The Volokh Conspiracy

At the Reason website, Kennedy (who apparently has only one name), argues at length that atheism should be considered a religion:

[W]hether you make sense of the world as an atheist and don’t require the God postulate to complete your understanding, or you are a theist and your feelings and experiences tell you something greater is there, biologically speaking, that big blob of gray Jell-O in our skulls is like a giant arrow pointing us in the same direction. I believe that is delicious. And religious….

I contend that if your system is about God—or about the non-existence of God—God is still at the center of the argument’s “aboutness.” In the spirit of that “off is a TV channel” comment above: God is the TV. Religions are the channels. If it is off, maybe he’s dead or disengaged, but at least you admit there’s a TV….

When atheists rail against theists (as many did on my Facebook page), they are using the same fervor the religious use when making their claims against a secular society. By calling atheism a religion, I am not trying to craft terms or apply them out of convenience. I just see theists and atheists behaving in the same manner, approaching from opposite ends of the runway.

These kinds of claims are often made, but they fall apart under close inspection. Obviously, if you define the term “religion” broadly enough, atheism can qualify. But such a redefinition obfuscates important differences between atheism and religion, and is also contrary to ordinary English usage.

Kennedy argues that atheism is like religion because both atheists and theists 1) try to understand the nature of the world, 2) have beliefs about God, and 3) are often emotional about their beliefs and intolerant of opposing views. All of these points are true, but none of them prove that atheism is a religion.

It is true that both atheists and theists try to understand the world. But only the latter are committed to a religious explanation for reality, which depends on the actions of supernatural beings. The former, by contrast, can try to explain reality by natural, scientifically verifiable causes. There is an important distinction between a naturalistic worldview and one that incorporates an important role for supernatural beings.

Moreover, atheism as such is not an explanation for the nature of the world akin to various religions who explain reality by reference to God (or multiple gods). Atheism is merely a rejection of the existence of supernatural gods, which does not preclude atheists from disagreeing among themselves about the fundamental nature of reality (e.g. – some atheists are materialists, whereas others are not; some atheists even reject the genetic theory of evolution, as the officially atheistic Soviet government did for many years).

It is also true that both atheists and theists have beliefs about God. However, if believing there is no God makes you religious, then disbelieving in ghosts makes you a believer in the existence of the afterlife and disbelief in phrenology makes you a phrenologist. Both phrenologists and anti-phrenologists have beliefs about the question of whether or not feeling the shape of a person’s skull tell you something useful about their personality. Similarly, both atheists and theists have beliefs about the existence of God. I am not suggesting that all theistic beliefs are as easily falsified as phrenology (some probably are, while others are not). But rejection of theism does not make you a religious believer, just as rejection of phrenology does not make you a phrenologist.

Finally, it is certainly true some atheists get emotional about their beliefs and are intolerant of opposing views – as is also the case with some theists. But emotionalism and intolerance are not enough to qualify a belief system as a religion. If they were, then conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, libertarianism, vegetarianism, environmentalism, and many, many other views all qualify as religions too. Many of their adherents are also emotional about their beliefs, and intolerant of opposition. The same goes for many sports fans. Some North Carolina basketball fans are very emotional about their team and famously hostile to Duke fans, and vice versa. Yet being a UNC basketball fan is not a religion, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense.

To be sure, we sometimes refer to adherents of some political or moral view as having a “religious” fervor. But this is a metaphorical use of the term “religious,” not a literal one. We don’t really mean that a person with a “religious” dedication to vegetarianism is necessarily actually religious. We just mean that he has as strong a faith in his beliefs as many religious people do in God and their theological commitments.

Perhaps these terminological battles don’t matter very much. So long as we all use terms in the same way and everyone understands what they mean, it may not matter whether we define religion broadly or narrowly. However, I do worry that efforts to define atheism as a religion may obscure the genuine and important difference between atheists and religious believers: that the one view explains reality (and often morality) by reference to supernatural beings, whereas the other does not.

