New Atheism: What Went Wrong?

0:00 When I was growing up, new atheism was at its peak. I read The God Delusion when I was about 12 in the back of my dad's car on a road trip, and I was absolutely hooked. I talked my family's ear off about atheism and why I thought that any belief in God was totally irrational. I even gave a speech in front of my school class all about the problem of evil. Those of you who might have watched the channel before will know that my opinion has shifted somewhat over the years. I've become much more skeptical about new atheism, but I've also maintained agnosticism about God. And recently, it's become fashionable to decry new atheism as totally dead, which means that we've reached the end of the action reaction cycle for this particular set of ideas. So, I think it is high time for a

0:45 philosophical autopsy. What did the new atheists believe? Where did they go wrong? And where do we go from here? whether we're believers or unbelievers. Also, do be aware I won't be able to cover everything about new atheism in one video. So, this is certainly not comprehensive. And as always, I do encourage you to take everything I say with the appropriate amount of philosophical salt. My name is Joe Foley and this is unsolicited advice. But if you want to avoid caricatured arguments on your newsfeed, then you should check out today's very kind sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around the world in a single place so that you can compare

1:30 how different outlets cover the same story. Each story comes with a clear breakdown of the political bias, factuality, ownership, and headlines of the reporting sources with ratings backed by independent news monitoring organizations. Ground News are very kindly offering anyone who uses my link or scans my QR code 40% off their Vantage plan as a special deal, and this is the plan that I use. So, I highly encourage you to snap that up. For instance, let's see how left and right-wing publications differed on a rather bizarre story. The White House releasing an image of President Trump dressed as a pope. While left-wing sources were heavily critical, arguing that this was intensely disrespectful, right-wing sources portrayed it as a light-hearted joke and argued that this

2:17 would not affect any Catholic support. I especially like the blind spots feed, which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by the left or the right and ignored by the other side. This feed helps readers step into the other side's news reality and understand the different narratives that can shape their beliefs, such as left-wing sources missing allegations concerning a cover up of Biden's health concerns, or right-wing sources missing lawsuits filed against the Trump administration and RFK Jr. over health cuts. I just don't have a lot of time to keep up with the news, and certainly not to examine every article I read for bias. So receiving my ground news roundup at the end of every day means that I can get a variety of news opinions, learn which sources are trustworthy, and make the world less of

3:02 a bewildering mess. Ground News are giving my viewers 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan. They've genuinely become my go-to news source. I cannot recommend them highly enough, and I really hope that you'll check them out. But anyway, back to the video. One, how to spot a new atheist. The novous atheisticus is a strange creature. Skeptical, anti-theist, and heavily into debating creationists. They prowl the hallways of the library looking for fresh prey. Aha! They have found a victim. William Paleley's argument from design. They seize upon this pre-Darwinian folly and tear it to pieces, leaving only the dashed hopes of intelligent design theorists in their wake. Talking about new atheism is quite

3:51 different from talking about other types of philosophy. Whereas something like empiricism is defined by a particular attitude towards observational knowledge or just plain atheism is defined by not believing in God. New atheism was primarily a publishing phenomenon as well as just a general vibe. The foundational texts of this movement were Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens God is not great. I've reread all of these and a few more for this video, and I will largely base my analysis on them. Obviously, the first claim of new atheism is just atheism. Defining atheism in a precise way is surprisingly tricky. Is it a belief that there is no god or simply a lack of belief that there is a god? This

4:37 might sound trivial, but those are logically quite different statements. They have different scopes. In practice, what atheist philosophers normally argue is that it is reasonable not to believe in God. That is, there are good, maybe even prevailing reasons to think that God does not exist, even if that reason is simply a lack of evidence rather than a positive problem. However, new atheism tends to go beyond this. Something all four of these authors come back to is not just that there are good reasons to not believe in God, but that there are no good reasons to believe in God. This is explicitly stated in the God delusion with the chapter title why there is almost certainly not a God, which concludes its point as follows. If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion, the God

