AS192: Everybody Is Wrong About God, Part 2

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 192. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and we are going to get right back into the interview with James Lindsay about his book, Everybody is Wrong About God. Let's get right to it.

0:00:55 Thomas: Where does this leave things like debates? I mean, should we stop, should atheists stop entertaining debates of that kind, where it's, does God exist? You know, here's the pro, here's the con. Is that something you think should go away.

0:01:10 James: So debates like, does God exist? I think that those should just stop. Just stop.

0:01:18 James: Exist isn't even the right word. Because as I say on the first page of my book, I want to tell you that God exists, but I want to tell the people who do not believe in God have it right. And so, God exists as a set of ideas. So, it exists in the same way that calculus exists, which you are not going to go find calculus in the world. You're going to find things that are described by calculus.

0:01:47 James: You've gone a step meta, as they say. Kinds of debates not so good are religious moral frameworks the best way to address human moral needs or concerns, that's a fruitful debate that could continue. Um, is a God a good explanation for the universe, that's where we talk about what I called in the book phenomenological attribution and the method of giving explanations for stuff that happens or for the universe itself. I would say that that's a debate that can continue, except that I think that Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig, last February, February 2014 I should say, uh, had that debate, and it should be done now. Sean Carroll destroyed William Lane Craig in a way that is utterly embarrassing. And, as I argue in the book, in fact, I think that Sean Carroll did so by taking a post-theistic point of view instead of an atheistic point of view.

0:02:47 James: So all I'm saying when I say we should change our conversations is that we should be having our conversations or our debates from a position of post-theeism, which doesn't take the terms of theism seriously. We see theism, like Sean Carroll argued in that debate, as a, a model that people use to try to understand things, that's just immature. It's not well developed.

And the hallmark of that, by the way, is that theology gives away the ghost that it's mythology, is that it, it's the kind of thing that answers why questions, why is there a universe? God made one. But it doesn't give the first answer to a, how, how did God make a universe where God can just do that? That doesn't answer anything.

So that's, that's a hallmark of of of an immature model, and if you're using a being or an entity to do it, it's a hallmark of mythology, and that's what theism has to offer, and that's why we should see it as mythology. And we shouldn't entertain, and it's 2015, it's almost 2016, we should not persist in in conversing in the terms of mythology as if it's seriously, that there are lots of people who do believe in it, and and therefore need to be kind of met where they are. There has to be, you know, some nuance. You can't just start badgering people. It's mythology, it's mythology. But you don't have to take the term seriously. And if you have any finesse to your way of thinking and dealing with people whatsoever, it is straightforward to try to talk not down to them, but to talk to the needs that they actually have to meet them.

0:04:27 James: If they're talking about God and really talking about morals, for instance, or talking about the meaning of life, you can talk about morals or you can talk about the meaning of life in a way that doesn't have to entertain the mythology, and you can reach them there. And you can even probably agree on lots of things about morals and the meaning of life without having to entertain that first notion that God is a legitimate or a mature model for dealing with those, those complicated topics.

0:04:58 Thomas: Yeah, one thing I think your book accounts for pretty well, and let me know what you think about this, is the fact that when you talk to most believers, pretty much impossible to engage, in my experience, let me now if this has been your experience, to engage, I don't know, 80-90% of believers in any sort of actual debate. And I think that's something that your book accounts for very well in how you've laid out what people really mean when they talk about God. For most people, for most believers, God isn't a proposition. God isn't an argument, you know?

It's not a proof, I don't think. And so when you try to talk to the average person, a religious person about God, and try to maybe—maybe for newer atheists who are all keen on the arguments and excited to try to convince somebody, it's just impossible. It really is. And do you think that's why? The reason why is that most people just don't look at it that way. They're looking at it in a completely different way, and you're trying to, you know, an atheist is trying to convince them of something that they just, they're not even in a position to look at.

0:06:13 James: I think what, what the problem there is, is that there's a complete mismatch in what the two people are talking about. Um, so for instance, I one time had a fellow and we've all heard this before, and I quote, um, the blogger, Amanda Marcotte's response, famous response to this line of thought. I once had a fellow standing there telling me, you know, he said that he had just left his—I'm not kidding—he had just left his church where they had said somebody from the Creation Museum come and give a talk, and then he ran into me at the store and decided to just lay this on me. And I just kind of sucked my cheeks and stared at him while I talked, and he said, you Know, God has to exist. I don't know even what got him started. He just had it on his mind, I guess. I didn't bring it up. And he said, God has to exist because God's law, there's only man's law and nobody has to follow man's Law because it's arbitrary.