The New York Times Room for Debate Forum has an interesting symposium on the role of religion in presidential elections. In his contribution, polling expert Andrew Kohut cites a 2007 Pew survey showing that atheism is viewed more negatively by voters than virtually any other possible trait of a presidential candidate. A whopping 63% of respondents said they would be “less likely” to vote for a presidential candidate who “doesn’t believe in God” (3% said they would be more likely_. This easily exceeds the percentages who say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who never held elected office (56), a Muslim (46), a homosexual (46), a person who had “used drugs in the past” (45), or a Mormon (30). Opposition to female, black and Hispanic candidates is several times lower (ranging from 4 to 14 percent, though some racists and sexists probably hid their true attitudes from the pollster). A more recent 2011 version of the same survey gets very similar results when it comes to atheists (61%), though there is less hostility towards gays (33%).

By contrast, 39% in the 2007 survey said they would be more likely to vote for a Christian candidate, compared to only 4% who said they would be less likely. However, many voters apparently don’t want a candidate who seems too closely associated with religion. The same poll found that 25% would be less likely to vote for a candidate who has been a minister, while only 15% said they would be more likely to support him. The questions about Christians and ministers were not repeated in the 2011 study.

The data cited by Kohut reinforce other evidence showing that atheists are by far the most widely hated religious or ethnic minority in modern America. The evidence suggests that hostility to atheist candidates is primarily the result of bigotry rather than information shortcuts (e.g. – opposing an atheist candidate because one assumes that he’s probably a liberal), though the latter is certainly a factor for some voters. In this 2006 article, I explored some of the reasons for that hostility and also explained why it isn’t justified.

Leah Libresco has now posted many of the questions and answers for the next round of her Turing Test for religion. They are available at her blog. In the previous round, her fifteen test participants (some real atheists, and some Christians) answered four questions about atheism, trying to persuade readers that they are genuine atheists. In this round, the same people answer four questions about Christianity, seeking to persuade readers that they are genuine Christians. The eight questions are available here.

Readers will be able to vote on which respondents are the real Christians and which the fakers.

Atheist blogger Leah Libresco has now begun to implement her Turing Test for religion, which I previously wrote about here. At her blog, she has recruited fifteen test participants who will first answer four questions about atheism, trying to persuade readers that they are real atheists. They will then answer four questions about Christianity, seeking to persuade readers that they are genuine Christians. The eight questions are available here. Some of the participants are actual atheists and the rest are Christians.

Readers will have the opportunity to see each test participant’s answers and then vote on which “atheists” they think are real and which ones fake. Later, they will also vote which answers to the questions about Christianity are given by real Christians and which ones are atheists pretending to be Christian. Leah plans to offer a prize to the atheist who persuades the most readers that he or she is a genuine Christian, as well as to the Christian who most successfully mimics an atheist.

The fifteen sets of answers to questions about atheism are now up at Leah’s blog, and you can vote on which ones you think are written by genuine atheists here.

Inspired by Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, atheist blogger Leah Libresco proposes a religious Turing test to measure the extent to which Christians and atheists understand the arguments of the other side [HT: Bryan Caplan]:

Just like Caplan, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and play in an ideological Turing Test against a Christian blogger. We could both answer a selection of questions posed by Christians and atheists or we could each write an argument for and against the side we support and then briefly rebut the two arguments the other one had produced. I’m flexible and open to suggestions.

Debates over religion have many parallels to political debates. Public ignorance about religion is almost as widespread as political ignorance. And most people react in a highly biased way to evidence and arguments that go against their position on either subject.

A religious Turing test, however, poses challenges that a political one does not. Liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism are rough equivalents of each other in as much as all of them are ideologies that try to delineate the appropriate role of political power in society. Atheism on the other hand isn’t really an equivalent of Christianity in the same sense. Atheism is just denial of the existence of God; it is not a comprehensive moral system. That’s why thinkers as divergent as Ayn Rand and Karl Marx could both be atheists. By contrast, Christianity goes far beyond merely asserting that God exists. It also incorporates many other theological doctrines (e.g. – that Jesus Christ is the son of God), and various ethical commands. The same goes for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and many other religions. Thus, simulating a Christian who is well-informed about the arguments for his religious views is a tougher challenge than simulating an atheist who is comparably knowledgeable about atheism. Christianity covers a much wider range of issues than atheism does.

Nonetheless, last year’s Pew survey of public knowledge of religion suggests that atheists and agnostics are, on average, more knowledgeable about religious doctrine than theists. Atheists and agnostics (an average of 6.7 correct answers out of 12) even outscored Christians (6.0) on questions that specifically tested knowledge of Christianity. Though it’s also fair to note that some subsets of Christians such as Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) did better than the atheists and agnostics did. Mormons (20.3 correct answers out of 32) also achieved a statistical dead heat with atheists (20.9) on the overall survey, as did Jews (20.5). I speculated on the reasons for these groups’ relatively high knowledge levels here.

