4 Reason: the rationality of beliefs
Reason: the rationality of beliefs
In January 1697 the great English philosopher John Locke wrote to his close friend William Molyneaux, celebrating the joy of the pursuit of truth in life: ‘I know there is truth opposite to falsehood, that it may be found if people will, and is worth the seeking, and is not only the most valuable, but the pleasantest thing in the world.’1 I keep coming back to Locke’s words, which I find a constant source of inspiration. They could serve as the motto for science, philosophy and theology – and indeed for the New Atheism, which I’m sure shares in this honourable and noble quest for truth in a puzzling and ambiguous world. Yet the New Atheism’s critics, including many atheists, argue that it seems to think it has a monopoly on truth, refusing as a matter of principle to concede the rationality of other positions, above all of religious faith.
I love reason and science. I’m a freethinker. That’s what led me to give up on my earlier atheism and embrace the Christian faith while studying the natural sciences at university back in 1971. I have no doubt that Richard Dawkins is a freethinker too. Yet Dawkins and I seem to understand the notions of reason and science in rather different ways, and find that our freethinking leads to very different conclusions.
But that’s just the way things are. Reason, as Dante noted, has ‘short wings’.2 Philosophers are still debating the great questions of truth and have yet to settle their differences. Is there a reality outside our minds? Is there a God? What is the good life? The jury is out on all these and countless other issues. But that doesn’t stop us making decisions about what we believe to be the best answers, and basing our lives on them. Maybe that’s one good reason why we should be respectful of differences and refrain from dismissing those who disagree with us.
The 2003 discussion between two leading academics – atheist Jack Smart and theist John Haldane – was a superb illustration of a principled, courteous and informed debate on the issues. Both scholars conceded the rationality of the other’s position, while arguing for the superiority of their own.3 There was no question of Smart lapsing into the kind of dismissive and superficial assertions Sam Harris has been known to make, or of Haldane defending the ‘irrationality’ of faith in ways that Dawkins or Dennett seem to think is characteristic of religious belief. Both positions were seen as worthy of support by thinking and intelligent people. The debate is – as it’s always been – still wide open.
In the next two chapters we’ll look critically at reason and science – both vital tools in our engagement with reality – and explore how they relate to the New Atheism. It’s important to remember that every tool needs to be calibrated before use. How reliable is it? Are there conditions under which it malfunctions, producing false positives or distorted results? What are its operating limits? Good tools, when badly used, lead to unreliable outcomes. The wise person knows the limits of the methods being employed to get results. Otherwise the results cannot be trusted.
This important idea of being critical about reason is not new. Immanuel Kant and David Hume, two leading philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, were quite clear that reason had its limits and that these had to be identified and respected.4 Both were deeply sceptical about the capacity of reason to solve metaphysical problems. Reason might be good at critiquing views it perceived to be irrational, but that didn’t mean that it could construct alternative visions of reality of its own.
The New Atheism makes rationality one of its core defining characteristics and emphatically and aggressively denies that any alternative view can be regarded as rational. It needs to be said, however, that this is a populist rather than a scholarly view. Most reflective atheists outside the New Atheism concede both the limits of reason and the rationality of non-atheistic perspectives. They may believe that their atheism makes more sense than its alternatives, but certainly won’t necessarily dismiss belief in God as irrational.
The rationality of belief in God
The twentieth century has seen philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, reaffirm the rationality of faith and reinvigorate traditional debates about reasons for belief in God – catalysed in part by new scientific understandings of the origins of the universe. There’s a growing consensus that belief in God is perfectly rational – unless, of course, you define rationality in terms that deliberately exclude such a belief.5
Rationality is less concerned with adopting a particular starting point or conclusion than with the rules that regulate reflective discussion leading to a conclusion. New Atheist writers often define the term beyond its fundamental sense, holding that it demands we interpret the world in a specific way that excludes belief in God. Yet this interpretation clearly involves smuggling in a host of value judgements, assumptions and unverifiable starting points about the nature of reality that are, strictly speaking, not demonstrable by reason. Here, for example, in a rather colourful passage from a lecture given at the Edinburgh Festival some years ago, Richard Dawkins asserts that religious faith is simply and necessarily a revolt against reason and evidence:
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence . . . Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument.6
Dawkins seems to overlook the legion of religious writers – such as Richard Swinburne and C. S. Lewis – who insisted that faith could and should justify itself by argument. Perhaps some religious people do refuse to think. My studies of New Atheist websites lead me to believe they’re not alone in that. But it’s just nonsense to represent this as typical of either religion or atheism.
