nasty feud between Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, one of the arch-apostles of the New Atheism. But upon parsing his statements, it appears that Chomsky isn't completely sold on a purely materialistic universe--or at least not on that idea's leading proponents. 

Having found a really smart Intellectual Herd Leader who, regardless of whatever his carefully-guarded true feelings on the subject are, has given us a little room to doubt the True Believers of the New Atheism, let's look at the atheists themselves just a little more closely. 

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and it's evolution that he says led him to dismiss the idea of the existence of God altogether. See, Darwinism explains the process. It removes the need for God as an explanation for life. God, as an explanation, is obsolete. Thus, Darwinism, according to Dawkins, is a sort of gateway drug to full-blown atheism. Which is kind of a dumb argument, in my mind, because knowing how a thing works doesn't make the fact that it does work any less cool. Or fascinating. Or miraculous. As a matter of fact, the more I read about evolutionary biology, the more convinced I am that there might just be something behind the process, guiding the process, or at least having put the right processes into play for the process to take place. 

Why do I believe this? Odds and math, mostly. The basic tenet of Darwinian evolution is that random mutations occur. Every so often, those random mutations result in something good, something that better adapts the creature to its environment. That creature, thanks to the random mutation that made it just that much better than its siblings, lives longer and breeds more often. Its descendants, thus, outperform the competition. 

Okay, that's fine. But life on earth, cosmically, hasn't been around for very long. And most mutations aren't particularly helpful. They don't help the creature survive. Think of Down Syndrome. Or albinism. So the odds are against random evolution from the start. 

Even if a creature is born with a helpful, rather than a harmful, mutation, the odds are still pretty slim that it'll survive. Imagine if a baby snake is born with, oh, I don't know, x-ray vision. Yes, that x-ray vision might help it survive longer than its siblings. But a hawk could still swoop down on supersnake from behind, thus eating that helpful mutation before it's had a chance to outbreed its brothers and sisters. And just think about how many useful mutations, which occurred against the odds, never really helped their owners. 

So. For life on earth to have experienced so very many helpful mutations as to account for the mindboggling complexity we see around us every day in such a very, very short time seems, well, pretty far-fetched. 

If you don't believe me, ask Robert Bakker, paleontologist, author of the Dinosaur Heresies, and the first guy who thought up the idea that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, and that they're still around--they're just called birds today. Brilliant evolutionary scientist, and an ordained pastor, too. 

Explaining evolution doesn't necessarily get rid of God. As Lawrence Krauss, the only physicist to have won the top awards from all three major U.S. physics societies, says, "Evolution, as a scientific theory, says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. It doesn't yet address the origin of life, either, but instead deals with the mechanics of how the present diversity of species on earth evolved." 

Essentially, for Richard Dawkins to say that he's an atheist because the Garden of Eden never existed is a little like saying that if George Washington never chopped down the cherry tree, he never existed either. It's a cute, but flawed, argument. Just because we get rid of some childish misconceptions about stuff doesn't mean that the stuff doesn't exist. Well, so much for Dawkins. On to Hitchens. 

Christopher Hitchens is certainly a bright guy, and I hope he recovers from his esophageal cancer. He's a truly amazing polemicist, he can argue like nobody's business, and I have the greatest respect for both the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to articulate it and argue it. His book "God Is Not Great," is one of those ziggurats of the New Atheism, right up there with Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation." But the subtitle is revealing: "How Religion Poisons Everything." 

Hitchens' major argument for being an atheist is that religion sucks. I won't argue with him that it sucks. It needs to go away, and the sooner the better. But the fact that religion sucks really doesn't address the question of whether God exists or not. That's a little like saying that because tobacco company executives are evil sons of bitches that deserve to be put up against a wall and shot, there's no such thing as tobacco. Tobacco, in the wild, is a nice plant that serves its purpose in the ecosystem very well. It's only how it's used that makes it evil. 

Sorta like God, really. 

But looking at Hitchens a little more closely might reveal something not about whether God exists or not, but about why Hitchens is so obsessed with this topic. 

Christopher Hitchens came to maturity as part of the Sixties Generation. He was an extremely passionate leftist, a Marxist of the Trotskyite persuasion, and he, like so many others of his generation, had a very strong sense of mission. The world is screwed, and we're going to fix it by any means necessary. I'm sure he was an atheist in those days, but it was part and parcel of his Marxism, secondary to the social struggle, and he wasn't really all that out there about it. 

And then came the shift. Christopher Hitchens broke with the Left. In 2001, he said that he could no longer call himself a socialist. He got into very public scraps with Gore Vidal, the Labour Party, and Noam Chomsky, among others. He threw his support behind George W. Bush and the War in Iraq. Essentially, he took a major lurch to the right. It is with the death of Hitchens the political radical that Hitchens the Professional Atheist emerges. 

I don't think Christopher Hitchens ditched the left out of selfish motives. I think he did it out of conviction. I disagree with him, and as a radical Leftist, I'm sorry to see him go, but I'm not about to question the integrity of his motives for doing so. 

But his life-defining purpose was gone, thus leaving him kind of hollow. I can sympathize with him. When I left grad school after getting my M.A. in Russian Lit, having realized that I was not going to go for a Ph.D, it really threw me into a tailspin resulting in a pretty serious depression. So much of my identity had been tied up in my academic life that when I no longer had it, it really pulled the rug out from under me. I think the same thing happened to Christopher Hitchens. With no more sacred calling--no more mission--I think he fixated on the one remaining aspect of his Marxism that he still believed in--its atheism--and decided to make that his new cause. 

I'm not advocating for religion. I'm not defending it. I like Dawkins and Hitchens both a lot. I've read their stuff and will continue to do it, and I hope more people take their words to heart. Not necessarily because we need more atheists, although it couldn't hurt, but because we need more doubt. Doubt is good stuff. And while I don't agree with their atheism, I do support their work, because we need them. Humanity in general, and America specifically, needs people who will cast doubt on what we believe, whatever it is.