It’s Wednesday, September 23, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group. We are still polling quite poorly in Wisconsin. Joining me are Ed Dutton and Keith Woods. Main Topic: The Death of Atheism. It seemed like only yesterday that all those online atheists were dominating YouTube—owning the fundies with facts and logic. *The dinosaurs are real—take that, Christians!* Chief Atheist Richard Dawkins just released a new book, *Outgrowing God*. If anything, it expresses the intellectual exhaustion and growing irrelevancy of the movement he launched some 15 years ago. Ed, Keith, and I look back at so-called “New Atheism,” revealing how those liberal edge-lords never asked any serious questions and how the battle between science and religion is not what it’s cracked up to be. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
We are still polling quite poorly in Wisconsin.
Joining me are Ed Dutton and Keith Woods.
Main topic, the death of atheism.
It seemed like only yesterday that all those online atheists were dominating YouTube, owning the fundies with facts and logic.
The dinosaurs are real.
Take that, Christians.
Chief Atheist Richard Dawkins just released a new book, Outgrowing God.
If anything, it expresses the intellectual exhaustion and growing irrelevancy of the movement he launched some 15 years ago.
Ed, Keith, and I look back at so-called new atheism.
Revealing how those liberal edgelords never ask any serious questions, and how the battle between science and religion is not what it's cracked up to be.
Welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
The team has reassembled.
I'm very happy about that.
Keith, how are you doing?
You're back from your summer abroad, full of wandering.
It's womanizing and wine drinking, I presume, or at least I hope.
Keith, how many STDs did you contract during your summer?
Well, I'm not sure, but my head feels a lot clearer.
I've had no Anglo takes contaminating my thinking for the last couple of months.
Feeling clear-headed can also be a symptom of pubic lice.
That's probably what it is.
I went to a pumpkin fair yesterday with the kiddos, so that was a lot of fun.
You know, swinging around, riding around on hayrides for hours.
Great stuff.
It actually was pretty fun.
Eating caramel popcorn.
Yum.
Ed, how are you doing?
I'm okay, yeah.
I haven't spent summer contracting sexually transmitted diseases from Southern European tarts.
I've been doing wholesome things.
For example, yesterday I went with my family to a spa hotel in Vokkowa, which is about an hour from here.
That was very pleasant and went on a long forest walk.
Cool.
Do you get in one of those Scandinavian saunas?
Oh yeah, they have those.
The spa hotel, yes.
So there was a steam one and a finished one.
So I've been doing that.
So I haven't been having the kind of prime that Keith has been having.
Well, no one has.
That level of insurance.
In Italia, il ha mille tre.
How many?
What did Keith have in Greece?
We might never know.
The real question is, from Ed's perspective, is that race mix and air to Southern Europeans white?
Significantly white, yeah.
It depends whether we're dealing with Portuguese people here.
There's quite a lot of black ab mixture in the native Portuguese population.
Actually, I don't know if you're familiar with...
I kind of like Varg, but I like him from a distance.
I kind of like that there's this madman out there.
Ranting and raving, but you kind of want to keep your distance from that.
All I would say about that is that Queen Victoria was a carrier of haemophilia, and there was no record of haemophilia in the royal family before her.
So either, her father was about 50 when she was born, early 50s, so either it was a de novo mutation on her father's sperm, or her mother copped it off with a gypsy haemophilia.
So it's one or the other.
Interesting.
And they're equally possible.
Equally possible.
Well, let's talk about new atheism.
So I asked you guys to do this just because Richard Dawkins has a new book out, and so I thought this would be at least somewhat timely.
I'm not sure the size of the splash that this latest volume is making.
It's called Outgrowing God or Growing Up from God.
It's children.
I've actually listened to about three hours of it now, just kind of as I was doing chores or whatever.
It's like the God delusion for dummies.
He's not saying anything that he hasn't said before, and it is kind of dumbed down a bit.
So yes, he's trying to get the teenage set or something.
This book has not made a huge splash.
It'll sell a lot of copies, I'm sure.
But he did make a big splash when he published The God Delusion in 2006.
And there was this phenomenon that lasted about 10 years.
And it was, to a very large degree, a YouTube phenomenon, which is also interesting at the time of the growth of YouTube.
And it was the atheism, new atheism, as they called it.
It was not new.
And most all of what they were saying was not new at all.
But it was something that was actually quite powerful and influential.
I think it might have...
I don't think it's too much to say that it changed minds on a mass scale and at least contributed to the decline of religious belief, particularly Christian belief, in America and the Western world.
So it was a thing.
But I think it's something that is now kind of old now.
It's now feeling a bit outmoded.
And I think it's something that we can kind of look back on and examine a bit.
And I guess it's interesting that we have this panel assembled because I think each of us in our own way is kind of a...
I don't think any of us really want to adopt an atheist label, although I don't think we also have the same perspective as an average churchgoer as well.
But anyway, I'm just kind of setting the table here.
But Keith, you're younger than I am.
When new atheism came around, I was already kind of like...
On a few meta levels up.
But you were a teenager or even younger.
I can't remember when I met your mom.
But you were fairly young when New Atheism was bounding onto the scene.
Was this influential as a kind of young, precocious know-it-all?
