AS191: Everybody Is Wrong About God, with James Lindsay

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 191, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, as I think I mentioned last week, we are going to forego the commentary for this week because we have a very extended and detailed and awesome interview with James Lindsay about his upcoming book, which I was able to read ahead of time, so I had plenty to talk about with him. Especially since his book is about something that could change the way we talk about God and atheism and theism and all that. So, plenty to talk about there. James can talk at length about this stuff, and we did. So without further ado, we've got plenty of show to get to, so let's get to it.

0:01:25 Thomas: Joining me right now is James Lindsay. How are you doing?

0:01:30 James: I'm good thanks how are you?

0:01:31 Thomas: I'm doing great. I'm excited. This episode has been in the works for quite a while. You were kind enough to send me a copy of your book ahead of time, which I thought was really cool, and I gobbled it up and I've got a million questions for you. So the the book is called Everybody Is Wrong About God, and it's... it I would... am I correct in saying that you're assuming this is a game changer? Your goal in this is that it's essentially changing the paradigm of how we ought to talk about God and theism and all kinds of things?

0:02:06 James: I want to say yeah, but I'm not, that I'm not, I'm, not that self-assured. I do have the goal that I want it to change the conversation about God to something more fruitful, and if game-changer seems like kind of a strong phrase, but that is what I'm aiming for.

0:02:26 Thomas: Well, It does at least seem like for the right audience it should probably shift the paradigm a little bit in how we're in how we're dealing with these things, assuming the thesis of your book is successful. Am I right that that's probably the goal? Yeah.

0:02:42 James: Yeah, totally. I mean, it has for me already. I have a hard time interacting with people who want to talk about God, especially if they want to get involved in theology. Because I think about these things differently as a result of doing the research that went into this book. And so my hope is that other people who read the book and have time to think about it will also start to think about these things differently. And therefore, like I said, end up having more fruitful conversations about topics related, I did a religion and belief in God and in the future. Yes.

0:03:15 Thomas: We want to take a minute to maybe talk about how you got into this kind of thing. I mean, I know, your background is in mathematics, right?

0:03:23 James: My background is in mathematics, but uh, a few years ago, um, I mean, so let me just launch into some history about myself. Then uh, I grew up Catholic in the overwhelmingly Protestant South, which is enough of a diversion, aversion from the prevailing religion to make it something that leaves a lot of questions. You know, why do they believe this? Why do I believe that? Why this? You know, it's so many questions. So the kind of seeds of doubt, plus I mean, it's almost a cliche, I grew up Catholic.

0:03:31 Thomas: Sure, sure. Yeah.

0:04:00 James: As a preamble to I don't believe in God now. So I've always kind of had on the one hand this lack of ability to buy into the whole Protestant narrative, at least about God, and the Catholic narrative always seemed just sort of irrelevant. I don't know how much you know about Catholicism, but for the most part, and I don't want to put down any Catholics, but for a lot of Catholics it's a matter of going through the motions. You go to church, as long as you do a couple of things, you eat the cracker every now and then, you remember to confess and go through the whole little rigmarole and you're saved automatically and you don't go through a process. There's no, there's nothing, if you, if you are in good standing with the church, you get to go to heaven, so you don't think much about it. I

0:04:50 Thomas: Did you have a lot of the guilt that typically Catholics are known for? Did you, did you have that experience, that part of it, or were you, was it, yeah.

0:04:58 James: X I experienced people trying to lay the guilt on me, but I, I think it just, like the stuff they taught in Sunday school and the stuff they talked about at church, just didn't make sense. So it didn't really stick. But all of my friends were Protestants. Pretty much every one of my friends was a Protestant of one stripe or another. And so as I got into my teen years, I kind of gave up on the church entirely. I used to say I made a deal with the devil, or my dad actually, I'm sorry, made a dealing with the devil. When I was a kid, he wanted me to behave and go to church and Sunday school, which I hated because it was boring. And he made a deal with me when I was young and said, if you go to church and Sunday school until you reach confirmation without putting up a fuss every Sunday, then when you're 13 and go through confirmation, you'll become an adult in the church and you get to decide if you want to go or not.

