A Manual for Creating Atheists (9 page)

OM
: I certainly would.

PB
: And what answer would satisfy you?

(Looking at me as if he didn’t understand)

PB
: I mean, what would he have to say to you to convince you that they were indeed the bones of Christ?

OM
: Well, I don’t really know. I’d have to see why he said that.

PB
: I don’t understand how you could not have a response to something so central to your life. So you’re not sure what would make your belief falsifiable?

OM
: I am sure. As I told you, the bones of Christ.

PB
: But what evidence would it take to satisfy you that they were actually the bones of Christ? If you could never know—or if there would be no way for you to know—that they were the bones of Christ, then your belief isn’t falsifiable. If your belief isn’t falsifiable then do you really believe on the basis of evidence?

(Brief pause)

PB
: I don’t say this lightly, but I don’t think you’re being sincere. You know that there’s absolutely no evidence one could present that would make you change your mind.

OM
: There is. I already told you.

PB
: But you don’t believe that. That’s verbal behavior. You’ve created impossible conditions and you’re okay with that? That’s not the intellectual attitude one has when forming one’s beliefs on the basis of reason and evidence.

(Silence)

PB
: Here’s what I don’t get. Why don’t you just say that you’re not open to evidence and that you’re going to believe anyway? Isn’t that a more honest and sincere way to live your life?

OM
: I told you. I am open to evidence. I’m willing to hear what someone would say.

PB
: I don’t believe you. You’re pretending that you’re open to evidence but you’re not really open to evidence.

OM
: I am open to evidence, but you’re not open to faith.

PB
: This isn’t about me being open to faith; this is about you being open to evidence. You’ve just told me you’re open to evidence, but when pressed you can’t provide details of that evidence. Specifically, what would that evidence look like?

OM
: Faith is belief in things hoped for that reason points toward.

PB
: That’s a deepity. Let’s get back to the question at hand. If a famous archeologist announced that he’d discovered the bones of Christ, what evidence would you need to believe that he was telling the truth?

(End of the conversation)

DIG DEEPER

Articles

Brock and Balloun, “Behavioral Receptivity to Dissonant Information” (Brock & Balloun, 1967)

David Gal and Derek Rucker, “When in Doubt, Shout! Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing” (Gal & Rucker, 2010)

Book

Cass Sunstein,
Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide
(Sunstein, 2009)

Videos

Peter Boghossian, “Walking the Talk”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ARwO9jNyjA

Peter Boghossian, “Critical Thinking Crash Course”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7zbEiNnY5M

NOTES

1. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard writes that anxiety is a key human experience. Most people are afraid of feeling anxiety, and they’ll do anything they can to distract themselves from it. What Kierkegaard means is that if you want to live a full, meaningful human life—catch hold of anxiety and don’t let it go. Use anxiety to follow your thoughts as a guide to see where it leads you. Don’t try to escape. Let it energize your life; let it bring you awareness not only of your ignorance but also of your desire to understand moments in every experience. At least for Kierkegaard, holding onto anxiety is a key to a fulfilled life.
   
2. When people aren’t reasoned into their faith, it is difficult to reason them out of their faith.
   

   Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition. The totality of this endeavor is indeed challenging, but a goal of the Street Epistemologist is to provide people with hope. Reason has emancipatory potential.
   

   There’s something to be said for Pascal Boyer’s account in
   Religion Explained
   that can help to understand this strategy (Boyer, 2001). Boyer is one of the leading figures in what can generally be referred to as neurotheology. Thinkers like Jonathan Haidt, Michael Gazzaniga, and Boyer, research in the areas of anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, neurology, experimental psychology, etc. They’re all moving in similar directions, which is to seek reductive explanations for the appearance of religion in human affairs. They provide interesting albeit speculative answers to a range of related questions: Where did religion come from? What purpose does it serve? How can these issues be viewed from the standpoint of evolutionary biology? In what way does religion help the survival of the fittest? What is religion’s survival value from a cultural standpoint? Why do human cultures invariably develop religious superstitions and ideologies?
   

3. There’s a vast body of literature in sales, marketing, and advertising about persuasion and convincing people to buy products they don’t need. Entire industries revolve around figuring out how to influence consumers’ purchasing behavior. For more on these industries and the techniques they use, I recommend two PBS Frontline documentaries:
   The Persuaders
   and
   The Merchants of Cool
   .
   
4. An interesting but highly technical paper that relates attitudes about information sources to doxastic attitudes is Baltag, Rodenhäuser, and Smets’s “Doxastic Attitudes as Belief-Revision Policies” (Baltag, Rodenhäuser, & Smets, 2011). They write, “This paper explores the idea that an agent’s ‘information uptake’ (i.e., what she does with some new informational input) depends substantially on her
   attitude
   towards the source of information: her assessment of the reliability of the source” (p. 1). Their research is applicable to faith-based beliefs formed on the perception of the evidential accuracy of ancient texts. This article also opens up potential new interventions that target attitudes toward sources of information.
   

   Additionally, I’d recommend social psychologist Arie Kruglanski’s body of work on what he terms “the need for closure.” Kruglanski has published interesting, though not entirely accessible for a lay audience, articles about the importance of being closed-minded.
   

