Goddities

This is going to be me going at it like a bull at a gate rather than just sitting down and composing my mind and thoughts about the issues at hand. My basic idea with this is to try to explore the common ground or otherwise between atheism and theism, because I sometimes wonder if we’re talking about the same thing or just using the same words. There are certain things which atheists have been known to do which I feel have just been designed for the specific occasion of their argument rather than having a wider respectability, and there are other things which, well, are just interesting for everyone, or at least might be, and I want to plonk all these things together today and talk about them.

The first one is something I’ve mentioned before, which is the question of active and passive atheism. I insist on a definition of atheism as the existence of a belief that no deities exist rather than the absence of a belief that a deity exists. I’ve been over this, so I’ll be brief. The motivation for defining atheism passively is to set it as the default belief, but in doing so one is forced to accept peculiar implications. We assume all sorts of things, which is in itself interesting and complicated because in fact we seem to have uncountably infinite assumptions but only a finite number of active beliefs. Therefore an assumption is not something which is happening in anyone’s mind. It’s something one has not done. This seems messy and excessive to me, and is actually more or less the exact issue which many philosophers have with the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Freges view of concepts, so it’s something which has been flogged to death in philosophy already and to produce this definition at this stage, I think, reflects a lack of philosophical training. It comes across to me as naive and reflecting a kind of thinking on the spot which hasn’t had its rough edges knocked off it. On the other hand, perhaps it reflects some kind of demographic shift. As I understand it, analytical philosophers have had very little interest in the concept of God since the start of the tradition, which was probably Freges thought itself back in the 1870s CE, but they may also have been enjoying this lack of interest in a more overtly theistic and religious society than nowadays, or perhaps a less confrontational one in this area, so the definition of atheism as the absence of a belief may have become more accepted simply because more atheists, as opposed to apatheists which probably characterises most philosophers, are now in academia. Nonetheless, there is no word for someone who doesn’t believe in Russell’s teapot or that there’s an invisible gorilla in every room, so in such a situation there may as well be no word for atheism, but clearly there should be and it does mean something. But I won’t go on.

Second issue: small g “god”. There are atheists who insist on using a small g for the name God. I think they do this because they want to equate God conceptually with what they think of as other deities. This, I think, is also erroneous and an example of an over-reaction to a situation they have kind of imagined. Look at it this way: atheists claim God is a fictional character. It’s possible to go further than that and claim that God is an incoherent concept, but that isn’t atheism, although it’s an interesting position to take and one I have more than a little sympathy with. Fictional characters are given names. We know who Gandalf is, who Bridget Jones is, and unfortunately we know who Bella Swan is (actually I forgot and had to look that up!), and they all have names beginning with capital letters. Is god supposed to be someone like ee cummings or archie the cockroach? Someone once said to me I was confusing myself by capitalising God, which they didn’t explain but I think it’s along the lines that God is just one deity among many. It is, though, a little bit interesting that we generally just call God “God” and don’t say, for instance, Metod any more, which used to be a word used for God and seems to mean “measurer” (i.e. “mete-er”) and “arranger”, which could be a euphemism or a kind of title but is in any case a name for God.

This is of course related to “I only believe in one fewer deities than you do,” which involves the supposition that theistic Christians believe the likes of Ba`al and Zeus don’t exist. This also I think is seriously misconceived and fairly thoughtless. My view of the other deities is not that they don’t exist but that they’re God under different names. They do of course have other attributes, but then if God exists, God is beyond human understanding, so we have no better idea of what attributes are true of God than of any other deities who are, in any case, God by other names. So yes, I do believe in all those deities because they’re all the same deity. Another rather unsettling consequence of saying I’m atheist about all the other deities is that it’s very like the Islamophobic belief that Allah is not God and that Muslims are not worshipping the same god as Christians. It has disturbingly racist overtones to it, to my mind, which is of course a feature of “New Atheism”, and this is where it gets interesting. Many Christians claim Muslims worship a different, false god and not the God of the New Testament, or presumably the Hebrew scriptures, where they see continuity, and among Christian nationalists I would expect a very strong denial that Muslims worship God. This unifies some theists and atheists. The details of the denial may be different though. For instance, Christian nationalists might want to distinguish between the Christian trinitarian God and the Islamic indivisible divine unity, whereas the New Atheist approach is more likely to be along the lines of imaginary beings being given different attributes, including the trinity or otherwise.

Emphasising the fact that New Atheism is not all anti-theistic atheism is vital. It’s also possibly a movement whose time has passed. Nor would I want to say that anyone within that movement is overtly racist. They are characterised, and perhaps led, by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, notably all White men, meaning that they will all have unconscious bias, some of which I inevitably share by virtue of my whiteness and to some extent other aspects of my social conditioning though not all. This by no means makes anti-theistic atheism unsalvageable, but equally it’s important to note that atheism is not monolithic. I always think of South Asia in this respect, with the separate Jain, Samkhya and Carvaka beliefs that God cannot or does not exist, among others, in one case because the force of karma is a sufficient explanation for the Cosmos, and more recently the Marxist anti-theistic movement there, though this is clearly influenced by the West. Some New Atheists see the development of European culture under Christian influence as a necessary precondition for the emergence of what might be termed a more liberal or progressive approach which includes atheistic approaches to reality, possibly including South Asian Marxist activists.

One major problem, I think, with anti-theist approaches in general is that they seem to make a major assumption which really doesn’t seem warranted and is odd for a group which tends to see itself as rational. That is that the urge to be religious can be removed from human psychology even if it should be. It seems to me that there are several reasons why this is unlikely. We have cognitive biasses involving finding patterns in things, we engage in magical thinking which may be the basis of rationality, and large communities tend to drift away from their constituted foundations after a while. We also have ego defences. The idea that a non-religious mind set could be adopted by the general population may not be realistic. There don’t seem to be any societies which are entirely non-religious, and when it does occur officially, religion creeps back in somewhere, such as superstitious beliefs about luck and fate. There are of course very large numbers of non-religious people whose lives are entirely healthy and well-adjusted, but they’re not an entire society and there’s too much diversity between people’s personalities and influences to conclude that everyone could live their lives that way. This has nothing to do with whether religious claims to truth are correct. This also seems to be an article of faith among, for example, humanists – that society can exist, whether or not it’s a good thing, without religion. I really want to stress that I’m not saying religion is needed, just that we don’t know if it even could be eliminated. In fact, ironically this belief is almost religious in itself, although I would also insist in defining religion in a different way which doesn’t emphasise belief.

I feel like I’ve spent several paragraphs low-key slagging off atheism. This isn’t what I want to do at all. I want it to be the way things are in my own life most of the time, and probably increasingly so in these isles with the possible exception of Ireland, that whether one is theist, atheist or agnostic is a private matter one would prefer not to talk about with people outside one’s possibly religious community and maybe not even that. What I’m trying to do is establish common ground and I’m not looking for a fight. There are more important things to engage in conflict over and it can be divisive even to bring this up, but at the same time it feels messy and naive, so I’m going to carry on.