0:06:19 Thomas: Right, right.

0:07:09 James: And if all, you know, there was no God's Law and we only had man's law, then you'd have people who didn't want to follow it. They'd be raping and killing and doing everything and stealing everywhere. And of course, Amanda Marcotte famously responded that when you say this, you terrify atheists. And this is why Amanda Marcott is wrong about God. This poor fellow was not telling me, and I could have engaged it and had this whole argument like she kind of did when she had her public response to it, that was very popular. It went viral. I mean, big time. A lot of people know that, and a lot of people agree with it, and they're wrong about god. This person was speaking a, to use a fancy term, was speaking a tautology to me. He was saying, when he said, without god's law, there's only man's law. What What he was saying is without an idea of morals the way that I conceive of morals, then there would be no morals.

0:08:00 James: So he's saying without morals, there are no morals, no kidding. So this is what the guy is really saying. So what he's say is not unintelligible, but the way he says it because he's speaking mythologically because he put it all in this mythological structure makes it unintelligible. So if I try to argue with the mythological structure, I've completely missed what he is actually talking about. If I want to talk to them about and wrong or morals, I don't even have to bring up the word God to do it. I can just talk about morals in general, and I can talk about why people don't rape and kill and steal in general or why we have social contracts that prohibit those things or whatever. And the whole religious part of it can be sidestepped because I don't want to say it's unimportant because it's clearly very important to them, and it is important, but they're not using the attachment to the idea of God there in order to have a discussion about theological stuff.

0:08:56 James: In general, what you have is you have psychological and social needs. Those are the thing that the person has. He needs to understand morals. He needs to know why things are right and wrong. He needs to know how to fit in with the society in terms of right and the wrong. Those are real needs. And then a layer up from those, you have beliefs about those. And then, a layer of from that, you have the theology kind of acting like a cap or something like that, holding it together in a shell for them. And then you have faith kind of like plastic wrap all around it, keeping everything out. And so the thing is that the arguments that atheists frequently decide to have with, with believers try to engage that third layer there.

0:09:48 James: They, and they're not talking about the needs. They're not talking about the, uh, the beliefs necessarily, even directly, they're talking about theological structure, which is only there kind of as like intellectual wrapping paper to hold the thing together. The, the beliefs are, are really what what matters. And those are based upon, those are there in service of certain needs. And my assumption, so I don't know this again for certain, but I have good reasons to think it's right. My assumption is that if the needs get met somehow, then most people will dismantle that architecture that lies above it. And so I would rather try to have conversations that speak to needs rather than beliefs and certainly not to get engaged in theological nonsense and then bad banding on or banging on faith.

0:10:39 James: Faith is just a shield to keep you from even having a conversation. So, you know, I don't, I don't try to, I don't think that that's particularly fruitful either to you. Sorry, that we do need to help people leave faith behind because it's not a good way to to think about things because it's basically a seal, a seal, it keeps you from reconsidering ideas, but you know, trying to smack at the articles of faith themselves doesn't work. That's where Peter Boghossian's A Manual for Creating Atheists was really clever. It doesn't, it says not to argue, it says ask questions.

0:11:13 Thomas: Yeah. And that was something we could perhaps get to later along the lines of the solutions to all this. But I think of it as, and it sounds like this is somewhat in line with what you're saying, but I think a certain percentage of people, just to lay it out in broad strokes, a certain percentage of people actually do look at God in the way that I think atheists do, which is in terms of propositions and logical arguments and, you know, first cause and things like that, where they're like, okay, because this argument works, I believe in God. But I think that's a very small minority. But, I think it's interesting, and this is a theory I have, and I'm wondering what you you think about it, do you think that there's any sort of correlation with perhaps atheists as a group being able to break off from religion?

0:12:06 Thomas: And I guess forget about ones who were never raised in it, because most of us were. I mean, just as a matter of statistics, most of us are going to have been raised in religion. Is there a correlation between that and some sort of... because it's been alleged at me and I'm sure other atheists that we are more antisocial because of this? Like, we're sort of able to not be so dependent on these group dynamics, these things that you were saying people get from religion. Is there something that we can learn about ourselves as atheists because of that? Do you think we are different, or is it, are we just looking at God as a proposition and that's how we're able to get rid of it? What do you think?

