Ridiculousness Isn’t The Key Disagreement in Philosophy of Religion

Your Vibes-Based Argument Has Bad Vibes

I’ve talked a few times on this substack about the different standards atheists and theists are held for conduct. Specifically: If you’re a theist you can say somewhat mean or unfounded things about atheists and get away with it, but the same isn’t true when the roles are reversed.

Unfortunately, one of the most recent editions of this double standard is

Bentham's Bulldog

claiming “A core area of disagreement between atheism and theism: Is theism ridiculous.”

A Core Area of Disagreement Between Theists and Atheists: Is Theism Ridiculous?

This is tiresome for a few reasons:

First, BB perpetuates negative atheist stereotypes, with a neckbearded wojack being the feature image of the post. Look: I don’t want to be oversensitive, but as a non-believer, I think we should treat the invocation of this imagery as unhinged, much as normal people treat those who portray the average religious people as Bible-thumping, gay bashing, science-denying, theocratic maniacs as unhinged.¹

Second, and most importantly, he doesn’t cite any actual atheist who says religion is ridiculous. There’s no polling, no quote, no data at all. I’m not going to pretend there aren’t atheists who believe that religion or theism is ridiculous, but if you’re going to make a bold claim, that ridiculousness is a core disagreement for people in this debate, you should probably cite data.

I watch a sufficient amount of atheist YouTube and read enough atheist substack² that this is resoundingly not my impression of a core disagreement between theists and atheists.

Sure, there are plenty of atheists who are outraged by religious logic and how it’s used to justify bad norms and policies. There are plenty who find religious ideas and philosophy unsatisfactory and incoherent. And yes, there are even some who crash out in frustration, and just call it ridiculous, among other mean things.

But that last group is a minority. If you engage with the people who create content that’s above the effort level typically found in the comment section, (which are themselves unrepresentative because most people don’t comment on videos and blogs), you’ll find respect and civility displayed toward religion, even if there’s also disagreement.

The Low Hanging Fruit

My initial facetious note-length reply to BB’s post is that he’s making up a phenomenon to explain another phenomenon he also made up, but that isn’t quite fair.

Sure, he doesn’t cite any data to show this is a core disagreement, but we’ve all seen atheists in comment sections who were just arrogant, mean, and trollish. That’s data of a kind, but it’s bad data. The average Christian in America is probably worse than the average atheist at understanding what the other believes.

The median atheist in America was either born Christian/religious, was raised by someone who was born Christian/religious, or has someone very close to them who is Christian/religious. They likely left religion after years of being a believer. Meanwhile, the average Christian in America was born Christian and has probably note encountered public non-believers until recently. To make matters worse, many Christians are intentionally not friends with atheists because they are atheists. They think they’re untrustworthy and immoral.³

What’s funny about BB’s argument about smart people disagreeing with you being evidence that you shouldn’t be too confident that you’re right, is that it’s just as true (if not more true!) for non-belief as it is for belief. There are just as many (of not more!) really smart people who don’t believe in God as those who don’t.

Yet BB is not directing his lecture at the 60% of the American population that’s Christian, but the 5% that’s atheist. What exactly are we doing here?

Stereotypes Are Bad

Perhaps BB wants to rebut the cringe reddit atheist he was in high school, he wants to explicate that demon. That’s fine! But generalizing atheists in this way is just purveying negative stereotypes.

One will often see religious apologists wave off the vicious excesses of less-intellectually-curious Christians as “not serious” Christians.⁴ Okay, let’s grant that. Why can’t we say the same thing about anonymous atheist commenters? Because when we fail to make that distinction, and perpetuate stereotypes in articles like BB’s, you put people like me on the defensive.

Though every group is stereotyped, we consider perpetuating stereotypes bad. But somehow, in popular philosophy of religion discourse, it’s normal to treat all atheists like angry reddit commenters. It’s a weird and obvious dynamic, noticed by any non-believer commenting on these issues!

Normal People Are Prohibited From Atheism

BB finishes his post giving boilerplate reasons for why he believes God is more plausible than atheism. These arguments are not meant to be comprehensive, as one who has followed BB will know he has argued at length about them, so I won’t put them under a microscope.

Still, I reject the implication he makes that one has to read all or even 10% or 1% of the theodicy literature to reject theodicies. Specifically, he says:

Very clever people, over the years, have thought of many theodicies, some of almost unfathomable complexity. You—who presumably haven’t read even 1% of what is written on the subject—should not be 99.999% confident that they all fail. You should, in other words, think there is some not unreasonable possibility that God, if he exists, has a good reason for allowing evil.

First of all, BB undersells how many theodicies are! When I took a philosophy of religion class back in the early 2010s, my (theist) professor said that in the aftermath of World War II, you could fill a library with the books written on the problem of evil. I’m not sure if he was just being rhetorical, but I bet you could spend an entire professional career reading all of them.