5:24 hypothesis, is untenable. Even when this is not argued for explicitly, it is often implicit in new atheist texts. For example, while Christopher Hitchens does not provide much of an argument against God's existence in his book, he spends a lot of time talking under the assumption that God's existence is unreasonable to believe in under any circumstance, calling it both stupid and prideful. This is a far stronger claim than that made by many traditional skeptics. For example, while David Hume was either a minimal sort of theist, a deist, or an agnostic, depending on which scholar you ask, he never went so far as to say that no reasonable person could believe in God. This also incurs a much harder argumentative burden. For instance, I

6:09 don't think that there is an adequate solution to the problem of evil, but I also don't think that no reasonable person could accept some of the purported solutions. If I did, that would require much more argumentation on my part. I won't recap my position here, but you can find it in this video. The third hallmark of new atheism is anti-theism. That is the belief that religion is almost always, if not inherently, a negative thing. There is a minimal and a more ambitious version of this thesis. The minimal version is just that religions are not true and it is not good to believe false things. The stronger version is that religion is pretty much always a corrupting influence on society. Rereading these books, I was surprised at just how much of their contents were devoted to this point in particular. Sam Harris's The

6:56 End of Faith, for example, was much more about this than any attempt to demonstrate the falseness of religion. And God is not great was similarly weighted in this direction. Strangely, the book with the largest number of chapters devoted to actually arguing that God did not exist in a direct fashion was the God delusion. Despite Richard Dawkins intensely anti-theist reputation, anti-theism is by no means unique to new atheism. Voltater is a good example of an enlightenment thinker with antitheist leadings, as is Foyback. But this is by no means the only kind of atheism. There are even atheists like Arthur Schopenhau who saw religion as potentially rather positive if it were used correctly. He viewed religion as a collection of ancient myths that contained allegorical lessons for the organization of our lives. But he still

7:42 thought it was straightforwardly false. Moreover, there are theists, deists, and atheists who nonetheless think that theocracy would be a disaster. Perhaps the best example of these are the majority of the founding fathers of America who held a variety of different theological positions, but all opposed a state church or all oppose a state church to my knowledge. Even some theists have recognized that sometimes religion can be a hindrance. The fourth and final thread in the new atheist not is a pretty extreme confidence in the strength of reason. The actual definition of reason varies between the new atheists. Dawkins, for example, seemed to think that reason would cause anyone to disbelieve in God, but did not argue that reason led us to certain moral truths. Harris, on the other hand, argued that reason came with a

8:29 consequentialist moral system. Dennett's views here are quite hard to pin down because his academic writings and his popular ones are written in quite different voices. For example, while in his academic writings he is quite careful with his moral claims, in his popular work he is in effect a consequentialist and subtly equates this with the outlook of the reasonable person. Hitchens does a similar sort of thing. He doesn't present an argument for why reason would lead to his particular moral system, but he nonetheless behaves as if to be roughly consequentialist is reasonable and to be anything else is unreasonable. For example, he quite often mocks the idea of taboss yet holds it as self-evident that religion is to be judged primarily on its consequences. Many have recognized this as a sort of weak spot in new atheist reasoning. And it's just

9:15 the kind of thing that David Hume might pick them up on as overestimating the capacity of reason to bridge the is ought gap. Nonetheless, it remains one of the main things that separates new atheism from many of its variants. For example, the philosopher Graeme Oppy grounds his atheism in the idea that we don't need God to explain natural phenomena. But he doesn't have the same optimism about the capacity of reason as many new atheists. Ultimately, any strict definition of new atheism is going to come up short because it's as much a historical event as a philosophical position. It was born out of a general frustration with religion's special status as something that is impolite to critique. And almost all the new atheists mentioned this as among their primary motivations. And in this aim, I think they certainly succeeded. I