0:12:47 James: That's a hard question. Um, I think again, like you said that the, it's likely that there's a minority of people who see, who believe in God, who see it as a proposition. The majority either don't think about the philosophical side of it all of it at all, or they have a tendency instead to think, um, how do I want to word this, they have tendency to leap to the first cause argument when all of a sudden the beliefs, you know, whatever they said gets challenged, and then they say, oh well, here's this thing you can't answer, therefore I have God, which is just playing the attribution structure thing that I talked about as one of the main reasons people believe in God and that use the word God for. Here's a thing you cannot explain, so God is an explanation for it.

0:13:34 James: That's assigning an attribution and calling it God. That is mythology, is what that is. But yeah, so I think that most people do that and there is a percentage. Now, as for atheists, it could be the case that there is a selection bias of sorts of people who leave religion who have a lower need for social engagement, but I don't necessarily think that's everybody. And I don't necessarily think it's required. I think it's that we have, and I think this is necessary, either a lower threshold or we have other avenues by which we're able to meet our social needs. Our social needs, our needs for society are not small ones.

0:14:20 James: We are a social. In fact, if you read a lot of the literature, we are an ultra social animal along with only a handful of other species that are ultra social. And so we do need community. We do need society. We don't need to understand ourselves in terms of other people. We need to know how we fit and a cultural narrative that that gives us meaning and all of this, this stuff. But it could be that there's a selection bias that those of us who happen to be better at finding that without having to be told what it is are more able to leave religion. Um, so at the end of the book where I'm talking about closing the religion gap, that's one of the things that I'm actually very concerned with. Although I am admittedly vague in that part of the book that I think, and I'll tell you why after I say what, what I'm about to say.

0:15:12 James: I think that if there are more clear ways in which people can find the sort of social binding that religion does tend to provide, but without religion, that many people will take it and it will make leaving faith easier because those people who have a need for a social group that's like what churches provide, for instance, will be able to the meat that needs some other way. And here's why I think this. One of the primary reasons, so the three major uses of the term God are as a figure for attribution, which is to make sense of something, as a finger for possessing a sense of control, and as a contextualizing element to give a sense to society.

0:16:02 James: Those are the three main psychological and social needs that the word God is used to speak to. And so control is a really big one. In fact, control is kind of where you have problems with death. We're powerless. We all die. We are powerless against death. Eventually, humanity will go extinct. This is a fact of physics. Even if we survive the death of the sun, for instance, eventually the universe will reach a point where we can't get to an area that supports life. And so humanity will die out or we might just kill ourselves pretty soon. Who knows? Hopefully not. But a need for control is really, really big.

0:16:50 James: And in societies like the Nordic societies and in other parts of Western Europe. Now, we have to be careful when we mentioned Europe at this point because of the immigration of Muslims who are religious people. But if you look at those societies minus the immigrants, which is not a call to get rid of the immigrants of course, but if you look at those what you see is a especially for instance look at the religiosity in countries like Sweden and Norway and and Japan, which which is not a Nordic country, but also has extraordinarily low religiosity, what you see in these countries also are ways in which the social contract meets the needs for people very well.

0:17:35 James: And so this is a well-known fact that as the society gets better at meeting people's needs, which often involves lowering wealth inequality, creating healthy infrastructure and maintaining it, providing good public services and so on, as the society gets better at that, religiosity drops precipitously. Why? Because the need for control that motivates desperate religious belief is being satisfied in another way. And since it's being satisfied in another way, it's easier for people to leave religion. Religion, furthermore, another observation that's really important, it comes out of, out of the psychology of religion, is that there tend to be two different kinds of ways, I said attribution, is one of the main things.

Two major ways that people tend to attribute things, people have natural attributions and people have superstitious ones, and the tendency among mentally healthy people is to always choose a natural attribution, a natural explanation for something over a a superstitious or a religious one, so long as doing so doesn't threaten other needs that they have at a deeper level. And so people who are atheists or non-believers in general may have a higher capacity, whether it's by learning, whether it's by genetics, whether by whatever factors lead to it, but they may, if we're talking about selection bias,

0:19:07 James: They may have a capacity to stare at a superstitious versus a natural explanation and realize that the other needs the superstitious explanation is servicing aren't that critical. But other people see these as deeply ingrained into their very identity, to their very being. They feel like they'll lose their society. They'll lose a sense of control over the universe if, for instance, they accept, uh, that that biology has, you know, living things evolve one from another in a, you know, gigantic tree of of descent or common ancestry and all of this, and the theory of evolution can't be accepted if it threatens your belief that you're going to see grandma in heaven. But for those of us who think, think, well, I can deal with my needs for, you know, death through some other process for contextualizing or understanding death or dealing with the fact that my family members and myself will die. If we can deal with that in a different, via a different process, then, you know, evolution is not scary. And so it doesn't threaten other needs. So we don't have a problem accepting that natural explanation.