0:05:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:57 James: And I immediately agreed to this and did for years, went to church in Sunday school without complaint for years. And then, literally, I got confirmed. My dad thought this would indoctrinate me, I guess. And the next Sunday, my dad came in, woke me up and said, do you want to go to church? And I said, no. He said, I don't have to go anymore. I'm done. And I never went back.

0:06:20 Thomas: Wow.

0:06:20 James: I've never been to church since. But as I got older, I became close friends, obviously, with a number of people, especially when I went to college. And all of them are Protestants. And I wanted to understand what was going on. And I had all these kind of like wishy-washy, almost pantheist kind of ideas about God. I had studied Buddhism and Taoism in my senior year of high school and then going into my freshman year of college. So I had these kind of like new age ideas about God. And then went to get to know what they were doing. And it me to start wondering a lot about, you know, what does God actually mean? And it didn't occur to me what became the thesis of this book until actually about a year or two ago.

0:06:21 Thomas: Wow,

0:07:10 James: But in the two books that I've written previously, first book, God Doesn't, We Do, I laid out this idea that there are a lot of different ways people conceive of God's different definitions they use. And, ultimately, what we can draw from that probably is that God is an idea. And then in my second book, which is called dot, dot, infinity plus God equals folly, which is math, really, I explored the idea of infinity being used as a theological concept. And my conclusion was that because of the inherent combination of the concept of infinity and the concept of deity, we to conclude that God is some kind of an idea.

0:07:55 James: That set the ball rolling for this book. I wanted to finally find out, well, what is the idea? And a friend of mine who I mentioned in the acknowledgments, a friend I have named Chris, is excellent for lending me books that he thinks will provoke my thought. And he lent me a book by John Haidt, a psychologist that at the time was at UVA, but now he's, I think, at maybe NYU. And he lent me this book called The Happiness Hypothesis by John Haidt. And it blew my mind. But in particular, Haidt uses, he talks about psychosocial evaluation schemes, the way that people evaluate ourselves and others psychologically. And And he talks about this being a three-dimensional, at least three-dimensional concept.

0:08:47 James: And we're all familiar with two of those dimensions, which are closeness of kin and reputation. And there's a third dimension that he, for whatever reasons, are his own, named divinity. And the divine dimension of how we evaluate ourselves struck me. Wait a minute, this is the core of the idea that people call God. And then I started reading religious psychology. And so I started reading textbooks, journals, um, and read for about a year and a half. I just read religious psychology and made notes and thought about it and put together a picture by having grown up in the American Southeast.

0:09:39 James: Um, I grew up in the Catholic church. I grew up surrounded by all out Bible thumpers. I still live among them. Uh, I just saw a thing the other day that said that Atlanta, which is not far from where I live near Knoxville, Tennessee, um, in Atlanta is, I think, the highest proportion of people who 100% believe that there is a God, and it's like 71% or 100% sure, that's what it's like here. And so pretty much everybody is 100% sure that there's a God, and acts like it. And I hear it all the time, people say this about God, people say that about God. And I just started listening to them. What are they saying?

0:10:07 Thomas: Yeah,

0:10:25 James: And in the religious psychology, what are they saying? At different times, they use the word God at different times. And sometimes they mean something to do with their morals. Sometimes they mean something to deal with purpose and meaning in life. Sometimes, they just want to understand what's going on. Sometimes, they mean a sense of community and what puts that together. And sometimes, they mean. And a lot of times, they mean. We just heard it a lot with the attack in, in Paris, where they're calling out for help and control, uh, an answer to powerlessness, and these themes are clear in the religious psychology. All I've done is take the themes in the religion psychology and gone a step further and said when people are saying the word God, they really mean one of these things or more than one of these things, although they've got this mythological archaeological architecture on top of it that they're actually thinking they're talking about.

0:11:14 Thomas: Yeah. And, and I think maybe to get a little bit into the kind of the crux of the, the first part here where you're spelling out the problem, to take the, I don't know, maybe stereotypical view, it seems like your thesis is that atheists are looking a little too too much at God as, oh, okay, he's this being with X, Y, and Z power. Here's some arguments for him. Ah, those arguments aren't right. Here is why. Bam. No, God. That is how I am going to engage with believers, I guess would be a good word. I was going to say theists, but I do not know if that will complicate things. There is some terminology clarification in the beginning that we may need to get into. I don't know. But is that sort of where the problem comes in, to a certain extent, that a lot of atheists are looking at it as, you know, God is this proposition. Let's look at the evidence. Let'S see what it is. Oh, I think I've refuted the evidence. Therefore, you now, believer, I win. You know, is that some part of the problem?

