Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Ross Douthat’s “how i lost my faith in atheism”

Others may know of Ross Douthat who writes for the NYT, etc.  He’s often known as Ross Douche-hat for his blatant lies.  He has another article on just how wrong atheists are, in which he fails again to show his imaginary friend exists at all.  “How I Lost My Faith in Atheism“ 

“Late in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus confesses his crisis of Catholic faith to a close friend. The friend asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen responds, “but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

Yep, this has started with a “bang”, it’s hilarious how yet again we can see how Christians love to attack each other and not one of them can show that their particular version is any better than the rest. 

“I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism—charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, when I was just a bit younger than Dedalus’s age in James Joyce’s novel. I read the book soon after my conversion, and while lamenting the main character’s loss of faith, I had a convert’s sympathy for his formulation of the religious options: that the intellectually serious choice was Catholicism or atheism, the Church of Rome or nothing.”

Yep, here’s Ross again insisting that only his version is the “right” one like every other cultist does with no evidence.  Curious how Catholics aren’t all they want to pretend they are. 

“Alongside Joyce, I had good intellectual company in this belief, from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America envisioned an eventual religious “division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome”—to Herman Melville, who predicted that “Rome and the atheists” would “fight it out,” with “Protestantism being retained for the base of operations sly by Atheism.””

Nice argument from authority fallacy, and again, still quite sure his cult version is the right one. 

“When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion—especially when you’re sitting down to write a general case for faith, as I’ve done in my new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That change has carried me well away from Stephen Dedalus’s young man’s formulation. I am still a believing Catholic, and I would still urge a Protestant friend to swim the Tiber. But I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future—as far as we can see it—will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out. “

Ross does indeed have a book out called “Believe: Why everyone should be religious” aka why everyone should agree with him and his baseless claims (it’s just a very long version of Pascal’s wager).  It’s amusing that he insists how he’s still right but well, he can understand why someone might not want his particular cult but darn it, they have to be part of some cult. 

“In part, that reflects a greater understanding of critiques of Catholicism, and a stronger expectation of Protestantism’s resilience. But equally importantly, it reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism.

The first shift has a moral, a theological, and a sociological component. Morally, the experience of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, which broke a little while after my conversion, gave me a clearer sense of why a reasonable Christian might retain faith in Jesus Christ while doubting the hierarchical order of the Roman church. Theologically, the shift from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis has revealed an instability in Catholic doctrine, a lack of synthesis between the church before the Second Vatican Council and the church after, that was less apparent in my youth. (Once you have found yourself crossways with the pope in public disputation, it’s hard to be too triumphalist about Catholicism’s advantages.)”

ROFL.  It’s great when Ross claims to understand why Catholics aren’t immediately obeyed, and he is surprised that another cult is just like them in “resilience”.  Then he tries to claim how this somehow makes him lose “faith” in atheism.   He never had any in the first place, but nice false claims made in order to yet again lie about atheists. 

It’s hilarious that the catholic raping of children and hiding the rapists has Ross say that it “gave me a clearer sense of why a reasonable Christian might doubt” his church.  This is a common Christian tactic, blame the people, but oh their god is blameless, you know, despite it being omnipotent, omniscient, and supposedly loving children.  Sorry, Ross, it’s your imaginary friend doing nothing that causes people to leave your cult. 

I do enjoy poor Ross is terribly upset that Catholicism isn’t what it claims to be and its “doctrines” aren’t agreed upon, even by their supposed hotline to god.  That the catholics are busy attacking each other and their various popes is just precious.  Alas, for poor Ross, Catholicism has no more “advantages” than any other version of this cult.

“And then, sociologically, Catholicism has remained extremely successful at winning intellectual converts. Yet it is weaker as a mass religion than it was when I joined the church—and Christianity is not supposed to be a faith just for the intelligentsia. One need only look around the Christian world, whether at church attendance patterns in the United States or at the growth of charismatic and nondenominational Protestant churches in Africa and Latin America, to see that the future will be shaped powerfully by a kind of a Christianity that is neither Roman Catholic nor simply a stalking horse for secularism. “

Actually, not “extremely successful” at all, and again the splintering of Catholicism is amusing.  Notably, Ross can’t identify a single “intellectual convert”.  It is nothing new to have Christians make appeals to authority fallacies to support their cult:  look look, smart people join us that must mean our claims are true. 

and again, still no evidence for his desperate lies that any christanity other than Catholicism is a “stalking horse for secularism”.   Poor Ross, those versions of Christianity you decry are no less Christian than yours, and since not one of you self-professed christains can do what jesus promises in your bible, it seems there is no such thing as a TrueChristian™. 

“So in all this, I find it easier to understand how someone can be Protestant or Eastern Orthodox than I did as a new-minted Catholic convert. But at the same time, I find it much harder to understand how someone can be a convinced atheist.

I never exactly believed the Stephen Dedalus implication that strong Christian claims are ultimately an “absurdity” relative to hardheaded materialist alternatives. But once I took for granted that there were some good reasons why so many of my fellow overeducated Americans took God’s nonexistence for granted, and that the Christian was sometimes in the position of Puddleglum in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, professing belief against the evidence, I determined to be “on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.””

Christian claims are not “strong” and have no evidence to support them, so what Ross “believes” is worthless.  I do appreciate Ross revealing what is the biggest threat he sees to his cult:  being supposedly “overeducated”.   Knowledge is the enemy of cults, and Ross admits that right here.  His belief is based on nothign other than wanting to be on a “side” that agrees with him. 

“Twenty years later, I’m still searching for atheism’s solid reasons. I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine. But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism—I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.”

