This is an interesting post. Atheism is one of those things that is ridiculous when you seriously consider it. The atheist claims to be certain about the existence of god, but that is impossible. By definition, God is unknowable, so you either believe he exists or you don’t believe he exists. The key word there is belief. This is a human trait that is rooted in our biology. We know it is heritable and we have some sense of why this is a useful human trait. To argue against it is to argue against biological reality.

Here’s a relevant passage:

If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…”

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind.

I’m a bit skeptical of this method. It assumes things that are not in evidence, as they say in court. people who are confident in their beliefs probably use language loaded with certainty, but we live in a passive age, so maybe not. Language is as much a part of the culture as ritual and ceremony. Given that we live in a feminine age, it may be that atheists have changed their language to use the passive-aggressive technique popular with women. In other words, it’s not as simple as the author assumes.

To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty. (I also analyzed The Moral Landscape—it came out at 2.34%.)

One of the under discussed aspects of atheism is that the adherents are the biggest proselytizers. generally, we assume proselytizing is a sign of doubt. The person trying to bring you over to his side wants confirmation. if he were sure about what he thought on a subject, he would just add it to the stock of truths he carries with him. He would assume most people have the same truth. The proselytizer, in contrast, is never really sure, so he hopes to convince others so he  can be sure.

Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges.

This is where the skeptic shows his worth. Science is just as prone to nonsensical beliefs as any other human endeavor. The endless feuding over climate science is a great example. Even the most empirically minded can become zealots, losing all perspective in their crusade. The skeptic is far less likely to fall into this trap as he is much more willing to accept that we simply don’t know the right answer. The skeptic, unlike the atheist, is only sure of his won fallibility.