0:20:28 Thomas: But that's like an unconscious thing, you think, that's not like someone actually goes through that process, yeah.

0:20:31 James: Oh, yeah. People don't realize. I very, very seriously doubt that people think, "Oh, my gosh, if chimpanzees and human beings have a common ancestor, then that means that I won't go to heaven." Therefore, clearly, I don't think people actually think that. I do think that hardcore young earth creationists have a real sense of that, a better sense of that than, say, Christians, for instance, who accept evolution. They have a sense that somehow their salvation is dependent upon evolution being false, which is correct. Evolution invalidates the Christian narrative. The, there's, without, without Adam and Eve there's no original sin, without original sin there's no need for a redemption, and the vicarious redemption of Christ is hollow. And so what gives? But evolution says there was no Adam and Eve, that we were the daughters of chimps and fish, or not chimps, but a common ancestor with chimps, and of some kind of a fish, and ultimately some single-celled something, and a not-cell something before that, um.

0:21:40 Thomas: Right, but I'm sure it was some sort of chimp that was tempted by some sort of snake. It's figurative.

0:21:46 James: That's That's probably how it goes. Yeah.

0:21:47 Thomas: Yeah, I know. But this is really interesting. I was thinking of what you're saying, and I was trying to apply it to myself. And I wonder if there's possibly another element to it, and I don't know if people share this same thing with me. Because when I think about my sort of history of, honestly, for me, I'll just let you know briefly, I've always wanted to believe in God, or rather, I'm always wanted God to exist, because I've really wanted there to be some afterlife where we can all, you know, everything's cool, and you know we can hang out and talk about how weird everything was, and we can have, you now, the questions answered that we never knew and stuff like that. It's something I would love to be true. But when you say things, when you were saying perhaps atheists are able to meet their need of seeing their loved ones, for example, they're able to meet that need some other way.

0:22:44 Thomas: Well, what occurred to me was I've always wanted that. I've wanted some way to be able to deal with that. But for me, I just have this practicality of, well, maybe I don't get that. Like, maybe there is no way to square that. There is no nice, happy answer to, oh, you're going to see your grandma or your loved ones when you die. For me, that's been the difference for me. I've seen a very clear difference between wanting to believe something and it being true. And I don't know how that that meshes with, with your theory on it. But, but I, I found it interesting trying to apply what you were saying, because for me, it's like, I don't, I Don't, maybe that's a psychological need of mine.

0:23:33 Thomas: I kind of don't think it is. I don't, you know, it, it might be a wish, it might be a psychological, you know, on my, on my wishlist of having some way to reconcile the fact that, you know, I'm going to die. Everyone's going to Die. But my core knowledge is that there there might just be, I'm screwed, you know, we might just be kind of out of luck. I don't know, what do you think about that?

0:23:54 James: Maybe it would help if I talk instead of trying to answer for you, which I don't know how to do. If I talk about how I handle or how I see the same question. So,

0:24:07 Thomas: Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, of course it may just be particular to us. I didn't mean to say you got anything wrong there. I was just trying to, you now, square it with my experience. Go ahead.

0:24:18 James: I life wants to – we should, when we're generally speaking healthy, absent some kind of psychopathology, we should want to continue living for as long as can be. Because we have a mechanism that we evolved to have in order to live long and not necessarily prosper, but propagate. And propagating often happens better when we prosper. So we have this whole mechanism to persist. And of course, death is in some ways scary. But if you talk to a lot of people who are fairly advanced in years, you start seeing them wanting to welcome death.

0:25:03 James: They've lived long enough and they're tired. You see this also reflected if you're a fiction reader, if you've read The Lord of the Rings, they talk about how the elves don't die and they become weary of the world and they can leave it and go to the Uttermost West where stuff is, which is an analogy to heaven. And then the men, they call it the gift of men that they die because they don't have to live in the world until they become wary of it. But what I think about is, what, when I think about death, and I have done so a lot over the last couple of years trying to work with this, and just maybe I hit that age, I don't know, I've thought a lot about death and dying, and one of the things that struck me, and I think this is connected to the research done by a social worker, I think she's a PhD social worker, Brené Brown, she talks about how, how we understand ourselves, who I am.

