Richard Dawkins's Nonsense Makes Me Miss the Not-Quite-New Atheism of Quentin Smith
Instead of being about politicized anti-theism as a front in the culture war, perhaps public atheism could have been about...atheism.
Richard Dawkins is in the news again.
I remember a time when the cultural spotlight couldn’t get enough of him. He was portrayed (brutally) in South Park and given an (affectionate) cameo on The Simpsons. There was an episode of Family Guy where Brian has a meet-cute with a woman at Barnes & Noble because they’re simultaneously reaching for the same copy of The God Delusion. Dawkins went on Fox News to hash it out with Bill O’Reilly about whether referring to Christian beliefs as a “mythology” was the same as calling believers “idiots” and he went on the Daily Show to chum it up with Jon Stewart. You couldn’t escape him.
These days, he only seems to bubble up to the surface of The Discourse when he says something dubious or controversial or slightly dumb. In 2021, example, he decided to branch out into literary criticism:
Most recently, he grabbed the spotlight with comments about his identity as a “cultural Christian” and why he was “slightly horrified” by Oxford Street in London promoting Ramadan rather than Easter. Dawkins said that Christianity is a “fundamentally decent” religion while Islam is not, and justified this contrast by saying the “holy books” of Islam are hostile to women and gays.
This is deeply strange. All religious traditions are sufficiently big and sprawling and self-contradictory to provide plenty of material for believers who want to draw any number of different reactionary or progressive conclusions, but any right-wing fundamentalist preacher—or, I would have thought, any Richard Dawkins-style militant atheist—would have no trouble pointing you Biblical passages condemning same-sex attraction and demoting women to a status somewhere right around sheep and cattle.
Dawkins’s willingness to wage anti-Muslim culture war alongside more-than-cultural Christians says a lot about the long strange death of New Atheism as a movement with real cultural purchase. I don’t particularly mourn it. But it is worth remembering that public atheism didn’t have to be like this.
In 1996, the Atheist Alliance met for their convention in Minneapolis, MN. The speaker they brought in to address them was a 44-year-old philosophy professor named Quentin Smith.
The title of the talk—Two Ways of Proving Atheism—already differentiates Smith’s presentation from the New Atheism that would come into its own a decade later. The “Four Horsemen”—Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—and their acolytes often claimed that it’s impossible in principle to prove atheism, that the request is ridiculous, but that atheism should be the default pending proof of theism. Some of the New Atheists even went around saying that “you can’t prove a negative” which is the sort of claim that tends to induce despair in anyone who’s ever taught a logic class.
Smith’s first “way” proceeds by exploration of contemporary physical cosmology. Some theists, like William Lane Craig, think that physics provides support for the cosmological or “first cause” argument for the existence of God in so far as it gives us a reason to think that the physical universe hasn’t always existed. Craig thinks it’s “intuitively obvious” that nothing can begin to exist without a cause.
But Smith points out that there’s an important ambiguity here. When we talk about a particular thing “beginning to exist” and something “causing” that to happen, in literally every case except the special context of postulating the physical universe as a whole being created by a disembodied intelligence, the kind of “causation” we have in mind is about existing physical matter being more or less dramatically or mundanely rearranged.
Once this ambiguity has been cleared up, how are we supposed to understand the claim that nothing ever “comes into existence” (in the special non-rearranging sense) without a “cause” (in a special sense that isn’t limited to physical causation)? Well, Smith says, this could be true. But why should we think so?
Smith says:
There's absolutely no evidence that it is true. All of the observations we have are of changes in things -- of something changing from one state to another. Things move, come to a rest, get larger, get smaller, combine with other things, divide in half, and so on. But we have no observation of things coming into existence. For example, we have no observations of people coming into existence. Here again, you merely have a change of things. An egg cell and a sperm cell change their state by combining together. The combination divides, enlarges, and eventually evolves into an adult human being. Therefore I conclude that we have no evidence at all that the empirical version of Craig's statement, "Whatever begins to exist has a cause," is true. All of the causes we are aware of are changes in pre-existing materials. In Craig's and other theist's causal principle, "cause" means something entirely different: it means creating material from nothingness.
It’s “pure speculation,” he continues, that this “strange sort of causation” is even possible. It certainly isn’t “supported in our observations in our daily lives.” But the “more important point” is that not only does contemporary physical cosmology not provide any meaningful evidence for a creator (in the absence of Craig’s dubious principle about causation) but cutting-edge physics provides a wholly naturalistic explanation of how the universe came to be. He talks here about Hawking and the Wave Function of the Universe.
