A MANUAL FOR CREATING ATHEISTS by Peter Boghossian, Michael Shermer

• we skeptics like to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
• God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad!
• when you are in the religious bubble everything makes sense and there is no such thing as chance, randomness, and contingencies.
• I call this activist approach to helping people overcome their faith, “Street Epistemology.”
• Let’s be blunt, direct, and honest with ourselves and with others.
• Socrates … said that wisdom is the key to happiness. Socrates was a skeptic about happiness, because we do not possess wisdom—no one he knows has wisdom.
• When pressed, the faithful will offer vague definitions that are merely transparent attempts to evade criticism, or simplistic definitions that intentionally muddy the meaning of “faith.”
• A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.
• Malleable definitions allow faith to slip away from critique.
• The words we use are important. They can help us see clearly, or they can confuse, cloud, or obscure issues.
• If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway.
• “Believing something anyway” is an accurate definition of the term “faith.”
• Not everything that’s a case of pretending to know things you don’t know is a case of faith, but cases of faith are instances of pretending to know something you don’t know.
• As a Street Epistemologist, whenever you hear the word “faith,” just translate this in your head as, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”
• Faith and hope are not synonyms.
• Give me a sentence where one must use the word “faith,” and cannot replace that with “hope,” yet at the same time isn’t an example of pretending to know something one doesn’t know.
• A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
• The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one.
• “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms.
• Faith Claims Are Knowledge Claims
• Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.
• A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth.
• Faith is an epistemology.12 It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims.
• Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world.
• Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims.
• Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion.
• Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
• Faith Is an Unreliable Epistemology
• If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value.
• The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.
• “No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
• Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities.
• The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them nonliterally.
• Faith is an epistemology because it is used as an epistemology.
• Absent any desire to know one is either certain or indifferent.
• Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he doesn’t think he lacks.
• Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.
• Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living.
• The sense of moving your intellectual life forward and feeding the hunger to know are a vital part of the human experience.
• As a Street Epistemologist, one of your primary goals is to help people reclaim the desire to know—a sense of wonder.
• ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.’
• people can and do change their mind in response to reasonable argument.
• Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.
• There are five reasons why otherwise reasonable people embrace absurd propositions: (1) they have a history of not formulating their beliefs on the basis of evidence; (2) they formulate their beliefs on what they thought was reliable evidence but wasn’t (e.g., the perception of the testament of the Holy Spirit); (3) they have never been exposed to competing epistemologies and beliefs; (4) they yield to social pressures; and (5) they devalue truth or are relativists.
• Belief revision means changing one’s mind about whether a belief is true or false.
• A “filter bubble” describes the phenomena of online portals—like Google and Facebook—predicting and delivering customized information users want based upon algorithms that take preexisting data into account (e.g., previous searches, type of computer one owns, and geographical location).
• Doxastic openness, as I use the term, is a willingness and ability to revise beliefs.6 Doxastic openness occurs the moment one becomes aware of one’s ignorance; it is the instant one realizes one’s beliefs may not be true. Doxastic openness is the beginning of genuine humility
• A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being.
• Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence.
• Having a reliable epistemology doesn’t guarantee that one will act accordingly.
• Most people are afraid of feeling anxiety, and they’ll do anything they can to distract themselves from it.
• When people aren’t reasoned into their faith, it is difficult to reason them out of their faith.
• Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition.
• Interventions are not about winning or losing, they’re about helping people see through a delusion and reclaim a sense of wonder.
• Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth.
• If someone knows something you don’t know, acknowledge that you don’t know.
• People dig themselves into cognitive sinkholes by habituating themselves to not formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence. Hence the beliefs most people hold are not tethered to reality.
• do not bring particular pieces of evidence (facts, data points) into the discussion when attempting to disabuse people of specific faith propositions.
• Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs—hence the term “epistemologist.
• Nearly all of the faithful suffer from an acute form of confirmation bias: they start with a core belief first and work their way backward to specific beliefs.
• Every religious apologist is epistemically debilitated by an extreme form of confirmation bias.
• Faith holds up the entire structure of belief. Collapse faith and the entire edifice falls.
• God is the conclusion that one arrives at as a result of a faulty reasoning process (and also social and cultural pressures). The faulty reasoning process— the problem—is faith.
• Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem.
• Early in the intervention, explicitly ask subjects to assign themselves a number on the Dawkins’ Scale. At the end of the intervention ask them to again assign themselves a number. By doing so you can test the effectiveness of your intervention.
• A solid strategy for lowering your conversational partner’s self-placement on the Dawkins’ Scale, and one that I repeatedly advocate throughout this book, is to focus on epistemology and rarely, if ever, allow metaphysics into the discussion.
• In other words, focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).
• Do not move on to another claim until the subject concedes that the particular claim in question is not sufficient to warrant belief in God.
• Again, it’s always advisable to target faith and avoid targeting God.
• The belief that faith is a virtue and that one should have faith are primary impediments to disabusing people of their faith.
• First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”14 I don’t make a statement about a subject’s beliefs being incorrect; instead, I ask the subject what conditions would have to be in place for her belief to be false.
• Second, I’ll ask, “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion?