But where is there any recognition of the limits of reason? In debate with Dawkins, he once challenged me to prove – by science or reason – that there is a God. If I could prove it, he would believe it. Unfortunately it’s not that simple! As will become clear in this chapter and the next, there are in fact rather few things that can be proved by reason or science, and God isn’t one of them. Nor, for that matter, is anything else of ultimate importance – including the core values and ideas of atheism.
The great British philosopher and intellectual historian Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) pointed out some years ago that human convictions can be grouped together under three categories:7
The first two categories concern what can be known reliably through the natural sciences on the one hand, and what can be proved through logic and mathematics on the other. The third category concerns the values and ideas that have shaped human culture and given human existence direction and purpose, but cannot be proved by reason or science.8
What sort of values and ideas? Here’s one. In 1948 the United Nations ‘reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights’. The statements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’ cannot be proved, logically or scientifically; nor can the belief that democracy is better than fascism, or that oppression is evil. But many noble and wise people make upholding such things their life’s work, trusting that they are, in the first place, right, and in the second, important. Nobody thinks they’re mad for doing so. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton rightly points out, ‘We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.’9
The philosopher Alvin Plantinga made this point years ago with reference to the perennial philosophical problem of ‘other minds’.10 To explain briefly: while I have direct knowledge that I have a mind, I can’t absolutely prove that you, the reader, have a mind, and you can’t absolutely prove that other people have minds. But nobody’s unduly bothered about this. It’s a safe assumption for us to make and chimes in with the way things seem to be. Plantinga argues for a parallel between proving the existence of ‘other minds’ and proving the existence of God. Neither can be verified, and good arguments can be raised against both – but to their defenders, both seem entirely reasonable.
The New Atheism refuses to confront the inconvenient truth that every world-view – whether religious or secular – goes beyond what reason or science can prove. That’s just the way things are. The ‘ultimate questions’ about value and meaning won’t go away. Both the New Atheism and Christianity represent and rest upon convictions. Both are based on what they know cannot be proved, yet nevertheless hold to be trustworthy. As has often beenpointed out, that’s how world-views and belief systems – whether religious or secular – work.
All such ultimate questions and their answers about life and death, sin and suffering, hope and healing, finally elude our intellectual grasp and strict logical proof. In the end we say simply, ‘I am doing this because I believe that this is the nature of life and that my ultimate happiness depends on my acting in accord with my deepest commitment and dearest beliefs.’11
Christopher Hitchens declares boldly that New Atheists such as himself do not entertain beliefs – ‘Our belief is not a belief.’12 It’s one of the best examples of blind faith I’ve come across – a delusion that makes his whole approach vulnerable. To give one obvious example: Hitchens’ anti-theism rests on certain moral values (such as ‘religion is evil’ or ‘God is not good’) that he is unable to demonstrate by reason. Hitchens simply assumes that his moral values are shared by his sympathetic readers, who are unlikely to ask inconvenient questions about their origins, foundations or reliability. When he’s called upon to prove them (as he regularly is in debates), he finds himself unable to do so. His beliefs are indeed beliefs, even if he prefers not to concede this decisive point. Welcome to the human race, Mr Hitchens. That’s the position we’re all in – including you.
Human reason and the invention of God
For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only ‘take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief’.13 Human logic may be rationally adequate but it’s also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there’s more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent but does not compel it. Sadly some of those who boast of being freethinkers are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, unaware of the radical changes in our understanding of rationality that have emerged in the last 50 years.14
Many New Atheists will quite reasonably want to protest at this point. From a New Atheist perspective it’s not that human reason discovers God by reaching beyond reason, but that naive human beings invent God. More than that: they invent a nasty God. Let’s reflect on this important objection in more detail.