Something which is not so divisive is the rather more nuanced approach found in both religious and non-religious circles which is not firmly atheist, theist, deist or agnostic, which is present both in some forms of mysticism and Western philosophy. Many religious mystics, and in fact a lot of just ordinary religious people like me, would say God is beyond human understanding, and in particular there’s the via negativa, which is the idea that you can best say what God is not in order to suggest what God is. God is also said to be unlike any created thing, and it’s a very familiar experience to find that one can’t express a religious experience in language. Similarly, there’s ignosticism and theological non-cognitivism, which I’ve talked about before on here. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a movement within analytical philosophy called logical positivism which attempted to establish that meaning, i.e. either truth or falsehood, only inheres in statements which are axiomatic, express necessary truths or can be empirically verified. Along with this claim was the one that religious statements were not in any of these categories and therefore they were meaningless. This is not the same thing as being false and in a way it corresponds quite well to the mystical position. Logical positivism is now considered passé, but other areas of Western philosophy have adopted a somewhat reminiscent position. My ex is of course German and among other things a philosopher in the continental tradition. When we got together, I was worried they might be Christian but it turned out that they saw religious claims very much as not having truth values in a manner I found reminiscent of logical positivism but which have much more in common with the postmodern condition, which sees philosophy as a branch of literature and everything as up for deconstruction. Statements about God make sense in their own communities and theology is a poetic or narrative truth, but these truth claims are no more or less valid than those of maths and science. Postmodern theology has been adopted by people in religious communities. There is, however, no truth outside language according to this.

I mean, I have certain views of course, as this view is both ableist and speciesist, but it is nevertheless interesting that there is a kind of agreement in this area between, of all things, postmodernity, religious mysticism and logical positivism. These are not all there is to philosophy of course, but it strikes me that this shows a way forward for us all. There are of course other non-theistic religions and non-theistic traditions within Christianity and Judaism.

Getting back to gripes though, there’s another cluster of beliefs which tend to be considered as universally associated. This is not a definitive list but I hope I’ve captured most of them:

• Theism
• An afterlife
• Souls and bodies as separate items which coexist in the same sense
• Varying fates according to actions in this life
• Subjectively sequential time extending beyond death
• Theological voluntarism/divine command theory
• Literal and unironic belief

The first three in particular seem to be closely associated with each other. For instance, it’s often said that people want to believe in God because they don’t want to die, so in other words they see the prospect of an afterlife, or possibly reincarnation, to follow from the idea that God exists. There’s also an implicit assumption that God is good and/or loving in theism, which unless you agree with the ontological argument for God’s existence out of the best-known “proofs” of God has no connection with whether God exists or not. In fact I strongly suspect a lot of fundamentalist evangelist Protestants don’t, deep down, believe God is good at all but are afraid to admit it even to themselves because God would be telepathic and know they believe this. Nonetheless their public view is that God is good and just.

In each case you can uncouple the bullet-pointed belief from theism. It’s entirely feasible to believe in an afterlife in isolation, with no God. There are also Christian physicalists, who believe God will re-create us all in superior physical form at the end of time with no separate entity bearing our consciousness. Jehovah’s Witnesses may fall into this category. Alternatively, there are religions which are strongly atheist but believe in souls, such as the Jains. So far as I can tell, even faithful Judaism as opposed to the reconstructionist form is pretty much agnostic on what happens when they die, and as a Christian I think it’s important for ethical reasons to ignore any claims about what happens beyond this life, if anything. My views on the nature of time make it a bit involved for me to go into this just now without it taking over the post. Theological voluntarism and divine command theory are the idea that God alone makes ethics meaningful, a belief which can only sincerely be held by a psychopath. Finally, literal and unironic belief relies on Biblical literalism, which is seriously compromised by Biblical criticism, and there is also a project to imagine history as proceeding as young Earth creationists and otherwise Biblically literalist people suppose but with no God. Incredibly, there really are people who believe that and are atheist.

I very much get the impression that some anti-theistic atheists really would prefer theistic Christians to be conservative evangelicals, and I seem to remember Richard Dawkins saying that liberal and progressive Christianity are dangerous because they represent a kind of gateway drug to extremism. It also seems to me that some anti-theists simply think that’s what Christians are like as a block, and I think this is our fault because of those of us who are particularly strident and emphatic about our bigotry. In fact churches can be excellent factories for anti-theistic atheists and we’re responsible for creating them in many cases. But on both sides there is a tendency, which I’ve probably exhibited here, to caricature the other side, whereas in fact there could be said to be no sides at all, just people dedicated to the truth.

Is Revelation A Source Of Knowledge?

This is not about the Book of Revelation, though as I typed it I realised it sounded like I was about to do some exegesis on the last book of the Bible. No, it means revelation in the sense of an experience of divine origin. The other thing is, this is something which I’ve been trying to sort out in my own mind for about fifteen years.

This may actually be quite a short post as it merely aims to pose a question, not to answer it.

I’ll start with a popular analytic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. A re-statement of this is that knowledge is belief which cannot rationally be doubted. There seem to be two sources of knowledge at this standard. One is direct experience. That is, although one might be dreaming, one cannot deny that one is currently experiencing a particular sensory quality when it’s happening. These are known as qualia: qualities or properties as experienced or perceived by a person. The singular is “quale”. Although the ringing in one’s ears may not reflect an actual sound and the odour of burning may be the result of an imminent stroke, the fact remains that one does have the relevant experience. This is not in doubt and cannot in fact be doubted rationally.

The other source of knowledge is logic and mathematics, or at least it seems to be. For instance, 2+3=5. This can be known. It can also be known that if it’s raining then it’s raining. One might also go on to claim that two parallel lines never meet by definition, but this is where a possible flaw in this source of certainty emerges, because it famously turned out that this was not so. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, which attempts to establish this fact through logic, is oddly wordy and unwieldy, and this is because it turned out that the parallel line claim was not axiomatic but based on observation, and it further turned out that in actual physical space, parallel lines don’t always stay the same width apart and do in fact tend to meet at an enormous distance. Likewise, logic’s reliance on bivalent truth values may be a similar flaw as these may not be enough. There might be meaninglessness, for example, or tense-based truth: something might be true now but false in the future. All that said, logic and mathematics seem to be a good basis for certainty independent of experience: multivalent logic exists and so does non-Euclidean geometry. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the number of things which can be known from this source alone is infinite, so it isn’t true that a fairly extreme form of scepticism leaves one with knowledge of almost nothing.

Suppose, though, that you believe in an omnipotent source of reliable knowledge such as God. It doesn’t have to be God but I am of course theist myself. If you’re not, this will probably sound highly arcane and theoretical to you but you could look at this more as a thought experiment or perhaps something that can be applied to another force acting on consciousness and it may mean that it’s logically possible that what I’m about to suggest can happen. Anyway, here it comes:

If an omnipotent and omniscient entity exists, that entity would be able to create knowledge in the human mind. Henceforth I’m going to call that entity, theoretical or otherwise, God. Putting it simply, God can do anything, so God can make people know things. That means that God can remove doubt when something is true, and if there is a God, revelation can be a source of knowledge.

However, there’s a caveat here. God doesn’t do everything God can do. When I was a child, I saw a graffito on a fence post saying “I hate you”, and for some reason interpreted it as God’s message to me. Don’t ask me why. I rushed home rather distressed and came into the kitchen, where my mother was listening to a song on cassette called ‘Our God Reigns’. In my perturbed state I heard this as “Our God hates”. I asked her if God hated me and she laughed, replying, “No! God is incapable of hate!”. This didn’t reassure me much because I was aware that the concept of God included omnipotence, meaning that if God so chose, God could indeed hate. This is the prototype of a belief about God I have today that God is capable of anything, but doesn’t invariably act on that capacity. Hence God can hate but doesn’t, or at least God chooses not to hate humans. Applying this to the matter at hand, that would mean that God might be able to force us to know things but does not choose to do so. Hence we are left with confident belief at most rather than actual knowledge in the sense that God provides us with anything it’s rationally impossible to doubt.