0:25:57 James: So the question, who am I? Of course, we can talk about Sam Harris's, there is no I, blah, blah. But the way that we understand ourselves is most deeply in terms of other people, but not just other people. The people who form our societies, but more closely, the people who are close to us and more closely than the people who are closest to us, our loved ones. And that's what a mature, close relationship means. And so when we think about death and when we think about the misery of death, of some loved one dying, what is it? It's that it's not sad for them, especially if you understand that when they die, it doesn't matter. If you have the religious view, as long as you don't condemn them to hell, they go to a so-called better place, which is what we always hear.

0:26:42 James: If you have a non-religious view, they die and they're suffering whatever is over. But those of us who are left behind, as Hitchens put it, It's not that the party ends, it's that the party most assuredly goes on, but I've been shown the door. The rest of us continue, but we do so in the absence. So, for instance, if I spend time, which I have, contemplating the horror of my wife or my mother or my children dying, and I think about what is caught up in that, it's what, and it sounds selfish, but it's not. It's that That who I understand myself to be is defined very largely in terms of those people who are closest to me.

0:27:30 James: And this is also if you listen to people that are advanced in years talking about why they start to welcome death. One of the reasons is because so many of the people who mean so much to them have died. And those connections are broken. Broken.

0:27:48 James: So I can go with my mother's memory or my wife's memory or my children's memories. And I can think, you know, what would my wife think of this? Or what would my child think of me? And now, if I were to share this with them, or I would just like to share this with them, and I can't, which is something that impacts me psychologically and helps build my esteem, I, my self-esteem, and just a sense of who I am. And that sense of loss, the loss that we have to ourselves, is what we really have to mourn when somebody else dies. We don't have to mourn for the dead. We have to mourn for the part of us that no longer gets to be defined by the way that they think and the way they talk.

0:28:35 James: And all we have rely on is a memory and a guess, as opposed to being able to connect and touch and talk and ask. And so when I look at it that way, way that I then deal with the fact of death is to twist around the lens and look at the other way and instead focus on life. If what makes death miserable is the loss of connection, then what makes life beautiful is taking the chance to make those connections and deepen them and to fulfill them as much as possible while we have the chance. So I don't know if, for instance, my wife or I will die first. Chances are one of us will.

0:29:21 James: One of us will die before the other. And we have a limited time in which we can invest into our togetherness and deepen that connection.

0:29:33 James: And so the idea that one or the other of us will die, I will either cause her that misery, or she will cause it to me, unintentionally, of course, or most likely, um, really, becomes a celebration of what we have now and the chance that we have now to do something with that. And so I don't have to to contextualize, you know, what would it be like to have more time with my grandma? I can just call my grandma and enjoy what I've got and realize that not only is that good enough, it's wonderful and it's an opportunity. And then eventually, because of the indifference, the cruel indifference of life, eventually, you now, we become separated from those things that we love most, or we are the the ones who separate ourselves from them by accident or hopefully not intent. And become, if we live long enough, tired of having those losses and we'll, you know, greet death as an old friend, as they say.

So the way I deal with the fact that I won't get to see my grandma in an afterlife is the fact that I get to see her now and do everything that I can with her now and then get to watch her, you know, eventually move on to where whatever struggles there are aren't going to be a part of, you know, life anymore because there isn't going to be life anymore and I don't have to believe that there's a better place to feel good about that.

So if I can contextualize death for myself that way, then I don't need to think, wow, it'd be great if I could go to heaven, and then I can start thinking, you know, with that space freed up to think I can start.

0:31:16 James: I actually had this conversation with my wife earlier, talking about heaven and how messed up it is, because, like, let's say that you go to heaven and your grandma goes to heaven, so you get to be together. Well, did your grandma get her 22-year-old body back? Is are you going to be attracted to your grandma? I mean, what this is weird, or does grandma have to be old, and why, you know, is is everybody old? I mean, the questions start piling up and become stupid. Or what if your child dies, is your child in heaven going to be seven, or do they grow up? I mean, it gets very very weird.

0:31:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah they grow up into someone you wouldn't even know then. Yeah that's

0:31:52 James: Right. It starts getting ugly real fast when you start thinking about that. And,

0:31:58 Thomas: Yeah, I think that's an interesting view of death and I think it's a good one and it's helpful. I wonder, to get back to, well, okay, I have so many questions I want to ask. I'm worried about time, but that view that you just described and laid out. It was very beautiful, actually, the way that you look at dealing with death or loss of loved ones. That doesn't sound to me like something... Sorry, were you going to say something?