Or was it not influential at all?
I'm curious.
Not really at the time, but I remember, I don't think I got regular internet access, so I was like 16, 17, and then it was actually when I started using YouTube or whatever, that was actually one of the first things I gravitated towards, was the new atheism stuff.
I don't know, there's a certain kind of person, I think, on the internet that's just kind of attracted to drama and conflict and arguments, but it is kind of funny to look at the progress that some of those Internet atheist types made.
I think in a funny way it kind of mirrors a lot of the people that sort of came into the alt-right in that like you look at the channels of some of them like what's that guy TJ something the amazing atheist or whatever but it's like he's kind of almost Yeah, it's funny.
He's kind of funny.
I'm not trying to slander him or anything, but he's definitely kind of edgy in a real way, not just making fun of Christians, which is not particularly edgy at this point.
But then there are other ones.
I remember when I would watch these.
Atheism is Unstoppable got banned a couple of months ago.
You know, you'd start talking to, like, Jared Taylor.
Because it's, like, it's funny, the route they went, it was, like, they started off, like, arguing with theists, and then they moved on to, like, veganism, and then it was, like, SJWs.
And then the next thing, it was, like, a little bit of race realism.
And then, oh, God, you know, all of a sudden, they're, like, in the alt-right side of things.
Well, it is true in the sense of, I mean, of...
A lot of them are genuinely open-minded.
I may be autistic.
I'm willing to go there and so on.
And then they actually do go there.
I think Atheism Unstoppable is a lot like that.
I mean, I've watched a number of his videos.
He does seem to be ultimately a kind of classical liberal, but he is willing to go there on a lot of different subjects.
And then you had the other ones.
I remember Jackie Glenn, I believe was her name.
And she was kind of like the cute, young, I'm not like the other girls, amazing atheist.
And I remember seeing some of her videos, you know, I don't know, 10 years ago or something.
And then I caught one last year or something and she's like talking to transsexuals and full on, you know, SJW hating her parents and whatever.
So there are many different paths that they can take.
I would say this.
One of the reasons why I don't have a tremendous amount of respect for New Atheism is that it's coming a century or two centuries after a major crisis of faith that was occurring to a degree due to Enlightenment thinkers.
Who are kind of operating on an elite level.
It's coming after Darwin.
It's coming after Nietzsche.
It's coming after the First World War, which itself just brought about an end of tradition and everything you take for granted.
And they're doing it now.
Even if I might agree with many things that they say, there's a level at which they're just kind of...
Tedious last men arguing for things that have already been won in a way.
They have absolutely nothing to lose.
Right, that's true.
And everything to gain.
So it's a way of signalling how rational and logical they are and how intelligent they are and how thoughtful they are.
They have that to gain.
But there's essentially, apart from pissing off a few nutcases, a few extremist fundamentalists, there really is nothing to lose.
There's nothing to lose.
It's a weak thing to do.
So whereas when people were doing something like that a couple of hundred years ago, someone like Darwin, he seriously didn't want to come up.
He came up with the idea of evolution.
And he held back on it for about 20 years because he knew what offence it would cause and how socially problematic it would be and how much it would upset his wife, who was a highly committed Christian, and then he wouldn't get sex, I suppose, and things like this.
And when he was under the impression, some people say wrongly, that somebody else was about to go there with the same idea, then he went ahead and published.
And these people had something to lose.
They could be socially ostracised.
There was no worse insult that could be thrown at people than being an atheist.
To be an atheist, if you were found guilty of atheism, they'd burn you.
And it seems that there were atheists around.
Nobody kind of knew their names or whatever, because this would be done kind of secretly and in secret societies, and you'd all be very careful and whatever.
And so there really is...
They're not brave.
It's like if you live in Eastern Europe, parts of Eastern Europe now, and you're...
Woke.
You're pro-leftist.
Well, I don't necessarily agree with you.
I don't agree with you.
I don't think what you're doing is good for the society.
But I have a certain amount of respect for the activists that are pro-LGBT in, like, Russia or whatever.
They're losing their jobs and having serious...
Problems.
You've got nothing to lose doing this in Britain or somewhere like that.
And so it's kind of like that.
I have very little...
It's a sort of a feeble thing to do.
I suppose with the God delusion...
Sorry.
Yeah, let me add real quick, although I think you might be going there.
Just to give a slight bit of credit to Richard Dawkins.
In 2006, it was a bit of a different time, you understand.
This was the height of the religious right.
They were openly, in some cases, in a minority view, talking about we're going to install a theocracy and God is on George W. Bush's side and we're going to invade the entire planet and install Christian democracy.
He at least Took on something.
That is true.
I was about to say that.
That is true.
In the context of 2006, we just had the Iraq War, or it was ongoing, the Iraq War, and it suggested that he and Blair prayed together or whatever.
Blair was this extremely committed Roman Catholic.
Bush was this born-again Christian who'd been an alcoholic or whatever it was and had some kind of converting experience.
So it is true that religiousness was much more powerful then, and therefore there was a degree to which there was a sort of religious establishment.
To some extent, the woke establishment wasn't as dominant as it is now.
And so now I think the reason why this atheistic tract is so much less interesting is because religion is now marginalised.