Knowledge of basic facts about religion is not the same thing as knowledge of more detailed arguments for and against various religious claims. I think I understand the most basic tenets of Christianity (the kind of information covered in the Pew survey). But I know very little about the arguments for them that Christian theologians have developed (with the partial exception of arguments for the existence of God). Libresco’s proposal might give us some evidence on the extent to which atheists and Christian’s understand their opponents’ more in-depth arguments; though obviously it would be a mistake to generalize too much from one small-N study. She reports that at least two Christians have expressed interest in participating in her experiment. So stay tuned.

UPDATE: Libresco describes the details of her experiment in this follow-up post.

UPDATE #2: Obviously, as in the case of political ideologies such as liberalism and libertarianism, there is a good deal of internal diversity among Christians. For example, there are significant theological differences between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and also between theological conservatives and liberals within each of these groups. That further complicates the the task of the Turing simulator. There is also some diversity among atheists as well, though perhaps less than among Christians because atheism, as such, covers fewer questions than Christianity does.

From yesterday’s Atchley v. Atchley:

The trial court addressed the following inquiry to the husband.
Q. Now, you said you attend a Morning Star Church?
A. Correct.
Q. Do you donate money to the church?
A. I don’t donate money to the church.
Q. Do you—does [husband’s girlfriend]?
A. No, she has not yet.
Q. Okay. Do either of you serve in any ministry that the Morning Star Church is involved in, whether some sort of charity work or teaching kids or anything like that?
A. No, not at this time.
Q. Do you have prayer in your home?
A. We pray at the dinner table.
Q. Bible study?
A. Not in the home, no.
Q. You’ve described yourself as a secular humanist, right?
A. Correct.
Q. Okay. How does—how does a secular humanist determine what’s right and wrong?
A. I mean, it’s a—it’s a—that’s a very deep question. I mean, I think people innately have an idea about what’s right, what’s wrong and you have to—you have to look at it from the perspective of not just, you know, what’s good for me, but what’s good for those around me, am I doing a greater good. I mean, I can have morals and make correct decisions without having a religion per se.
Q. What’s the authority though that you submit to?
A. Just my basic philosophy in life which is that I think humans can help each other solve their own problems. I don’t think we need to look elsewhere. I think if we work hard at it, then we can make a better society and we can all get along and we can solve problems and we can improve how it is we live, what the human condition is.
Q. But ultimately what you’re telling me is that the authority for what you think is right and wrong comes from you?
A. Yeah, I mean, it’s—it has to come from me. I mean, you have to think—but you have to be—you have to try to be, you know, objective about it. Yeah, I don’t have a book or a sheet of paper with a list of tenets or anything I should follow.

Continue reading ‘Judge Grilling Parent in Child Custody Case About the Parent’s Secular Humanism’ »

The New York Times recently ran an interesting article on the Secular Right blog, which I commented on here back when it was first established:

As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.

They are part of a small faction on the right: conservatives with no use for religion. Since 2008, they have been contributors to the blog Secular Right, where they argue that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them….

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, noted that conservatives throughout history have esteemed “mediating institutions” like schools and churches, sources of authority other than the state. “If that’s the way you’re thinking, concern for the strength of organized religion follows pretty naturally,” Mr. Ponnuru said.

I do have a small bone to pick with the article and possibly with Ramesh Ponnuru. There is a difference between being an atheist and having “no use for religion.” One can deny the existence of God, while simultaneously recognizing that religious institutions sometimes serve useful purposes. Being an atheist doesn’t prevent me from seeing that the Catholic Church runs an excellent system of private schools, for example. It also doesn’t prevent anyone from recognizing the value of “mediating institutions,” including religious ones.

At the same time, it is also the case that organized religion has often contributed to grave injustices, providing support for slavery, gender inequality, and occasionally (in the case of “Liberation Theology”) even communism. Whether a mostly secular society will be better off than a mostly religious one depends on the values advocated by the religious and secular ideologies in question. Atheism doesn’t require anyone to believe that every conceivable secular belief system has better social consequences than every conceivable religious one. One can be an atheist while still believing that Catholicism, Judaism, or Mormonism is less harmful than Marxism, for example.

