Christopher Beha has a long essay titled Losing Faith in Atheism wherein he describes his personal journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back again. As one who had a journey from religious belief to non-belief but have never had any reason to go back, I am always curious about what makes others revert and so I read his essay with interest.
The first part describes how he lost his faith and he describes reading the well-known books by the so-called New Atheists that I am sure many readers would be familiar with, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. But he says he could not find anywhere in them an answer to the question “How am I to live?”.
To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
He says that he started reading the modern philosophers, searching for answers. He says that there were two schools of thought that purported to provide answers: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.
Roughly speaking, [scientific materialism] holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.
…At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.
But he found both philosophical approaches inadequate.
After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.
So he returned to religion. His reasoning for doing so is a little vague but seems to be predicated on his observation that atheism seems to conflict with liberal values. He says that “Many of the young and highly educated cohorts who populate the portions of the left most suspicious of universal liberal values are also among those least likely to identify as religious believers.” He seems to think that liberalism “needed be grounded in faith” and that a commitment to scientific materialism forecloses making alliances with people of faith in the fight against illiberalism.
I think that this is a specious argument. People of faith (of various stripes) and atheists (of various stripes) can and do work together to advance liberal values and fight for social justice. Of course some people of faith will have nothing to do with atheists just as some atheists may feel that all religious people are to be avoided. But that is due to their personal temperaments and is a not an inevitable result of their beliefs.
I was more interested in the logical reasons he gives for his rejections of scientific materialism, since that is the view that I largely subscribe to.
Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.
This so-called problem of induction was first identified not by any counter-Enlightenment reactionary but by the Scottish empiricist David Hume. Earlier empiricists like Locke and Francis Bacon believed that the physical sciences should still be grounded partly in metaphysical belief. Hume became one of modern atheism’s great intellectual heroes by rejecting this idea. But he didn’t substitute some other foundation in its place. Instead, he argued that we should simply do without foundations entirely, apart from the rather shaky ones of custom, habit, and expedience. That has been more or less the scientific-materialist answer to the problem ever since: scientific materialism just works.
So far, so good. But then he explains why this was not satisfying to him, and this is where I part ways with him.
If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.
Consciousness doesn’t exist? Of course it does, and accepting that it exists does not mean rejecting materialism. Consciousness, just like our sense of color, is an epiphenomenon, a product of the brain, which is manifestly material. Pinning down what we mean when we say we see ‘blue’ is not easy, since it depends upon the interaction of complex processing of our brains with external stimuli. But that does not mean that the color blue does not ‘exist’, unless you limit the word exist to apply only those things that are purely material entities.
We all search for ways to navigate though life and find some approaches more personally satisfying than others, for reasons that appeal to us at an emotional level. I can understand that and one cannot really challenge those who pick a worldview because it is emotionally satisfying to them and fills a need. I think that there are many people who are dissatisfied with the idea that the material world is all that there is and is the source for various epiphenomena, and feel the need to believe in something transcendent because it provides a sense of cosmic purpose, because an individual meaning seems inadequate. But some of them like Beha seem to also feel a need to find a logical reason why scientific materialism needs to be rejected, perhaps because they feel that an emotional reason is somehow not intellectually respectable. They then proceed to try and create one, but the arguments they propose, such as that it rules out the existence of consciousness, tend to be highly dubious.
I left religion for purely logical reasons, not emotional ones. I found that however hard I tried, I just could not reconcile the scientific view that everything occurs according to natural laws with the traditional religious view that seemed to require an entity that could bypass those laws to act in the world to change the course of events. It took me a long time to overcome the emotional attachment to the religious beliefs that I had. So while I can understand how logical reasoning can make one leave religion, I cannot see how it can drive the reverse process, as Beha seems to desire.
Beha says “… is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. …”
To me, that is an argument that goes against religion more than anything else.
Whatever one wants to see in the world is even LESS in evidence in religion.
Atheism doesn’t claim to establish a worldview. But secular humanism has asserted that we can choose to live according to our global understanding of what can be called the common moral decencies. That is, humanity has observed that being decent to others facilitates reciprocal altruism and other virtues that create a better world for us all.
In contrast, religion has no proof that it is anything more than stories that other humans made up. And some of these stories are abhorrent. And no religious stories enable altruistic behavior that is unavailable to atheists.
The most likely explanation for this view of Beha is that he is taking back religion because of deep seated childhood programming, and then rationalizing some weak excuses afterwards. Sad.
I think I understand Beha’s difficulty, but he chose a poor example (assuming it was his only example) to illustrate it.