Religion is now disempowered.
It's the woke people who are all kind of atheists or whatever anyway, who are in charge and who have power.
And so you're not really...
It's rather feeble to waste your energy on it when there are bigger fish to fry.
Also, more importantly, the irreligious society is bearing fruit, and we are seeing the results of a generation who have been raised not with a group-selected ideology, i.e.
religiousness, which pushes them in a group-selected...
Pro-social direction where you sacrifice the interest of the self for the interest of the group and whatever, but an individualistic ideology which is all about the feelings of the individual and everyone not feeling upset and feeling they're all equal and feeling the same.
And we're seeing this bear fruit in this emotionally incontinent snowflake generation who are utterly bigoted in their thinking and can't take criticism and can't deal with people that think differently from them.
And so, therefore, it's no longer in any way brave to challenge religion and to challenge God and whatever.
It's brave to challenge atheism and to challenge those people.
It's intellectually dangerous to toy with the idea that not only whether God exists, I don't know, but that there could be positive things about religion because that's what undermines really a kind of state communism, which is now...
So, yeah, so I think it's just the last gasp of a man who spent his career obsessed with slagging off religion and, I don't know, maybe needs the money.
I don't know.
I think the interesting question about new atheism is, you know, what was new in the new atheism?
Because, you know, obviously, as you said, like, other people, better people have made these arguments before them.
Well, I think what was new was, one, how bad the arguments were.
And I do actually think that was part of why it was a popular phenomenon, is it was like, you know, it was kind of like the McDonald's of, like, secular philosophy, in that it just sort of stripped any of the...
Any of the good arguments that's in atheism as a tradition.
Do you know what I would say, Keith, is that it stripped the tragedy from it all.
Yeah, well, that's where I was going with the second aspect.
One aspect is how bad the arguments are, but the second aspect was the evangelical tone that came with it.
Previous atheist philosophers, I mean...
You know, like Nietzsche was grappling with this as a serious problem, and I think he recognized the tragedy of the death of God and the huge problems.
I think he foresaw a lot of the problems that were...
Earthquakes and volcanoes, whatever he was writing about.
Yeah, and the whole project of modernity.
And that's just completely lacking in the new atheists.
I mean, you know...
There's a few of them are actually...
Dennett is a philosopher.
A.C. Graylin is a philosopher.
I mean, Dawkins doesn't put forward any philosophical arguments, really.
It's basically sort of moralistic tomes against the Old Testament God.
But no actual engagement with classical theism in terms of the basis for it as a philosophy.
But the remarkable thing is how much they just kind of...
We'll presuppose this, like, secular Christian morality.
I mean, like, Dennett at times will make arguments that, well, morality is just, you know, evolutionary adaptation, Darwinianism and things.
But then at other times, he'll just, you know, he'll just treat it as obvious that these sort of, you know, this very complex Christian moral worldview is just always obvious to people.
And, you know, as well, the way they'll just kind of skirt over some of the horrors of the 20th century, which...
Right.
And it wasn't.
I mean, I think, you know, in The God Delusion, Dawkins does make some gestures towards...
I mean, he actually, he doesn't quite dismiss, but he is skeptical of group evolution in a way that Ed is not.
But he does kind of say that, you know, morality...
Is going to evolve and it's going to precede religion in the sense that you have to get along and cooperate with your group.
You obviously have a lot at stake with your own children and even your nephews and cousins.
That is true.
There were some studies which I found on this recently.
It is true that...
Well, no.
I've just found...
This is a review I did of The God Delusion in 2007.
I just dug it out.
But one of the things that was found is that highly complex societies precede moral gods.
So the order in which it goes is a high level of societal complexity.
Then moral gods seem to develop as a way of holding that society together.
And as for his scepticism of group selection, I think that's just a result of, I think that's his own personal problem.
So in the 70s, when he basically talks about group selection, the National Front, which were the main British far-right party at the time, picked up on this and said, oh yeah, Richard Dawkins, this professor has said this, and so therefore we wipe it.
And he was horrified that he should be associated with the National Front.
And so he came out and condemned group selection.
I mean, I've got a...
I've recently did a video on this for The Jolly Heretic, and there is no logical argument against group selection at all.
The first argument they use is that, oh, we were in these small bands in the player scene or whatever, and consequently we couldn't have developed group selection because we were in these sparse bands.
But it's been shown that there were appalling wars, appalling genocide.
In the player scene, A. B, though they were these sparse little bands of clans that were separate, they would come together in perceived times of crisis when outsiders were trying to destroy them.
They would come together, like, you know, ten times their numbers, and so there would be group selection.
There's clear evidence of massacres of huge numbers of people.
There's historical evidence, archaeological evidence of the wiping out of entire tribes by other tribes.
So that is group selection.
It's a logical extension of kin selection, and computer modelling has demonstrated that group selection seems to explain this.
He has just a prejudice against group selection.
And as for what he says about religion as well, he says that, oh, well, religion, it's this kind of misfiring of various adaptive things.
Well, that's clearly bollocks, because for something to be adaptive, for it to be accepted to be adaptive in evolution, and he would know that as an evolutionist, it has to be partly heritable, or religiousness is at least 0.4 heritable aspects of religiousness.