According to New Atheist websites, this invented God is to be blamed for the evil of the world. It’s not the fault of decent human beings. God is a revolting oppressor, more to be compared to a North Korean dictator than to a good shepherd. This fundamental criticism is summed up clearly, if a little portentously, by Richard Dawkins:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.15
It may be a clumsy piece of prose, but there’s no denying the rage it expresses, which Dawkins is careful to present as reflecting his moral outrage rather than anti-religious prejudice. There’s no point in understanding or tolerating religions when they submit to such a repulsive deity. The important thing is to resist them and purge such hideous ideas from society at large.
New Atheist bloggers frequently speculate on the moral turpitude and degeneracy of this invented deity. Some even go so far as to declare that God was the hidden force that locked the doors of the Auschwitz gas chambers and poured in the cyanide. But let’s think about this for a moment. As a made-up concept, God could not possibly tell people to close the doors of the gas chambers and pour in the gas. Nor, for that matter, could God tell people to kill vast numbers of innocent people in an act of terrorism such as 9/11. Within its own intellectual framework, God is simply not an intellectual option for the New Atheism. God is a delusion. People are deluded in believing in God. If the New Atheism is right, there is no God to tell people to do anything.
Yet the doors of the gas chambers were still closed, and the gas was still poured in. And 9/11 happened. If there’s no God, these things simply cannot be God’s fault. They were acts committed by human beings. The New Atheism may protest that they were committed by deluded human beings. But there’s no escaping the dreadful and inconvenient truth: if there’s no God, then there’s no one to dump the blame on for human evil. The fault is ours alone.
The New Atheism, in scapegoating God for the rational and moral failings of human beings, is hoping that nobody will notice the blatant incoherence in its own world-view. Everything that’s wrong with the world, it assures us, can be blamed on God. But if God is an invention, a fictional character, then the blame has to be laid firmly and squarely at the door of God’s human creators. It wasn’t God who initiated or executed the Holocaust. It was human beings in the twentieth century, supposedly at the zenith of their rationality and morality. And the New Atheism needs to get used to this, and start making some adjustments.
Classical atheist critiques of religion argue that gods look just like their creators.16 Human beings create God in their own likeness, attributing their own moral and rational qualities to these allegedly supernatural beings.17 Hitchens himself endorses this view and provides a snappy little summary of it: ‘God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about.’18 Or alternatively: ‘The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.’19 Yet if the New Atheism is right about the moral delinquency of God or religion, Hitchens’ conclusion doesn’t exactly portray humanity in a very good light. Maybe it’s not that religion corrupts humanity, but that a corrupt humanity creates a lookalike religion.
So let’s rewrite Dawkins’ piece about the God of the Old Testament, retaining its style, while making the crucial point above, which raises very difficult questions for the New Atheist way of looking at things:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction, created by equally unpleasant human beings who were jealous and proud of it; who were petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freaks; who were vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleansers; who were misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bullies; and who created their gods in their own image.
The New Atheism is in an intellectually and morally uncomfortable place. The more it excoriates religion as irrational and immoral, the more it highlights the irrationality and immorality of its creators. It’s caught in a dilemma framed and created by two of its core beliefs (neither of which, of course, can be proved):
As I read Hitchens and Dawkins, I sometimes find myself wondering if they would actually prefer God to exist. Their ferocious anger and their litany of complaints would then be directed against a real being, who could be hauled before his accusers and held to account. If the ferocity of some New Atheist writers and bloggers is anything to go by, God would probably get lynched. (Come to think of it, didn’t that happen once?) God can be scapegoated for everything that’s wrong with society, and that allows some people to feel better about themselves. But if there’s no God, the spotlight of blame shifts relentlessly on to us.
The real problem for secular rationalists is that having made human beings the ‘measure of all things’ (Alexander Pope), they find themselves embarrassed by the range of convictions human beings have chosen to hold – most notably, the widespread belief in God. If belief in God is a human invention, and if the crimes committed in the name of religion are thus of human origin, humanity appears to be rather less rational and moral than the New Atheist world-view allows.
