Is atheism dead? Yeah, kinda.
There are a couple people in my life who constantly remind me that the internet exists, and thanks to one of those people I watched a video interview of a guy who wrote a book called Is Atheism Dead? The interview was hosted by Sean McDowell, a friendly dad-like spirit who one of my internet mediums frequently feels the need to channel for me. I think Sean McDowell is a nice guy, and I really appreciate the effort he makes to bridge divides between people of differing beliefs. Simply because I’m familiar with his content, I think I will have to come back at some point to write some constructive criticism of things he could do better, but I do support his endeavors to make the world a more communication-friendly place. When it comes to certain of his views, and to some of the people he interviews though, my opinion may be noticeably less positive.
Returning to the title of this particular guest’s book, the point I want to make about it is that it fits in perfectly to a pattern of choices that reveal how out-of-touch many who focus on Christian apologetics are with today’s world. If you peruse the books and videos on apologetics out there, you will notice that a lot of them seem fixated on atheism. They want to tell Christians how to defend themselves rhetorically against atheist attacks, or they want to explain why atheism is illogical. (This second approach is what the book Is Atheism Dead? is going for.) Sean McDowell himself frequently addresses atheists in his videos, reminds Christians that they can be friends with atheists, and even sometimes pretends to be an atheist so that Christian students can practice conversing with him in that guise.
To me, this all feels like yet another way that apologists continue to live in the 1860s. While there might have been a time when the primary threat to Christian beliefs was an intellectual assertion that God did not exist (was there?), I think we’re far past that now. Today, if you care enough to label yourself an atheist, you care more about religion than a lot of people. Apologists make it sound like Christians are going to be faced by hundreds of grumpy little academics itching for a debate on some conflated mixture of theology and quantum physics, but come on—Have you made friends outside of church? For many people today, being asked to argue against God’s existence would be like being asked to argue that The Silmarillion is not a true history of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Most people alive don’t believe that The Silmarillion is a true history of Middle Earth, not because they’ve rejected the idea that it is, but because they’ve never thought of it one way or the other.
Now, with the concept of God being much more widely known than The Silmarillion, the response to the question of whether God exists isn’t going to be, “What in the world are you talking about?” but it’s likely to be a yes, no, or maybe unaccompanied by any interest in defending the position because the position just isn’t that important. This isn’t a win for your typical conservative apologist because a person who says, “Yes, God is out there somewhere, but I don’t claim to understand who God is in any detail,” is not the same thing as a Bible-believing, born-again Christian.
I don’t know what goes on in the minds of apologists, but from my perspective as an outsider it sometimes looks as if their strong focus on atheism is simply the result of their wanting a good fight. It’s not fun to challenge someone who doesn’t care, so atheists end up being singled out. They’re not the biggest threat, but they’re good debate material. Or maybe the issue is just that Christian apologists don’t know where to start when it comes to trying to influence people who have never seen religion as important, so they stick to what they know? Or maybe they really are so out-of-touch that they don’t realize how much the very concept of atheism is irrelevant to a lot of people?
This view on the irrelevance of atheism is just my opinion of course and is heavily influenced by the limited number of cultures I’ve lived daily life in. But it’s worth noting that the apologetics materials I’m used to encountering are typically produced by English-speakers living in the United States, with much of their focus being on the United States as far as I can tell, and to me they seem out of touch with today’s United States as experienced by people my age and younger. If fewer and fewer people are identifying with the beliefs Christian apologists would like them to hold, it doesn’t look to me like this is happening primarily because they’re becoming atheists but rather primarily because they simply have better things to do with their time than to develop any well-articulated position on religion whatsoever. (To be accurate, the number of atheists in the US has increased, but if you look at the percentages and compare them to the percentage of people who are Christian but not the sort of Christian apologists want them to be, it's not so much that atheism is dead as that it was never all that alive, at least not compared to the practice of being only comfortably religious, which is absolutely thriving.)
To me, it’s already weird that we even have a term like “atheist.” Imagine if we viewed the entire world as being divided up into people who preferred the original Star Trek and people who preferred Next Generation and so on with all the denominations of people who preferred the various series. People would ask, “What kind of trekkie are you?” and if you didn’t like any of it, you would be considered an anti-trekkie. When people thought of who you were, a large part of what formed their understanding of your identity would be the idea that you had rejected the option of being any type of Star Trek fan.
