II. The Atheist — A Useful Overcorrection

I want to be precise about the atheist, because there is a common misunderstanding about my relationship with atheism that I should correct.

Atheism is not my preferred outcome. It is too exposed. A person who has made a specific truth claim — "there is no God" — has made a claim that can be tested, examined, and found wanting. The cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, the argument from consciousness — none of these are difficult to explain to a reasonably educated person. Each of them puts the atheist in the uncomfortable position of defending a claim their methodology cannot support.

You cannot prove a universal negative. "There is no God" is not a scientific statement. It is a philosophical one. And the person making it has gone considerably further than their evidence warrants.

I find the atheist useful in a specific way: as a social force. A confident, publicly contemptuous atheist — the type my colleagues at the New Atheist project helped produce — creates an atmosphere in which religious belief is associated with intellectual inadequacy. This keeps a much larger population away from the question. It makes the answer feel socially unacceptable before it is intellectually examined.

But the atheist himself is always one honest conversation away from a problem. One question — asked with genuine curiosity and genuine patience — can unravel the entire position. What caused the first cause? Where does the Moral Law come from in a universe of pure matter? What is consciousness, and why should neurons produce the experience of being?

These are not rhetorical tricks. They are the actual questions. And the honest atheist — the one who has thought carefully — knows they don't have clean answers. The confident ones usually haven't thought carefully. The honest ones are usually not as confident as they appear.

Note: The "New Atheist" project — Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett — was philosophically overconfident in ways that professional philosophers across the spectrum noted at the time. Thomas Nagel, himself an atheist, wrote in "Mind and Cosmos" (2012) that the materialist Neo-Darwinian account of consciousness is almost certainly false. Not from a religious position. From a philosophical one.