To me, it seems quite invasive and controlling for God to cause this to happen in one’s consciousness. It seems to violate the principle of free will. However, it could be that God would respond to one giving consent to bring this about in some way. “God I believe: help my unbelief.” Would it happen then? Prayers are not always answered the way one might expect. It’s undoubtedly also true that omnipotence means God could create a feeling of complete confidence in something which isn’t so, which is not knowledge.

I think that’s the issue stated as clearly as I can, but there’s another approach to this based on the general use of language. In many cases, if we were to insist on exact meanings for words, they’d end up not referring to anything. Nothing physical is perfectly spherical, perfectly flat or perfectly smooth. Hence if I were to say something like “Here is a smooth one metre sphere resting on the flat upper face of a two metre cube”, it would fail to refer to any real situation because the “sphere” wouldn’t be perfectly spherical, exactly a metre in diameter or perfectly smooth, and it wouldn’t be resting on a perfectly flat perfect cube exactly two metres on an edge. Nonetheless I might seem to have referred to a situation correctly and usefully, and to be that nitpicky about language and reference is plainly silly. Now for the situation with God causing me to know something. Maybe my standard of what constitutes knowledge is too high with justified true belief. Maybe knowledge is just belief that is near enough to certainty that it would make no odds. Otherwise we’d be stuck with a concept of knowledge useless for a wide variety of practical situations.

So that is basically the question I’m asking and a few considerations related to it. It’s also something I asked a few times on Yahoo Answers of all places in the vain hope of getting a sensible answer. All I got in the long run was some legalistic moderator saying I shouldn’t ask the same question more than once, even though I asked it several years after failing to get a helpful answer. Ah well.

A Post-Truth Test Tube

I’m currently a recovering addict. A few months ago on a whim I joined a FB group to debate Earth’s shape. I’ve come across flat Earthers before, online at least. Whether I’ve encountered adult Westerners who believe Earth is flat, I don’t know. Finding the group highly addictive, I became one of the main posters and enjoyed it a lot, but it isn’t really the best employment of one’s time. That said, it does constitute an interesting case study of the way we think and behave.

The useful thing about looking at flat Earther psychology is that it’s firmly established that Earth is spheroidal. The room for doubt is practically submicroscopic on this matter, so there’s no risk of being wrong or being drawn into believing that it’s flat, and because of that, rather than becoming embroiled in arguments which might persuade one, one can instead just examine how flat Earthers justify their position. Positions plural, actually. Most flat Earthers seem to believe we are on an almost flat surface under a transparent dome with the Sun going round us, but there are other views. For instance, some believe Earth as we know it is surrounded by broader rings of continents and oceans to which we have no access, and to be honest that is a really fascinating and appealing view which might go some way towards addressing the claustrophobia of the more restricted version, and a few of them seem to believe we are on an infinite plane. I say “seem to” because this is one of the problems with trying to work out what’s pagoing on: are they serious about this or just kidding around?

The answer to this is probably that it depends. This is one thing about groups seen from a distance as opposed to groups examined more closely: the details of individual differences become clearer. As far as I can tell, there seem to be several categories of “flat Earther”. There certainly are people who are just joking, and in fact when the flat Earth society was reëstablished in I think the ‘noughties, it appears to have been a joke. There are also trolls, which is a slightly different thing because I suspect the people concerned enjoy either tweaking the feathers of people they see as nerds or deceiving people into thinking it’s flat for fun. This seems to blend into a group of people who are trying to make money out of gullible people and present themselves as serious campaigners and investigators on the issue. Then there are their followers, who have bought into the whole thing, which is where the conspiracy theories start. There are few people who think independently on the issue, and there are then religiously-motivated people and people who are simply persuaded but not particularly religious. Finally, there are enquiring people who don’t seem to be skilled at fact-checking and simply feel that the two views, flat and round Earth, are equally open to question: kind of “false balance” people who think there is enough evidence for it to be a fair fight.

I can certainly vouch for the power of the force of gravity here, because I couldn’t leave it alone. Rather than manifesting itself as concluding Earth was flat for me, it came across as a compulsion to post and address issues even though I knew it wouldn’t persuade anyone to do it. It may be worth asking myself questions about why I felt the draw of the belief system and attempting to change it, and why “flat Eartherism” in particular has this pull. I know that I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies although I’m not going to pathologise that or embrace a self-diagnosis, but it is there and it probably is a factor for me. But it was also very time-consuming. Cutting my ties with it is also a judgement call, because it’s possible for some people actually to make a living out of addressing the issue. There are, for example, YouTube channels devoted to debunking flat Eartherism as well as all the so-called “Truth” channels focussing on promoting it. Pushing it far enough might in theory have brought some money in although I’m small fry in that pond,so probably not.

This raises the question of whether it’s harmless. In a way, this is beside the point. It’s more that the occurrence of the belief, which often seems to be a long way down the line for many people who have come to question other widely-held beliefs such as how genuine the Apollo program was, is symptomatic of poor fact-checking abilities, and when I say “ability” I do believe critical thinking can be developed in most people. They could even develop it themselves, although it may be difficult to overcome emotional and social attachment to a belief. It is also true that believing Earth is flat is going to exclude people from certain lines of work, or at least make it difficult for them to pursue them, such as on large engineering projects or piloting international aircraft, so maybe human resources are lost to society because of this belief. More broadly, however, there are the issues of overvalued ideas, vulnerability to more negative consequences from other beliefs (anti-vaccination comes to mind) and the general feeling of distrust and fear which may arise from the idea that there is a vast conspiracy to keep all this from the public. The size of this effort would be a lot bigger in this case than any other conspiracy I can think of, because so much more depends on the shape of the planet than other things.

Looking at the trolls, and here I presume that trolls exist and I’d expect there to be at least a few, an outsider would see them as pretending to be of low intelligence and poorly-educated, which is an odd thing to do to one’s reputation. I imagine that they are deriving entertainment from successfully deceiving others or annoying people they may see as nerds. I have in common with these people that I’m drawn into wasting my time and energy on a project which is not very productive and a bit of a pointless endeavour. Trolling is something I don’t fully understand and I sometimes wonder if trolls even know what their real motivations are, because it’s so easy to develop an online persona unintentionally. Beyond this, I can even develop a little conspiracy hypothesis of my own that the whole exercise is a distraction from more consequential issues for all of us, not just the flat Earthers. It’s possible to drop the whole intentional fallacy from this idea and just say, this is what it does and it doesn’t matter if it’s a concerted effort or not. This is one reason why I’ve given up on them, because it really is a bit of a waste of time.

There’s also something like the “sunk cost fallacy” operating here, perhaps on both sides. The sunk cost fallacy is the feeling that because you’ve spent a lot of time and resources, and have perhaps lost a lot in your own life socially and otherwise by pursuing a particular goal, it’s hard to back out of it. If you’ve become a flat Earther, you may value the comradeship of the people around you, online or off, and in many sallies away from majority opinion, people can lose friends and acquaintances, and also opportunities, and all of these things amount to costs. Another form of cost is the embarrassment one may experience from admitting one was wrong.