Of course, that’s not how we conceive of that particular issue. We don’t assume that everyone has a position on Star Trek or use a special word to denote those who aren’t fans because there are so many people who don’t know or care enough about Star Trek to fit into any such categories.
I understand that it’s different when it comes to religion because historically so much of the world’s population did belong to one religion or another and did place enough importance on religion that it made sense to categorize people by their religious positions. I know that historically it was unusual not to agree with any of the positions offered and so the position of disagreement itself warranted a name.
It is funny though that the best thing that could happen in the view of the classic anti-religious atheist is for atheism to be dead: for it to become a thing not worth naming, a state of rejection that doesn’t even exist anymore because people have no familiarity with the concepts they’re supposed to be rejecting.
Perhaps this too is why Christian apologists keep acting as if atheism mattered more than it does. Christianity is the be all and end all of their world, and in their mind it is impossible that it could fade away and be forgotten, so they fail to notice the extent to which people nowadays overlook religion and instead keep assuming that those who are not Christian actually hold a specific intellectual position against Christianity. It does already seem like a running theme to me that apologists refuse to refine their theory of mind: All my life I’ve been hearing apologetics arguments that assume non-Christians know Christians are right but lie about it, that people only stop believing in God because they are angry at mistreatment from the church, that nonbelievers have zero basis for morality and have to admit their position is nonsensical if you ask them why they think some actions are wrong, and so on. Given the substandard theory-of-mind track record I’ve witnessed, it makes sense that many apologists would fail to understand the way those who don’t care about religion see the world. When you are used to an environment in which everyone views religious questions as the most important parts of life, it’s difficult to visualize how much some people would struggle to even begin seeing religion as more than a trivial matter of opinion.
I try to be aware of this unchurched perspective myself: I do realize deep down inside that being an atheist is super lame. I mean, I try to sound a little less lame by saying “nihilist” because at least that gets a double-take sometimes, but I kinda wish I was cool enough to not care about this stuff. The only reason I’m specifically atheistic instead of just being a person who isn’t part of any particular religious fandom is because I was raised to think that religion was by far the most important thing in life and now I can’t stop thinking that way. I feel like an anachronism being an atheist in the 2020s, but I only got here by starting off as an anachronism who thought the earth was 6,000 years old in the 2010s.
The other day, after telling someone about my book, I started to wonder if its contents would sound ridiculous to the person once they actually read them. How could someone who wasn’t raised fearing that their eternal fate could hang on the intricacies of first century Greek grammar understand the impulse that drives me to make the Bible-nerd arguments the book is full of? Sometimes I feel like the priorities I was raised with have left me cut off from the real world. Our elders instructed us so diligently not to value this earthly life, and then the things we were supposed to value instead turned out not to be real. So now instead of constantly thinking about how religion is true like I used to I've just shifted to constantly thinking about how it's not true. What would life be like as someone who thinks about real stuff, I wonder?
What apologists should realize is that if you've spent your life accustomed to focusing on real things it can be a little hard to see why concepts like substitutionary atonement for sin matter. Maybe you feel some deep guilt about something you've done, and maybe having a higher power say you're forgiven helps with that guilt, and maybe it makes sense to you that the higher power couldn't just forgive you like a person does but had to have his son die first. But maybe none of that makes any sense at all and the speech about Jesus dying for your sins flies as far over your head as a calculus problem would for a kindergartner. Apologists act like everyone knows what a derivative is. Everyone is born with an innate knowledge of derivatives even! But in reality you need layer upon layer of background knowledge before you can understand the concept just as you need layers of cultural and historical and theological background information before you can even parse the meaning of the Christian gospel, let alone decide whether you think it's true.
Many people who call themselves atheists, at least in historically Christian areas, probably know this background information and just disagree with Christian conclusions on it. That's something an apologist can work with. Apparently a person who isn't going to remember what an apologist said in five minutes because it's so devoid of connections to anything they think about day-to-day isn't really the sort of person the average apologist feels they can work with. So they just keep talking as if when you tell someone they can be reconciled to God, they're definitely going to understand what you mean by that.
What's my point in all this? Nothing grand really. Just that there aren't that many people who are specifically atheists in this country but Christians seem so fixated on them. And I really want to be a cool person. If you're cool and you know how to stop spending the majority of every day thinking about religion, let me know! Preferably no drugs.
