Were the New Atheists right? No. But!

I was on holiday recently and came down with a bad cold while still a bit jetlagged. I took some Brazilian Tylenol, which it turns out is Good Shit. As a result, I totally passed out and awoke suddenly at two in the morning thinking: ‘Wait a minute… were the new atheists right?‘

What prompted this thought (aside from the Tylenol) was, basically, the United States of America, former bastion of Enlightenment thinking, now a colony of evangelical Christians who hate vaccinations and are cheering on while evil idiots trash the economy, the rule of law and scientific institutions. This is, it has to be said, exactly what the new atheists said would happen if you let superstitious people control the government. The New Atheists of course were not fond of religion, but they saw it as exactly the same as superstition. The belief in the equivalency of religious superstition and other nonsense superstitions was a defining feature of the new atheism. They were just as furious about Uri Geller as they were about the Pope. To the New Atheists, this was the same type of person.

The current state of the USA is good evidence that the new atheists were right about not giving a certain type of person political power. However, not all religious people have caused quite that level of damage. Sadiq Khan is a religious person who runs London pretty well, having cleaned up the air and delivered some pretty big infrastructure projects without bankrupting anything, all while not noticeably causing anything like the level of chaos you might have predicted if you listened too credulously to, e.g., Sam Harris’ opinions about Muslims. So, having slept on it a bit, I’ve come back to my previous view that the new atheists were wrong on the big picture, but they were wrong in more interesting ways than I’d previously given them credit for.

I like to mock Richard Dawkins as much as the next guy, but even I have to admit that as far as epistemology goes, he and his fellow New Atheists1 were not wholly wrong. Whatever philosophical approach you take to its foundations, the scientific method really is the best way of understanding many aspects of the universe. Without wanting to sound tautological, reality is real and we can learn real things about it. The scientific method allows us to do this.

So far, so good. But obviously it wasn’t this that caused me to wake up in a cold sweat in a hot country. The New Atheists weren’t distinguished so much by their adherence to a science-based epistemology as by their insistence that scientific, matter-of-fact ‘rightness’ was also a moral ‘rightness’. Although they rarely put it this way, they clearly found the wrongness of un- or anti-scientific thinking offensive; it was a moral matter for them.

Now, the New Atheists were mostly quite flawed thinkers2 and one of the ways they were flawed is that they did too little self-reflection. One question they should have asked themselves was ‘Why does this make me so angry?‘ If they’d done this, they might have done better at articulating something they always reached after: a moral critique of superstition.

Instead, they largely embraced utilitarianism. To them, superstitions are wrong because they’re anti-utility. If you believe your horoscope contains true information you will make bad decisions about your life. If you believe vaccines don’t work (or are dangerous) you and your children will get sick and die. If you believe that your neighbour worships the wrong god (or the right god the wrong way), you will burn him at the stake.

As these examples show, the problem with the new atheists’ utilitarian understanding of the wrongness of superstition is twofold. First, it’s not at all clear that a belief in heresy necessarily leads to burning at the stake (we stopped doing that a long time ago) or that a belief in star signs leads you to make bad decisions (I’d bet its net effect here is neutral because the patterns behind it are so random). And, if you live in a jurisdiction that mandates vaccines, your false belief that they’re harmful won’t actually in itself hurt you, because you’ll have to get one anyway, so the belief per se, doesn’t cause the purported harm in this case. Secondly, the levels of harm here are far from the same: burning someone at the stake is obviously much worse than concluding that you shouldn’t go out this week because you’re a Libra or whatever3. Yet, as noted above, the new atheists thought all these beliefs were harmful and harmful in the same way and to the same extent.

This is where they should have thought more clearly, because they essentially got the ethics of their own position wrong. Their view is not utilitarian. If it was, they would argue that all these beliefs are equally false (which they are) but not that they’re equally wrong (because from a utilitarian point of view, they’re not).

In fact, what they failed to acknowledge or perhaps to notice is that their idea of superstition was based on an entirely different ethical model, that of virtue ethics. Where utilitarianism focuses on outcomes to the neglect of other considerations, virtue ethicists understand morality as rooted in character and patterns of behaviour; they believe outcomes matter, of course, but they see good outcomes as a necessary function of good character, an effect of right-thinking rather than the goal as such. It is from this point of view, and this only, that we can understand the disgust new atheists felt at the credulity of people who believe in alien abductions, conspiracy theories and homeopathy as well as religion.

The new atheists in fact shared the view of Socrates, that ignorance and evil were more or less the same thing, and that conversely, knowledge was itself a good. This is not a view that is compatible with the utilitarianism they espoused, where not only are facts morally good solely insofar as they add to utility, but where even a falsehood can be a good if it also adds to utility, that is, leads to a positive outcome4. Unfortunately, their obsession with epistemology blinded them to this fact. Their focus on scientific knowledge led them to the quite correct view that religion is false in the same way and to the same extent as every other superstition. But, their worldview is too scientific.

Science as a methodological approach relies on outcomes. You perform a test to see what will happen. Then you repeat the test, to see if the same thing happens. You develop a theory to explain what has happened, then perform more tests to see if the theory holds. Utilitarianism, similarly, claims to judge the morality of an act based on outcomes. This is the source of its appeal to scientists like Hitchens and Harris5. However, as we have seen, utilitarianism cannot claim that or adequately explain why astrology is just as morally wrong as anti-vax views.

