A recent post at Uncommon Descent mentioned a topic at Big Think:
The title is perhaps what attracted the UD poster. But the title is already absurd. Why would anyone think that atheism is particularly rational?
For starters, atheism isn’t actually a belief system. It is merely a matter of not being committed to theism. So it doesn’t actually make sense to ask whether atheism is rational.
The post lists the author as Will Gervais in partnership with John Templeton Foundation. A google search suggests that Gervais is a professor of psychology at UKY.
Absurdities
I chose to respond to this because of the absurdities that I noticed. The post begins with a subtitle:
Many atheists think of themselves as intellectually gifted individuals, guiding humanity on the path of reason. Scientific data shows otherwise.
This already seems dubious. The first sentence is undoubtedly true, if only because “many” is an undetermined number. Six people could count as many, and I know at least that many myself who match the description. But scientific data is unlikely to counter this. The scientific data more likely reports a statistical probability, which is not the same as “many”.
The first full paragraph reads:
You are a member of a very peculiar species. Of all our quirks, the human religious impulse may be our most distinctive one. We build skyscrapers? Big deal, bowerbirds construct ornate decorative nests and they have brains the size of almonds. We live in really big societies? Great, so do ants, whose brains are even tinier. We can do math problems? Wonderful, but so can slime molds, and they don’t even have brains!
Well, okay on the bowerbirds and ants. But the idea that slime molds solve math problems is absurd. This idea does not originate with Gervais — I have seen it mentioned elsewhere. But it is still absurd. The slime mold exhibits some behavior, for which we might use mathematics. But it is jumping to unwarranted conclusions to say that the slime mold is using mathematics.
Gervais then gets on to the question of religion:
Most people who have ever lived believe in some sort of god; they are as certain of their gods as of their breath. But not a single organism outside our immediate evolutionary lineage has ever contemplated the existence of a god.
Gervais cannot know that. He cannot tell whether naked mole rats think of a god, which would presumably be a super naked mole rat. Nor can he tell whether prairie dogs think about a prairie dog god. The best we can say is that we do not know of other organisms that contemplate gods.
Continuing, Gervais writes:
On closer inspection, religion is not an evolutionary puzzle so much as two evolutionary puzzles. First is the puzzle of faith: the puzzle of how Homo sapiens — and Homo sapiens alone — came to be a religious species. Second, there is the puzzle of atheism: how disbelief in gods can exist within an otherwise religious species. If belief in god(s) is truly an evolved human universal, how is it that millions or maybe billions of people today don’t believe in any? How can a defining feature of our species (which religion most definitely is!) not be a defining feature of our entire species?
Gervais is assuming that human religious tendencies are biological rather than cultural. And that seems unlikely. And if it is cultural, then it is not a defining feature of our species. Likewise, if it is merely cultural, it is not surprising that there are cultures and subcultures that eschew religion.
Morality
Gervais then discusses the question of morality. He mainly reports that immorality is often taken as evidence of atheism. But this is a shallow way of looking at it. The sociologist Phil Zuckerman has looked at whether atheists are really more immoral, and has found otherwise, as a google search will turn up.
Rationality
The main point of the post seems to be about rationality. I’m actually puzzled that this would come up. Yes, there are some very rational atheists. But there are also some very rational Christians. For myself, I would not think rationality has a lot to do with it.
It is, of course, true that some outspoken atheists have made public statements about how rational thinking took them away from religion. However, I know quite a few non-religious people — I don’t know whether they call themselves “atheists” — who are non-religious for the simple reason that they were not indoctrinated into religion during their childhood. Using rationality as an explanation for atheism seems a stretch. It may be the explanation for a particular person’s atheism, but it could not be a general explanation.
If we look back a few hundred years, we will see that there were times when being Christian was a prerequisite for social advancement. This is typified in the song “The Vicar of Bray” (you can google that). In such a society, rationality would favor being Christian.
The issue is made even more confusing, because we do not actually have a good definition of “rational”. The term “rationality” suggests the use of reason. People very often accuse others of being irrational, when they simply disagree with their conclusions. But someone might well have used rational means to come to a conclusion with which I disagree.
My overall impression is that Gervais wrote a puff piece about religion, for the purpose of getting funding from the John Templeton Foundation. And I guess that counts as rational behavior.
The Heretical Philosopher 