Returning to the title of this particular guest’s book, the point I want to make about it is that it fits in perfectly to a pattern of choices that reveal how out-of-touch many who focus on Christian apologetics are with today’s world. If you peruse the books and videos on apologetics out there, you will notice that a lot of them seem fixated on atheism. They want to tell Christians how to defend themselves rhetorically against atheist attacks, or they want to explain why atheism is illogical. (This second approach is what the book Is Atheism Dead? is going for.) Sean McDowell himself frequently addresses atheists in his videos, reminds Christians that they can be friends with atheists, and even sometimes pretends to be an atheist so that Christian students can practice conversing with him in that guise.
To me, this all feels like yet another way that apologists continue to live in the 1860s. While there might have been a time when the primary threat to Christian beliefs was an intellectual assertion that God did not exist (was there?), I think we’re far past that now. Today, if you care enough to label yourself an atheist, you care more about religion than a lot of people. Apologists make it sound like Christians are going to be faced by hundreds of grumpy little academics itching for a debate on some conflated mixture of theology and quantum physics, but come on—Have you made friends outside of church? For many people today, being asked to argue against God’s existence would be like being asked to argue that The Silmarillion is not a true history of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Most people alive don’t believe that The Silmarillion is a true history of Middle Earth, not because they’ve rejected the idea that it is, but because they’ve never thought of it one way or the other.
Now, with the concept of God being much more widely known than The Silmarillion, the response to the question of whether God exists isn’t going to be, “What in the world are you talking about?” but it’s likely to be a yes, no, or maybe unaccompanied by any interest in defending the position because the position just isn’t that important. This isn’t a win for your typical conservative apologist because a person who says, “Yes, God is out there somewhere, but I don’t claim to understand who God is in any detail,” is not the same thing as a Bible-believing, born-again Christian.
I don’t know what goes on in the minds of apologists, but from my perspective as an outsider it sometimes looks as if their strong focus on atheism is simply the result of their wanting a good fight. It’s not fun to challenge someone who doesn’t care, so atheists end up being singled out. They’re not the biggest threat, but they’re good debate material. Or maybe the issue is just that Christian apologists don’t know where to start when it comes to trying to influence people who have never seen religion as important, so they stick to what they know? Or maybe they really are so out-of-touch that they don’t realize how much the very concept of atheism is irrelevant to a lot of people?
This view on the irrelevance of atheism is just my opinion of course and is heavily influenced by the limited number of cultures I’ve lived daily life in. But it’s worth noting that the apologetics materials I’m used to encountering are typically produced by English-speakers living in the United States, with much of their focus being on the United States as far as I can tell, and to me they seem out of touch with today’s United States as experienced by people my age and younger. If fewer and fewer people are identifying with the beliefs Christian apologists would like them to hold, it doesn’t look to me like this is happening primarily because they’re becoming atheists but rather primarily because they simply have better things to do with their time than to develop any well-articulated position on religion whatsoever. (To be accurate, the number of atheists in the US has increased, but if you look at the percentages and compare them to the percentage of people who are Christian but not the sort of Christian apologists want them to be, it's not so much that atheism is dead as that it was never all that alive, at least not compared to the practice of being only comfortably religious, which is absolutely thriving.)
To me, it’s already weird that we even have a term like “atheist.” Imagine if we viewed the entire world as being divided up into people who preferred the original Star Trek and people who preferred Next Generation and so on with all the denominations of people who preferred the various series. People would ask, “What kind of trekkie are you?” and if you didn’t like any of it, you would be considered an anti-trekkie. When people thought of who you were, a large part of what formed their understanding of your identity would be the idea that you had rejected the option of being any type of Star Trek fan.
Of course, that’s not how we conceive of that particular issue. We don’t assume that everyone has a position on Star Trek or use a special word to denote those who aren’t fans because there are so many people who don’t know or care enough about Star Trek to fit into any such categories.
I understand that it’s different when it comes to religion because historically so much of the world’s population did belong to one religion or another and did place enough importance on religion that it made sense to categorize people by their religious positions. I know that historically it was unusual not to agree with any of the positions offered and so the position of disagreement itself warranted a name.
It is funny though that the best thing that could happen in the view of the classic anti-religious atheist is for atheism to be dead: for it to become a thing not worth naming, a state of rejection that doesn’t even exist anymore because people have no familiarity with the concepts they’re supposed to be rejecting.