All that said, we should avoid “othering” people whose beliefs we’re confident are incorrect. One reason for this is that having delusions is part of the healthy human psyche, and even where they don’t serve a positive purpose they may nonetheless exist. Failure to acknowledge that we rationalise our beliefs, even if they’re correct and well-supported by evidence, is lack of self-awareness. Our beliefs also have functions beyond the practical. They can be like interests which bind a club together, and of course this is a substantial part of the function of religious beliefs. I have long maintained that religious belief of some kind is inevitable and therefore that we shouldn’t always resist it, as it can play a valuable part in maintaining good mental health. The question here is whether believing Earth is flat is worthwhile enough for the cost paid through lack of contact with reality.

I have an acquaintance who used to be quite a close family friend. We even went on holiday together and attempted some joint business ventures. Quite some time back, they expressed the view that the Apollo missions were a hoax. I engaged with them on this but they didn’t change their mind. I should point out at this stage that this person was a faithful Green Party voter and possibly even a member of the party. They were also an alternative medicine practitioner. This particular category of work has a lot of variation in it and can be stigmatised. It’s also how many people see me. Nonetheless there is a perceived issue of evidence supporting efficaciousness or otherwise which plainly does apply to some modalities. During the lockdown, they expressed support for Trump, not just regarding his approach to the pandemic but more widely. I could make a link between belief that Apollo was a hoax and this later conclusion. I found the incident very saddening and disappointing.

It seems that a lot of the more vocal flat Earthers nowadays connect their beliefs to the Apollo hoax idea, which makes sense if you think Earth is flat, and also to anthropogenic climate change denial, the New World Order conspiracy theory and anti-vaccination. Of all of these, I should point out that in the 1990s I was close to being anti-vaxx, although my problem was that as usual my opinion wasn’t similar to that of others. I tended to get lumped in with anti-vaxx people even though my actual position was that I wanted some vaccinations to be given by inhaler or nebuliser, not injection, rather than being opposed to vaccinations as such, and as such wasn’t opposed to the single tetanus jab or OPV per se. Now that this is being done routinely with children, I no longer have that objection although I am still concerned about the evolution of slow viruses by attenuation. However, I’ve long felt that the real problem with vaccination resistance is that much of the population doesn’t feel respected or listened to, and I wonder also if this is a factor here. This is one conspiracy theory I’ve seen from the inside. I get the impression also that flat Eartherism is the “hard drug” as it were. It’s the last thing people end up believing in once they’ve accepted all the others.

Due to the universal nature of delusions, a more useful marker for mental illness may be the overvalued idea. It isn’t so much that people believe Earth is flat as that they’re preoccupied with the idea and it comes to dominate their lives. It is understandable that if you think something so fundamental is different than how it’s presented publicly, you probably would think it was quite important to do something about it, and are also likely to think there may be a sinister reason behind the deception. Is it an overvalued idea for a starving person to focus on finding something to eat?

According to the conspiracy theory, the rationale behind persuading the world that Earth is round is to dislodge humans from the centre of creation and lose Earth in the vastness of an impersonal Universe, thereby undermining theism. If that were the aim, it seems like overkill. Why would it be necessary to keep “building” the Universe in the way they would have had to have been doing, for instance initially portraying distant galaxies as nebulæ within our own and likewise with quasars, before promoting them to enormous distances? There’s another perspective within this one that the Big Bang theory, evolution and flat Earthism are all part of a plot to do this, and are associated with the Illuminati, the Masons and unfortunately sometimes the Jews. This last association probably indicates why all this might be dangerous.

I actually find the bog-standard flat Earther view to be claustrophobic and think it makes the world feel like a prison. It also seems to guarantee that there is no life anywhere except on Earth, which for me is a deal-breaker for theistic prayer and worship. If God chooses to sustain a Universe where we are the only sentient beings in a single biosphere, it seems like God cannot be related to by humans on an emotional level. This makes more sense if one does see the Universe as vast, but it still works to some extent on the prison world hypothesis because whereas God could have chosen to sustain a vast Universe, she chose not to, which means we’re trapped conceptually. Of course, we could still be literally trapped on Earth in a vast Universe, but at least the way things are we do know how enormous the world is and the contrast with the largely lifeless Universe in which we’re embedded emphasises the specialness of this planet. This would be less true of an infinite plane Universe though there is still the problem of apparently being at its centre, since it is supposed to be infinite and therefore has either no centre or a ubiquitous one.

Of course one might be forgiven for asking why this matters given the current world situation, and that’s a valid question. It would be easy to come up with a conspiracy theory of one’s own here, that fine minds are being distracted from what matters in order that atrocities can be committed, but in response to that I would say that many of the minds which are being distracted, mine included, are rather far from fine and wouldn’t make much of a contribution anyway, and also that it’s a basic principle to focus on the consequences of a set of circumstances more than the cause, which is a distraction in itself and also symptomatic rather than the more general underlying cause of the problem, which would be worth addressing. The question remains, then, of whether one should bother with this at all. Unfortunately the answer seems to be yes, because analysis of how the issue has arisen allows insight into how other more serious issues have, or might do in future. It’s a kind of model for how, for example, Russian trolls might influence voting in elections or how the Rohingya genocide was engineered.

The idea of conspiracy has tended to centre on NASA as a major actor in this realm. This is peculiar as the sphericality of the planet seems to have been first suggested by Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, its circumference measured by Eratosthenes in the third century BCE and it was then accepted by the Church into the European Middle Ages, to the extent that they used to discuss whether it was possible that God would have created land on the opposite side of the globe from Christendom because if it were inhabited, it might not be feasible for the Word of God to reach them. I have to admit to being a little confused by this as it seems to imply their view of gravity was quite modern, but it is nonetheless so.

This does, however, raise the question of what kinds of people accepted Earth as round at the time. It does seem quite likely that the average European peasant would not have had an explicit view of Earth’s shape at the time, as they had more pressing concerns, but that might be to underestimate their mentality. Likewise, it also seems entirely feasible that even today many peoples who have not had contact with Western civilisation would assume Earth is flat. The rather startling figure of seven percent of Brazilians, though, appears to refer to Europeanised Brazilians rather than the likes of the Yanomami.

I’ve noticed also that some flat Earthers are merely repeating claims without checking up on them. Two of these in particular are that until the 1920s, US public schools taught that the world was flat. This does not tally well with discoverable facts about history. It was the work of a couple of minutes to locate a digital archive of nineteenth century school geography textbooks, on whose first page it was stated categorically that Earth is round and we live on its exterior. This particular work was published in 1889. It is possible that children were being taught that the world was flat at a later date, for a couple of reasons. One is that teachers don’t necessarily teach what is on the curriculum, and could be either poorly educated themselves or believe that it’s flat, in which case they would presumably teach that if the issue arose. Another is that it isn’t clear how far such textbooks had penetrated by this time. A second, less consequential, claim is that Eratosthenes was inserted into textbooks in the 1980s. I am in the happy position of being able to refute this. I first read of his experiment in ‘The Collins New World Of Knowledge Encyclopedia Of Science And Technology’, published I think in 1973. It’s quite an audacious claim that it was added more recently than that, and I expect that if I were to bother to look, I would find earlier examples. These two claims make me feel that it’s almost Last Thursdayism. A rather similar claim is that NASA pictures taken in the 1960s are CGI, which is very peculiar as there would’ve been many other ways to fake images at that time.