0:11:57 James: Yeah, don't say the T-H word.

0:12:24 James: Okay, so let me talk about the T.H. word first, and then we'll probably come back to that at some point, but then I will answer this rather complicated question, hopefully in a short fashion. The T.H. word, theist, I don't use the word theist because I I think primarily, I know it's a term in philosophy. I understand that. I understand it does mean, generally speaking, somebody who believes in God, but nobody's really a theist in the sense that nobody identifies with that word. Nobody at all. People are Catholics. People are Protestants. People are Muslims. People are whatever denomination that they have, and that's what they identify with. They do not identify as theists. And theist is, I mean, people argue all the time that words like Muslim and Christian and Jew are too broad to specify what you're actually talking about. Well, what about theist?

0:12:34 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:13:25 James: Now we're actually talk about completely contradictory religions, sometimes that don't even have the same God. It's not a good word. So why is this word getting used? I think that the way by looking at how it typically gets used, it gets used by philosophers refers occasionally to branded people in general, but I think in general now it has been taken up as a team marker. You have two teams, atheists and theists. And since I read, in addition to religious psychology, I read moral psychology. I don't think the idea of making two teams is a good one. In fact, I think it's a very bad one that perpetuates the problem.

0:14:11 James: If there are atheists to stand against theists, then there are theists that have a reason to stand. And it's basic psychology, period. If I took a bunch of people, this has been demonstrated, put them in two groups, say I have a party.

0:14:28 Thomas: Oh yeah, you referenced this in the book. I thought this example was really cool. Yeah, go on.

0:14:32 James: Yeah, we have a Party. And this example actually was given by forensic forensic psychologist, uh, Andy Thompson and his little gem of a book called why we believe in gods. But if we take a party full of people, 40 people or whatever, and we put 20 on one side and 20 on the other side, and when we give them names or we tell them to throw nerf balls at each other or some game that puts them against each other, even if they just talk amongst themselves and are coaxed in some way to see the other group as an other, then you immediately start to see the makings of tribal behavior. They will evaluate each other more favorably and the people in the other Group less favorably. There have been extreme examples of this.

0:15:19 James: I think I only talked about those in the footnotes where they did this with kids at camp and had to end up separating. They had to close down the thing because the kids were so violent by the end of like two weeks. Kids were so violent with each other, they had to separate them completely and eventually send them home. But what happens is when you put people into two groups, or more than two groups. But when you give them at least two groups, they start to identify with their groups and we start to see what is called parochial altruism coming about. We are groupish and we act according to a thing called parochial altruism. We're good to the people in our group and we are increasingly hostile to people that we perceive as others. So I see the word theist primarily used as a term to label not atheists as others, and so you're perpetuating the team mentality. Both teams are strengthened in their identity this way, and all you're doing is maintaining an argument.

That kind of leads me to talk about what you actually asked, which is to say the arguments against philosophical theism were very important up until they stopped being important, which I think the phenomenon that's been called new atheism, which spans roughly from 2004 to the present, but really it's kind of in its death throes now.

0:16:47 James: I would say it probably really started dying in the early 2010s and people are really getting over it now. You can see that sentiment all over the internet. People are just sick of it. I think it finally theism. The arguments have all been dealt with. The religious people will continue to make new ones, but they're going to become increasingly Baroque and increasingly desperate. And I don't think that this is fruitful to do anymore. Um, I'm not saying that such arguments having access to them, ready access to them. I don't think that there's a problem with that. In fact, I think it's important because people will leave their religion. They will have grown up on Aquinas' five so-called proofs and they will want to know answers to those. So having, having, uh, archives with, with these arguments easily accessible, I think is important, but I don't think we need to keep doing that.