10:01 can't speak for a time before the new atheist movement as I was unfortunately an infant. But there are not many taboos around criticizing belief in God. Now my own channel is testament to this. I have many videos attacking various religious arguments and don't receive much backlash for that at all. But enough with defining new atheism. Let's move on to what I think are its greatest strengths. Because while it has become fashionable to bash new atheism wholesale, we can forget where they arguably succeeded in their aims. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to the channel or if you're feeling particularly generous, the Patreon to gain access to very occasional exclusive content. The links are in the description. Two, the strengths of new

10:46 atheism. For a long time, the novous atheisticus was at the top of the online food chain. It had no natural predators and so naturally flourished as a result. The novous atheisticus was also a fearsome predator itself and found certain varieties of the theisticus genus like the theisticus creation artist and the theisticus fundamentalist easy prey. Although the new atheists often pitched their arguments against all religion, in practice they tended to focus on a few specific targets, normally creationism or fundamentalist interpretations of scripture. And here is also where they made many of their best points. For example, a favorite target of the new atheists was the argument from design. In Paley's formulation, this asks us to imagine we

11:33 are strolling along a beach one day and come across a watch lying in the sand. What would our natural conclusion be in this scenario? Would we think, oh, I wonder what intricate natural forces led to the creation of this watch spontaneously without any will or intellect involved? Absolutely not. we would conclude that someone made it. The standard analogous case is the human eye. The classic argument here goes the eye depends on so many intricate parts all working in tandem just like a watch. So using the same reasoning by which we concluded that the watch must have a watchmaker. We must also conclude that the eye had an intelligent designer. Thus there exists a god and moreover an intelligent god. This kind of argument was where the new atheists thrived. The

12:19 God delusion is the best example of this. Contrary to the intelligent design inference, Dawkins points out that evolution by natural selection can explain how we get the appearance of intention from merely descriptive forces. Moreover, this kind of probabilistic empirical argument exactly suits Dawkins background in empirical research. Dawkins uses the same general thought against the fine-tuning argument as well, invoking the idea of the multiverse or even evolving universes to explain why life is possible on this one. I personally find this response unsatisfying and think there are stronger arguments against fine-tuning, but it does help to broaden our idea of what could explain seemingly inexplicable ideas. The same goes for biblical literalism or fundamentalism, which these authors dispatch reasonably

13:06 straightforwardly by pointing to where it does not line up with historical data. This is pretty closely tied with the creationist point, as the literalists they critique are often arguing for a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, but it's still worth pointing out. If I were to make a general observation, the new atheist books are at their best when they are dealing with the linear causal arguments for God. That is with claims of God's direct intervention in the causal chain of events in this world. As an example, both Hitchens and Dawkins argue against miracles along roughly Human lines, saying that it would take something truly extraordinary and undeniable to convince them that a miraculous explanation is necessary rather than turning to a hallucination or some other psychological event. I actually think this is an improvement on Hume's

13:51 original argument which seemed to say it is irrational to believe a miracle has occurred under any circumstances. A claim which has been widely and understandably criticized. This linear causal God is also the kind much more prone to the god of the gaps argument where something like consciousness is attributed to divine intervention simply because it is difficult to explain scientifically. These are distinct from arguments that science cannot explain something even in principle. New atheism had quite a lot to say about the god of the gaps and I think that a fair amount of it was very sensible. Additionally, it's easy to forget that some of the main targets of the new atheists era were people campaigning for evolution by natural selection to be taken off school curricula or to be taught alongside intelligent design as if the two were epistemically on par here. Again, they

14:39 defended their point very well. The same sort of thing goes for at least some of their more anti-theistic messaging. When the new atheists said that a certain level of violence has been historically motivated by religion, they weren't wrong. There certainly has been religious violence and probably will be for years to come. Likewise, when they point to repressive practices linked to religion, such as attempts to justify slavery using passages from the Bible, they are talking about real historical events that really happened. Dennett is very keen on the case of Jim Jones and his death cult as an example of what faith at its worst is capable of. And ultimately, I think that this kind of critique was very valuable in certain cases. Hell, I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing to the negative effects of systems that I