On a basic level, I think the atheist is going to approach the volume of problem of evil papers differently from BB. Is the fact that we have thousands of papers on the problem of evil indicate that philosophers are just the guy in the striking gold meme…

…or is just that we have a poorly formulated question that won’t have a satisfactory solution?

I personally like

Bryan Frances

’s thoughts on the Problem of Evil in its academic context, some of it joking, some of it not:

Funny Vid on Problem of Evil

I am not smart enough to formulate the conclusive argument for or against theism, to end all religious debates for all time. But at the same time, why is the onus on me, some dude with an email job?

This is again, a double standard. The early 2010s New Atheist in me wants to just call it the Courtier’s Reply, even though it’s probably not. Regardless, it’s unfair that the only thing you have to do to be socially and intellectually accepted as a Christian (see: Bentham and apologists will ignore you, not call you intellectually lazy, and not put up mean stereotyped imagery of you) is accept Jesus into your heart as your savior, while to be socially and intellectually accepted as an atheist you need a PhD in philosophy and read everything ever published on the Problem of Evil.

I love philosophy and reading as much as the next guy. I'm more read on philosophy than the average person. But I intentionally didn't become a philosophy academic because I knew that there was no end to these debates. To the extent that any belief can ever be “justified” (however you may mean that), one doesn't have to reach academic levels of education in the subject, or obsessive levels of hobbyism, to be educated and confident enough to form an opinion.

Unlike something like quantum physics or pharmaceutical research, belief in God is something that effects everyone. The implications of the truth or falsity of God’s existence may touch every aspects of one’s life. Saying or implying an atheist must do all this work, while remaining silent on the pervasive thoughtlessness of many (if not most) theists is an elitist double standard.

A Skeptic Argument For Ridiculousness

Before I close, I want to outline a skeptical argument to take religious arguments seriously, especially if you find them ridiculous. BB is right, ridiculousness is not good grounds to reject Christianity, but not for the reasons he thinks. Once again Bryan Frances (who I’ll remind you is a skeptic) knocked it out of the park:

Possibility of God Existing & Venus Being Made of Cheese

If you’re a true skeptic, the apparent ridiculousness of theistic beliefs should not in itself be evidence against theism, because reality as we observe it and can (somewhat) empirically verify it is ridiculous.

The fact that there are atoms is weird! The fact that our species evolved from mammals that swung on trees is weird!

You can look at any established scientific fact and call it ridiculous, because the only reason we don’t think these facts are ridiculous is because they fit in a framework we are familiar with. Specific facts are familiar, we’re desensitized to them, and then they don’t seem crazy. The ridiculousness fades. Ergo, we are a bad judge or ridiculousness!

Further, when we zoom out and talk about things outside of our direct experience and perception, all of those things look ridiculous and weird because we have no frame of reference. Quantum physics? Weird. Pulsars? Absurd? My favorite FCS football team scoring 50 points in a game in the 2020s? Ridiculous.⁵

It would be weird both if there is and if there isn’t a God. The only thing that would make sense of God’s non/existence is the surrounding context of that fact or explanation, and as an existential condition, that context will always be outside of empirical verification.

At the end of the day, everyone is a poor judge on what is true and what is ridiculous. The whole point of philosophy and science is to make sense of this ridiculousness, as best we can. People who reject ideas because they are ridiculous⁶ are themselves rejecting to think, and for that reason we should not take their opinions seriously.

Still, the people who are problematic here are not mostly skeptics or atheists. I’m tired of these stereotypes being normalized because it makes my life more annoying.⁷

1. I am not one of those people who goes to atheist conferences or likes to talk about atheism all the time. But I love philosophy and identify as a skeptic (not in the James Randi sense, but also the Pyrrho of Ellis sense). I’m sufficiently unconvinced by religious arguments, that I don’t believe it’s something that will change in my life. So when I see this imagery, I feel a little queasy because it feels offensive. As a white dude, I don’t typically feel offense on anything, but there’s really no other word for it, but “I’m offended”

2. Most philosophy content creators that aren’t Joe Folley or Abigail Thorn are obsessed with religion

3. This is a robustly found social science fact that you can just google it, I’m not digging up another study to link

4. Put aside the fact that the Christians who believed the rapture would happen in September far outnumber those that have heard of William Lane Craig)

5. The joke here is that my favorite football team is awful at scoring points. They have not scored 50 points in a single game in over 6 years, and so I have no direct experience of it. Leaving this note here for nerds who don't understand sports.

6. Which I will note, is different from rejecting something because it’s indiscernible, which I do all the time with religious claims all the time.

7. It’s not something I’m going to start a movement or become an activist about (atheist activists are kind of cringe!) but I will tell you to stop being a jerk in blog post format!