As I noted in a recent post, the Pew Research Center survey of public knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons are the groups with by far the highest knowledge levels in this field. The disparity between these groups and the rest of the population persists even after controlling for education.

What explains the difference between these three groups and the general population? Jamelle Bouie and Matthew Yglesias argue that it is their status as religious minorities. As Bouie puts it:

To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.

Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority.

I am skeptical. If Bouie’s theory were correct, the disparity between the three highest-scoring groups and the rest would be mainly the result of their strong performance in knowledge of Christianity – the majority religion in the US. Mormons (an average of 7.9 correct answers out of 12), atheists/agnostics (6.7) and Jews (6.3) do indeed score better on questions about Christianity than Christians do (6.0). But in the case of the Mormons, this is in large part accounted for by the fact that Mormons are Christians themselves, even if of an unusual kind. The 12 questions about Christianity are primarily about the Bible and its doctrines.Mormons recognize the Bible as one of their holy books (though they differ from other Christians in also paying deference to the Book of Mormon). In the case of atheists/agnostics and Jews, their main knowledge advantage over Christians comes from their much higher levels of knowledge about non-Christian “world religions” (mainly Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism). Jews got an average of 7.9 questions out of 11 in this category, atheists/agnostics 7.5, and Christians a mere 5.0 (the Mormon average was 5.6). While Jews, atheists and agnostics also outscored Christians on knowledge of Christianity, the margin was much smaller.

Thus, the main knowledge advantage of these three religious minorities came on questions that had little if any connection to “survival” as religious minorities in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Moreover, even the minority groups’ edge on knowledge of Christianity cannot be entirely attributed to this factor. After all, several of the questions about Christianity covered parts of the Bible that are also Jewish holy scriptures. Jews have reasons to know about them that are unrelated to their minority status. As for atheists and agnostics, a high percentage of them were raised Christian or Jewish and therefore might have acquired some biblical knowledge that way. In sum, the Bouie-Yglesias theory probably accounts for only a small percentage of the difference between the three high-scoring groups and the rest.

What does account for the difference between these three groups and the rest? I suspect that it is their greater cosmopolitanism. Jews, atheists, and Mormons are all notable for their unusually high levels of interest in other cultures, religions, and philosophies. In the former two cases, this is well-known. Mormons, by contrast, may strike some people as insular. However, the Church actually puts a high emphasis on education and many young Mormons spend two or three years as missionaries abroad, which exposes them to contact with other cultures and religious traditions. Although very different in their religious and (median) political beliefs, Mormons, atheists, and Jews are similar in their higher than average commitment to education and cosmopolitanism. For these reasons, it’s not surprising that these groups outscore the rest on measures of religious knowledge.

A Recent Pew Research Center survey of American’s knowledge about religion shows widespread ignorance. The study asked 32 mostly relatively basic multiple choice questions about various religions (including a few on religion and public life):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life…..

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.

There is also widespread ignorance about constitutional restrictions on the teaching of religion in public schools. Most survey respondents believe that the Supreme Court has banned the teaching of the Bible even as “literature,” and most believe that public schools are not allowed to have “comparative religion” classes:

[A]mong the questions most often answered incorrectly is whether public school teachers are permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature. Fully two-thirds of people surveyed (67%) also say “no” to this question, even though the Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Bible may be taught for its “literary and historic” qualities, as long as it is part of a secular curriculum. [J]ust 36% of the public knows that comparative religion classes may be taught in public schools.

I. Who Knows the Most About Religion?

Which groups have the highest knowledge levels? It turns out that it’s atheists and agnostics (an average of 20.9 correct answers out of 32), though Jews (20.5) and Mormons (20.3) scored almost equally well. The differences between the three groups are statistically insigificant. Atheists, Jews, and Mormons still score higher than other groups even after controlling for education.

Interestingly, atheists and agnostics (6.7 correct answers) score significantly higher than Christians (6.0) on the 12 questions that cover knowledge of Christianity and the Bible. Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) are, however, clearly the high scorers in this subcategory.

II. Is Ignorance About Religion Rational?

In some ways, ignorance about religion may be rational, just like the equally widespread political ignorance. For most voters, it is rational to be ignorant about politics because most people aren’t much interested in politics, political knowledge is rarely useful for everyday life, and the chance of any individual vote determining the outcome of an election is infinitesmal. Of course, individually rational decisions not to spend much time acquiring political knowledge may lead to bad collective outcomes, such as poor electoral decisions and terrible public policies.