15:24 support and uphold. I am an enormous fan of democracy, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore any of the problems that a specifically democratic style of government might bring. There have been numerous religious thinkers who have critiqued negative usage of religion. After all, Pope Pius V 6th Nostra Itat is just one example of this. It condemned religious discrimination and implored people to respect Christ's message to love one another. Although as a counterpoint to the new atheist claims here, we have books like Tom Holland's Dominion or Glenn Scriveners The Air We Breathe that aim to demonstrate some of the positive effects that religion has had. I should also say there is some genuinely interesting argumentation in these new atheist books. For example, Dawkins claims that any god that was sufficient to explain the existence of the universe must be just as in need of

16:10 explanation as the universe itself. I think there are ways that we can respond to this argument. We could hash out what the word simple means here and talk about the concept of divine simplicity. On the other hand, it does challenge theist to say why God does not need explaining in the same way that say material objects do. It also encourages all of us to ask what it means to explain something. Dawkins implicitly assumes something like an interventionist theory of explanation. X is explained by Y when we can interact with Y to cause some effect on X. This is pretty different to the more metaphysically loaded idea of an explanation held by most theists. So this argument could help us to clarify some of the key concepts that work in the background of religious debates but often go undefined in actual

16:55 discussions. Lastly, Dennit makes some engaging points about religious psychology. That is, if God or gods do not exist, why does almost every culture have some idea of them? And moreover, why is it that this idea is so persistent? This question has been tackled elsewhere by anthropologists and psychologists, but it's still interesting to see discussions about it. Dennit comes up with quite a sophisticated idea of what might drive religious faith if it's looked at from a third person perspective and a naturalistic Lex. Whether or not you believe in God, this question is fun to answer. I think it's part of the new atheist movement that we often forget, which is kind of a shame as it takes up more total page length than positive arguments for and against the existence of God across these four texts. I wanted to start by praising new atheism because

17:42 it has become quite fashionable to dunk on it for reasons that we will be exploring in the next section. But we can forget that for a certain subset of theistic argument, they actually did give quite reasonable responses. And they did make some good points about some excesses of religious thinking that have spilled over into violence. But enough with all of that. Let's get to the juicy bit, the pitfalls of new atheism. And I'll be focusing here on whether they established that belief in God is totally unreasonable. Three, new atheism challenged. All is not well for Novous Atheisticus. It now faces arrival. The Counter Apologeticus is one of its fiercest competitors in the hunt for opinions. No

18:28 sooner has the New Atheist published the paperback edition of its book than The Counter Apologeticus is winding up to challenge it. Maybe the most cutting response to the new atheists comes from Catholic philosopher Ed Faser in his book, The Last Superstition. And I'm going to read directly from it here. To anyone who actually knows something about the history and theology of the western religious tradition for which Harris, Dennit, Dawkins, and Hitchens show so much contempt, their books stand out for their manifest ignorance of that tradition and for the breathtaking shallowess of their philosophical analysis of religious matters. Fesar offers many responses to these specific arguments made in new atheist books, but his general critique is much wider than this. He accuses the new atheists of

19:15 strawmanning and misrepresenting religious claims and religious arguments. And in some senses, he is definitely right. I'm surprised in hindsight just how little these texts actually did address arguments for God's existence. The God delusion was the main one that did so, and so it will inevitably be the focus of this section. Take St. Thomas Aquinas's five ways for example. Dawkins strips these of their context and their background in Aristotilian metaphysics. and as a result makes them seem much weaker than they first appear. Again, I have a full video on this point, so I won't go into too much detail, but an example will illustrate what phaser means. Dawkins outlines Aquinus's first way as follows. The unmoved mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress from which the only escape is

20:01 God. Something had to make the first move, and that's something we call God. It is true that the classic way of referring to God in this argument is as a mover. But Aquinus more meant changer and sustainer. Aristotilian motion is to do with change rather than movement specifically. Aquinus argues that when things change, they actualize a potential. In order for a potential to be actualized, something else has to act on the thing changing. So in order to transform wood into a fire, there needs to be a spark as well as the laws of physics that allow combustion to occur. Without this, we would not have fire. That potential would never be actualized. Aquinus's argument is that if you trace this chain of dependence back, you must eventually arrive at something that has no potential but is pure actuality. This is what he