The ‘Bright’ and the redemption of rationality
But there’s a way of getting round this problem for the New Atheism. To explain this, we need to return to the idea of the ‘Bright’, which we introduced in Chapter 2. This elitist notion became something of a public-relations embarrassment for the New Atheism, solidifying the growing view that the movement was intellectually conceited. Nevertheless, the idea of the Bright is completely consistent with the New Atheist metanarrative, which often takes a strongly dualist turn, especially on atheist blogs. Humanity is here divided into two camps: those who rely on reason and science and those lesser mortals who are credulous and superstitious. According to this controlling set of ideas, people who still believe in God are intellectually and morally deficient. They’re the irrational and immoral villains who caused religion to come into existence in the first place and continue to support it today.
Although Hitchens refuses to use the term ‘Bright’, a similar idea is central to his analysis. The biblical authors were, as Hitchens rather disdainfully puts it, ‘crude, uncultured human mammals’.20 Yet this radical division of humanity reinforces the growing perception that the New Atheism – which must here be distinguished from the gracious, moderate, tolerant and informed atheism of writers such as Alain Badiou, Julian Baggini, John Gray and Slavoj Žižek – looks and sounds awfully like a form of religious fundamentalism.
The fundamentalist mindset, whether religious or secular, is characterized by a dogmatic certainty about its beliefs that fails to acknowledge the limitations under which human reasoning operates. Fundamentalisms divide the world into two rigid categories – the saved and the damned (if you’re religious) or the rationalist and superstitious (if you’re secular). There’s no spectrum of alternative or intermediary possibilities, no tertium quid.
But if the New Atheism is angered by ‘moderate atheists’ who don’t fit into its maps of meaning, it’s happy enough to align itself with moderate atheists when it suits its purposes, using the high repute of writers such as Iris Murdoch to deflect charges of intellectual vapidity or argumentative deficiency. Unfortunately I see nothing of Murdoch’s personal graciousness, philosophical skills or wisdom about the human situation reflected in the New Atheism. Her emphasis upon the human capacity to deceive itself,21 accepting illusions as if they were reality, has much to say to Dawkins, Hitchens and their colleagues. They assert that religious people are deluded in their beliefs about God, but what about their own beliefs about human nature? Or the foundations of ethics? As Murdoch once quipped, ‘One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.’
An alternative New Atheist strategy is to argue that humanity has grown up since the age in which religion began to flourish. It wasn’t that humanity was originally irrational in believing in God; that just seemed the best way of making sense of things back in the Bronze Age when nobody knew any better. But what of the situation now? Numerically, far more people believe in God today than ever did in the past. The New Atheist dilemma concerns why so many human beings continue to hold to such belief when they have no business doing so.
Once more the concept of the Bright comes to the rescue. Those who break free from the past and assert the gospel of atheism are the illuminated elite, while the persistence of religion can be put down to unenlightened individuals rebelling against the dictates of reason and science, perniciously defending the indefensible when they know it to be wrong – or being so dim and unperceptive that they fail to understand what reason and science are saying in the first place.
To critics of the New Atheism this comes across as nauseatingly arrogant; within the movement itself, as I’ve discovered from numerous conversations, it’s seen as self-evidently true. Outsiders are fools or knaves; true enlightenment is only found within its hallowed Bright walls. Believing that the rest of humanity is deluded does, I fear, generate a certain unpleasant smugness on the part of these ‘true believers’.
The Enlightenment and the New Atheism
The ideals of the Enlightenment play an important part in the thinking of New Atheist writers. Indeed, critics of the New Atheism have not been slow to point out that it’s incorrigibly wedded to modernism, a cultural mood that’s now in retreat.22 In line with this modernist commitment, Richard Dawkins is highly critical of postmodernism, regarding it as irrational twaddle and believing that a return to the Enlightenment would put an end to all this nonsense. Christopher Hitchens portrays the Enlightenment in an embarrassingly triumphalist manner – a bold and brilliant period in Western culture in which reason and science overthrew the tyranny of religion, tradition, prejudice and superstition. Humanity, we’re told, began to think for itself, and threw out the junk in its attic – such as God.