Fundamentalism is 0.7 heritable.
It has to be associated with fertility, which it is heavily.
It has to be associated with mental health and physical health, which it is at the genetic level.
There have to be certain parts of the brain that are associated with it.
You stimulate them with magnets, you become more religious or whatever, which is the case.
It has to be associated with pro-social traits because we're a group-oriented species.
Which it is.
So on every single marker of it, religiousness is something that's been selected for in itself.
And so therefore he can't just dismiss it as some misfiring of adaptive things like following the leader and over-detecting agency.
That's not the case.
As Keith said, it's how bad the arguments are.
He's so dismissive of things.
He's so emotional in the way he presents things.
He's so completely over the top.
In this new one, for example, rather than talk about the existence of God, he kind of poisons the world by saying, oh, well, you know, there are people that believe in fairies and there are people that believe in imps and there are people that believe in, you know, talking dinosaurs or whatever.
That is true.
Well, yeah, it just seems to be a complete...
You mentioned, you said that you think he's the worst of them.
I don't think he, I think he's the, in some ways, someone like Daniel Dunnett, who you mentioned a minute ago, or Keith mentioned, openly said that scientists should lie.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah, if the social consequences are too, I think he said actually specifically about something like race and IQ.
Yeah, he did.
He was one of these new atheists and he openly said that.
And at least Dawkins hasn't said that.
My counter-argument to that is that traditionally scientists have these transcendental values, these values that the truth is sacrosanct.
And what that ultimately comes from is neotomism, is really a belief, what these scientists originally believed was that...
Their purpose was to unveil God's revelation and therefore to lie.
That means that you can't lie.
You believe in eternal truth, and what backs it up as true is a sort of traditionalist idea that there's a metaphysical realm which verifies it as true, or God verifies it as true.
And then the belief in God died, but the belief in truth without God, the worship of truth, hung on for a while.
I don't know if Dawkins has that to a greater extent.
This is a very Nietzschean argument, and he might very well have not been the only one to make it, but he basically made exactly the argument that you just made.
He overturns this notion of the opposition, the great battle between science and religion, and he demonstrates that science, in a way, overestimates truth.
And that's a kind of very, you know, kind of a little bit sarcastic way of that Nietzsche would put things.
But in the sense that truth itself is divine and you must pursue it.
And so science is lit by the same lamp as religious fervor of previous years.
And then there's a kind of.
And this is, again, in Nietzsche's kind of playful way and in a discomforting way as well, he'll kind of...
Look at, you know, we shouldn't just value memory.
We should also value forgetting.
And we shouldn't just value truth at all costs, even at the cost of ourselves.
We might actually need to value illusion and delusion at some point.
I mean, this is, again, a very kind of Nietzschean move in that sense.
But you want to go ahead, Ed?
I have some more to go on this.
People argue that he's a bit like a fundamentalist because he's dogmatic Dawkins, because he's dogmatic.
He's highly emotional in his argumentation.
He seems very, very certain and whatever.
And his counter-argument is, no, I'm not a fundamentalist, says in The God's Illusion, because fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book.
Now, that's what I mean about just the badness of these arguments.
So what about religions that are not religions of the book, like Hinduism?
I mean, it's just evidence that he doesn't care.
He's not even trying to argue a logical case if you say something as dismissive as that, but can be just pulled apart very, very quickly.
It's just a way of rallying the troops with a load of emotional bad arguments and saying, oh yeah, there's no God.
Aren't we clever in these stupid Christians that believe in a God on a cloud?
And it's...
I mean, let's go...
Dawkins himself acknowledges, as he did in The God Illusion and as he would now, that morality is evolved in the sense that it actually is good to cooperate.
It is good for people to trust you and not lie, etc.
And that this operates also in a kind of group level in the sense that for those things to work and good, you have to have trust and investment with the people around you.
So you might very well be as gentle as a lamb with your children and nephews and friends and colleagues, and you might be as violent and ruthless and amoral as a lion when you are facing off with another band that also wants that piece of territory or might want to kill you or take your territory, etc.
There is a kind of in-group, out-group component of moralism.
You can even see this in populations like Germans and Japanese who are completely...
Nice and if not goofy when they're within their own societies and then utterly a total maniacs when they're going to war with other populations.
Yeah, precisely.
That's what's been selected for.
That is the morality that's been selected for.
High and positive and negative ethnocentrism.
And once you get a group which is sufficiently large, like a city or whatever, where you're not...
Closely genetically related to the person, they're not a member of your family or your extended family, and where indeed you might not even ever see them again, then you have to have some reason to cooperate with them.
And that's where moral gods then come from, because if he believes in the same moral god as you, then it's an insurance policy that he will cooperate as well for the greater good of the society.
He's not going to be a free rider.
Parasite off the society.
He's going to cooperate with you back.
You can trust him.
It's an insurance policy.
And if they don't believe in the same gods as you, then that shows that maybe you can't trust them.
And so that's where religion becomes important.
And therefore, morality becomes...
Being highly moral and pro-social, internally cooperative and externally hostile, becomes...