0:17:42 James: And it's, when I say that everybody's wrong about God, including atheists, all I'm talking about is that we're taking the terms of theism seriously, and we shouldn't do that anymore. I think new atheism, if we're going to call it that, did its job. It stood up. It finally, you know, the cartoon, I thank everybody that has an internet connection has seen it now. Now, it shows old atheists and it shows a religious guy yelling at an atheist person and says, shut up. And it says new atheists. And it shows religious guy yelling at an atheist and says shut up, and the atheist says no. That's the difference between pre 2004, 2002, maybe 2001, if we really want to put a fine point on it, and now, and I think that the phenomenon has done its job.

0:18:33 James: Books like The God Delusion, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, John Loftus' Why I Became an Atheist. These books have really nailed down the arguments. I mean, philosophers are going to have a cow that I said The God delusion nails down philosophical arguments. But religious philosophers have dealt with the arguments you have. Philosophers of religion, I should say former philosophers of a religion like Keith Parsons, who say that the argument for theism is done and that he won't even bother with it anymore. And that was in 2010. I mean, legitimate philosophers have turned tail. You see this, I mean philosopher type theologians and apologists like William Lane Craig say that there's a a renaissance of theistic thought going on in philosophy departments, but the data show that that's not actually true. The reality is that philosophy of religion is a growing field in some ways, But it's overwhelmingly something like 75 or 80% Christian theists. No, I'll use the TH word. Christian theologians working in the field, um, I

0:18:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:19:50 Thomas: Well, I think it's pretty appropriate to use the TH word in that context because I just wanted to say, and sorry you've gone on, but I was going to say something about your first answer. I just didn't want to interrupt because you're on such a roll. But yeah, when I think of theism, because you are right, I mean, is there anyone in the world, is their single person in the world who would describe themselves when someone asks, hey, what's your religious belief? A theist. Like, would anyone say that? I mean, I can't...

0:20:21 James: Don't I can't imagine it and

0:20:22 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And it seems like it's unnecessarily aiding our, you know, I guess, quote-unquote opponents. You know, it's like it's grouping a bunch of people together against atheism who may not necessarily be together if if you were to break down things at more an argument level, at more of a, you know, specific tenets or specific beliefs, you now, and people who probably don't believe in even close to the same God, it's grouping them together and it's sort of adding legitimacy to each of them, you kno?

0:20:24 James: Yeah.

0:20:59 James: I, I totally agree, and the sad part is this isn't new, um, this particular idea was presented at a conference, the something like Atheist Alliance International, I don't know, AAI, I I think, are the initials. In 2007, by Sam Harris, he gave a talk about abandoning the notion, the word, the label, in particular, atheist. And of course, it was poorly received because the atheist movement, as it got called, was in full swing and nobody listened. And as I say in this book, and Everybody's Wrong About God, a couple of times, I think Sam Harris was right about pretty much everything he said about religion. He just said it before people were ready to hear it, and so I don't mean to say that my book is a rehashing of what he said because it's not, but I do remind my readers of those points that, you know, this isn't a new argument, that the idea that branding ourselves atheists creates certain problems. Harris referred to it specifically as a trap that we have laid for ourselves and like happily walked into.

0:21:02 Thomas: And right, yeah,

0:22:08 James: And I think we would do better to start moving away from atheism. And yes, I do think that atheism is most identifiable with arguing with religious believers in theistic terms. And that's why I say that we should, when I say things like the second chapter is titled The End of Atheism, the ninth chapter is entitled Unthinking Atheist. I think atheism, so far far as with theology or theism, on its own terms is a mistake and that that's what's got to go. And we should also drop the label, the team, atheist community, atheist movement, blah, blah, it's not, only if you understand moral psychology, is it setting the stage for us to become something?

0:23:01 James: And when I say us, I mean, people who don't believe in God, very generally, for certain nonbelievers to coalesce into groups that are, if not religious, quasi-religious, it's also creating a competing brand, and it's not just a competing brand. It is a brand that, by its very definition, atheist means I reject theism, and because of what the word God means for most people, which has a hell of a lot to do with morals and purpose in life, which is tied to values, you're saying I reject your values, and who wants to set themselves up in a camp that by the very name is going to be heard by the other camp as rejection of values that you hold.