Perhaps this too is why Christian apologists keep acting as if atheism mattered more than it does. Christianity is the be all and end all of their world, and in their mind it is impossible that it could fade away and be forgotten, so they fail to notice the extent to which people nowadays overlook religion and instead keep assuming that those who are not Christian actually hold a specific intellectual position against Christianity. It does already seem like a running theme to me that apologists refuse to refine their theory of mind: All my life I’ve been hearing apologetics arguments that assume non-Christians know Christians are right but lie about it, that people only stop believing in God because they are angry at mistreatment from the church, that nonbelievers have zero basis for morality and have to admit their position is nonsensical if you ask them why they think some actions are wrong, and so on. Given the substandard theory-of-mind track record I’ve witnessed, it makes sense that many apologists would fail to understand the way those who don’t care about religion see the world. When you are used to an environment in which everyone views religious questions as the most important parts of life, it’s difficult to visualize how much some people would struggle to even begin seeing religion as more than a trivial matter of opinion.
I try to be aware of this unchurched perspective myself: I do realize deep down inside that being an atheist is super lame. I mean, I try to sound a little less lame by saying “nihilist” because at least that gets a double-take sometimes, but I kinda wish I was cool enough to not care about this stuff. The only reason I’m specifically atheistic instead of just being a person who isn’t part of any particular religious fandom is because I was raised to think that religion was by far the most important thing in life and now I can’t stop thinking that way. I feel like an anachronism being an atheist in the 2020s, but I only got here by starting off as an anachronism who thought the earth was 6,000 years old in the 2010s.
The other day, after telling someone about my book, I started to wonder if its contents would sound ridiculous to the person once they actually read them. How could someone who wasn’t raised fearing that their eternal fate could hang on the intricacies of first century Greek grammar understand the impulse that drives me to make the Bible-nerd arguments the book is full of? Sometimes I feel like the priorities I was raised with have left me cut off from the real world. Our elders instructed us so diligently not to value this earthly life, and then the things we were supposed to value instead turned out not to be real. So now instead of constantly thinking about how religion is true like I used to I've just shifted to constantly thinking about how it's not true. What would life be like as someone who thinks about real stuff, I wonder?
What apologists should realize is that if you've spent your life accustomed to focusing on real things it can be a little hard to see why concepts like substitutionary atonement for sin matter. Maybe you feel some deep guilt about something you've done, and maybe having a higher power say you're forgiven helps with that guilt, and maybe it makes sense to you that the higher power couldn't just forgive you like a person does but had to have his son die first. But maybe none of that makes any sense at all and the speech about Jesus dying for your sins flies as far over your head as a calculus problem would for a kindergartner. Apologists act like everyone knows what a derivative is. Everyone is born with an innate knowledge of derivatives even! But in reality you need layer upon layer of background knowledge before you can understand the concept just as you need layers of cultural and historical and theological background information before you can even parse the meaning of the Christian gospel, let alone decide whether you think it's true.
Many people who call themselves atheists, at least in historically Christian areas, probably know this background information and just disagree with Christian conclusions on it. That's something an apologist can work with. Apparently a person who isn't going to remember what an apologist said in five minutes because it's so devoid of connections to anything they think about day-to-day isn't really the sort of person the average apologist feels they can work with. So they just keep talking as if when you tell someone they can be reconciled to God, they're definitely going to understand what you mean by that.
What's my point in all this? Nothing grand really. Just that there aren't that many people who are specifically atheists in this country but Christians seem so fixated on them. And I really want to be a cool person. If you're cool and you know how to stop spending the majority of every day thinking about religion, let me know! Preferably no drugs.
Some statistics showing the percentage of atheists in US is small while the percentage of nominal Christians who don't meet most apologists' standards is large:
This 2021 Barna release reports 69% of respondents call themselves Christian while only 9% hold what Barna considers a biblical worldview and only 6% hold a biblical worldview and "demonstrate a consistent understanding and application of biblical principles" according to Barna's standards.
An article reporting on the above for those who want to avoid downloading the PDF: https://julieroys.com/george-barna-survey-biblical-worldview/
A summary of Pew Research data on atheism and related topics mentioning, among other things, that 4% of respondents from 2018 and 2019 surveys called themselves atheists: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/06/10-facts-about-atheists/
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