Daniel LaPointe

The following is an essay I initially wrote for the Harvard Salient, a conservative student publication that had been newly revived when I was on campus (and rather obnoxiously delivered to everyone’s door). The goal of this piece was to “troll the trolls,” so to speak. After a good deal of effort writing it, however, I decided not to submit it for publication. Why not? Honestly, I can’t provide a coherent answer. Shyness. Masochism. Paranoia that there was some really, really obvious rebuttal to a point I had made. Pity on their poor souls. I don’t know. Some permutation of those things. I hope the piece finds a home here, though. There’s lots to chew on.1

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Reading the essays from Volume 1, Number 1 of this publication, I could not help but be reminded of why I am an atheist. In the words of the Salient’s General Introduction, “No opinion is barred from the Salient, so long as it is well argued and rationally defended.” The ensuing paragraphs are my attempt at a rational defense of atheism, and a testing of this publication’s fealty to its stated policy.

The atheist arguments, frankly, are as routine as they are convincing. It is my hope that the familiarity of these arguments has no bearing on their perceived merit.

The first argument. If one is to believe in the existence of the Christian God, how is one to not also believe in the myriad other gods that are out there? If the authors of the prior publication had instead been born into Muslim families, would they not pray towards Mecca five times a day? If they had been born into Hindu families, would they not believe in reincarnation? What if they had been born in the Aztec Empire? Would they not have cheered the child sacrifices to Tlaloc? What intellectually consistent principle warrants belief in one case, but not the other?

Perhaps the theist bites the bullet here and concedes the point. “Yes,” he says. “I would have been raised on the local religion, and I would have embraced it all the same.” Conservatism, he says, “is not about the particulars of one’s belief. It is about one’s attitude toward received knowledge. To undermine organic continuity with the past, all in the name of being technically correct on a philosophical matter – this is to miss the point entirely.” The atheist, then, is a neurotic who can’t get over the petty details. He is intellectually committed, but socially inept. He is too focused on his own ego to utter a mere falsehood in the presence of others – a falsehood, mind you, that has been socially ordained through centuries of practice.

Now, the theist would never admit to something like that outright. For to do so would be to play his hand too soon. Recall that Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor – the personification of this sort of brutal honesty – was not a real character in the context of the novel. He was a caricature invented by an atheist. In much the same way, I would hold that no true theist would ever talk in the above manner. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think this is the most honest answer to the inconsistency question. I’ll also note that if one ventures into the deplorable corners of the internet – the 4chan board /pol in particular – one is struck by the sheer pragmatism with which the users discuss religion. Christianity, Islam, Odinism – anything will do for the racists2, so long as it resists the liberal urge to undermine organic kin groups. I can’t help but wonder if this is merely a striking example of a more general phenomenon. Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith, after all, can be made subconsciously.

The second argument. How can religion be taken seriously in light of a simple, historical explanation of its origins? Natural history buffs know the routine. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago out of a cloud of gas and dust. For much of the planet’s history, life was either non-existent or microscopic. Then came the “Cambrian Explosion” some 550 million years ago, in which diverse, macroscopic life emerged onto the scene. By the Silurian Period animals had moved onto land, and by the end of the Permian there was a mass extinction. The dinosaurs conquered the globe in the subsequent Triassic Period, and by the Jurassic and Cretaceous had attained beautiful, terrifying forms. These beasts reigned until the well-known Cretaceous extinction event some 65 million years ago. Then emerged the mammals, who have ruled the planet ever since. Humans – a breed of upright, tool-wielding apes – only evolved in the last half a million years or so. Only in the last six thousand years did they begin writing things down. Indeed, if we were to condense all of Earth’s history into a single year, human written history would only take up the last 40 seconds of that year. Christ’s crucifixion would occur at the 11:59:47 PM mark on December 31st, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence would occur at the 11:59:58 PM mark.3 Amidst this inconceivably dense canvas of Being – in which more animals have been birthed, lifed, and deathed than one can scarcely imagine – do people really mean to say that the most important thing to have ever happened was the execution of a philosopher? How does this not smack of hubris? I’ll note that a similar argument can be made with respect to the vast size of space. On this matter, the scientific evidence is clear. Humans are insignificant on the scale of the universe.

Furthermore, natural history provides a compelling explanation for the origins of religion. Recall that the theory of evolution is the common thread running through the above narrative. Applying it in the case of religion, it isn’t hard to see an adaptive advantage to a belief in the afterlife. When life was short, nature was cruel, and death was often arbitrary, a belief in the afterlife made it easier for a people to be optimistic. Simply put, it gave life meaning.4 Furthermore, in the absence of a massive, worldwide community of scholars diligently pursuing scientific truth, people were entirely justified in making up origin stories. They came up with their own explanations of nature best they could, often with liberal amounts of anthropomorphic projection. But to take any of these artefacts of thought seriously in the 21st Century – it boggles the mind.