20:47 identifies as God. His argument is obviously a lot more complicated than this, and he spends a lot of time arguing that this point of pure actuality must hold the classic characteristics attributed to God, but you get the general picture. Now, as it happens, I do disagree with the idea that this implies a god for a number of reasons that I can't go fully into here. For example, even if we accept the aristatilian backdrop, I reject Aquinus's later arguments that a point of pure actuality needs to be unique or personal. I think that a mathematical or logical object is just one example of something that has no potential in the Aristotilian sense. It cannot change yet is still not personal, and there can obviously be more than one of them. Aquinus has a sophisticated response to this because he thinks that pure actuality also implies no limitations,

21:33 but we will veer far too off topic if I go down that particular rabbit hole. We can also challenge any number of the Aristotilian metaphysical premises as Graemey has done and I have done in the past. However, we can immediately see that Doran's response to this argument that they make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress no longer works. Aquinus does give a reason to say that God is immune to the regress because he begins by showing that there's a point of pure actuality and builds outwards from there. As I said, I don't think that Aquinus's arguments do prove God because I don't agree with their metaphysical premises. But Dawkins critique here leaves them frustratingly untouched. Ironically, I do think that Faser also does the same sort of thing with some of the other philosophers that he examines. For example, he caricatures Hume

22:20 extensively in his book by leaving out almost all of the reasoning for his positions. He also dismisses can ethics outright while ignoring 200 years of scholarship on it, which specifically addresses his critiques. This is not unusual for a popular book, but it's just a little bit of a shame considering how much Faser quite rightly takes the new atheist to task for doing the exact same thing to Aquus. At points, the new atheists are pretty open about the cursory nature of their theological investigations. In an updated preface, Dawkins does concede that his book is aimed to target the average believer rather than a theologian, and there is some value in this. However, this does sort of place the stated conclusions of the new atheist out of line with what they have demonstrated. Specifically,

23:05 I'm thinking about the second claim that it is unreasonable to believe in God. It seems that the bar for unreasonability would be that there's no scenario in which you could reasonably believe in premises that underpin a logically valid argument for God. This would involve refuting all purported reasons or presenting a truly insoluble problem with a belief in God. I think the new atheist attempt at this is to invoke Russell's teapot, which is to ask if the same claim that's made about God could also be made about an invisible intangible teapot which orbits the earth. As a general litmus test for claims, I actually don't think this is a bad idea. But very few theologians have tried to argue for God in this way. Natural theologians, for example, tend to infer from some fact about the world

23:50 to some way that God must be like. There are reasons to be skeptical of their specific arguments, but this is quite different from positing something totally unfalsifiable. For example, historically, some theologians have argued from the inviability and total regularity of physical laws to the existence of a physical lawmaker and have been challenged in recent years by the quantum conception of certain physical laws as stochastic rather than deterministic. This was an argument that was falsified and theologians have since revised their argument to work at a more macro level. I have no doubt that some religious arguments are a little bit like Russell's teapot, but this is not a knockdown objection to everyone. Lastly, and this is why I personally distanced myself from new atheism as a general movement, is that it it sort of ceased

24:36 to be curious. This is just anecdotal and perhaps it is merely my own experience. But I gradually found that the atheists I knew who were very into this movement went from considering whether God existed to assuming that he did not exist and becoming completely close to any counterargument. It gradually felt less like we all happened to agree on a particular philosophical position and more like we were part of a tribe. Atheism became build as a kind of package deal with a load of other philosophical positions that it definitely doesn't imply like eliminative materialism and a sort of simplistic view of consequentialism. I think we gradually develop this sort of arrogance about our underlying position that was not justified by the arguments that we made. Disbelief seemed to rely less and less on argumentation and