Selected for concomitantly, both because of religiousness, because the group that is better able to be positively and negatively ethnocentric, because it's the will of the gods they believe in, but also it becomes, religiousness therefore becomes selected for concomitantly with greater morality and whatever.
And what you find, the group that is going to be more, is going to become selected for, is going to be more and more internally ethnocentric, more and more religious at the same time, and they'll go up.
And we know, Dawkins in that book goes on about all the terrorists, Religious people have done all the wars and massacres and whatever.
Yeah, to different groups, to out-groups, that's the point.
With regard to in-groups, or simply with regard to generalized morality when asked questions, religious people, it's just a fact, religious people are higher in agreeableness, in the trait of agreeable.
They're higher in generalized altruism than atheists, and they're higher in generalized conscientiousness.
They're more pro-social people, on average.
Let me take this in a...
Interesting direction.
There's a quote from...
I'm forgetting.
He's actually a Jewish scientist.
It's not Weininger.
He has a name like that.
There's this classic quote that new atheists always say, which is that whether religion can make a bad person good is up for dispute.
Maybe that happens in some cases.
Maybe it doesn't happen in others.
But religion can make a good person bad.
That is...
Religion can give you the power to go to war.
Religion can make you conquer because God is on your side.
Religion can make you persecute heretics, maybe within your community, to maintain group cohesion.
So religion can make good people bad, but whether it can make bad people good is up for dispute.
And I mean, I guess my answer to that is kind of like, yes.
And the people who have God on their side are going to win.
At some point, you have to back away from this kind of moral peacocking and just recognize that those who believe in themselves and believe that their triumph is good for the world are going to triumph.
It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense of belief.
Sorry, the sun is rising, perhaps symbolically right now.
The lighting in my room keeps changing, but don't worry about that.
Maybe I'm about to be struck down by lightning.
Who knows?
But so it's those who believe that God is on their side are going to win.
And I think in some ways, I mean, I gave Richard Dawkins a smidge of credit.
For publishing The God Delusion in 2006 in the sense that this was the height of the religious right and George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
And I agree with him on being at the very least skeptical of those things and certainly opposing the Iraq War.
So, you know, good on you for that.
But I think it also kind of...
It has a neoconservative element to it.
And remember, perhaps the second most famous new atheist is Christopher Hitchens, a contrarian left-winger, writer for The Nation, and I think he was a Trotskyite at some point or something like this.
But someone who ultimately became a kind of neoconservative, who endorsed the Iraq War, wanted to crush Islamofascism, etc.
He was the contrarian of the left of his day.
And there's this almost neoconservative quality to new atheism in the sense that, yes, they want to demoralize and demean the religious right and the fundies and the vangies and all that kind of stuff.
But their target...
Seemingly is Islam at some level.
I mean, particularly with someone like Sam Harris.
Their target is Islam.
You want to demoralize Islam.
At the very least, you see this growing religious fervor on the horizon as a threat to your secular, liberal society that you're wanting to defend.
You seem quite skeptical of this.
Well, you may be right about that, about demoralizing Islam, but that's not really what they do, is it?
These books are aimed at white, middle-class people.
This is not going to be read by Muslims.
Muslims aren't going to read this book.
Dawkins is engaging in a completely anti-evolutionary process.
Demoralizing his own people so that they will be conquered by Muslims.
So is Christopher Hitchens, because he's taking away their religion.
And the thing that will allow them in the battle of group selection to triumph, as they did do, as they did do at the time of the Crusades, the thing which allowed them to triumph over Islam was that we were at an earlier stage of civilization that the Muslims were at that stage.
We were the desert tribesmen.
We were Ibn Khaldun's desert tribesmen.
Tribesman with a high level of Asabiar.
That is why, and that was also the case a bit later, and that is why we were able to successfully, one of the reasons why, we were able to successfully fight against Saladin and people like this.
And he is, people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins and these other posers, these intellectual posers, Dennett and his impenetrable books about consciousness and whatever, are just damaging their own side.
They're individualists who realise that they can attain status as individuals by doing this, not by rocking the boat in a small little kind of way which doesn't damage them much themselves or creates a few enemies but creates much more friends than those enemies, signalling how clever they are and how rational they are and damaging their group in the process.
Parasites off the group.
And the fact that Islam will not tolerate this nonsense within its own societies is one of the reasons why, of many, that it is growing.
The only interesting part of that new Dawkins book is at the bit where he's trying to justify morality and he obviously...
you know, he has no philosophical basis for any of his ethical claims, but he keeps using this phrase where he talks about, like, some of the progress of the past few hundred years, like abolishing slavery and giving women the vote.
And he says there was just something in the air.
You know, he uses this, like, quasi-mystical language about, like, the progress of liberalism.
And you kind of see this with all of them.
I mean, like, atheism obviously is a sort of value-neutral worldview.
I mean, it should be a You should be a moral nihilist if you're an atheist, but they're all of this complete reification of Western liberalism and progressivism that they can't really ground in anything, but that just seems so obvious to all of them.
It's the same in that book Sam Harris wrote about moral foundations, where he spends the whole book showing how science can show us levels of suffering and how to alleviate suffering.
But again, he has no philosophical basis for why.
Progressivism and alleviating suffering is a good thing.