But while the New Atheism tends to present the Enlightenment as a reaction against God, it could arguably be more accurately regarded as a quest to liberate human institutions and ideas from external authority (such as the state or Church), and ground them on a universal rational foundation, which would command assent by force of evidence, not by force of arms.23 The identification of such a secure and universal basis of knowledge would free society from incessant disagreements and recurrent violence, such as that experienced during the Thirty Years War (1618–48).
The Enlightenment asked all the right questions and challenged a series of traditional attitudes and beliefs that were in radical need of overhaul. For a while it looked as if it might actually work. Human reason could sort out all the great questions of life without the need to appeal to a higher authority – or, indeed, to any other authority. But by the outbreak of the First World War it was obvious that the Enlightenment quest for truth was in deep trouble. Why?
One major concern was that the Enlightenment’s appeal to reason as the ultimate reliable source of authority could not be verified. How could it possibly be checked out to make sure it was reliable? Some retorted that reason itself could demonstrate its own authority. But to its critics this was unpersuasive. Surely such a defence of the authority of human reason was ultimately circular and parasitical, assuming and depending upon its own conclusions? If there was a flaw in human reasoning processes, reason itself would not be able to detect this. We’d be locked into unreliable patterns of thought without any means of escape. Some say rationalism liberates. Wiser souls suggest that it has the capacity to entrap and imprison.
The recent rise of postmodernity is really not a symptom of irrationalism (as Hitchens and Dawkins assert) but a protest against the existential inadequacy of rationalism and the authoritarianism it has encouraged. People came to realize the manifest deficiencies of an approach to life that’s determined – as opposed to being merely informed – by reason, and protested against those who tried to shoehorn them into a rationalist cage.
The work of the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) gave a new rigour to these concerns. While he was only 25 years old, Gödel set out his ‘incompleteness theorem’. Although Gödel’s theorems were primarily mathematical, it was obvious they had profound philosophical implications, not least in demonstrating the inability of reason to prove its own competency. One of Gödel’s more recent interpreters here explains the importance of his work:
How can a person, operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of madness?24
Gödel’s analysis reinforced the growing realization that reason cannot be used to establish its own authority and competence. This point is simply evaded by those who speak loosely and naively of ‘free-thinking’, unaware of the capacity of reason to delude, limit and imprison. Reason is constrained. Other concerns can easily be added to this. More recent philosophical critics of the Enlightenment – such as Alasdair MacIntyre or John Gray – have argued that its quest for a universal foundation and criterion of knowledge faltered, stumbled and finally crumbled as it became clear it just couldn’t deliver what it promised.25 For MacIntyre, this meant that human beings need to realize that they have to reason and live in the absence of any clear, unambiguous, absolute and purely rational truths. We must indeed articulate and defend criteria by which our beliefs may be justified, but also realize that those beliefs may lie beyond proof. They are, to use a phrase popularized by the Harvard psychologist William James, to be regarded as ‘working hypotheses’.26
These concerns about the reliability of human reason, and its capacity to resolve the great questions of life consistently and authoritatively, are given added urgency by the writings of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. Let’s explore why.
What about Marx, Darwin and Freud?
In the last two centuries, Karl Marx (1818–83), Charles Darwin (1809–82) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) have raised questions that are deeply troubling to those wedded to exaggerated forms of rationalism that stress the autonomy and reliability of unaided human reason.
Let’s look first at the issues raised by Karl Marx. One of his basic assertions is that human ideas are fundamentally shaped by cultural factors, above all social and economic conditions. Ideas are the superstructure erected upon – and perhaps even ultimately determined by – a socio-economic base.27 The New Atheism points out that Marx and his followers declared God to be a social construction, reflecting human social alienation. Yet it conveniently chooses to ignore that Marx’s approach is universal in scope, and that if he’s right, all our ideas are covertly moulded by our contexts – including atheism. We do not have control over them, as rationalist thinkers once believed. While the New Atheism would like us to think of Marx criticizing religion as the ‘opium of the people’, his thought is just as corrosive to the Enlightenment rationalism undergirding New Atheist ideas.