This is what I mean, I suspect, I don't know, but I would suspect that this is, a goes a long way to explain why atheists are marginally less trusted by, uh, the general population, or by, by religious people, than rapists, um, that was a, you know, big shocker, a study that came out a couple of years ago that, you know, rapists scored higher on the trustworthy scale than atheists. Why, what, what in the hell is going on here? And the, the answer is, is that if theists, to use the word again, if believers think that morals only make sense in terms of this word God, that God is a summary for what morals mean, to reject God in atheism is to reject morals. So why would you trust somebody who doesn't have any morals? Of course you wouldn't. So that's

0:24:11 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right.

0:24:47 James: Why they don't trust us. I mean, I don't know that for certain, but it's a a plausible understanding of the ideas there.

0:24:54 Thomas: Yeah, in addition to just the in-group, out-group basic stuff that you've kind of already identified as well. Yeah. And man, there's a lot of ways we could go here. You said something that sounded a little bit like something that is a quick way to piss off atheists. And that is to say, look, atheism is just another religion. Now, I don't think you said that precisely, but I think,

0:25:00 James: Yes.

0:25:16 James: I did not say that precisely.

0:25:18 Thomas: Right. But you said some things that I might be inclined to agree with based on the the sort of the new way that you're trying to show us that people look at God, or rather, you know, that's not a new way, but how they've always looked at it and a new way of understanding that. Based on those definitions, it seems to me in the book, and if I'm wrong, let me know, but it seems like you go a bit of the way over towards saying that atheists do a lot of the same things. Now, I may not be saying, you know, atheism is a religion, but is it sufficiently similar in some ways? What is your view on that?

0:25:57 James: So what we need to talk about is what religions are. And religions are, at the very bottom, what are called moral communities. And moral communities are groups of people who are united along similar, but not necessarily identical moral frameworks. A moral framework is a set of moral attitudes. And so, religions have people of similar moral frameworks grouped together that have tied their moral framework to this theological kind of philosophical architecture, the set of beliefs that are ultimately mythology, some theism.

0:26:44 James: Well, I shouldn't even say religious people, theistic religious people, because there are religious people who aren't theistic, but those people are living out in the community side of things, which is still tied to the idea of being a moral community. The thing is, is sometimes moral communities become ideological in nature. Before I get to that, let me mention everybody is in a number of moral communities. It is probably the defining human thing to do is become a member of moral committees.

You are in a lot of them right now. Your family constitutes a moral community that you're in. Your group of friends, you know, everybody knows how those things overlap and interact. The whole, you know, "blood is thicker than water" saying is supposed to speak to that in some, in some way. You have peer groups that are broader than or other than your friends. You rec, you represent, or you recognize yourself as being part of a political identity, whether you are somewhere liberal, somewhere conservative, somewhere, as you might call yourself, independent, whether you think you're libertarian, whether you tend toward authoritarianism, wherever you lie, there are all kinds of little camps and you're in lots of these communities, every little group. So you may even have different groups of friends.

You may have the group of friends that you hang out and do this kind of stuff with your bowling league or whatever, and you act and talk a certain way with them. And then you have your group of friends that you get together and have beers with, and then you think about how awkward it would be if, you know, your bowling league buddy showed up at your beer group buddy, and how awkward that could be, because those represent different moral communities. You have different sets, although they're very similar, different

0:28:21 James: Sets of moral attitudes and different ways of behaving. What's good, what's bad, what's appropriate, what's inappropriate. These are value, valuative words. And so we're all in a whole mess of moral communities. Well, religions are a more moral community. And when you start tying certain moral positions to lacking religion, to atheism, which a lot of people have done now, if you have an atheist community or any number of them or an atheist movement, there must be values tied in there. There must be identities.

I am an atheist. I can be a good atheist. These kinds of things, I don't know if anybody really says they're a better atheist than somebody else, but they try to be better atheists. So, it's implied that some are better than others, um, atheist leaders. You see this, um, being talked about. These all give off the idea that the atheism, which is a position on one particular topic, of it's barely even a metaphysical topic, it's, it's really, you know, where you stand on, on accepting a mythological explanation for the world or not. So you have a null position on one question getting tied into moral and other valuative structures. And then these, like religions, religions are often ideological in nature. They, in other words, have taken certain precepts. I think religions are almost always, if not always, ideological in nature because they've taken precepts to be sacred, which Jonathan Haidt defines as ideas that have been imbued with infinite value.