It's funny, at once they're attacking Christianity, but they're all so bound up in the Western tradition that liberalism...
And they're not self-critical or self-aware of it.
Yeah, they don't see at all the historically contingent nature of some of the moral truths they believe and how reliant they were on the Christian tradition.
In a weird way, they reify Christianity more than anyone.
I think that's a very interesting point that Keith makes there.
This is a book I got some years ago called God is Dead by Steve Bruce.
And it's basically the secularization thesis.
Well, they call it a thesis.
It doesn't actually predict anything or allow any predictions to be made.
But basically what it says is, basically the idea is we get, well, it starts off with Weber.
We get Protestantism.
Protestantism makes us kind of more hardworking and makes us more rational somehow.
I'm not sure that's true.
I would say Protestantism is perhaps more religiously fervent.
But anyway, from then we get the Industrial Revolution.
From then we get science.
And science then just sort of magically spreads.
People realise that science is the answer and science is the way forward and we become more scientific in our thinking, more and more and more scientific.
Our religiousness is relegated to private life and eventually religiousness dies out.
And again, it's rather like there's something in the air.
There's a sort of miasma of science that floats.
It floats over society, and it becomes more scientific.
And when you show evidence that, well, look, yeah, it's becoming more scientific, and then this happens, and people become more religious.
Wars, for example.
I would say it's because of stress.
It's reduction in stress that's causing this.
It's not science itself that sets off this process.
There's factors behind it, genetic factors and environmental factors that are reducible to biology.
And he just says, oh, well, yeah, these are just humps and bumps.
Well, you're always going to get humps and bumps in a general process.
That doesn't explain anything at all.
It just describes it.
I think that's exactly what Keith was saying, this idea.
It's just in the air.
And anyway...
Is it good that women have the vote?
I mean, is that progress?
I mean, let's think about what that set off.
Now and.
You know, come on.
I mean, that's their own fundamentalism because obviously they have no ethical foundation for why it's good that women vote.
But if you challenge that, you know, they'll all be perfectly happy to silence your Troy Odey Academy because, you know, there's something in the air.
It's just as mystical a statement as...
I believe in the God of the Old Testament because I feel it in my heart.
There's just something in the air.
They just blithely accept postmodern liberal democratic norms.
It's just kind of like, well, of course.
Science taught it.
Women are less rational than men.
Women are low in autistic traits than men.
The extreme male is hyper...
Systematising and to do with system and logic and solving problems and basically empirical truth.
And the extreme female is high in empathy and therefore disinterested in those things and more interested in everybody cooperating and everyone getting along and nobody having hurt feelings and not much competition and everyone just getting along.
So what does it result in if you have more and more women in, just forget about voting, in the academy?
It means less science.
It means less science.
Because suddenly something is more important than the truth and reason and logic and the empirical facts.
Something's more important than that.
And that's getting on with people and everyone getting along and no one being upset and whatever.
And so you get the rise of these midwits who are reasonably intelligent, but more important than that is that they're good social skills and they're good at getting along with everybody and they conform.
And that's why women are highly conformist.
They're much more conformist than men.
They're much, much more performers.
They're higher in conscientiousness.
More religious than men.
Traditionally, the women are more religious than men because they are...
More moral, more pro-social, more altruistic.
They're selected to be more religious because if you're under a society where you have to invest in the female to get sex, then the fact that she's religious is an insurance policy that you won't be cuckolded.
And so religion is sexually selected for women in a way that it isn't in men.
So they're more religious, more conformist.
And when the religion is a...
And an adaptive religion, then they are the enforcers of that, and they are the church ladies, and they are more conservative.
And initially, giving the women the vote meant that you had more conservative government, because women were more religious, was conservative, and women voted conservative.
With the collapse of that religion, and its place with liberalism, women are more conformist, more pro-social, more group-oriented, more not wanting to hurt feelings, therefore more liberal.
And that's what we see now with the new church ladies, of these woke, Harrodins with their purple hair and bingo wings.
Right.
So is it good?
And as Keith says, the fact that you can't question it, is it necessarily good that they have the vote?
Are these things, are these moral progressives, are they necessarily good always?
Shouldn't a scientist like Richard Dawkins and a philosopher, as he proposes to be, think about these questions, you know, carefully and without rancour and without prejudgment?
I amazed Keith got far enough in the book to find this stuff because I tried to read the book.
I tried to.
It was so bad.
It was like teen fiction, as you say.
It was just so bad that I couldn't get past that.
I don't think you can stress the point enough how...
Bad their arguments are.
I mean, they basically have three arguments that they repeat ad nauseum.
One is that evolution is true, and they kind of build up a straw man of fine-tuning arguments, whereas normally fine-tuning arguments have nothing to do with evolution anyway.
I mean, most theists now in philosophy departments accept evolution.
The other one is that atheists can be moral, which again...
No one really contests.
No theist really contests that.
It's not really a challenge to anything.
And then the third one is that, well, look how evil the God of the Old Testament is.
I mean, that's basically their main argument, is that they hold up God as just another contingent being, like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and then they make a logical positivist argument against that.
But I mean, the problem is the whole tradition of theism...
It doesn't argue for a contingent finite being.