In the case of religion, theological knowledge has little utility for everyday life, most people have only limited interest in religious doctrine, and any one individual’s ignorance about religion probably has very little effect on society. Thus, it’s possible that most people are ignorant about religion for much the same reason that they are ignorant about politics. However, economist Bryan Caplan – a leading scholar on public ignorance – has some reservations about this analysis:

If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:

1. Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….

2. Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?

An alternative possibility is that most Americans believe that in order to be saved in the afterlife you just have to be “spiritual” in some vague way. So long as you believe in God (or perhaps multiple gods), the precise details of religious doctrine don’t matter too much. This is consistent with survey data showing that most Americans believe that a variety of religions can lead to salvation, but 50% say that you can’t be a good or moral person if you are an atheist. If all you need for salvation is a kind of vague general religiosity (plus, perhaps, some good works), then you don’t need much actual knowledge of religion.

This, however, still leaves open the question of why most people don’t make more of an effort to determine whether this kind of ecumenical spirituality is actually true. After all, many great religious leaders (e.g. – Luther and Calvin) argued that your soul can only be saved if you embrace the one true faith. Some atheist writers (e.g. – Christopher Hitchens) contend that you are more likely to become a moral person if you reject religion altogether. It may not be rational to reject these possibilities without investigating them in greater depth than most of the American public apparently has. On the other hand, it’s possible that getting at religious truth is so difficult that most people rationally choose not to study it in depth because they know they are unlikely to increase their chances of salvation very much even if they do.

On balance, I think that religious ignorance is somewhat less rational than political ignorance, though far from completely irrational. But the issue is complex and deserves further study.

UPDATE: Some argue that in many religions, it’s faith, not knowledge that determines salvation. This, however, doesn’t really counter Caplan’s point. You need knowledge to know which theological doctrines are the ones you have to have faith in. Should you have faith in Christ, Vishnu, or the doctrines of the Koran? It’s hard to make an informed choice unless you have at least basic knowledge of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

UPDATE #2: The Atlantic has a summary and links to various commentaries on the Pew survey.

The Brisbane Times reports that:

A Queensland University of Technology lawyer[,] … Alex Stewart[,] has taken leave from his non-academic position as a QUT [Queensland University of Technology] commercial contracts lawyer after controversy erupted over a YouTube clip in which he smokes self-made cigarettes rolled in pages from the [Koran and the Bible] before rating which “burns better”….

The Daily Telegraph (UK) reports,

[Stewart] on leave following a meeting on Monday and is facing an inquiry.

“The university is obviously extremely, extremely unhappy and disappointed that this sort of incident should occur,” vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake said.

Stewart’s point was apparently to argue (among other things) that people shouldn’t venerate books to the point of getting upset about others’ supposed mistreatment of the books. “Is this profanity? Is it blasphemy? Does it really matter? I guess that’s the point with all this, this crip — it’s just a [bleeped out] book. Who cares? Who cares?” I quote here a video accompanying the Brisbane Times article, which includes a short excerpt from Stewart’s YouTube clip. But I do not know where one can find the full clip; if you can point me to it, or send me a file containing it, I’d be much obliged.

Note that the Brisbane Times video also quotes a police spokesman who is saying that Stewart’s actions were likely not a criminal offense. Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

UPDATE: Just to repeat what the title says, Stewart is a lawyer working for the university, not a professor.

Co-blogger Eugene Volokh links to an Indian newspaper article about a ruling concerning the property rights of Hindu gods. According to the article, Hindu deities are allowed to acquire at least some types of property rights under Indian law, though perhaps “only deities of registered public trusts were allowed to acquire property in their names.”

It actually makes more sense for deities of polytheistic religions to acquire property than for a monotheistic God to do so. Most adherents of the major monotheistic religions believe in the type of God posited by “classical theism,” who is omnipotent and omniscient. An omnipotent God has no need for physical property. Even if he did, he could effortlessly create any property he needed himself, if necessary in unlimited quantity. And of course he would not need human courts to enforce his property rights, being fully capable of doing so himself at no cost in time or effort. Moreover, anyone who wanted to sue him for using his property to commit a tort would be unable to do so because there is no way a court could force an omnipotent being to pay restitution.