5. Another type of doxastic closure involves ego and narcissism. For example, there are times when we’re too narcissistically involved in our conclusions, when our egos have been involved in a judgment, when we’ve spat out an opinion we’ve held for a long time, or when we don’t want to consider objections because we like to win arguments. It’s important not just to be aware, but also to be sincere when asking ourselves why we hold the beliefs we do. Sincerity is indispensible not just in leading an examined life, but also in having meaningful relationships.
   
6. The less pedantic sounding terms “snapping” (Dubrow-Eichel, 1989, p. 195) and “unfreezing” (Kim, 1979, p. 210) have been used to describe the moment of successful deprogramming when subjects cognitively leave religious cults.
   
7. In an interesting study, Orenstein relates religious belief and church attendance to belief in the paranormal (Orenstein, 2002). Orenstein makes this interesting and overlooked observation: “A particularly intriguing comparison in these data is between religious variables and educational attainment. There have been numerous calls for upgrading science education in order to combat paranormal beliefs… . However, the effects of education are so small that it appears that values and faith rather than rationality are the driving factors in paranormal belief. Moreover, if paranormal beliefs are as closely attached to religious beliefs as these data indicate, were the schools to present a skeptical position regarding the paranormal, they would run the risk of arousing a religiously-based opposition. Some observers suggest that the legitimacy of science itself is under attack by supporters of the paranormal” (Orenstein, 2002, p. 309).
   

   In
   The Believing Brain
   , American author Michael Shermer discusses how science education does next to nothing to undermine belief in the paranormal (Shermer, 2011). Shermer demonstrates that this effect is related to science content, not process. This is why, Shermer argues and I agree, that we need to teach people how to think like scientists (see Shermer’s Skepticism 101 program:
   http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/08/30/skepticism101/
   ) and not just have them memorize science facts (Shermer, personal correspondence, August 16, 2012).
   

CHAPTER 4

INTERVENTIONS AND STRATEGIES

“There’s evidence that religious belief is something that people go into quite quickly, but come out of rather more slowly. True, almost no one is instantly reasoned out of belief. But that’s not to say people cannot be reasoned, or cannot reason themselves, out of a particular religious belief. I have talked to many who have left religious belief behind, and it turns out that a willingness to think critically and independently has almost always played a pivotal role.”

—Stephen Law

“As Christian teachers, students, and laymen, we must never lose sight of the wider spiritual battle in which we are all involved and so must be extremely wary of what we say or write, lest we become the instruments of Satan in destroying someone else’s faith.”

—William Lane Craig,
Hard Questions, Real Answers
(2003, p. 34)

This chapter will provide you with tools and intervention strategies to begin your work as a Street Epistemologist. It covers basic principles of effective dialectical interventions designed to help people abandon their faith. These tools and strategies are pulled from diverse bodies of peerreviewed literature, including those dealing with exiting cults, effective treatments for alcoholics and drug addicts, and even salient pedagogical interventions. In my work as a Street Epistemologist, I deploy the general strategies described in this chapter in conjunction with my principal treatment modality, the Socratic method, discussed in the following chapter. Ultimately, you’ll need to personalize and tailor these techniques and strategies to account for the person with whom you’re speaking, the context, and your own personality and style.

In the United States alone, we have a standing “army” of more than half a million potential Street Epistemologists ready to be empowered, given the tools, and let loose to separate people from their faith. Approximately 312 million people live in the United States. Five percent of the U.S. population does not believe in God (CBS News, 2012). If only five percent of these 15.6 million nonbelievers become Street Epistemologists and actively try to rid the faithful of their faith affliction, then 780,000 Street Epistemologists can be informally deployed to deliver millions of micro-inoculations (of reason) to the populace on a daily basis.

PART I: INTERVENTIONS

Your New Role: Interventionist

“The deprogrammer is like a coach, or a ‘horse whisperer’ who convinces the wary animal that crossing a creek to leave an enclosed area is not so dangerous.”

—Joseph Szimhart, “Razor’s Edge Indeed” (2009)

“Deprogramming, a methodology of inducing apostasy, relies heavily on this need for alternatives to the cultic interpretation of reality. After dissonance has been induced, or even as a method for inducing it, deprogrammers typically present a brainwashing model of conversion and membership in religious cults. This is a type of medical model which essentially absolves individuals of responsibility for making their original commitment, for staying with the movement… . It also holds out … the promise of a viable existence apart from the movement in which the individual will come to again experience independence and intellectual freedom. This facilitates apostasy similar to the way the adoption of a competing religious world view does. Such a model or paradigm provides a cognitive structure with which individuals can reinterpret the cultic world view and their respective experiences in it as well as anticipate a life outside it.”

—L. Norman Skonovd,
Apostasy
(1981, p. 121)

Your new role is that of interventionist. Liberator. Your target is faith. Your pro bono clients are individuals who’ve been infected by faith.

Street Epistemologists view every conversation with the faithful as an intervention. An intervention is an attempt to help people, or “subjects” as they’re referred to in a clinical context, change their beliefs and/or behavior. Subjects start with a faith-based belief or a faith-based epistemology. You administer a dialectical treatment with the goal of helping them become less certain and less confident in their faith commitment (or perhaps even cured of faith entirely).

You will, in a very real sense, be administering a dialectical treatment to your conversational partners in a similar way that drug addicts receive treatment for drug abuse. Drug addicts come into the detox center in state X, undergo treatment, and then leave the facility in state Y, hopefully improved. You will not be treating drug addicts—you will be treating people who have been infected with the faith virus.