• Simply causing one to consider that their core beliefs could be delusions may help them recognize the delusions.
• Model the behavior you want to emulate.
• Avoid politics whenever possible.
• Bringing up politics when conducting interventions sidetracks the discussion—which should be about faith.
• Always be mindful that your relationship with the subject will make or break the treatment.
• Trustfulness of reason and willingness to reconsider are two crucial posttreatment attitudes the faithful need in order to make a full recovery.
• System 1 thinking (intuition) is instantaneous, automatic, subconscious, and often has some degree of emotional valence; System 1 thinking is the result of habits and resistance to change. System 2 thinking (reasoning) is much slower, more subject to change, more conscious, and requires more effort.
• Many beliefs are formed on the basis of the System 1 fast-thinking phenomenon.
• Arguing about what constitutes evidence and what are the criteria for evidence usually results in shifting the discussion into ever-receding tangents. Such shifts are common rhetorical tactics of apologists.
• The process of genuinely opening oneself up to competing ideas is vital for one’s intellectual life, because it prevents doxastic closure.
• Knowledge = Justified True Belief.
• Knowledge is not a fuzzy thing that we can decide to have or not.
• Meet people “where they are.”
• if one thinks one has the truth, one stops looking.
• “Often as a consequence of sustained Socratic dialogue, one realizes that one did not know something that one thought one knew.”
• The Socratic method may sound complicated, but essentially it’s asking questions and getting answers.
• The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly
• The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something:
• Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges.
• Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder.
• The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis.
• The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false.
• A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a process of falsification.
• A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis. (There’s an asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation.)
• The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia.
• It’s a good idea to ask someone to repeat or restate their claim.
• “I don’t know” is a deceptively powerful statement.
• A pregnant pause is a very useful, nonthreatening technique, typically used in sales, to get the result you want.
• Humor is an incredibly effective and underused dialectical technique, probably underused because there are so many ways it can backfire.
• I never allow people to steer these discussions from faith is true to faith is beneficial (comforting) unless they explicitly acknowledge that faith is not a reliable guide to reality.
• The phrase “open yourself up” and the word “gift” are frequently used to indoctrinate people into faith systems. These terms may also be effective in nudging people toward embracing reason.
• When administering Socratic treatments, make sure to offer as few hypotheses as possible.
• (Asking people to “just pray about it” pushes them into a form of confirmation bias where the very act of prayer means they’ve already bought back into the system they just escaped.)
• Socratic interventions are easy to administer, no-cost treatments that can engender doxastic openness and even separate faith from its host. The main way this happens is by helping expose contradictions and inconsistencies in subjects’ reasoning processes.
• After an intervention, don’t leave the subject hanging. Be prepared to provide names, contact information, and resources that can help.
• Always be prepared to furnish resources at the end of your intervention, and also have that information on hand just in case you run into a subject at a later time.
• Forming new relationships is important because these interactions mitigate the risk of recidivating and falling back into faith communities.
• Sam Harris observed that there are only three defenses offered in response to critiques of religion (Harris, 2007b): (1) Religion is true; (2) Religion is useful; (3) Atheism is somehow corrosive of society or other values.
• The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out.
• No faith is needed to posit that the universe may have always existed.
• Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.
• Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing— that weeds out false claims.
• Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works.
• Equating an extraordinary claim with a mundane one, and then suggesting they “both require faith,” is disanalogous.
• Conversations about whether or not faith is beneficial should only take place after your interlocutor explicitly states that faith is an unreliable path to truth. Once you ask people to acknowledge this, you’ll almost never enter into a conversation about the benefits of faith.
• The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm.
• “What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens.
• A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person.
• Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity.
• All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence.
• The basic idea behind cultural relativism is that because everyone is always judging a culture from their own particular, situated cultural viewpoint, it’s therefore impossible to make reliable judgments about other cultures and cultural practices. This means that cultures and cultural practices cannot be judged.
• The fundamental idea behind multiculturalism is that different cultures can and ought to peacefully coexist.
• When one believes dignity is a property of ideas and not just a property of people, then criticizing an idea becomes akin to criticizing a person.
• Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity. That is, tolerance doesn’t handle intolerance very well.
• Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across all academic disciplines.
• Give faithbased justifications no countenance. Do not take faith claims seriously.
• In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.
• Generally, praise is underused in advancing dialogue.
• (For better or worse, putting the onus of action on someone usually ends the discourse, as most people won’t act beyond the initial contact.)
• Curriculum Resource Center (http://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/): “A comprehensive, free repository of resources for teaching students how to think skeptically.
• Historically, philosophy has focused on truth. Contemporary philosophy instead focuses on meaning.
• Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.
• People infected with faith don’t think of it as a malady, but as a gift, even a blessing.
• It matters how we talk about things. It matters what words we use.
• If you’re fortunate enough to engage imams, mullahs, rabbis, pastors, ministers, clerics, swamis, gurus, chaplains, shamans, priests, witch doctors, or any other faith leaders, be blunt and direct when demanding evidence for their claims.
• Atheism is skepticism applied to a specific extraordinary claim, and children should be taught to apply skepticism to claims in general—not just faith and extraordinary metaphysical claims.
• act the way you want others—particularly your children—to act.