The Making of an Atheist
As you might have noticed on the sidebar, my latest book, The Making of an Atheist, has just been released. In the book I discuss the moral-psychological roots of atheism, showing how disbelief in God is not the result of an intellectual assessment of evidence but rather the consequence of willful suppression of the truth about God. Essentially, I turn the tables on Richard Dawkins and his ilk, as I argue that it is not theists but atheists who are delusional. You can find out more about the book here.
I was recently interviewed about the book on Prime Time America. The interview is in two 10-minute parts. Here are links to the first and second parts of the interview.
Tags: atheism, The Making of an Atheist
Print This Post
February 8th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
While I have not read the book, I am skeptical of the psychological paradigm. Even if the individuals did deconvert from a religion, it does not mean that they did not have rational arguments for not believing that may have motivated the change; nor does it mean that they did not develop rational arguments after deconverting for not believing in God.
Rather, this seems as an ad hominem attack on the new atheists by saying that their motivations for believing that God does not exist was motivated by something other than pure reason (which I’ve never heard any of my atheist friends claim, some of whom are new atheists). The truth of a belief is independent of the emotions that an individual holds. If we discovered that Heisenberg contemplated suicide because his principles for quantum mechanics rendered his Newtonian view of the world completely null at the atomic level, it would not change the fact that his principles are rationally motivated and grounded in evidence. Or if Godel was spurred to prove the incompleteness of mathematics because his logician father beat him, it wouldn’t change the power of his proof for the incompleteness of arithmetic. What is needed to counter the new atheists’ claim that they hold a rational belief is an argument showing that each and every one of the possible arguments against the existence of god cannot be rationally grounded and therefore are subject solely to the psychology of the individual. An argument of that sort ought to be shared freely with the world so that all the new atheists could learn from it; it should not submerged in a book to profit off of it.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:47 am
James,
You would do well to read my book first before commenting on it.
You misconstrue my book’s claims at several points. I do not pretend to offer an argument against atheism, in which case my thesis would indeed be an ad hominem. Rather, I develop an explanatory account of atheism, which is very different.
As for your point that the truth of a belief is independent of any person’s emotions, I heartily agree. But the question is whether one’s beliefs ABOUT what is true are independent of influence by one’s emotions (or other non-cognitive factors). That beliefs are not immune to such influence is a plain psychological fact—even in the sciences, as so powerfully shown by such philosophers of science as Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, among many others.