By contrast, most of the deities of a polytheistic religion are necessarily not omnipotent. No more than one omnipotent being can exist in the same universe. If God A cannot coerce God B, then A is not omnipotent. If, on the other hand, A can force B to do his bidding, then B isn’t omnipotent.

Unlike the God of classical theism, non-omnipotent deities have many potential uses for property rights. They might want some items they can’t create for themselves. Even with respect to some objects they could make, they might prefer to pay humans to manufacture them in order to exploit the benefits of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage might also lead them to rely on humans to protect their property against the depredations of other humans (perhaps also other deities). Finally, non-omnipotent deities are at least potentially subject to the power of human courts.

There is, however, one major problem with property rights for non-omnipotent deities. As Eugene points out, it’s hard to prove that the “owners” actually exist and ascertain how they want to use the property in question. The Indian law described in the article appears to handle this problem by limiting deities’ property rights to those that have registered public trusts. In practice, therefore, the gods’ property rights will be exercised by human trustees. This, however, raises the issue of how deities could sue to remove the trustees for breach of their fiduciary duties.

In a recent Slate essay, Ron Rosenbaum argues that agnosticism is preferable to atheism because atheists wrongly believe that they can explain the origins and nature of the universe:

I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

I think Rosenbaum fundamentally misconceives the nature of atheism. Atheism is not a complete theory of the nature of the universe. Rather, as I discussed here, atheism is simply a rejection of the existence of God, by which I mean a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and completely benevolent (the definition [traditionally] accepted by [the vast majority of adherents] of the major monotheistic religions). One can reject the existence of God without believing that we “can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

There are numerous arguments against God’s existence that don’t depend on any particular theory of the origins of the universe. In my view, the “problem of evil” is one of the strongest. For a good and accessible summary of the major arguments for atheism that don’t require explanations for the nature of the universe, see David Ramsay Steele’s recent book Atheism Explained. The “new atheists” whom Rosenbaum attacks also don’t rely on any comprehensive theory of the universe in making their case against the existence of God. Writers like Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have their flaws; but believing that they can explain the origins of the universe isn’t one of them.

But how can atheists rule out the possibility that God created the universe if they don’t have an airtight alternative explanation? The answer is that it’s often possible to rule out one potential explanation for X even if we don’t know for certain what actually caused it. For example, I don’t know why I had a headache a couple days ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t rule out the theory that it was caused by a witch’s curse. There is strong evidence against the existence of witches with magical powers that isn’t tied to any particular explanation for the origins of my headache. Similarly, if we have strong arguments against the existence of God that are not tied to any specific cosmological theory, we have good reason to be atheists even if we can’t explain why the universe exists.

My purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive argument for atheism. That can’t possibly be accomplished in a blog post. Rather, I want to make the much narrower point that such an argument doesn’t require a demonstrably true alternative explanation for the existence of the universe. And most serious atheist writers do not in fact rely on the claim that they have such an explanation.

Rosenbaum is on firmer ground in criticizing some of the rhetorical excesses of the “new atheists.” Richard Dawkins, for example, has foolishly claimed that religious training of children necessarily amounts to “child abuse.” On the other hand, some theists engage in equally ridiculous rhetorical abuse of atheists. Theist intolerance and bigotry against atheists is at least as common as the reverse. For example, some 50% of the American public believe that it is impossible to “be moral and have good values” if you don’t believe in God. In any event, the crude rhetoric and intolerance of some adherents says very little about the ultimate validity of either atheism or theism. And it also doesn’t provide much of an argument for agnosticism.

In this post, I criticized psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa’s widely discussed recent article claiming that more intelligent people are more likely to be politically liberal. Kanazawa also claims that his data shows that more intelligent people are more likely to be atheists. This claim is better supported than the article’s argument about political liberalism. Nonetheless, the evidence isn’t nearly as strong as Kanazawa suggests. My own conjecture is that Kanazawa may be right about countries such as the United States, where atheists are a small minority, but less likely to be correct about the many nations where atheists are a much larger fraction of the population.

On the plus side, Kanazawa’s measure of atheism (survey responses stating a lack of religiousity and lack of belief in God) is better than his extremely dubious definition of liberalism. Even this part of his analysis is not completely airtight, since lack of religiosity doesn’t necessarily equate to lack of belief in God. Still, the two are at least highly correlated, and Kanazawa gets similar results for a General Social Survey question that directly asks respondents whether they believe in God. Controlling for various other variables, including education, gender, and race, more intelligent respondents are more likely to say that they don’t.