Getting back to NASA, there are two oddities about this particular focus. One is that their existence is completely superfluous to the evidence Earth is round, which as I said is millennia old. Another is that they are only one of many space agencies, which I think probably reflects the US-centric nature of Flat Earthism. There are around sixteen space agencies with launch capability and several times that number capable of doing things like building satellites to be launched by others. These two aspects seem to reveal a considerable degree of ignorance about general knowledge. This is coupled with two other aspects of how flat Earthers view education. They often view mathematics with suspicion and are unwilling to apply the scientific method, often engaging in ad hominem attacks when these are used. All of this taken together had led me to feel that they have been poorly served by the schooling system. They seem to regard belief in a round Earth to result from indoctrination when well-expressed scientifically based tests which are easily reproduced by someone without elaborate equipment are actively avoided. This makes it more likely that their beliefs are motivated by religious sensibilities, but unfortunately not open-minded or progressive ones.

The Bible does seem to imply that its human writers tended to assume Earth was flat. Apart from references to “the four corners of the Earth” in the Tanakh, Jesus is depicted as rising into heaven above Earth, which suggests a sandwich-like cosmology with heaven constituting an entirely horizontal layer above the terrestrial realm. It also raises a question in my mind which I’ve been unable to answer so far. If Biblically literalist Christians (and also many Muslims but not religious Jews on the whole) are often young Earth creationists due to their approach to their sacred texts, why is it less common for them to be flat Earthers? Such a view is clearly assumed by Biblical authors just as creationism is, yet the view is much less popular. If I could crack this conundrum, it might lead me towards better arguments against creationism. This might also be a massive waste of time of course, like the rest of it.

A major problem with how flat Earthers interact with the rest of humanity is that we who have an accurate view of Earth’s shape are often guilty of ridicule and insult towards them. This leads to entrenched positions which are defended and attacked not by reasoned argument but through largely emotional interaction. I can imagine a flat Earther becoming more relaxed about her beliefs and getting on with her lives in other ways, and then eventually not caring much about Earth’s shape or quietly conceding she was wrong, but if that day does dawn in their lives, it will do so a lot later if they’ve been pummeled for their beliefs in this way. They’re likely to thrive on persecution, and it is in any case wrong to behave thusly towards them. This may fuel the retention of the beliefs in question.

Flat Earthers, oddly, seem to see the rest of us as indoctrinated “sheeple”. Both sides seem to accuse the other of the same things, and for once because we are able to state confidently that Earth is not flat and back that up with evidence, it’s possible to separate the accusations from the reality, but it is still interesting that they perceive us as we perceive them. Unlike us, sadly in a way, the evidence they present is not remotely convincing and could only be believed by someone who was both unaware of science in the sense of it being a body of information and of the scientific method. They often think of scientists as having their views dictated by monetary interests, and to be honest this has been known to happen, as with medical research into the consequences of smoking tobacco, but in the case of investigating Earth’s shape this is easily reproducible. I have, as mentioned here before, suggested that in order to avoid accusations of manipulation, they come up with their own falsifiable test but I have never known one to do that.

It only takes one reliable falsification for a hypothesis to be rejected. In the case of Earth being flat, many falsifications are available. It would be interesting if the hypothesis that Earth is round could be falsified, but apart from minor details such as its oblateness this has not happened so far and nothing offered by flat Earthers that I’m aware of has succeeded in doing so. Good quality evidence would be most welcome, but is not forthcoming. The closest they get is objects being visible which seem to be beyond the line of sight, but when this is definitely testable it can be explained by refraction of light by the atmosphere, which can only make objects appear higher, i.e. visible if somewhat beyond the horizon, than they would be if no atmosphere was present. Other, similar attempts have been made, such as the claim that RADAR works beyond the horizon. It does, but that’s a special kind of RADAR called, appropriately, “over the horizon RADAR” and works by bouncing short wave radio waves off the ionosphere. Similarly, a microwave mast in Cyprus can communicate with one in the Lebanon, and since microwaves only work by line of sight this would only be possible if each is above the horizon from the other’s perspective, but in fact Lebanon is quite a mountainous country and this is not at all problematic.

I’ve also noticed quite basic misunderstandings which seem to result from not reading sources closely. One flat Earther claimed that my own claim that seismic waves indicated that there was an apparently spheroidal core centred six thousand odd kilometres below the surface was outdated because Earth’s core was not made of iron and nickel but of ionised light elements such as hydrogen and oxygen, and provided a link. What they actually linked to, if followed, reveals a paper which was scientifically quite rigorous but didn’t make this claim. Rather, it claimed that seismic waves appeared to show that Earth’s core was an alloy of iron and nickel combined with ionised hydrogen and oxygen which behaved differently due to the high pressure. This particular flat Earther said they were an ex-engineer who had accepted all their life that the planet was round, but changed their mind later on. Although I’m not questioning that, I do wonder if it’s a sign of cognitive decline, because the paper did not claim anything like they said it did. There were also many spelling mistakes not similar to autocomplete errors in their writing, which again doesn’t show for sure that they’re mistaken but does suggest something regarding their reliability.

All of this, then, seems to be the consequence of something characteristic of our time, perhaps like the Targeted Individual community, where people diagnosable as in a markèdly delusional condition meet others online who reinforce their beliefs of persecution, but combined with poor educational attainment and critical thinking skills. However, we can’t feel all superior about this because not only is it partly about bad luck with the education system, but it’s also nothing more than a delusion we happen not to share, unlike the individual delusions the rest of us happen to have.

If you’re a flat Earther reading this, I want to say the following to you. Although you’re wrong, I will also inevitably be wrong about some of my beliefs, and the reason you’re wrong is not connected to you being in the minority. Even if only a single person in the world believes something, the mere fact that it’s just the one person has no bearing on whether it’s true or not. I don’t want you to feel I treat you with contempt, and if any of what I’ve written has made you feel this way, I sincerely apologise. It takes courage to stick to a belief which the whole world is against, and I respect you for that. Who knows what else we might have in common outside this area?

Gnosticism

Trigger warning: Rape.

Here’s some common ground for mainstream theistic Christians and metaphysically naturalistic atheists: something neither of us believe in. Gnosticism is a variety of religion, possibly a form of early Christianity but arguably not, which existed from about the first Christian century until going into decline around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It might have been the other way round, in which case mainstream Christians would’ve been the heretics and they’d be orthodox, but this is how it really turned out.

The word “Gnosticism” is derived from the Greek γνωσις, which both means and is cognate with the English word “knowledge” and the Sanskrit word ज्ञान, jñāna. The general idea is that Jesus provided special esoteric knowledge to a few people, such as his disciples, which can be discovered by analysing what he said. Because history went the way it did, Gnosticism comes across as odd to today’s Christians, and also has a flavour more akin to Eastern religions such as Buddhism than Judaism or the other Abrahamic religions. A possibly over-simplified version of Gnosticism goes as follows: There is an ultimate true God known as the Λογος, Logos, or Word, who rules over all and is ultimately good. This God is hermaphrodite and defined only negatively, for instance as the Unmoved. Several steps down from this God is the Δημιουργός, Demiurge or artisan, carpenter perhaps, who fashioned the physical Cosmos and has trapped souls in matter. This Universe as we know it is therefore effectively the Matrix. This is the origin of the idea that we might be living in a simulation, and the secret knowledge we gain enables us to escape. I often think this makes the film series ‘The Matrix’ and Elon Musk’s and others’ idea that we are in a simulation distinctly unoriginal. Some Gnostic Christians saw Christ as the manifestation of the Logos and contrasted the New Testament God with God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as being the Logos and the Demiurge respectively.