Perhaps the theist tries to beat the scientist at his own game, disputing the very validity of the above narrative. Or perhaps the theist grants the truth of everything above, but vastly discounts the importance of prehistoric times. “So what if the dinosaurs lived for millions of years?” he says. “They weren’t people. They didn’t have language, or culture, or civilization, or love. It is these things which elevate humanity above all else. If anything, your narrative makes me more of a believer. It was religion which brought man out of the void, and it is religion which he must maintain so as not to return. Call it non-degeneration, call it the maintenance of a low-entropy state – call it whatever you like. But these stories are all we have.” The essence of conservatism, then, is a sense of precariousness. A sense of having been handed something truly unique and miraculous, something which the void only spits out once every 500 million years. “To reject that miraculous thing because your individual reason tells you otherwise – a reason, mind you, which is itself intellectually indebted to the Christian religion – this is the height of arrogance,” the theist continues. “It’s buying another ticket after you’ve already won the Powerball.” So be it. Jordan Peterson, for one, is wont to make claims of this nature. But how can we be so confident that religion is an essential component of this “miraculous thing”? What about mathematics, the scientific enterprise, and industrialization? What about curiosity itself? Can we really be confident that the Enlightenment and religion are inseparable? Who’s to say religion is the baby and not the bathwater?

The third and final argument. This one, I find, is the most compelling. Take any human from Christ’s era, and place them in the modern, developed world. Would they see the “degeneracy” so thoroughly decried in the last batch of articles? This hapless soul would enter a world of fully stocked grocery stores. A world with skyscrapers. A world with cars, trains, and planes. A world in which the vast majority of infants survive into adulthood. A world without smallpox. A world which has constructed the Periodic Table of Elements, split the atom, and been to the Moon. Would such a world not utterly overwhelm this time-traveler? Whatever conception this man had of Heaven before stepping into the time machine, would this not surpass that? If Heaven is the greatest thing imaginable, then that concept is limited by an individual’s imagination. To say, here and now, “This is it. This is the City upon a Hill. This is what a civilization should strive to be” – such a claim lacks the perspective of history insofar as it denies future generations their creativity. Point being, the humanity of the year 3000 may achieve things we are scarcely capable of imagining. God, then, is perpetually on the run.

“I do agree,” says the theist, “that our hypothetical time traveler would be shocked, initially, by the modern world. We must not, however, mistake his temporary surprise for the complete satisfaction offered by Heaven. As you may already know, your time traveler is likely to grow weary of the modern world – and quite quickly. Once the novelty of it all wears off, would he not slink into a depression? Despairing of a purpose, would he not succumb to some vice or other? As the Puritans rightly understood, true satisfaction is attained through ascetic devotion to a cause greater than oneself. In the language of your anointed psychologists, meaning is what matters most, not pleasure. And in modern America, there is a profound dearth of meaning.”

Understood. But can’t this all be incorporated into “the system” anyway? If the psychologists have identified a crisis in meaning, are we not already on the way to solving it? Why bring superstition into the mix? Surely the mental health benefits of regimenting one’s behavior, cultivating virtue, and seeking attainable goals – surely these can exist independent of an anthropomorphized deity? And if Christianity has something more transcendental to offer – say through its singular focus on the importance of sacrifice – can this value not also be exported sans superstition? If one holds that the purest of human actions is the noble sacrifice, are there not ample exemplars of this virtue in more recent historical memory? I’m thinking of the Americans who stared down the Nazi horde at Omaha Beach, or the Soviets who stared down that same horde at Stalingrad. In my mind, the evil they faced was far more visceral, convincing, and relevant than whatever is described in the Bible. We have no need for dubious claims – no need for loaves and fishes, no need for cured lepers and transfiguration – when plain history writes a better tale than we could ever imagine.

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Notes:

  1. Editor’s note: this paragraph added by author on 2/21/22. ↩

  2. This is not a misnomer. Those who post and comment on that page are truly, virulently racist. I would urge caution before investigating. ↩

  3. For these computations, I have assumed that a year is 365 days. Using the data provided in the paragraph, the reader should be able to reconstruct the times from the analogy. ↩

  4. I’ll note that this more of a memetic argument than a genetic argument. That is, it was religious cultures that were more likely to succeed, not religious genes. ↩