This is the part of his argument it’s hardest for those of us who don’t feel confident in making judgments about theoretical physics to evaluate, but his second “way” relies on nothing but “the ordinary logic of induction that we use in our everyday lives.”
This is the Problem of Evil. How, for example, to reconcile the hypothesis of an all-PKG (all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good) being with the Spanish flu wiping out twenty million people just as the world was finishing being ravaged by World War I?
Warming to the point, Smith starts to show a little polemical swagger:
So how do theists respond to arguments like this? They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simply answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil?
And, later:
There's no evidence at all, for example, that twenty million people dying from Spanish influenza is for a greater good. The conclusion follows that God probably does not exist.
Now the theist might respond that there may be some greater good we don't know about. But notice the theist says, "there may be some greater good we don't know about." Well sure there may be some greater good we don't know about. Anything is possible. It is possible there is an elephant stomping through my house. It is possible that Elvis Presley is alive and is doing the twist on the dark side of the moon. But the fact that something is possible does not show it is the least bit probable. So the fact that it is possible that God exists does not show it is the least bit probable that there is a God who created these unknown greater goods. So if someone asks me to accept on faith that there [are] all these greater goods which explain all evil in the world and therefore that God exists, I respond that I'll accept that on faith if you accept on faith that Elvis Presley is now swiveling his hips on the moon.
Full disclosure:
Twenty years ago, Quentin was one of my professors at Western Michigan University . I wrote about him for Arc Digital Media when he passed away, and I’ll direct anyone curious about my personal recollections there and restrict myself here to two relevant points.
First, he might have been able to logic-chop like nobody’s business, but he had a playful streak. He and William Lane Craig co-wrote a book of battling back-and-forth essays called Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. I remember one of my fellow students, a former protestant seminarian who was obviously very much on Craig’s side of the argument, once asked both men to sign his copy. Craig included in his inscription a quote from the Bible complete with chapter and verse numbers. Not to be outdone, Quentin included in his a quotation from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals complete with the page number. (The man had a freakishly good memory. There was also a surprising amount of Heidegger he seemed to be able to call up word-for-word. For an “analytic” philosopher, he had a lot of unabashed “continental” interests.)
Second, between the goatee and the glasses and something about the angle of his face, Quentin looked very slightly devil-ish. I could imagine that making it fun to see him doing things like going on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor in the late 2000s to argue with Bill O’Reilly about God—the way Dawkins and Hitchens did in the actual world.
Can you imagine Quentin giving Bill those lines about being a hundred feet tall or Elvis Presley shaking his hips on the dark side of the moon?
I can. In fact, I can damn near hear him saying that stuff in my head.
Four years before the Atheist Alliance speech, and twelve years before I met him, Quentin published a paper called “Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism.” In that one, he used the language of probability theory to take on the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God—in this case, the version of that argument presented by Richard Swinburne.
That argument proceeds from the premise that there are an insanely narrow range of possible ways the universe could have been which would have made intelligent life like us—or even life at all!—possible, and treats this as evidence that rather than the cosmic roulette wheel going for a single mindless spin and just happening to come down on a universe within that range, the wheel was rigged by God. A standard response by Godless philosophers and physicists is to take refuge in many worlds cosmology and say, essentially, that the wheel has been spun so many times that any particular result is bound to occur. Another one—the one I used in my own debate with Charlie Kirk—is to argue that the improbability of any particular result of a random process can never by itself be convincing evidence that the process wasn’t random. Wherever the wheel stopped, that would have been incredibly unlikely. The range of life-permitting universes only seems significant to us because of our particular interests as living beings.
In this particular paper, instead of taking these familiar routes, Quentin starts with some probability-theoretic machinery I won’t reproduce here, and grants for the sake of argument that if “e” is the evidence from the “anthropic coincidences’ (i.e. various facts about exactly where the roulette wheel stopped that allow us to exist) and “h” is the hypothesis that an all-PKG being exists, e does indeed “confirm” h—i.e. it raises the probability that h is true.
But!
The first thing I want to say by way of evaluating Swinburne's argument is that e confirms h': h' = there is a malevolent creator of the universe, no less than it confirms h.
Given that:
A decision between two hypotheses each of which is equally confirmed by the same evidence e can be made if there is some further evidence e' that disconfirms one of the hypotheses but confirms the other. In the case at hand, e' = there is a large amount of gratuitous natural evil.
The Spanish Flu is perhaps a sufficiently vivid illustration of that last point, but Quentin improves on it elsewhere. In his 1991 paper “An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws,” he starts with a personal anecdote:
Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another.
A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist.