Now for a bit more detail.

This is a diagram of the πληρωμα (pleroma). This is literally “fullness” and is a concept used in both orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. It means the totality of divine power. There is, incidentally, a lot of overlap between the concepts of orthodox and Gnostic Christianity and the word is used many times in the New Testament. It contrasts with κένωμα, kenoma, emptiness, and there may be a third contrast with κοςμος, kosmos (more usually spelt with a C in English). I should point out, incidentally, that when I say “orthodox Christianity” I’m actually referring to the version of Christianity which is directly ancestral to the Roman Catholic, Protestant and of course Orthodox denominations of the Church, and not just the Orthodox churches, although at the time what was to become mainstream Christianity was also to become the Orthodox Church. Terminology just is confusing here. A general trend of sophistication can be traced in the New Testament between the earlier synoptic gospels and the later Fourth Gospel and Johannine writings, and this trend continued with Gnosticism becoming more esoteric. Therefore the Pleroma as shown above works like this. The point at the top is the Monad, which seems to be another word for the Logos but I’m not sure (I’ll come back to that). This emanates into νους & αληθεια (I’m having to shift between Greek and English keyboards here all the time, hence the ampersand in the middle of that – it’s quite tiresome!), which are Mind and Truth. The word for “truth” is negative in Greek, meaning something like “non-forgetfulness” or “the state of not being hidden”, hence the “a-“, as in “atypical”, “asymmetrical” and “atheism”, also found in the related Sanskrit. This reflects the tendency in Gnosticism to pursue the via negativa, i.e. describing things as what they are not because the divine passes all understanding and therefore cannot be described positively – we don’t have appropriate concepts for God. This could lead into something interesting, and it will in a bit. Every point in that diagram within or on the larger circle represents one of the emanations of the divine, and the circle itself is referred to as the Boundary, Cross (Stake as in σταυρος), i.e. the same word used for the instrument of Jesus’s execution. The pleroma is where the ‘αιωνης (I’m not sure of that plural) dwell. These Æones (singular “Æon”) are the enamations of the Monad. Emanations are things which are “thrown off” the Monad without it being diminished. I tend to think of them as separate beings but I’m not sure this is correct. A similar idea is found in Zoroastrianism with the 𐬀𐬨𐬆𐬱𐬀 𐬯𐬞𐬆𐬧𐬙𐬀, Amesha Spenta, seven divine and personified emanations of Ahura Mazda representing various virtuous attributes of God. Since these are personified, I assume they are also in Gnosticism, which has thirty of them.

The kenoma could be linked to kenosis, an important concept in orthodox Christian theology. Kenosis is the idea that in becoming human Jesus emptied himself out and “became nothing for us”, and is a useful concept, for example, in the idea that Jesus was gang-raped before the crucifixion by Roman soldiers. One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘Was Jesus Raped?‘ which goes into this in more detail, but it should be noted that there are many people who describe themselves as Christian now who object to such things as this statue:

A photo of the Jesus the Homeless Statue by Timothy Schmalz outside
Date
22 April 2014, 14:15:07
Source
Own work
Author
Pjposullivan

This statue is sometimes objected to on the grounds that it attempts to debase Christ, and similarly there are attempts on Yahoo! Answers to insult Christians by bringing up the question of him being gang raped. Kenosis focusses on the idea of Jesus becoming the lowest of the low: a homeless man, born in a stable, who happened to be God. The Gnostic concept of the Kenoma is of the emptiness or void outside of the Boundary of the Monad, and is the world as we perceive it by our senses. Each Æon in the pleroma has a corresponding entity in the kenoma.

The reason all this stuff is speculated about is that it’s supposed to be secret knowledge which carries the key to the Universe, and it’s also an attempt to reconcile Christian philosophy with Neoplatonism. My first impulse is to throw all of this into some kind of conceptual dustbin as completely idle and pointless esotericism, but one thing that stops me is the fact that, and this opens me to potential ridicule, I actually believe Nostradamus made successful, unambiguous and accurate predictions, and he based his technique on Neoplatonism. Also, the esoteric has a draw to me: it can be seen in alchemy, the Qabbalah, choirs of angels and the likes of the chakra system in Yoga.

I am, of course, coming out of the dominant strand of Christianity, some of which was to evolve into evangelical Protestantism, and consequently I’ve inherited the dismissive attitude of the early Church from about the fifth Christian century onwards, which regards Gnosticism as heretical. This history of early Christianity may, however, help to explain a couple of notable features of today’s mainstream Christian faith. Christianity as I understand it has an oddly sparse and austere cosmology. Any other world faith seems to have accumulated complex models of the spiritual universe such as many deities, the various worlds of Buddhism, the emanations of Zoroastrianism, the complexity of the Talmud in Rabbinical Judaism and the names of God in Islam. Some denominations of the Christian faith share that kind of concretion, but not the likes of the Society of Friends or Evangelical Protestantism, the two aspects wherewith I have most to do. I also place ethical considerations right at the centre of my life, something which occurred to me when I first looked at the Qabbalah, because the idea there seemed to be that “doing the Right Thing”, which in that case probably meant following the Talmud perfectly, was simply the first stage of the Tree Of Life, whereas to me that makes the entire thing redundant because it constitutes a distraction from that duty and a waste of time and energy. This plainness and austerity, in the context of what became orthodox Christianity, seems like a continuation of the trend which began with the rejection of Gnosticism.

There is, though, an opposite trend which is equally apparent in Evangelical Protestantism, and the fact that these two seem to coëxist in it really puzzles me. If you look at, for example, Judaism, that has a list of thirteen precepts arrived at by Moses Maimonides which sums up its basis, although of course you then have the sophistication of Torah, Talmud and perhaps even the Zohar. Islam has its Five Pillars and Buddhism its Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. All of these amount to just one principle: do good deeds in the world and you will achieve a higher state of being. Evangelical Protestantism is markèdly unlike this. It has no “elevator pitch”. In order to do the right thing according to that, you have to repent and commit to Christ, the uniquely fully human and fully divine sinless person who died on the Cross for you in order to atone for the inherited sins of the human race due to the first people’s disobedience from God, and it isn’t good deeds which help here but just the one deed of letting Christ in. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to it, but all that seems a lot more complicated than other religions. And somehow, this austerity and complexity comfortably occur together as features of Evangelical Protestantism. Which is weird. However, I think this complexity is probably inherited from Gnosticism, because a clear trend can be seen towards it in the chronological order of the New Testament texts.