25:22 skepticism and more and more on ridicule or just general vibes. I know that to a certain extent this is what happens when a philosophical position becomes a public phenomenon, but it was still unfortunate. Surely us non-believers ought to welcome the possibility that there might be a god. This is the strange burden of holding a negative position on anything. Your argument is never technically done, but must always be open to revision. Ultimately, I think the issue with new atheism is that it bit off a little bit more than it could chew. It aimed to not just make a case for non-belief, but treated belief as if it was something that only a stupid person can have, and that the correct response for any argument for God was simple mockery. Moreover, this blinded new atheists like myself to where we might have misunderstood existing

26:09 religious arguments and caused us to just be overconfident in our conclusions. It seemed to jump very quickly from some religious arguments are clearly flawed to all arguments for God must be ridiculous. As an inference, this just never quite made sense and it made new atheist claims look spurious even where they might have had a point. I think this is part of why people reject it wholesale now, including the parts where it may have been correct. But for all this critique, I am quite thankful for some of the long-term effects of new atheism because I think that it has advanced public debate about religion and it's made people aware of some issues that might have otherwise passed them by. The remaining question then is where do we go from here? Four,

26:55 the future of religious debate. The confrontation is over and the dust settles. But what now lies in store for Novous Atheisticus and Counter Apologeticus? God only knows. In some ways, new atheism and the corresponding backlash that it received, follows a natural pattern that just tends to happen in public discourse. A given idea finds prominence, gets a little bit too big for its boots, and then a counterveailing idea gains enough traction to respond to its worst excesses. Hopefully through this process we end up in a relatively sensible place. I won't butcher Hegel by calling this a dialectic, but certainly some sort of intellectual development is occurring. And it's worth noting that

27:40 the primary targets of new atheism, things like young earth creationism, probably do hold less sway now than before the new atheist phenomenon. They're certainly less intellectually respectable. To that extent, it did its job and can retire to a sunlit villa in the Maldes. Moreover, from the backlash to new atheism, a more sophisticated wave of apologists gained much more public traction. People like Ed Faser or Justin Bryley or William Lane Craig, who have popularized some much more scholarly brands of theism. As someone who's broadly just pro people learning philosophy, I see this as an absolute win. But now that this particular moment in history has died down a little, where do we go from here? What have we learned from new atheism and its associated

28:26 responses? Well, the first thing is perhaps a little bit of humility around fields that are as expansive as the arguments for and against God's existence. If there's one thing that I noticed from both recapping new atheist literature and those responding to it, it was that neither side really bothered to engage with the strongest versions of one another's arguments. I mentioned Faser's caricatururing of Hume earlier and Dawkins misunderstanding of Aquinus, but I could have just as easily talked about Hitchens assertion that religion is mostly wishful thinking or Frank Turk's claim that either someone created the universe or no one did, which is almost a satirical example of a false dichotomy. Every single writer that I have mentioned today is or was extraordinarily clever, far cleverer

29:12 than I will ever be. So it seems like a woeful misuse of their intellectual gifts to be attacking weaker versions of atheism or theism when they could just as easily spend that time coming together and discussing the strongest variants of these positions, ones which after all might actually stand a chance of convincing them. The second is that there are far more positions along the spectrum of theism and atheism than this debate captured. The scholastic god of Ed Faser might look superficially like the god of the intelligent design theorist, but this is mostly illusory. Faser's god has a significantly more aristoilian grounding, and we can infer quite different things from him than from the god of the biblical literalist. The scholastic god, for example, is pretty much incapable of changing his

29:58 mind since he cannot change. Whereas, if you were to just take a literal interpretation of the Bible, God quite regularly changes his mind. If we were to expand a little further, we might encounter positions like deism, which only gets a passing mention in the new atheist debates, but is historically a very respectable position often taken by people who are convinced by maybe some of the arguments for some kind of foundational being, say, a first cause in the to sense, but argue we cannot infer much about God beyond his mere existence. Moreover, it's not just the variety of god-believing positions that get overlooked in this debate. There are whole sades of atheism and agnosticism that are totally separable from materialism or the particular mechanistic worldview of the new atheists. Chopenhau, for example, was an