0:32:26 James: Hey, I was just gonna throw out the idea that I have entertained writing a short, very short, like 10,000, 15,000 word piece about my thoughts about death at some point, maybe a year or two from now, just to

0:32:40 Thomas: That may be a great idea. Yeah, that would be very interesting. I would certainly like it. But it strikes me as something that you... I doubt you you had that all lined up when you rejected belief in God, and I think that was kind of what I was trying to get at, is I didn't see, you know, don't you think that was the timeline? Like, it doesn't seem to me like you found this substitute for the psychological need and then therefore were able to reject God. It sounds to me like you knew the idea of God was ridiculous very early on, and then sometime later formed this very mature look at that psychological need. I'm wondering, does that conflict with your view on this at all, or do you reconcile that somehow? Or am I just wrong in what I'm saying?

0:33:30 James: So No, You're you're right, you're right, I definitely arrived at the thoughts about death realizing that death is final, I mean, if you, you don't have that, it'd be very difficult to arrive at a thought about death like I just had, and I rejected God long before I had notions of, uh, you know, mature notions of what death and dying mean in terms of living in life. So what I think is going on is that we have, again, a large number of needs that we use the word God to stand in for. Some of those are explanations, so moral, moral attribution, phenomenological, you know, stuff happening attribution. Um, the God of the gaps is usually the answer there. Uh, purpose, uh, context, different things like that. Sense of control over, over life.

0:34:18 James: Um. Somebody that you can reach out to when you're desperate, and prayer, for instance, uh. A, a concept that binds the society together. These are a large number of needs that we have, and the social needs, the psychological needs for control and to understand. I think basically the idea is that if you start, so we'll start from the position that somebody believes in God, you start seeing problems, like perhaps it's that heaven thing I just described, or perhaps it's, you know, biological evolution turning the Christian narrative on its head or something like this. Or more often what you actually see is Christians or other religious people having this statement that they're these great moral people, and then they act like utter assholes.

0:35:11 James: Yeah, Westboro Baptist, I think, does more to make atheists than probably half of the people arguing for atheism out there. Um, true, I mean, there have been more, that the rise of the nuns, I think, has largely followed Christian hate of gays. I really think that that's what it is, and it scares me, because I think once the Christian churches start to accept, um, homosexuality and homosexuals as individuals, which they will eventually, for the most part, some will always not, and whatever, um, but as they start to, in mainstream, when mainstream Christianity accepts it, the psychology of religion predicts that people, as they age, tend to boomerang, they tend to leave faith or make it less important and then boomerange back to it.

And I think what we're looking at right now is a large number of nuns who are basically just mad that Christianity is hateful to the gays, who will forgive and forget in 20 or 25 years when they have kids of their own and want to have kind of a stable, those other other needs being met. So, but to answer the question you asked, we have a large number of needs, and we have large number topics that the word God is used for.

And if enough of the needs are being met, on the one hand, the more needs, let me just say it that way, the mere needs that are being made, the easier it is to leave religion.

0:35:30 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right, right. Right,

0:36:28 James: And then you can start trying to work on the other ones individually. On the other hand, what probably happens is in these many any different definitions for God, which I started to say with, you know, morals run amok or phenomena being explained by God being nonsense or something like that, or prayers failing again and again and again, which is often how people have this.

I have a friend who had a parent die and on that day went from an evangelical Christian to a deist because God wasn't there that day, he said. And if God wasn't going to be there that day, God's probably never there. He probably exists, but is never there. So I'm a deist. That's what he says. And it was because his need for control that he had put in the word God wasn't met. And so anyway, what I think is when something gets too out of whack, when the cognitive dissonance on some or many of those uses of word God get big enough, the belief can start to crack.

And if enough needs are being met via your social groups, via science explaining the world for phenomenological attribution, via making sense of purpose by what you do in your life, loving your job, connecting with people, etc, if you have a decent sense of morals where you've questioned some of the crap they taught at church, so you know that you can stand on your own morally, then chances are you're in a space where you can step away. So it doesn't challenge. You don't have to meet all the needs to get somebody to leave religion like we see in the Nordic countries.

0:38:04 James: And in Japan, we have a social contract that provides for most of the needs that are related to control. And that's enough to give them space to not need to fall back on religion and to accept non-religious explanations for things in many, many cases. So does that make sense?

0:38:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I actually 100% agree with what you said about gay rights being the crucial issue. That's fascinating. I really think that you could be right about that, that we'll see kind of a boomerang effect on that one. Because I fully agree. I think that Christianity largely is already starting that reformation, and they will eventually recognize gay people and gay rights. And then, because I can't tell you, just in the last few months, I think a couple of the guests, just randomly, that I had on both told me their conversion to atheism or whatever, their deconversion, was because of that very thing, was because of how religion was dealing with gay rights. It's, like you say, once that goes away, who knows what will happen?