Of course, his actual position wasn’t that the universe was created by Cthulu rather than Jehovah. It was that evil—especially natural evil—is sufficiently powerful evidence to refute the claim that it was created by Jehovah, that there are sufficient naturalistic explanations for our existence, and that it’s at the very least extremely improbable that there’s a supernatural creator of any kind.
In fact, in a different paper on anthropic coincidences, he points out that the very same fact appealed to by advocates of the fine-tuning argument—the dizzying array of different ways the universe could be—also undermines the inference from the improbability of universes allowing for biological life in the familiar sense to the conclusion that the wheel stopped at these physical constants for the sake of ensuring the existence of intelligent beings who could be in communion with God:
If these constants vary from world to world, why cannot other empirical laws vary, like the laws of the association of consciousness with matter and energy? Perhaps in our world consciousness requires neurons, DNA molecules, carbon, planets, etc., but in other words it requires tachyons, virtual particles or radio waves with wavelengths greater than a mile?
One of the saddest moments in the history of New Atheism was Christopher Hitchens’s debate with William Lane Craig. At one point, for example, Craig laid out his version of the “first cause” argument. The Hitch’s response could be gently described as “fumbling".”
Swap out Quentin for Hitchens in the same debate, and presumably he would have trotted out the argument made in Smith’s 2001 paper, Time Was Created By A Timeless Point. There, he essentially points out that even if we accept for the sake of argument every single premise of arguments like Craig’s, and thus the existence of a First Cause, there’s no reason the zero-dimsensional space-time point which Big Bang cosmologists tell us expanded into the universe where we’re all having these conversations couldn’t have been that First Cause.
Smith did, as a matter of fact, do at least one in-person debate with Craig on the existence of God, in addition to their many debates on this and various other topics in the pages of philosophy journals. You can read a transcript here. But that one was two years before the creation of YouTube.
In 2008, Smith appeared on PBS and Western Michigan issued a breathless press release:
It seems television producers just can't get enough of Dr. Quentin Smith, who is becoming Western Michigan University's most visible face on the "small screen."
Millions of television viewers will see the WMU professor of philosophy share his thoughts about the cosmos on a new program…
This was a year after Hitchens’s god is Not Great and two years after Dawkins’s The God Delusion appeared in Barnes & Nobles locations throughout (and beyond) the English-speaking world. The moment was right. But Quentin Smith never became a Horsemen. There were no Family Guy episodes featuring any of Quentin’s books. There was no YouTube superstardom in his twelve remaining years of life.
That’s a shame—at least for anyone who would have enjoyed a version of public-facing atheism that’s smarter than the one we got. There are also probably several straightforward reasons it didn’t happen, ranging from the limits of Quentin’s own interests in putting himself forward in that capacity—why tour the country debating pastors and rabbis when there are papers to write on the metaphysics of time?—to much more depressing reasons having to do with what New Atheism always was.
I said earlier that popular atheist discourse could have been better. There’s a clear sense in which that’s true. But there might also be a sense in which it’s not.
Here’s what I have in mind:
Atheism is a subject of enduring human interest. There will always be people raised in pious homes who start to doubt the existence of God and seek out authors and speakers who can reassure them that their doubts don’t make them crazy or depraved. But the level of cultural prominence the Horsemen achieved in the late 2000s had everything to do with the confluence of post-9/11 anxieties about fundamentalist terrorism and Bush-era liberal anxieties about creeping theocracy. The shape of the culture war has shifted in fundamental ways since then, which may be why Dawkins is trying out new material. But back in the New Atheist era, someone like Quentin, for some of the same reasons he always would have been better at arguing about the existence of God than Dawkins or Hitchens, was never going to be what the moment demanded.
Because he didn’t care about culture war—whether against flag-waving evangelicals or hijab-wearing Muslims. He didn’t care about politics. His atheism, unlike the “New” kind, was actually about atheism. You know—nerd shit.
So perhaps it was never going to be Quentin Smith.
It was always going to be Richard Dawkins sneering the flying spaghetti monster and how “all the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge” and being embarrassed whenever he butted heads with a philosophically competent theist.
If so, that’s further evidence for atheism. Because I have to think a loving God would have given us a better caliber of non-believers.
Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology is a wonderful book. It was the first book I read that helped give shape to my skepticism about the existence of God, but also the back-and-forth essay style was illuminating in a way most philosophy books I’d read at the time struggle to be when presenting multiple sides to an argument.
If you make it all the way to the end, Ben rewards us with this gem, “I have to think a loving God would have given us a better caliber of non-believers.” Nice article! As a long time atheist in the US, I keep hoping that we get a voice that we need to turn the tide once and for all. Probably not in my lifetime, but maybe my kids can live in a time free of religious nonsense.