30:45 atheist who held that the defining principle of reality was will. And that far from grounding goodness, the underlying chaotic will of the universe entailed a deeply pessimistic metaphysics. Nch is another good example of an atheist who definitely wasn't a materialist. The intermediary space around here is surprisingly rich. For example, if you were to take a roughly verificationist view of statements or neoverificationist I should say. That is that statements are factually meaningful if and only if they can be verified. then you might disregard some of the metaphysical arguments for God's existence, but nonetheless think that an awful lot hinges on the historical basis for Christ's resurrection or on particular miracles, as these would be direct observable evidence that implies a god. I talked to a surprising number

31:32 of people who hold roughly this position. They are pretty skeptical of Aquinus's argument that God must be a being of pure actuality since they suspect that the metaphysical principles underlying it are unverifiable. But they concede that something like the miracle of the sun does present a genuine challenge to atheism. For me, the main thing holding this debate back was attempting to solve absolutely enormous issues far too quickly. A very simple seeming question like does God exist or is religion a good thing tend to hide a multitude of complexities. Are we talking about Spininoza's pantheus god, the stoic logos, the point of pure actuality, or the much more straightforwardly anthropological god of the biblical literalist? Are the more philosophical variants of these even

32:19 supernatural in the traditional sense? If they don't interfere with linear causal chains regarding the impact of religion, which religions are we talking about? How do we separate the causal factor of religion from economic, cultural, or political concerns when discussing something like the start of a war? As is so often the case, I think that we fell into Daniel Carneaman's supreme cognitive trap, having been presented with a complex question, we tried to answer a simpler one. I think that part of the way forward for public discourse about God is to approach God's existence in a much more peacemeal fashion. This is somewhat reflected in the more recent popular literature around this topic. Something like Tom Holland's Dominion, for example, does not seek to answer is religion a good thing, but what has been the effect of a

33:05 Christian ethical system? This is still admittedly huge, but it's slightly less huge. Bartman deals less with God directly and more with biblical scholarship specifically and the arguments for God that surround this. There is an increasing recognition that these questions are difficult and that there can be sensible disagreements about quite large sways of them. Despite the hopes of new atheists and their theist counterparts, the issue of God's existence is just quite unlikely to be solved in a scant 300 pages. However, I am very grateful for the new atheist movement. It brought more attention to religious discourses and did make some genuinely good points. It is possible that our more nuanced public conversations around God would not have been possible without this action and reaction. But at the same time, I am

33:52 privately quite glad that we're somewhat past that particular moment and could proceed by taking the best parts of new atheism and potentially setting aside the rest. This is after all how philosophy develops and this is no less true in the popular sphere than in the academic one. So what atheist literature would I recommend? Well, I think that Graeme Oppy's writings are a fantastic place to start. His overall argument against God is very focused and rather simple in its composition, if not in its details. He thinks we do not need God to answer questions about existence and that naturalism is thereby a simpler hypothesis. He has two books that are highly interesting on this topic. Arguing about gods and the best argument for atheism. It's been a long time since

34:38 I read either of these, but I remember finding them both informative and enjoyable, and they certainly inform my position today. On the theist side, I probably wouldn't recommend The Last Superstition, as I don't think it's phaser at his best. But his book, Five Arguments for the Existence of God, is a great introduction to scholastic and metaphysical style arguments about God's existence that you might not have encountered before. If you fancy something a bit more head-on, the debate between Bertram Russell and Frederick Coppelston is a great example of a genuine clash in theist and atheist positions. In particular, it's worth unpicking the first exchange where Coppleston infers the existence of a necessary being, and Russell argues that only propositions that are true by definition can be necessary. More

35:24 foundational disagreements like this often get overlooked in debates about God, but they're often the very basis for disagreements later down the line. Above all, let's stay curious. Our philosophical position on God is just as revisable as any other, and neither atheist nor theist need let their thinking on the topic decay into dogma. But if you want something a little different, then check out this video to watch me try my hand at defending theism. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.