James A. Lindsay - Everybody Is Wrong About God

Pitchstone Publishing

Durham, North Carolina

www.pitchstonepublishing.com

Copyright 2015 by James A. Lindsay

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lindsay, James A.

Everybody is wrong about God / James A. Lindsay ; foreword by Peter Boghossian.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-63431-036-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. God. 2. ReligionControversial literature. 3. Psychology, Religious. 4. Atheism. 5. Theism. 6. Secularism. I. Title.

BL473.L56 2015

211dc23

2015027515

To Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt

I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. We have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.

George Berkeley

For decades tobacco companies conducted and promoted research into the harms of tobacco, even though they knew smoking was deadly. Their objective was to persuade people that there was some question as to the toxicity of cigarette smoke. They reasoned that people would think the act of researching indicated there were questions that werent answered and that the more uncertainty there was around the question of whether smoking is harmful, the easier it would be for people to smoke.

A nearly identical mechanism is found in theology, apologetics, and religion. So many people spending so much time investigating the existence of God must mean that theres something to investigate. The act of researching indicates there are questions that arent answeredand the more uncertainty there is around the question of God, the easier it is for people to believe in God.

This is obviously nonsense. The number of peopleor the number of hours, or the length of timespent researching a phenomenon is not an indication of the likelihood of the actual existence of the phenomenon. For over 100 years phlogiston theory dominated a branch of chemistry. It stated there was a combustible element in things, called phlogiston, that released when combusted. There is no phlogiston. A lot of intelligent, thoughtful people spent a lot of time pursuing a fiction.

And so too it is with God: A lot of intelligent, thoughtful people have spent a lot of time trying to prove the existence of something that cant be proven. The byproducts of this uniquely unprecedented, tragic waste of time range from the production of endless corpses to the creation of countless cultures that have been inimical to human flourishing. With Everybody Is Wrong About God, Godand with it atheismis finally and unequivocally interred. James Lindsay is the undertaker.

Everybody Is Wrong About God shifts the way we understand an ages-old problem, while providing frameworks and mechanisms for a post-theistic world; it articulates how and why weve fundamentally misconceptualized theism. Theism is not a philosophy. It is not a Weltanschauung. It is not a symptom of an underlying social pathology. Theism is mythology. It looks to a fantasy as a method of characterizing reality. God is a psychologically satisfying idea believed in via mythology; Lindsay exposes the roots of the myth and thus argues for a psychological as opposed to philosophical or scientific understanding of the term God. Treating theism on its own terms is a mistake that gave the title to this bookit gets God wrong.

Consequently, because theism does not merit consideration, atheism as a counterpoint is senseless. When atheism gets treated as its own kind of thing it becomes ridiculous. And while culturally it will be difficult to recover from millennia of moral and intellectual vandalism caused by theism, atheism is not even a nostrum: atheism is harmful to the goals of leaving God behind and constructing a post-theistic world. (This may seem like a contradictory statement coming from the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists. Its not. My objective has always been to create critical thinkersatheism, or whatever word replaces it, is a byproduct of this.) Atheism, as a counterpoint, gets God wrong when it treats theism on its own terms, and in so doing tends to take on features that its critics rightly see as looking quite religious.

Lindsay argues that one of the gateways to herald the end of theism and atheism is leaving belief in God behind by changing the direction of the conversation. For centuries philosophers readily took the bait and positively ran with theism on its own terms as a philosophical position, and this doomed them to arguing endlessly in circles with theologians. No more. If we can identify what God means to people and look at it in terms of those real-world foundations, we can treat the problem differently and begin the process of burying God-beliefs. Theres no reason to persist in asserting that the word God means something other than what it does, and seeing it as a psychosocial construct can take us post-theistic almost at onceabsent atheism.

Everybody Is Wrong About God is a crucial book. Its a signpost at a crossroads. It takes a completely novel approach to understanding faith, religion, theology, and the psychology of belief, yet it builds upon multiple domains of literature before removing this scaffolding. As Wittgenstein writes, it allows readers to throw away the ladder after theyve climbed up it.

Everybody Is Wrong About God is an opportunity to clear the dust, so that we can see.

Peter Boghossian

Portland, Oregon

Im going to start this book by telling you a few things that do not seem to go together. Everyone will find these things controversial because everyone is wrong about God.

First, I want to tell you that God exists.

Second, I want to tell you that people who do not believe in God have it more or less right, and in fact, that at the level of ideas, their view has already rightfully won.

Third, I want to tell you that the key to getting God right, and thus getting over God and on with our lives and societies, is recognizing that belief in God itself is how we get God wrong.

Because God exists, when people say God doesnt exist, they are not saying something intelligible to believers. In fact, what theyre saying is worse than nonsense. The trick is that God doesnt exist; God does, and believers hear what they really mean by that word whenever they hear it. All thats needed is sorting out whatever God really means. That is an effort this book will set into motion.

This is not paradoxical. Believers are speaking mythologically about something real, so they all talk about their beliefs in the wrong way. They talk about them theologically, and thats really mythologically. Thus, they are wrong about God.

Very few nonbelievers understand this fact, and they also do not understand what God means. Lacking another way to talk about the topic, they argue in the same mythological language, and thus they are also wrong about God. While a lack of belief in the existence of God is the right position, theological terms are the wrong way to engage the topic. Atheists, increasingly identifiable as a motivated subset of those who lack belief in God, are particularly keen to commit this error and do so at two major costs. First, they perpetuate the debate about theism on its own terms, and the continuation of that debate is all the intellectual defense that belief in God has going for it. Second, they set themselves up for a number of avoidable pitfalls, most notably becoming identifiable from the outside with being something that seems almost religious and, worse, actually becoming such.