I read what he is saying in the quotes you provided that he has concluded that scientific materialism (as opposed to science) is only concerned with physical phenomena. That is, it is concerned with the existence of atoms, molecules, materials, objects, levers, forces, weather, gravity, space-time, etc. Things which have reality which exists without humanity.
If this is the definition he uses, then he is correct, it does not include any information about how to be good (or evil). The parts of the universe which exist independently of humanity cannot provide moral direction. Humanity can assign moral direction to such phenomena, but science explicitly says that we cannot establish morality based on the behavior of say, parasitic wasps. Are parasitic wasps evil because their larva eat a living creature from within? No. Neither are the good. They just are.
Beha apparently does not understand that science is broader than scientific materialism. There are real things which can be studied which are non-physical and only exist because of humanity. Or at least, the existence of immaterial reality is often more readily observed in humans. One example of such a real thing, but not a material thing, is the concept of value.
The concept of value is certainly not restricted to humanity, we can observe it in other animals. We can also study this phenomenon, it is quantifiable and measurable. But value is a relationship between the animal and the environment, a relationship the animal establishes with it’s environment. Once that animal dies the relationship ceases. At least for that animal. It is not surprising that animals of the same species may establish the same relationship with the same portion of the environment. Value could be as abstract and limited as a crow valuing a random stick to use as a temporary tool, to as powerful a feeling as a mother protecting her cubs.
Humanity, which has exaggerated a lot of these types of non-material things more than other animals, treats value as a thing. Value can be, and is, measured. It is studied scientifically. And it can be evaluated, along with other things, in relationship to human interactions and with human happiness, on an individual and societal level. Value is only one example of a number of immaterial things which, taken as a whole, establish human society. Things like justice, truth, honor, and pride; as well as prejudice, lies, and chicanery. Within that penumbra of immaterial human traits is morality. The means of distinguishing between good behavior and evil behavior. The methods of scientific inquiry can be used here too, albeit very difficult to extract coherent data from that morass. But some general principals can be found, like, “let’s try to be a bit nicer to each other.”
In my view, Beha has decided to stop trying to figure out morality for himself. He has relinquished his thinking about morality in favor of accepting the morality of the religion he has re-joined. There is no reason to censure him for choosing this path, a lot of people make the same decision, but it’s a labor saving device for their minds. Regrettably for him, if he has given some real thought about morality, he will certainly find that the church he has joined is not going to agree with him in all cases. It never does.
If you’re looking for faith then you’re not looking for an explanation but for someone to tell you what to believe. So for him atheism was simply the wrong religion. Faith can be more comfortable than doubt but it also doesn’t lead to more knowledge.
There are far more fictional stories by religious “ex-atheists” than there are truthful ones. If any of the latter exist, I never encountered them. I do not know this Christopher Beha, but I can no longer bring myself to read any more fables of how someone lost their faith and then rediscovered “the light”. Life’s too short. Just reading that they returned to Catholicism of all things is a colossal red flag.
It wouldn’t surprise me to find that this essay had been written with AI help. It also wouldn’t surprise me if it was the first of many to surface by previously unknown writers. I can just imagine the congratulations of Christ-bearer Beha because a prominent atheist (you Mano) has linked to this guy’s conversion/ex-conversion story. Oh dear, my skepticism slip is showing again…
Seems to me this guy wants somebody to hold his hand and give him absolute guidance he need never question.
That’s a psychological problem on his (and many others’) part. Science may be able to help a little by tracing the cultural and personal (and maybe even evolutionary) causes of his dependence, but he must look elsewhere to find the support he needs (just as, say, alcoholics may benefit from learning about neuro-endocrine biochemistry but won’t get too far from that alone).
Such a pity that most of those in the “support” business have their own agendae, in which the well-being of the supportees plays a secondary-at-best role. He does have it right in seeing that atheism-as-we-know-it does not and should not attempt such functions (though I have heard good things about some secular-sobriety-support projects).
file thirteen @ # 4: I do not know this Christopher Beha… It wouldn’t surprise me to find that this essay had been written with AI help. It also wouldn’t surprise me if it was the first of many to surface by previously unknown writers.
C. Beha is a real person with a real history of serious writing, including a novel “long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction” (per Wikipedia) whose title perfectly supports my psychological-stresses thesis: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.
We can only hope his return to the Holy Mother Church does not add another entry to that Index…
Didn’t mean to suggest that he wasn’t a real person Pierce, which is why I said AI help rather than just AI. My comment on his name was more one of irony: indoctrinating cultists just love to give their children names like Christopher.
Long (= not short) listed for a national book award, be still my beating heart.
What ridiculous gobbledygook. BTW, he did not say that he returned to Catholicism, but just to “theistic belief”. But he never even says who or what god is, or how it relates to anything. He says he returned to “theistic belief”, but it’s not clear to me from all his babbling whether he even knows what that means or what he returned to.