Modern mainstream Christianity, including in fact heterodox sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges from a tradition which defined itself as “Not Gnosticism”, although there are other heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism, while also inheriting Gnostic features. One legacy is the via negativa, that is, describing the Divine by what it’s not. There is a view that metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist atheism is the result of a Christian world view because of its separation between the Divine and the created realms, the latter of which is taken to be amenable to logic and governed by physical laws, and ultimately leading to the redundancy of the concept of God. Some other forms of atheism are remarkably different. For instance, some Indian atheists simply saw karma as a sufficient explanation for everything an therefore rejected the concept of God. But to me the most appealing other option to theism, and probably the one closest to my own theism, is theological non-cognitivism, also known as “ignosticism”, which is the view that religious language, including talk of God, is not about semantic meaning, and therefore that “there is no God” is just as invalid as “God exists”. It’s similar to ethical non-cognitivism – the idea that a sentence like “this is the right thing to do” in fact means “I approve of this, do so as well”. It is also true that the via negativa edges into that, and if I were to reach another set of beliefs from where I currently am, I would probably just decide that atheism and theism are equally crass and ill-conceived. This idea can be traced back to Gnosticism, although it crops up in other belief systems, such as logical positivism. There is no point at which I would ever claim to be atheist, for that reason, unless I change my mind about the idea that there is always a strong emotive element in meaning. My narrative tends to be psychological even though I’m externalist, but ignosticism also works as a way of highlighting the possibility that our notion of God, among other religious ideas, may simply be incoherent.

I don’t consider Gnosticism to be a good thing. To my mind, it removes the distinctiveness of Christianity and makes it more like Buddhism and Hinduism in that it leads one to view matter as evil. This has negative consequences in the real world. For instance, Ayurvedic medicine is influenced by the idea that reincarnation is an undesirable consequence in that it sees in utero development as painful for the fetus and pregnancy as an unhealthy state, so it brings misogyny with it. Women are, for Ayurvedic medicine, undesirable vessels which trap us all in life as opposed to Nirvana. The same kind of thing happens with Gnosticism, since it views matter as evil and something to be escaped. Adopting such an attitude undercuts the urge to make a positive difference to the world, since life is effectively an illusion anyway. The modern Church has also accused transgender people of Gnosticism, which I won’t cover since this is the wrong blog for it: here is a pamphlet from the Christian Institute on the matter, so to speak.

There are opposing views regarding whether the New Testament itself contains Gnostic elements. It had a tendency to use words also used in the New Testament, and the Septuagint, but elaborated way beyond their usual meaning, which accords with its esotericism. The Fourth Gospel (“John”) of course mentions the Logos in a prominent position and there seems to be something odd going on with its prose style which I’ve never been able to put my finger on, possibly chiasmus, which might be used to extract some kind of hidden meaning. Analysing the texts of the gospels themselves, some claim that earlier and later versions can be distinguished in such as way that Jesus was viewed differently as time went by. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical gospel which, however, appears to be Q, an early long-undiscovered apparent source for other canonical gospels, seems to focus on the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and doesn’t refer to the idea of the End Times. This could reflect on a change in attitude when the apparently promised imminent end of the world didn’t happen. To my mind, it seems that paradoxically the idea that the world was about to end is a later idea, although this may not be sustainable considering the apparently apocalyptic focus of much contemporary Judaism. It’s also possible that Paul was influenced by Gnosticism, because his focus was on the Gentiles, who would at the time have been more comfortable with Greek ideas, although the Jews were themselves quite Hellenised at this time. He may even have been Gnostic himself, referring to “knowledge” in such texts as 1 Corinthians 8:10 –

Εαω γαρ τις ιδη σε τον εχοντα γνωσιν εν ειδωλειω κατακειμενον ουχι η συνειδησις αυτου ασθενους οντος οικοδομηθησεται εις το τα ειδωλοθυτα εσθειν;

For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 

I don’t know about you, but to me this looks a bit contrived, since the “knowledge” might simply be the usual Pauline theology of salvation.

To conclude, if Gnosticism had become the dominant form of Christianity I don’t think it would’ve been a good thing. Even as it stands, Christianity may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire because people simply didn’t care about the world any more, and with Gnosticism it would’ve been even more so. It’s popular in certain circles and has influenced Christianity as we know it, pun intended, but it isn’t a good thing. It’s still quite interesting though.

New Atheism, New Mythos?

Atheism is not a religion but an opinion. Many Christians seem to be keen on claiming that it is in fact a religion. There are so many things wrong with this statement that it’s difficult to know where to start. Nonetheless I shall try, before moving on to the main point of this post.

Firstly, the contrast is often made between either atheism and Christianity or atheism and religion. Neither are opposites. Atheism is properly the opposite of theism. Theists need not be religious and atheists may be. I find it ironic that fundamentalist Christians and certain atheists are in agreement about the nature of the dispute. Both of them take a historical-grammatical approach to Scripture. Both are also realist in their interpretation of scientific discourse. Both of them see religion as centrally involving a belief system. Both see religion as essentially conservative and atheism as essentially liberal. And so on. This isn’t about that, but there is a whole list of things the people I just described as “certain atheists” agree on which could further be described, as they do themselves, as “New Atheists”. These are prominent figures in Western Anglophone atheism, including of course, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Of these, only Dennett is an academic philosopher, and I recently went into why I found his model of consciousness implausible. The others come across to me as good communicators who are popular but who don’t really know what they’re talking about, and moreover don’t even want to know that they don’t know. Then there are their fans, sometimes campaigning fans, who have a more derived version of their belief system, and in their case, as opposed to atheism generally, it really does look like a belief system, though it must be stressed that that’s not the same thing as a religion.

I once gave a talk about philosophical counselling at Leicester Secular Society. I wanted to go in there with the image, or ‘εθος to use the Greek rhetorical term, of being a philosopher because that’s what I am, but was introduced as a herbalist, which I also am. I gave the talk and took questions. One of the questioners, and I don’t think they’re at all representative, became exceedingly focussed on the fact that I practiced herbalism and seemed to project all sorts of things onto that fact from their perspective as an atheist, even to the extent that a short section where I’d been into Stoicism was turned into its opposite and they also denied that Buddhism was a religion because it’s non-theistic. They were oddly focussed on the question of the efficacy of herbalism when this had nothing to do with the topic of the talk. I fully recognise that this was just one individual who shouldn’t be taken as representative of any movement, but it felt very familiar and is of course an example of ad hominem. That said, I have my doubts about that being a genuine fallacy because it amounts to a special case of inductive inference: one witnesses a large number of false statements or invalid arguments emerging from a particular person, or perhaps type of person as one understands the term, and draws the inference that they are reliably unreliable. However, scepticism about induction is also common in philosophical circles, as with Hume, and to that extent ad hominem is indeed fallacious. The problem then is that rejecting that out of inductive scepticism is likely to scupper one’s ability to argue successfully in the majority of discourse, although it wouldn’t always. Tempted to put an emoji here!

A notable claim made by this person was that Buddhism wasn’t a religion. This doesn’t measure up to Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion: ritual, mythos, ethics, hierarchy, material, social and experiential. It is in fact a distinctively Abrahamic and Western way of looking at religion, which doesn’t work, for example, with Spiritism, which is atheistic, or Scientology/Freezone beliefs. It is in fact a straw man.

Atheism is not a religion, to be sure. There are atheist religions, such as the ones just mentioned, and there are atheist adherents to faiths generally regarded as theistic. Theism is, similarly, not a religion. However, leaving aside the fact of these two categories of atheist religious people and atheist religions, there are people who are both atheist and have a number of other beliefs which correlate and relate to atheism. These often seem to be people who consider atheism to be an important issue and may also be anti-theist, and I suspect these people are either themselves survivors of spiritual abuse or influenced by such survivors, because rather than being non-conformist they tend to be anti-conformist, and this is probably one cause of their problematic claims.