Virtue ethics allows us to see both what is actually wrong with an evangelical Christian, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and what she has in common with RFK Jr., Donald Trump and Elon Musk6 who, whatever they say, are not religious people. It also allows us to see how different these people are from, say, Joe Biden, who actually is a deeply religious man, or the late Pope (who was, I hear, also a Catholic).

The problem with the MAGA adherents, and what they actually have in common, is not that they hold beliefs that are false (they share that with Joe Biden and, indeed, with everyone). Nor is it that their beliefs have negative outcomes, nor even that their actions have negative outcomes (though they plainly do). The problem is that they are deeply flawed characters. In fact, they hold the beliefs they do because they are false. They positively enjoy stating their obviously false beliefs because it make other people uncomfortable. Still more, they enjoy the power to act on beliefs they know are false, because this makes people still more uncomfortable and, indeed, often actually hurts people. Thus, the particular set of false beliefs they hold are less relevant than, and merely an excuse for, their desire to hurt people. In this, they are the same as Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, both atheists (indeed, both Marxists, as was Hitchens) whose core motive was quite plainly that they enjoyed inflicting pain, and who were also both given to making statements they knew were false in order to discomfit their perceived enemies. That all these people had and have such a large – and ever-growing – number of enemies is also due to their faulty personalities. It would be rational to think that they identify their enemies, then develop a desire to hurt them7. In fact, they act in the opposite direction: they identify who they can get away with hurting, and then declare them enemies.

Their false beliefs stem from and are also intertwined with their terrible personalities. To put it another way, they would be awful people who inflicted harm whatever they believed, as long as it was false; at the same time, they would not be the people they are – have the characters they have – if they held broadly true beliefs about the world or their place in it.

So much for the obviously evil MAGA crowd. What does this have to do with your more run-of-the-mill believers in homeopathy or crop circles?

I wouldn’t want to claim an equivalence between an actually evil person, like RFK Jr., and someone who occasionally takes homeopathic remedies because he has a headache. But we don’t need equivalence to note similarity. They share a species of wrongness which is a matter of degree, rather than of type. There is no reason to persist in the falseness of superstitions that have been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved. Doing so anyway does, as virtue ethics tells us, suggest a personality flaw: it cannot be good to possess a tendency to believe false things or to persist in those beliefs when they are shown to be false. This goes just as much for classic superstitions as it does more contemporary ones, on indeed for any other non-superstitious false belief.

Being wrong is not itself evil or stupid. It is, in fact, inevitable. This is the value of the scientific method (and, indeed, of philosophy and journalism, as Dennett and Hitchens might have told us), an approach that, correctly applied, can help us identify where we are wrong. However, deliberately embracing and persisting in believing in false things is wrong, morally speaking, but this moral wrong is, crucially, separate from the falseness of any beliefs held or espoused as a result.

In failing to distinguish between morality (wrongness) and fact (falseness), and in failing to correctly identify the source of their moral discomfort at falseness, the New Atheist epistemology was, and remains, wrong.

1. Principally, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. It should be added that these four people had very different beliefs about nearly everything except atheism and, as we will see, ethics. Dawkins is a biologist who seems to have fairly generic conservative opinions, whereas Hitchens was a sort of unorthodox Trotskyist or ‘conservative Marxist’, per his own description. Dennett was an actual philosopher, while Dawkins and Harris were scientists by profession who are really just dilettantes when it comes to philosophy (as, I should confess, am I) while Hitchens was originally a journalist. It is interesting that their three professional approaches to truth converged in this way. ↩︎
2. Honourable exception to Dennett, who was at least an actual philosopher and had other ideas (including about atheism and secularism) that were at least interesting. ↩︎
3. I neither know nor care how star signs ‘work’, because I know that they don’t. ↩︎
4. A utilitarian might thus argue that religion is good if religious people give more money to charity, a view specifically rejected by New Atheists demonstrating that, despite what they claimed, they were not utilitarians. ↩︎
5. Needless to say, not all scientists share their view. ↩︎
6. That the New Atheists have sometimes found themselves awkwardly on the same side as these people is, ironically, a consequence of something else they were right about. The truth value of a statement is not correlated with who is making the statement (although this doesn’t mean such contexts are irrelevant to our understanding). Some adherents of the contemporary identity politics movement overemphasised the context given statements by the speaker’s identity in a way that, at times, tripped over into the very dicey claim that the identity of the speaker mattered more than the truth of the statement, a concept that was anathema to the New Atheist way of looking at things. The MAGA movement’s opposition to identity politics, rooted in out-and-out racism and misogyny, thus put them on the same side as the New Atheists insofar as the New Atheists went too far the other way, totally denying the relevance of identity to our understanding of the meaning of a statement. There may be a conflict here between ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. The fact is that someone can say something factually true while, on a moral level, essentially lying. ↩︎
7. The belief that cruelty and suffering on some level ‘work’, i.e., have good outcomes, is widespread but false. ↩︎