He just knows he doesn’t like naturalistic belief nor romantic idealism because . . . well, I cannot figure it out from what he says. But somehow atheism is involved. He says he wants to know “How am I to live”? Theism, I guess, tells you, each according to its tenets. And I guess that, in the end, the fact that atheism doesn’t dictate such a thing left him empty. But it looks to me as if a god-answer, with no basis in fact and no evidence, is what he needs. Huh?
I would recommend the excellent 2015 film Spotlight to anyone who prefers Catholicism over other worldviews.
From Wikipedia: ‘The film follows The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team, … and its investigation into a decades-long coverup of widespread and systemic child sex abuse by numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.‘
He asks “How should I be?” Only he asks it of what I call “atheist popes,” who are IMHO shining examples of how not to be. (I suspect that they like atheism because they can behave as horribly as they like without any authority to tell them not to.) Unfortunately, most of the theists who offer answers turn out to be not much better.
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As for attempts to logic your way to an answer, the lesson from millenia of philosophizing is that (as Tom Lehrer put it) it’s like a sewer — you get out of it what you put into it.
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If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that nothing is truly certain, and anyone who claims that it is is conning you out of something. But a lot of people turn to religion to give them absolute certainty, which IMHO is the real delusion. I don’t see a problem with believing in a God or gods or whatever, as long as you keep in mind you could be wrong.
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In the long run, you have to answer the question yourself, and take responsibility for your answer and the consequences (on you and on everyone around you.) Even if you decide to go with answers from some guru or faith leader or whatever, ultimately, you are making the choice, so ultimately, you are responsible for your choice. (I remember saying this to my mother once, and she angrily accused me of being “arrogant.”)
I find Beha’s style of reasoning so foreign it’s unrecognisable.
We are animals whose purpose in life is to propagate our genes. That’s all evolution has ever tasked us, or tasked any organism, to do. There is no meaning to life other than this and even looking for a meaning shows you don’t understand that our intelligence is an evolutionary accident, not a sign of some deeper cosmic woo.
It’s like asking ‘what colour is an invisible unicorn.’ The question is meaningless.
Fear of death disrupts clear thinking.
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That is why many rich people pay to be frozen after death, even though a brief bit of research shows expanding ice chrystals will rupture cell membranes (if you found a way to dehydrate the body and replace H2O with a liquid that does not freeze at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, it would be a different matter).
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Also, there is the question “what is the meaning of life?”. For this, I refer you to Brian in ‘Family Guy’.
#notallchristians and all that, but if you were concerned about illiberalism religion doesn’t seem an obvious port in the storm. #notallcatholics either, but the Catholic church is hardly a bastion of liberalism either.
And -- returning to a fallacy theists keep falling for -- atheism is not a “faith”. It serves the same role as zero in numbers.
Christians don’t believe in the 3000-odd gods of hinduism. Atheists just go one further.
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Going off on a tangent -- I was -- and is -- offended by the mess that is Islamic theology but these days I rarely bother making posts in various blogs about it. The debate about islam has been partially hijacked by bigots who mostly pretend to be upset about islam as a pretext to hate darkies.
The mayors of London and New York are nominal muslims, but so liberal the original prophet would likely have beheaded them for apostasy.
I save my venom for the fundamentalists.
In fact, if there is anything we non-muslims can do to help the liberal muslims in the competition with hard-liners, we should do it.
Maybe going from sunni salafism (aka Saudi Arabia) to a liberal variant is a smaller step than going full atheist. But once you have noticed the self-contradictions in fundie islam it may be logical to go all the way (but keeping it secret, if you live in a muslim-majority nation).
Allison #10
This, as I see it, is the important point and the one that he’s trying to run from. Even before turning to religion, he was still looking for the answer to be provided to him by others and that’s just not how it works.
It’s your life. You’re the one who has to live it.
And, as you point out, following someone else’s rules is also a choice. I would have more respect for it, if it was explicit. I.e. “I believe that this person knows better than me, so I’m going to do what they recommend.”
He is correct that the statement “There is no God” does not tell you anything about how you should live. But neither does the statement “There is a God”, nor even “There are several Gods”, by itself. Rather, any sense of “how to live” is embedded inextricably into enumerated lists of behaviours that please and annoy Gods with the power of reward and punishment, which are carefully curated by representatives of those Gods.
If it is true that there is no God to be pleased, or at least not annoyed, then certain behaviours will not be subject to divine reward or punishment. But that does nothing to change the fact that humans have behaviours that please and annoy us.