0:39:11 Thomas: I mean, we could be back to where atheists will dwindle. I don't know. It's interesting.

0:39:16 James: Well, it wouldn't be the first time that there There have been revivals of religion. But look at what's happening. So you have a moral attitude that I would argue is correct that accepts homosexuals fully. And then you have moral frameworks, moral attitudes that reject them and then use religious teachings as the excuse or that are even motivated by the religious teaching in the first place. Sometimes it goes one way. Sometimes it go the other. Um, I think that, that people who would have maybe been open to accepting homosexuals learned in their religions that they shouldn't. And sometimes, and then sometimes it goes the other way that they didn't want to their, their grossed out or icked out or whatever by it. And they think gay people are icky or something. And then they turn to their religion. They read Romans one or something horrible or Deuteronomy and they get these ideas. Okay, well, God hates gays.

So therefore it's fine for me to, um, I think it goes both ways, but here's what we've got is we've got two moral attitudes. And so it's become very, very in vogue for young people. This rise of the nuns is predominantly showing up. It's not all, but it's predominantly showing up in people under 35 and largely in millennials. So it's very in vogue. It is a moral community itself that rejects Christianity as part of its thing.

0:39:21 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:39:46 Thomas: It

0:40:39 James: In other words, it's cool to reject Christianity if you're 19 for a lot, a lot of young people. If those people don't have a considered reason to understand why Christianity is bupkis, once Christianity is cool with how they actually think about the world, they are likely to not only reconsider it, but be very open to it. And the fact that Christianity offers a lot of things, all the religions do, the religions evolve themselves to try to meet or help people ignore certain psychological and social needs. And so, you know, you get about 40 years old, you've got some kids, you start thinking about things. The church you rejected because it was cool to not be Christian because they hated gays. All of a sudden it's cool with gays, but now you're thinking about death.

0:41:25 James: So you need something to do that. You're thinking about needing society or a group that you can identify with. Stuff's getting hard at that point when you're in your 40s, you start, as my dad said, life has a few phases. The first phase, you go to a lot of birthday parties. The second phase, you go through a lot of weddings. The third phase, you go into a lot of funerals. And the fourth phase, you get to start going to birthday parties again. But there's a lot of funerals. So, when you get into your 40s, you're in the lot of funerals phase. The weddings phase is pretty much petered out and you're in the funerals. So you're seeing death a lot and thoughts about mortality tend to make people turn toward religion. You got kids, you want to raise them with morals, so people associate religion and morals unless that stuff gets fixed. If people don't understand what's going on, there's likely to be a boomerang effect or a revival, and the religions haven't failed to take advantage of this again and again, and iGen, um, let's

0:42:20 Thomas: Sounds like it's a pretty critical time then, really. I mean it sounds like we almost need to make sure we try to meet some of those needs while we can, while we have an audience, and while people are currently, you know, not so in love with the church as they might be in a few years.

0:42:39 James: So yeah, I think it's very important for a few things. One is that people understand why faith is a bad way to deal with things, for people to understand what morals are and how they work, what social contracts are, for us to have stable societies with strong infrastructure, strong, say, emergency services, things like that, that provide for the citizens in a way that, you know, the more of these needs that we meet again and again, the more of these needs that we meet, the less people are going to have to turn to religion in order to answer the questions that are going to come up or to meet the needs or ignore the needs that start to become more and more pressing. I think it would be very wise right now, given that, like I said, I think new atheism did its job.

0:43:26 James: I think that it opened the can, so to speak, as the can opener, and now the next phase has to start. In the next phase, we have to fill in the religion gap. We, we have to help make sure that our societies are constructed in ways where it's clear how we can have social connection without having to go to church. Or even if it is like the Sunday Assembly, something like that, that's fine, whatever. You know, clubs or whatever become prominent in society. We have to find ways to make sure that – I think the biggest one is really following the example of what I keep saying, the Nordic countries and Japan, places with low inequality index. Those places tend to have really low religiosity, and I think that is the crux because control is so big.

0:44:13 James: And I also think now is the time for us to start doing, instead of these arguments against religion, start producing. And it's happening already. Humanists are dealing with it and other people are dealing it, but start producing this really eloquent stuff about death and dying and living and about advocacy, not in terms of making science popular, but people need to trust science and terms of. So that deals with two other things. In terms of making more and more known about how humans do moral reasoning, those kinds of things will really step in to help fill the gap. So there's a space for people to really start to work on those areas. And instead of banging on why we shouldn't believe in a God so much, just start filling in the gap instead.