0:30:03 James: In other words, they're not challengeable. Once you start giving certain ideas infinite value or you render them unquestionable or transcendent, then you have yoked whatever set of beliefs you have to an ideology. And once you have an ideology that is built out of your moral community – I coined a term in the book. It's an acronym, IMMC, for Ideologically Motivated Moral Community there, and I pronounce that MC. So if I say MC, that's what I'm talking about. Once you have an MC, this is the general phenomenon where you see like, you know, people say, well, Stalin was an atheist and atheists killed lots of people. And then you see Sam Harris answer in his book, End of Faith.

0:30:50 James: It's just another brand of the same kind of thing. It was state religion or whatever. Well, ultimately, whether you want to call it a religion or not, the underlying phenomenon is that it is a moral community that has become ideologically motivated. In other words, it's an MC. And I think that groups of atheists have attached very strong moral frameworks and ideological commitment to those moral frameworks to what they have branded their atheism, which is ridiculous. Ridiculous. It's, it's like having, these are my zero apples. What the hell does that mean?

0:31:27 James: Um, this is my lack of belief. What the, I'm gonna say bad words, um. It just doesn't make sense, but they have taken that and cobbled on other things which are great, like humanism, secularism, sometimes social justice, which that's, that's good as far as it goes, but once you start getting weird with it, there's some problems there, um, they've cobbled that on, and once they make that ideological, which I think some groups explicitly have done, then they are in the same camp as things that are religious. They are not religions, they are ideologically motivated moral communities, but religions are the same thing, and that is the operative thing that makes religion's religion's troublesome. Uh, you need an ideology typically to motivate you. You know, what was, the was it Steven Weinberg that said, you know, good people without, whether or without religion, will do good things, and bad people, whether or that religion, will do bad things, but it takes religion to make a good person do bad thing or something along those lines. Um, that kind of statement, he's talking about ideological motivation. It doesn't take religion. It takes ideological motivation.

0:31:26 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, that's okay. There's well,

0:32:40 James: And so I do think groups of non-believers have become ideologically motivated moral communities under the brand of atheism and therefore have become not religious but quasi-religious in the most important way. And if we were to really stretch the word, we would say that they're taking certain propositions on faith, and they just don't call it that, and they have maybe even a god, and the, uh, scare quote, quotes, around the word God, like I use throughout the book, uh, they just don't call it that.

0:33:14 Thomas: At least there's no supernatural claims.

0:33:17 James: I think with theistic religion is, is, is an explicit difference between an ideological. That defines a theistic religion as a kind of evimsy is that they have magical thinking or superstitious thinking at the core and usually something of infinite value tied to that.

0:33:38 Thomas: Well, I thought that was very interesting because you spelled that out to a certain extent in the book. And I still don't think it would be accurate to say atheism is a religion, but I think that, yeah, I mean, I think you make compelling points that there are aspects of the movement and maybe subdivisions of the movement that share similar qualities. And they're not all bad. It's not like they're all bad qualities. I mean a lot of the qualities you talk about that that people value and use the word God to describe, um, are positive things, you know, community. Uh, so, so yeah, I

0:33:48 James: It's not.

0:34:12 James: Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of the things That people use the word God to describe are excellent things. And a lot of things that religions say, teach, believe, and do are fabulous things. And this is kind of a big point because there's this kind of a question right now because you see some of these really motivated crusaders, we'll call them, on the internet, sometimes being very vicious, very mean. And you see this kind of thing where people say things like, you know, dancing around words, being very cautious and saying things like, if your cause makes you a worse person, or, you know, I'm less inclined to want to spend time with you than if your beliefs about the afterlife or supernatural powers or beginning of the universe make you a nice person. I would want to to spend time with somebody who's nice rather than somebody who is mean. And, you know, with the Paris thing, is Islam a religion of peace?