For me, the question of why not to be an atheist is far less meaningful than the question: what evidence exists that compels us to believe in a god or gods? If you posit a god that affects the material world, it is perfectly appropriate to ask the believer to outline the evidence for the belief. If you posit a god that has no effect upon the world, then we are back to Sagan’s invisible fire-breathing dragon that cannot be seen, does not generate any heat we can detect, and leaves no footprints.
Unlike your commentariat I sympathize with this person . I too was marginally religious -- now non religious -- and I dont think I will ever convert back to religion.
I agree.
I also think that Libertarianism, not Liberalism is where most non believers will end up ,IF they strictly hold to scientific materialism and follow through their reasoning. Fortunately the majority don’t .Scientifically -- What is kindness ? empathy ? happiness ? Some epiphenomenon no different in scientific terms from cruelty! All pre-determined by some unknown laws of physics.
Why should we favor increase in happiness for the society as a whole , even if it comes at a cost to us, personally instead of maximizing our happiness even if that means that society as a whole is worse off ?. We only have 1 life after all in this material world. Why should I care if you suffer if that means that I get something more ?
But for most of us -- we’d say because that is good and we arent evil assholes -- Our ethics demand that we favor the greater good. That we reduce harm, pain -- There is no scientific justification needed -- It is faith/belief in what we think is right , based on experiences sure -- but no scientific theory is needed. If someone else wishes to ascribe that faith to a higher power -- so be it.
Documented human behaviors, directly related to the health of social groups.
Because if you don’t care about other people, you make them ask themselves that very same question with regard to you. And there are a lot more “other people” than there are “you”.
I grant that I’d prefer a decent theist to a bastard atheist, but I still say it’s cowardly to not be willing to just admit that the real reason is “because I said so”.
You cant label everything as science. What is the hypothesis here? What is the test ? What is the control ?
Is your argument really that we should care about Iranians otherwise they wont care about us ?
Im not sure what you are referring to here. Who is not admitting what ?
@Deepak Shetty, #18:
If you cannot see that the answer to that question is right there in the question itself, I really do not know what more I can say to you.
Deepak Shetty @18: The key is that humans are social animals. We depend on one another. Evolution has been acting on us while we were living in groups (though most of the time in rather small ones). Therefore acting in pro-social ways feels rewarding to us, while also improving the lot of others around us, and thus makes survival of our group more likely. Also makes it more likely that others support us (willingly and happily) in our time of need.
Studies have shown that one of the most consistent ways to achieve happiness is to do acts of kindness to people you interact with.
Now things get more difficult when one lives in extremely large groups as we have been doing in the last few millennia, in that we depend on the work of a society that is way too large for us to know all its members. There is less emotional reward from helping anonymous unseen others, yet we depend on them just as much as our ancestors depended on the members of their clan or village. So we have to use rational analysis besides our emotions to come up with good policies and behavioral guidelines. And it comes down to understanding our interdependence and realizing that in the long term we need a society and a world that are stable, and for that we need them to be more harmonious, more just.
In Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, she uses the phrase “graceful life philosophy” to describe philosophies of life; philosophical frameworks of how to live, where gods are not really relevant
This blogger took the concept and expanded on it:
https://gracefulatheist.com/2023/05/24/get-you-a-graceful-life-philosophy/
@bluerizlagirl
I did phrase it intentionally , but the question really is what in “scientific materialism” gives you that right answer ?
@anat
Oh i dont disagree with what you are saying. But we are still talking on average. Why should a billionaire share their riches -- they probably derive happiness from hoarding wealth and using it AND they can interact socially with whoever they please -- The topic though is still what in scientific materialism says that the approach is wrong ?
@Deepak Shetty, #24:
Please re-read my post #16.
There is nothing in “scientific materialism” (nor, for that matter, in belief in deities; only in beliefs about the preferences and prejudices of those aforementioned deities) that determines a good way to live. Rather, it is an emergent property of our reasoning ability and our equal dignity as human beings.
It’s also not so much that “a billionaire should share their riches”; but rather, no-one should be allowed more than their fair share of anything (defined as the total amount of that thing in the world divided by the number of living people in the world) in the first place.
Deepak Shetty @24: If the billionaire thinks for a bit what his riches depend on they should eventually realize that all the riches in the world won’t save them if human civilization really goes to shit. Money will delay the inevitable, but sooner or later the inevitable comes. It can be in the form of a world destabilized by climate change, it can be the public coming at them with metaphorical pitchforks, it can be a rich rival messing their business and pushing them out of billionairehood, some market misbehavior that sends their business nosediving (and the rest of businesses too, eventually).They are better off when society is more robust, when the public isn’t mad at the rich.
But they can also have a revelation if they just try helping another person who needs it. Empiricism for the win!