It argues for, out of logical necessity, some being that's the necessary ground of contingent being.
And it comes to that true logical modal inference.
But they'll never deal with that.
And even Richard Dawkins famously avoided a debate with William Lane Craig for years, who is a serious and respected theistic philosopher that engages in Christian apologetics.
He avoided that for years.
Craig fairly easily dispatched Hitchens and Harris.
I think that's when it kind of came to an end, is when actual philosophers like Craig and David Bentley Hart started writing books.
But yeah, Dawkins avoided a debate with Craig famously and wrote an article saying he'd never debate him because Craig made apologies for some crime that God committed in the Old Testament.
So Dawkins started accusing him of being an apologist for genocide, which was like...
Oh, I remember seeing that, yeah.
Yeah, like a very transparent way of getting out with someone who's actually competent in the field.
But yeah, I mean, you know, again, it's worth pointing out, like, for all their popularity, it was, I think, a large part of their popularity was because it was such, you know, slop, slop for the pros.
It was nothing serious.
I won't dwell on this, but...
Yeah, I mean, I tweeted something out about this the other day.
I don't know if you saw it, but Craig is putting forth a kind of Platonism, and I actually think that's what needs to be interrogated.
In the sense of, as opposed to the low-hanging fruit of the religious right or crazed Muslim fanatics, I think we actually need to examine that.
And that's more interesting.
I mean, I do think Craig is, I don't want to dwell on this, but I do think he's kind of fundamentally wrong or backwards, but he's wrong in a much deeper sense.
He's wrong in the way that the whole Platonist tradition is wrong.
Yeah, I mean, people don't realize this, but, like, it's funny, I mean, everyone has this idea that, you know, like the new atheists, everything is secularizing and we're moving past all this, but theism, actually a huge resurgence in philosophy since, like, the mid-20th century.
People like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig that have, you know, taken some of the work that was done on logic in the 20th century and have kind of revived, like, theistic personalism.
So, I mean, yeah, that is an interesting...
Anthony Flew, who is very famous, and he spent his career arguing for atheism, and in the end, he came to...
Yeah, I remember reading his book, and he was actually convinced by a fine-tuning argument of sorts, based on, you know, the variables of, you know, contingent variables of the universe, and that they were so fine-tuned for life.
But again, you know, Dawkins will, like...
Build up this straw man of if evolution is true, then you have to accept a materialist, atheistic worldview when there's hardly a philosopher that believes that.
So a lot of the stuff was preying on his audience's ignorance.
Again, I don't want to dwell on this too much, but speaking merely from my perspective, I think we actually need to go back to the ancient world to look at the roots of this and particularly look at the just...
major shift that occurred post Plato and to understand ourselves because this is, I mean, Nietzsche's flippant one liner is Christianity is Plato for the people or Plato for the masses.
I mean, that was an insult.
Understand it deeper.
It is that whole line of thinking of logic and beauty and truth existing in an outer realm.
The famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead is that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.
I agree, yeah.
Let's go back to the pre-Socratics and let's just go back to the fundamental idea that...
Well, I agree, Ed, but I'm not...
But, you know, look...
This should be a question that societies, as they knew even then, as they documented, societies rise and fall.
They go through these seasons, and it's when they lose their religiousness, they lose their fear of the gods, they become decadent, they rationalise everything, including having children, the intelligents stop having children, and the society collapses, and the cycle carries on.
And there's very little that can be done about it.
The most one can say that we shouldn't encourage these people like Socrates to corrupt the younger...
I mean, you're speaking my language.
I mean, Socrates was...
He was killed for a reason, and it's like we like to put...
Socrates was kind of the Dawkins of his day.
He was a gadfly hanging around Athens, pissing off everyone, making them question everything.
He was the BLM of his day.
And corrupting the youth, and I have to say, the term corrupting the youth has some other associations, and I don't think...
I want to go on record as saying this.
Socrates is an absolute fuckwit.
Dunn's, like, gone full.
Look, I basically agree.
I mean, the only thing I would say, the problem is we don't know enough about many pre-Platonics or pre-Socratic philosophers like Heracles.
And Heracles himself was kind of Nietzschean, kind of poetic, kind of being playful, playing with words.
But the one...
Passage of Heraclitus that almost everyone knows is that you never step into the same river twice.
The river has changed, but then so have you.
And I think what you can glimpse from these passages like that, which again are very poetic, you could hang it up on your wall.
But it's that tension of opposites within Manitz himself, and to understand something as both flowing and as static.
It is still a river, even though it is changing and moving.
And you are still you, even though there are actually tensions and conflicts.
And so it's, you know, even the word logos, which again is now...
That sounds more like Plato than Heraclite is, right?
What?
Sounds more like Plato.
How?
Because you're finding a kind of transcendent identity within which you're situating the change.
But the transcendent identity does not exist outside of this world.
The transcendent identity is within the river itself.
I mean, it really is fundamentally different.
I mean, Logos itself is...
Well, you can have your own reading of Plato that's better.
I mean, I'll give you that.
But I mean, that is the fundamental move with Plato.
But like Logos itself, I mean, it means word, obviously.
And there's this, you know, now, I mean, a couple years ago, we had this like Logos is rising meme of going back to the text or the dogma of the church or what have you.