0:44:36 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:45:05 James: There's a lot of fruit there.

0:45:07 Thomas: Well, I'm going to go ahead and say that I should let you go because this has been a very long interview. I think I want to, maybe we can schedule something later and incorporate maybe the general reaction to it too and talk about how your book has been received. The book, of course, is Everybody is Wrong About God, and the author is James Lindsay. Where's the best place for people to find that? Should they just Google it, or is there a specific place they should go?

0:45:34 James: Yeah, Googling it. I mean, Amazon and Barnes & Noble and wherever books are sold online, apparently there are going to be physical copies in some bookstores, but I have no idea where those go.

0:45:44 Thomas: Can we order them from your site or anything? Physical copies?

0:45:47 James: There is a link on my blog that goes to the Amazon page. But if you just Google Everybody is Wrong About God, it comes up at the top and you can click on it. It has a nice kind of blue-green cover with the words in gigantic white letters that you can't miss, you can order it there. That's probably Amazon, or if you don't like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers have it. I should add this. It is available for pre-order now, and in Kindle, so electronic formats. My publisher said all the electronic formats will be accommodated, or the major ones at least, and the more important thing because I keep getting asked and I'm getting tired of answering it is that I am in the process of recording an audiobook.

0:46:31 Thomas: Audiobook? Yeah.

0:46:34 James: December

0:46:36 Thomas: Yep. That's how a lot of people consume books these days. So, excellent. And what's the official release date for it? Okay.

0:46:43 James: 1st, so it's a couple weeks from now, it will be officially released, and I am not saying it, but I am saying it. Amazon seems to let books fly a couple days early if you pre-order them, a lot of times, so there you go.

0:46:58 Thomas: There you go. Get your pre-order on with Everybody is Wrong About God. Thanks so much for the lengthy discussion. Really, so much more I didn't even get to, so I hope we can do it again sometime, and I really wish you the best of luck with the book. It's exciting. I think people should read it. There's a ton there, just so everybody knows. There is a ton that we didn't even touch on. So it's very dense, as James told me before we started recording. It's a dense book. It's not terribly long, but there's so much to get out of it. So I really recommend it. So thanks again. I I hope to talk to you soon. Maybe we can, like I said, get reaction and how people have reacted to it and that sort of thing, and maybe cover some parts of the book we didn't get to now. But thanks so much for coming on.

0:47:49 James: I'd love to do that thank you

0:48:08 Thomas: All right, thanks for another great week. Thanks to James Lindsay again for that very fascinating interview. There's a lot to gather from his book there. I think maybe I'll talk about it at a later time, still digesting it. I think there's a a lot of interesting ideas there, and I strongly recommend that people check it out. It's a good... I'm not sure I fully agree with everything he said and I picked a few spots where I was unclear on some stuff, but a lot to digest, and it'll be interesting to discuss that with you guys going forward. Okay, so thanks for listening. Thank you to all my patrons who go to patreon.com/atheist to give back to the show. It's much appreciated. People like Zimu Zinu, Adrian Borshchoff, Michael, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Bangs Naughty Bits, Peter Skelton, Brian Gerfort, Dale, Matt Garrett, and Samantha.

0:49:01 Thomas: Thank you guys so much for your kind contributions to the show. You keep it going. There'd be no show without you guys. So if you want to be counted among my patrons, go to patreon.com/atheist. Other little random note, I had an episode of Comedy Shoeshine this week that was, it was odd. It was, um, now I know not everyone's listened to that show. That's perfectly okay. It's a totally different show. It's mainly just, just making jokes with my brother, just observations, stuff like that. So, if you're not into that, no big deal. But if you are into it, if you like me and my brand of humor, you might like it. And this week, we just ended up, it was almost like, I don't want to give it away, but it almost turned into like a family therapy session.

0:49:47 Thomas: And it was really weird, but It was really funny. People have kind of enjoyed it. But it was also, it just, if anyone out there at all happens to be interested in kind of why I'm me, which I don't know why anyone would be. But if there isn't anyone interested in my upbringing and the weird things that I may have referenced here and there, you can check it out, Comedy Shoeshine. It's okay if you don't, though. Don't worry. No pressure from me. Just wanted to add that in case I haven't mentioned it in a while, so I don't always mention my other shows. While I'm at it, T and the B, Thomas and the Bible is my big one. So thank you guys. Check that out if you'd like. And I will see you next week.