Yep, amazing how his claims of searching for 20 years are evidently lies.  It seems that Ross has never once talked to an actual atheist, never once looked at counter apologetics, etc.  He tries a common theist tactic to insist that *some* god must exist and he can “understand” that people differ on the details.   Alas, no evidence for any god worthy of the definition. 

All Ross has is an argument from personal incredulity fallacy.  No evidence of any plan, no intentionality, no purpose etc that is outside of humanity.  The mind comes from the material e.g. the brain, and yes, poor Ross just can imagine himself just being like everyone else, part of emergent qualities, and not the favorite of some magical being.  Reason is easily explained by evolution, and “logos” is simply a bit of theist nonsense with again no evidence to show it exists. 

No accident needed, but also no god needed.  As usual, Ross attacks a strawman. 

“I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. (The attempt by atheistic intellectuals to find refuge in the theory of the multiverse, which casts our universe as a rare life-supporter among trillions of dead ones that we can never actually observe, seems similar to the epicycles attached to the Ptolemaic system when it became clear it couldn’t accurately describe reality.)”

Funny how all we know now shows that no gods exist. Disease doesn’t come from magical being’s anger.  Stars aren’t little lights in a solid dome that can fall off.

No fine tuning found at all.  At best some scientists say it “appears” or “seems” that this is happening but not one scientist can support that claim.  We literally have no idea how much we could be off and get what we have.  And poor Ross, he has to explain that, if here is “fine tuning” why is god was such an idiot, or malicious, to “choose” the constant that makes the sun give us and other animals cancer. 

The multiverse is a hypothesis.  It may or may not be true.  Humans may never completely figure out why the universe started, etc. In any case, that still doesn’t mean Ross’ imaginary friend exists.  We have no idea how common life may be or isn’t, again, Ross depends on ignorance and lies to argue for his imaginary friend. 

“I don’t see how anyone can believe it given the resilient mystery of consciousness and the ways in which it seems to be integrally connected to the basic order of the universe—both in our reason’s ability to explore and comprehend level upon level of the system, heights and depths far beyond anything linked directly to the evolutionary needs of early hominids, and in the mystical-seeming link between observation and reality, the mind’s eye and the material, that quantum physics has revealed.”

Yep, here’s even more fail.  It is becoming more and more clear that consciousness comes from the material, e.g. the brain.  No brain, no free floating consciousness.  And that we can’t currently explain something doesn’t mean his imaginary friend is the explanation.  God of the gaps lies are typical Christian currency.  That something is ordered in an ordered universe isn’t anything special.  Again, just because poor Ross doesn’t understand something doesn’t mean his imaginary friend exists. 

Ross also has no idea what was needed for early hominids.  He simply makes things up.  And gee, the usual appeal to quantum physics by a fraud who has no idea what that is.  He, like other charlatans, often appeal to science when they don’t understand it. 

“And I don’t see how anyone can believe it given that religious experience, all the weird stuff of mysticism and miracle, has not only persisted under supposedly disenchanted conditions but even revealed itself in new ways (near-death experiences, for instance) because of the ministrations of modern science. We have done away with the cultural rule of religion, the institutional structures that many Enlightenment-era atheists believed imposed supernatural beliefs on a credulous population. And yet those beliefs have persisted, and in some cases even spread, because it turns out that supernatural-seeming experiences, intimations of transcendence that fall on nonbelievers as well as on the faithful, are just a constitutive part of reality itself.”

Then we get the appeal of popularity fallacy: look at all of the religions, and baseless claims they make, that must mean my god exists.   Alas, for Ross, NDEs have not been shown to reveal any afterlife at all.  That christains can’t even agree on what their afterlife even is shows that they simply lie about NDEs.   Yep, beliefs in imaginary garbage persists.  That doesn’t  make what is believed in real.  No such thing as “transcendence” only a feeling claimed to be somehow related to magic.  That isn’t shown to be true either.  The only thing that is constitutive is that humans often mistake events for agency. 

“At the very least, it seems clear to me at midlife that a religious perspective on reality, a basic assumption that all this was made for a reason and we are part of that reason deserves to be the serious person’s intellectual default.

It’s a perspective that makes coherent sense out of multiple features of reality, multiple converging lines—the evidence for design, the distinctive place of human consciousness, the varieties of religious experience—that atheism struggles and fails to reduce away. It’s the parsimonious answer to a set of overlapping questions raised by very different features of the human experience.”

No reason to believe that Ross’ baseless assumption that his imaginary friend exists has to be considered a “serious person’s intellectual default”.   Like many theists, Ross has to imply hat anyone who dares disagree with his baseless claims isn’t “serious” and isn’t “intellectual”.  He can support neither claim. 

His cult makes no more “coherent sense” out of reality than any other cult.  No evidence for design, no evidence consciousness is magical, no evidence “religious experiences” are supernatural.  What’s more, each theists claims that the others are wrong, so what is a ‘serious intellectual” to make of that fact? 

“And if that answer opens into further questions, further debates, I expect those debates to be different than just a clash between my own Catholic Christianity and the heirs of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins. Not just because the debates among different kinds of Christians will go on, but because the weakness of atheism means that eventually—and, in fact, soon if not already—the main alternative to Christianity may be something quite different from Enlightenment rationalism, something that blends the pagan and promethean, seeking supernatural as well as natural power.

In that case, Christians of all kinds will be facing a spiritual rival, not a secular or atheistic one, in the contest for the human soul.”

No soul can be found so Ross crashes and burns with that last line.  Atheism is doing just fine, despite Ross’ baseless claims.  He has yet to show is imaginary friend exists, so atheism isn’t “weak” at all.  It’s the actual default. 

What Ross seems to needing is a new opponent, since he can’t show his imaginary friend to exist.  He has to claim some other “religion” is the enemy, since he has to pretend atheists don’t exist.  It’s always good for a fraud to simply try to ignore where they’ve failed.