0:35:01 James: Well, there's a plausible reading of the Quran that says that it is. It's maybe not the dominant plausible reading, but it is certainly a plausible reading. Is Christianity a religion or peace? There is a plausible reading of the New Testament that will give you that. There are plausible readings that are not Not quite so nice, too. But there are genuinely people, Christians and Muslims and Jews and other religious people who are genuinely great people and better people because of their religions. And this is because if you've hitched yourself to a moral framework that's generally good, you're going to have good results. Um, there are good aspects to, becoming, I'm sorry, to, to belonging to moral communities as long as the moral framework is good.

0:35:52 James: Now, the thing is, I want to say that ideological moral communities, MCs, you have a big problem because when you've got one that's ideological, ideological, be that a religion. And if you poke even the most liberal, friendly Christian, most of the time you'll get to something they get really mad about. You don't have to poke very hard. You just have to ask the right questions about God or death, and typically you'll work them up. And then if you take people, let's say, that are non-believers who have a wonderful moral framework, they're social justice minded in the best of all possible ways, but they've given certain propositions infinite value.

They've made them sacred. They are unwilling to revise those beliefs in light of contradictory evidence or better argument. That's a problem. And it's a problem even if you're right. It just doesn't show up as obviously. And so, yes, you can be good with these things, but the underlying problem is believing things and and not being willing to change your mind if there are good reasons to, and that inherently has to be dealt with. So, the chapter I have in the book, seven, it's called Uprooting Faith.

0:37:14 James: I talk about pulling up religious faith, but it applies to all kinds of, you know, this extended concept of faith also, and there's a section in there about that, where if your political leanings or your social justice leanings, or your maybe social social anti-justice, you know, if that's how you view things. If you have these different attitudes, we can have conversations. But if you are unwilling to change your beliefs in light of argument or evidence, especially evidence, then you've got the same problem that the worst religious people have, which is that you believe something on faith and you have closed the door to conversation.

0:37:55 Thomas: Likely what you may be alluding to is a lot of the current climate of alleged kind of censorship and, and that sort of thing in, in higher education. And we can all think of the, uh, video or the image of, of the the college student student screaming at a, at the top of her lungs at a administrator. Is that the sort of thing you mean when you talk about, giving certain proposition?

0:38:17 James: Yes, those people have imbued a certain structure to their, to what they think that their lives should be and what other people's lives should b, with infinite value. And so, instead of having a conversation to work out, in that case, what's appropriate for a university administrator to do regarding adults choosing what kind of clothing to wear for a holiday and working problems out for themselves, instead of being willing to have that conversation, they scream things like, "Why the F were you hired? Why the the F are you here?" They aren't. These are, from what I understand, nice, clearly intelligent. You can't go to Yale and not be intelligent. Generally good people. But what happens is they've got certain propositions that they're not willing to, not only are they not willing to consider them, they get their backs up the second that they hear something that challenges them or threatens them.

0:39:11 James: Now, I don't want to, I mean, they are students at Yale and they're adults or whatever, but a lot of these people are like 19 and 20, and They're kids in a sense still. I know they're legally adults, but I mean they're, they're young, It, Where,

0:39:19 Thomas: Yeah. It is interesting that it's such a battleground for, and some people look at that issue as almost a battle ground for intellectualism in our society. And it's taking place where, you Know, 18, 19, 20 year olds are are the, you know, are the main subjects of it. It's kind of interesting that that's the case.

0:39:45 James: 18, 19 and 20 year olds are setting themselves as the main arbiter of what is and isn't appropriate regarding, The discussion, despite the fact that they're 18, 19, 20, and as smart as, brilliant as, well raised, or whatever it is they might be, utterly lacking perspective, which is hilarious because it's the main thing that they yell about is perspective, perspective, prospective. That's probably why, is that they don't have a broad perspective. They all have necessarily a fairly narrow perspective that 20 more years of life will change, makes it a bit of a shame, though, that they can take an attitude like, so they, those people, for instance, yes, are behaving quasi, quasi-religiously. Those people represent an ideologically motivated moral community, or set of those. And they have certain propositions that they have given infinite value, that they're not willing to discuss in a rational way.

0:39:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:37 James: They're not willing to hear any possible thing. They think the discussion on social justice has been settled in the way that happens to match what they already think, and that's fantastic, except for the probably vast majority of people who have slightly different or drastically different views, some of which are as illegitimate as theirs and some of which are quite legitimate, but all of which they're not willing to hear because they're different from theirs. Okay.