It’s no criticism of certain leading representatives of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to suggest that they must now be seen as sociologically naive. Enlightenment thinkers couldn’t be expected to understand how deeply human beliefs and practices are embedded in a social and cultural context, a perception that only began to emerge in the late nineteenth century.28 But now that we’re aware of it, there’s no going back. The rise of the New Atheism, and the specific forms it took, are clearly conditioned by its historical context.
As if social and cultural conditioning were not enough, we also have to contend with the Freudian argument that we do not have access to our own true motivations. Our actions and ideas are shaped by dark forces within our subconsciousness that we do not really understand and find difficult to overcome. If reason is shaped by our subconscious yearnings and passions, might it not imprison rather than liberate us?
A real problem for those who believe that reason can liberate us relates to contemporary interpretations of evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin is often adopted as a popular mascot by the New Atheism. For example, Daniel Dennett is adamant that Darwin’s theories demolish many traditional ideas – such as belief in God. Dennett playfully imagines his critics – there turn out to be rather a lot of these – demanding that Darwinism be kept on a tight leash: ‘Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics and religion!’29 For Dennett, Darwinism is a ‘universal acid’ that corrodes the certainties of much traditional thought – especially religion.
Yet the attentive reader of this extract will notice a conspicuous absence from this list of disciplines that Dennett suggests might benefit from Darwinian intervention: Dennett’s own discipline of philosophy. If Darwinism is indeed the ‘universal acid’ that Dennett proclaims it to be, it must be allowed to corrode his own ideas – not merely those of others.
It’s easy to figure out why Dennett wanted to seal his philosophy in an acid-proof bubble: it relates to a disturbing question, fundamental to philosophy, that has recently received much attention: does natural selection select for truth or for survival? More than one evolutionary theorist has concluded that ‘natural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success’.30 Is human reason hardwired for survival rather than for seeking truth? If so, what are its implications for the ‘pure reason’ in which the New Atheism places so much trust?
For Hitchens the precondition for human self-improvement is that we must be able to ‘transcend our prehistory’.31 If some of today’s Darwinians are right, we may not be able to do this. Marx, Freud, Darwin and others have forced us to confront the painful truth about the limits and biases of human reason. Their ideas may ultimately prove to be wrong but they cannot be disregarded by the New Atheism. Might reason simply lock us into habits of thought and action we do not really understand? Might reason be shaped by hidden social and subconscious impulses so that what we believe to be pure reason is actually socially constructed and manipulated by our past history and subconscious motivations? Might natural human notions of goodness simply echo the demands of survival? These inconvenient questions are deeply controversial, yet they cannot be avoided by those who proclaim human reason as the supreme resource for life and thought.32
Conclusion
In this chapter we’ve reflected on some aspects of the New Atheist appeal to reason in support of atheism. I’m quite reconciled to being told by New Atheists that my comments are predictable nonsense indicating how my mind has been messed up by a degenerate belief in God. Others, however, will easily see the force of the point being made, namely that there are multiple valid conceptions of rationality. The rhetoric of the New Atheism would have the world divided into the rational and irrational. So what happens when we’re forced to realize that there seem to be many ways of being rational? What becomes then of this simplistic dichotomist way of thinking?
I remember being taught Euclidean geometry at school in the early 1960s and learning all its definitions and axioms by heart. Sadly nobody bothered to tell me that Euclid’s approach represented just one way of doing geometry. It was an internally consistent system that many unwisely assumed to be the only rational system of its kind. It turned out that there were other, equally rational and consistent approaches, such as those of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856) or Bernhard Riemann (1826–66).33 The casual and breezy New Atheist references to the rationality of godlessness and irrationality of belief in God merely invite the entirely proper question: ‘Which rationality do you mean?’34 Religion may not conform to the New Atheism’s dogmatic notions of rationality, but there are still plenty of rational alternatives. And belief in God turns out to be one of them.
Maybe that’s why so many inside the movement now prefer to appeal to science instead – a trend we’ll consider in the next chapter.