Just to paint a stereotypical picture, the minority of atheists I have in mind also tend to be left wing (as am I of course), scientifically realist, metaphysically naturalistic, take the historical-grammatical approach to sacred texts and physicalist with regards to the mind-body problem. It isn’t entirely clear to me what Dennett’s view of consciousness is, but it seems to amount to something like functionalism, behaviourism or physicalism. Maybe he’s just vague. All of these are defensible positions, but I get the impression they haven’t been thought about. I get a similar impression with a couple of other core claims, as opposed to these more peripheral views. These are the claims that:

• atheism is the absence of belief in God or deities (some people tend to say “gods” at this point, but that complicates the issue with sexism), and
• Jesus is not a historical figure.

Neither of these propositions is considered academically respectable. Although there are historians who claim there was no historical Jesus, I don’t think any of them are considered reputable. That’s outside my area of expertise of course – I’m not a historian. However, the first claim is pretty central and not at all sensible. The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, which is a pretty standard reference work, defines atheism as:

The position that affirms the non-existence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief.

This is a respectable work of philosophy and this definition was written by the Purdue professor William L Rowe, who came up with the concept of “friendly atheism”, which is the acceptance that theists may have rational belief in God even though we’re ultimately wrong, and this extends to the principle of charity, which is to interpret arguments rationally. Given my conversation at the Secular Hall, this was not extended to me by that person on that occasion, and this is a substantial part of the problem.

Atheism must be the presence of belief that God does not exist. The claim, for example, that babies are atheists because they lack belief in God is problematic in a couple of ways. One is the obvious idea that a system which has no beliefs can be coöpted into the fellowship of non-believers. It can, of course, but it means that inanimate objects, lacking as they probably do belief in God, are also atheist, and this is intuitively not sensible. The other is that this is in fact a presumption, predicated on the idea that a baby with beliefs would not believe in God if the idea hadn’t been somehow introduced to her. A fetus is in an entirely living world. A baby has left that world but given the common tendency in children’s stories and pretend play to anthropomorphise, it wouldn’t be surprising if babies are hylozoists – believe the world is entirely alive. That belief is pretty close to pantheism, meaning that to my mind babies are unlikely to be atheist from the point where they can be said to have beliefs. Moreover, casting my mind back, I can clearly recall imagining a powerful nebulous person protecting me when I slept alone, and it makes sense that babies would develop a belief in God due to separation anxiety even if they didn’t have it already. That would mean they’d transitioned from atheism to theism, but it’s still an early theism which does not arise from actively being taught that a deity exists. There is no indoctrination here. Babies are not atheists. Nor are people who have never been introduced to the idea of God, such as perhaps people living in officially atheist states or states with a history of official atheism such as Albania, North Korea, China or the former East Germany. If they’ve never thought about whether there’s a God or not, they are not atheist.

The idea of passive atheism is problematic when applied more widely. As well as involving the absurd-sounding claim that inanimate objects are atheist, it also applies the other way round and makes someone who doesn’t know anything about Schanuel’s Conjecture, and that includes me, an “a-Schanuelist” or something. It means every possible active belief one has not yet acquired needs to fall under that description, which is very crowded and messy. This was in fact one of the chief objections to Frege’s view of concepts as outside the mind, which I happen to agree with. Looking at it that way, the beliefs that we have can be thought of as notions with which we have actively established a connection. Atheism, defined passively, is not such a notion for non-atheists. And in fact there are also claims that babies are born theists. This may be equally absurd, but both claims are bald assertions without a clear way of testing their veracity. This claim does not belong in a rational atheist’s inventory.

The other claim is sometimes awkwardly referred to as “Jesus Mythicism”. This is the claim that Jesus, more authentically known as something like Yeshua ben Yosef, is fictional. The motivation for this claim is rather obscure to me. It isn’t necessary to believe anything along the lines of the virgin birth, resurrection or miracles performed by Jesus to believe that he existed, and in fact if it could be established that the historical Jesus did exist and didn’t do all that stuff, it would make many Christians atheist if they were intellectually honest with themselves. There is a problem with finding documentary or material evidence for most people living in the ancient world unless they were royalty or in a position of authority. We can be pretty sure that there were Afrikan governors of Britain and Afrikan Roman emperors because they were in that position, and we can probably assert with confidence that someone like Seneca or Pliny the Elder existed because their writings have survived, but Yeshua ben Yosef was not like that. Most people of his status living at that time and in that place will have been lost to history, and this is the norm in such circumstances. A list has also been produced of people who could be expected to have mentioned him if he had existed. This list is unreliable because it includes people whose surviving written work is very limited, such as a couple of poems. Are we expected to believe that the few lines which have been handed down to us would mention Jesus? If only a couple of these blog posts survived into the next century and happen not to mention Boris Johnson or Justin Welby, would that mean they didn’t exist? Like anyone else, I don’t spend most of my time harping on about famous people.

Another question is, why wouldn’t he exist? Claiming to be the Messiah is a viable career opportunity for a Jewish boy born in particular circumstances, and Jesus is not the only Jewish person ever to make that claim. In a sense, the burden of proof is really on the idea that he didn’t exist rather than that he did. A deeply religious community is under threat from an occupying power and has a myth that a military saviour will arise from its ranks in its time of need, and lo and behold it appears that someone did, name of Yeshua ben Yosef. That’s not a remotely surprising happening. Nor is him being crucified as a result of his actions.

There are also the claims that Jesus is an accretion of pagan myths who was made into a supposèdly real figure. Not only does this not have a bearing on whether there was an actual Jesus, but it’s odd that such a strongly anti-pagan group such as the Jews would allow all that into their religion when even decades later they were still dubious about the idea that Gentiles could become Christian. There absolutely are, in my opinion, similarities between Mithraism and Christianity and between the stories of other figures such as Osiris and Jesus, but that doesn’t mean everything about him is a myth. The gospels also go to some lengths to explain how Jesus could be from Nazareth when the prophecies said he’d be born in Bethelehem, and to explain why Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist when he was supposed to be the sinless son of God. Why introduce these complications if they didn’t actually happen? Why not just come up with a mythical character who fulfils more of the prophecies more straightforwardly? Why would there be anything to explain?

The historians Tacitus and Suetonius refer to Jesus. Although Josephus appears to as well, this reads like an obvious later insertion into the text. More specifically, Tacitus says:

Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt

Unlike the Josephus quote, which I’m not going to bother with, this is in keeping with the flow of the longer passage and repeats details found in the gospels.

It’s also claimed, rather more controversially, that the Talmud refers, disparagingly of course, to Jesus, but the bits I’ve read don’t particularly come across to me as referring to him specifically, just someone called the same name.

It’s important that some arguments offered by anti-theistic atheists succeed. We would all benefit, for example, from a secular society which places equal value on all beliefs, and it’s a no-brainer that sexism and homophobia, both supported by fundamentalists, become things of the past. Churches also have no business exploiting the poor and gullible or acting as bastions of racism. Rejecting evolution and in some cases even claiming we live on a flat Earth is harmful to medical and other scientific progress. All of this needs to be defeated, and in that respect anti-theistic atheists are our allies. For this very reason, it’s important that they argue from a position of credibility and a good reputation that they need to know what they’re talking about. Therefore, adopting a mythos like this – that there was no historical Jesus and that atheism is the default position – harms us all, and harms the more vulnerable people in society such as the uneducated, gay or disabled. Speaking admittèdly as a theist, I would seriously request that atheists of this kind stop making these claims, because they overstep the marks of plausibility and truth which surely we’re all committed to.