Unfortunately, however, Kanazawa improperly generalizes from the US results. Only about 2 to 10 percent of Americans are atheists and agnostics. In an overwhelmingly religious society, it is probable that relatively more intelligent people would be more likely to question conventional wisdom – especially since many of the arguments for atheism are counterintuitive. Kanazawa wrongly assumes that atheism is just as uncommon in the rest of the world as in this country. He cites the fact that The Encyclopedia of World Cultures refers to atheism in its descriptions of only 19 cultures, all of them formerly communist societies where the government coercively imposed atheism on the population. Regardless of what that Encyclopedia might say, however, many nations that have never been communist have large numbers of atheists and agnostics (the distinction between the two is not relevant to Kanazawa’s analysis). According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman’s comprehensive article in the Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Companion to Atheism, there are at least 500 to 750 million atheists and agnostics worldwide. To put it another way, atheism and agnosticism have more adherents than any religious group aside from Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. Survey data compiled by Zuckerman also shows that many never-communist countries have 30% or more of their population who fall into one of these two groups. These nations include Japan (65%), Norway (up to 72%), Denmark (up to 80%), Sweden, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and others. These figures are far from definitive. But they do suggest that atheism is a lot more common than Kanazawa assumes. In the absence of comparative data covering countries where atheism is widespread, Kanazawa’s US data don’t prove that there is any universal tendency for more intelligent people to become atheists.

The fact that atheism is so common in much of the world also undercuts Kanazawa’s and others’ claims that it runs counter to evolutionary instincts. Any such instinctive theism is likely to be relatively weak if atheism can become so widespread despite centuries of repression by political and religious authorities that ruthlessly suppressed it in most of the world up until at least the nineteenth century, or even later.

Ireland has recently enacted a law banning “blasphemy,” which has in turn attracted plenty of justified criticism:

Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.

The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

It defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted”….

But Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the new law by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Björk, Frank Zappa and the former Observer editor and Irish ex-minister Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Michael Nugent, the group’s chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if it were charged with blasphemy.

Nugent said: “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

There are many strong objections to the new Irish law, including the ones noted by the Atheist Ireland leader quoted above. I want to criticize the implicit assumption that it is somehow more justifiable to forbid criticism of religion than of secular political or moral views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t see why it is more objectionable to criticize Christianity or Judaism as opposed to conservatism or Kantianism. One possible answer is that many people are deeply attached to their religious views and are more likely to be offended by harsh criticism than believers in secular ideologies. But that is far from universally true. Some people care deeply about their secular political and moral commitments, as well, and may be just as offended by criticism as religious believers. Think of the reaction of strongly committed environmentalists to harsh criticism of recycling, for example. An alternative defense is that criticisms of religion are particularly likely to be inaccurate or based on unfair prejudices. But there are certainly many examples of inaccurate and unfair attacks on secular ideologies. Just look at the public debate over almost any contentious political issue.

Perhaps the most common argument for treating religion differently is the long history of persecution based on religion. But there is also a long history of persecution targeting advocates of dissenting secular political ideologies. In the last 100 years, it is likely that more people have been killed or imprisoned because of secular political beliefs than because of religious ones. Think of all the people repressed for such reasons under communist, Nazi, and fascist dictatorships. It’s also worth noting that in many countries, there is a long history of persecution of atheists. Arguing for atheism often involves “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by [a] religion.” For example, atheists often forcefully argue that God doesn’t exist, which can certainly be perceived as “insulting in relation” to a “matter” held “sacred” by most of the world’s major religions. Even if anti-blasphemy laws don’t impose a complete ban on pro-atheist speech, they surely have a chilling effect on it. Ironically, the effort to protect religion from persecution has the effect of facilitating prosecution of a group that has been persecuted at least as much as any religion. Note also the asymmetry in allowing unlimited criticism of atheism by religious believers, while the atheists have to carefully calibrate their responses lest they say something that runs afoul of the anti-blasphemy law.

Obviously, the law could potentially be amended to forbid all speech that is “grossly abusive or insulting” to any moral or political views, whether religious in nature or not. However, no liberal society would even consider that approach, since it would have the effect of chilling public debate across the board.

UPDATE: I have made a few changes to the post to eliminate awkward phrasing.