But I...
Heraclitus, his conception of Logos is different than that.
The truth you are getting at is a darker, more dynamic truth.
It is about tensions and opposites.
It is not just simply a reading the text.
I think logos in a platonic sense is something that is, I don't think it's just a metaphor.
You are exiting the cave and seeing the world as it is.
You are seeing the chair itself.
You're seeing beauty itself.
And I think returning to pre-Socratic philosophy would be something that we need to do in the wake of the death of God.
Even the most devout theists would recognize that...
It's so cliche that one of the questions they might ask you at a philosophy interview for a university is to do an essay on what makes a table a table.
That's the essay.
Well, there is this joke...
Respond.
That is a decadent question.
Well, the best response...
Ask that question.
Yeah, the best response is there was a philosophy seminar and the professor put a table up in front of them all and he said, you know, describe tableness to me in less than 10,000 words, you know, in your blue book in the next five hours, you know, have fun.
And the smartest student handed back the blue book early and he had one sentence and said, what table?
Question mark.
Yeah.
Deep.
I find that funnier than you do.
But the only thing I would say is that you have to find something.
Because even Craig or other people would not deny that we are living in the death of God in the sense that the Christian system is self-critical.
It's had the wind knocked out of it at some level.
And we are living...
I mean, I don't...
We're living in a secular age to a degree.
Now, I am highly critical of that term, but you understand where I'm going.
We are living at a point where it is more and more difficult to justify actions on the basis of...
The church or a book or the Christian tradition.
And also these things have been suffering from withering or attacks that would not have been tolerated previously.
You didn't need to justify.
That was the thing.
But when there wasn't religious society until, I know, the 50s in Europe or a bit later in America, you didn't need to justify them on those grounds.
It was just obvious.
Of course you are.
Of course you can't steal.
Of course you can't lie.
Of course you can't kill people.
Of course you can't.
And when society fragments like this into these group-selected versus individually-selected camps, then there's absolutely no crossover.
There's absolute polarisation, which is when you get very, very serious problems, which is what we're seeing now.
But I'm not sure about the death.
We're living through the death of God.
I think that if you look at the data on who has babies, Or who's breeding?
Who's having children?
Then we could be living through the rebirth of God.
But, you know...
Even at the...
I agree with you.
I mean, this is something that...
Imagine the future of just Nick Fuentes types.
High...
Religious, high and extroversion.
That's what we seem to be selecting for.
That's a horrifying thought.
Get ready for a world war on thoughts, I guess.
I agree with you to a large extent.
We talked about this in your book with Eric Kaufman and the fact that the religious shall inherit the earth.
They are having one and a half children in America.
Evangelical Christians are having one and a half children for every one child of a wasp.
And then if you take it out further, it's kind of like a fundamentalist Muslim is having three children for every secular humanist Westerner.
I mean, it is dramatic.
And an Amish is having seven children.
I don't think the Amish will take over the world anytime soon, but your point stands that it's like we might be at the end of a secular age and it was kind of a secular moment.
That being said, I think the intellectual crisis is still going to persist among the elite and culture makers.
I don't think we can go back.
I don't know.
Well, yeah, once you reach a tipping point of about 25% or something like that of the population being religious, and they'll be religious, remember, for genetic reasons.
So you can be religious for environmental reasons, you can be religious for genetic reasons.
Environmental reasons are out.
Stress is so low that that's probably not a factor.
People that are religious now, or are right-wing now, or are conservative, are utterly resistant to the environment.
Utterly resistant to an environment which is telling them to be maladaptive.
They're totally resistant to it.
And once those people become about 25% of the population, those are the people that are breeding, then you get a tipping point, and then you get a change in the elite.
And that's the kind of thing that one would...
I'm writing a short thing on this at the moment.
That's the kind of thing that I would suspect is going to be happening within our lifetime, certainly.
I think the...
I'll say...
Yeah, I think...
You know, I think this current of...
Relativism and materialism and humanism, I think it would be a mistake to see it as something that has any kind of permanence.
I think it's largely a reflection of sort of technical progress in civilization and how that influences people's thinking.
I don't think it's...
I mean, there was no great revolution of thought that displays theism or anthem.
So I think this is...
We think how quickly these changes can happen, how fast they can happen.
And often as well, it's when the system feels itself under threat that it doubles down and becomes even more extreme.
So the height of conservatism was probably the 50s, where you were at a point where illegitimate children born to working class people were put up for adoption.
That didn't happen in Victorian times.
That was happening in the 50s.
That was the height of extreme persecution of homosexuality.
They went from being tolerated in the 30s and 40s to being persecuted heavily in the 50s in Britain and America.
McCarthyism and whatever.
It's when it's at height that that's when you know it's falling apart.
I mean, I think about Ireland, the change has been so rapid.
When I went to Ireland in 2002, it was Ireland.
It was the stereotypical Ireland we all know of.
And when I went there in 2015, it wasn't.
And it completely changed.
And that was in just about 13 years.
Yeah, I mean, it's easier to...
Like, up to 1992, homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland.
So you want an example of how quickly things can change, you know?
Yeah, and now you've got basically everybody that runs Ireland is gay.