0:41:07 Thomas: Now, this is interesting because I could draw a parallel, and maybe we can backtrack a bit because there's still some stuff kind of early on that I want to go over. Could you draw a parallel between what you've just said and what you're advising we should do with atheism? Because I'm curious as to how people will react to your book when you say that atheism is one at the level of ideas, and essentially we need the end of atheism, and what you said earlier about new atheism having achieved what it should have. Now, can I make a similar argument and say, well, sure, maybe it's one at the level of ideas, but look at all the, what, 80, 85% of this country that don't accept that? I mean, is it then the case that we can't act like that, those college students you're referencing?

0:41:58 Thomas: We can't shut down the conversation. What's the difference there? What do you see as the difference between what you're advocating re-atheism and what you've just said is a bad thing to do about social justice?

0:42:11 James: So, what I am trying to do, where it comes to the discussion about, about theism and atheism, is change the terms of discussion. I do not want to shut the discussion down. I want the discussion to continue. And the problem with the discussion is currently you have at least one group of people, although I would say that there are groups on, we'll say, both sides, to use the phrase, who are not willing to have fruitful discussion. I also think that we need to clarify the terms of the discussion. So there is a parallel in a sense to the social justice thing, but it's not exactly the same parallel. My thoughts on the discussion regarding atheism are that we are discussing the matter in the wrong terms.

0:43:02 James: We are not discussing necessarily the matter regarding social justice in the wrong terms. Race and gender and the struggles of different people and their feeling of marginalization, these are the correct terms. It's just a matter of how relevant they are and what's the best course. When we try to have the discussion about atheism and theism, the problem there is that we're talking about it in terms that take a myth seriously, like it's real. And theism is the myth. It is a mythological structure that contextualizes the world in terms of things, most of which are difficult to understand, like morals and purpose.

0:43:49 James: It fills in the gaps in our understanding, it binds our societies, it takes these concepts and mythologizes them into a character that has the capacity to do it. Okay, so that's fine. What I'm saying is we should be having the same kinds of conversations that we're already having, and we should have lots of them, but we should recognize what we're actually talking about. We don't need to talk about the myth.

We wouldn't argue, for instance, with somebody who is trying to have a discussion about, say, sending a ship across the Atlantic in terms of Poseidon. We would not entertain those terms. Why? Because of the wrong terms. Terms we need to know about weather, we need to know about about ocean currents, we need to know about, uh, you know, storms and that kinds of stuff, that kinds of, those kinds of things we don't need to know about, Whether or not Poseidon has had enough dolphins, you know, slaughtered for his, Propitiation.

And so when we talk about theism, as in, well, you don't know that there's an infinitely powerful being that can do anything, that arranges the world to be the perfect balance of suffering, and and so everybody gets off as well as possible, like Dr. Pangloss would say from Voltaire. We're talking about the wrong thing. When we talk about God in theistic terms, we're talking about Poseidon, like the real thing that some Romans believed in, or Greeks, I guess, believed in, under the sea as a person. And that's wrong. We don't need to have that conversation there. So I'm saying that what we need to have is a continuing conversation done in terms that are closer to what actually needs to be talked about.

0:44:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:40 James: So, for instance, we need to know why people believe in religion. Well, one of the main reasons is moral. So we should be having legitimate discussions about what constitutes moral thinking. How do we have moral thinking? Why do we think in terms of moral? What are moral communities? When do they become a problem? When are they good? Those kinds of conversations need to happen. What do ideas like God do for people in terms of giving them a moral framework to work with? What are the shortcomings of those moral frameworks? But we don't need to entertain the idea that that there's literally a being that is a moral lawgiver that wrote down the moral laws of the universe, because this just doesn't make sense. It's a myth.

0:46:40 Thomas: All right, that'll do it for episode one with James Lindsay. Episode two will be Thursday. Thank you so much for listening. We got plenty more to talk about Thursday, including... I'll just tease it. Starting Thursday's episode, I ask him what he thinks about atheist debates, like atheist versus theist debates, what his view on those are. Should they stick around, or is his view sort of that they are no longer needed, since he said atheism has succeeded already on the level of ideas, so find out what he thinks about that on Thursday, and I will see you then.