Q&A: Atheistic Motivation
Atheistic Motivation
Question
Good afternoon.
On the question of God's existence, academia and the scientific community hold an overwhelming atheist majority. “Believers are naive fools, and atheists understand the simple, obvious truth—it's such stupidity not to see it.”
This doesn't seem like a phenomenon that happens only because of their rationality. To me, it actually seems very simple and intuitive to infer God, at least in a deistic sense, and yet the simplicity of that conclusion is very far from being represented. I think this reflects a motivation toward atheism. I grew up on “they're afraid of religious commitment” and so on—but that seems less likely to me, because religious commitment is an additional stage. I have a few possible directions, like a “sociological drift,” where the attitude is, “here we are, enlightened.”
Do you have any insights on this? What is the motivation, or motivations, if there are any?
Answer
I don't know where you're getting the data about such an overwhelming majority. In any case, the phenomenon has several possible explanations.
First and foremost, scientists are not necessarily good philosophers, even in their own fields (see my books Science, Freedom and God and God Plays Dice). Second, all of us have a tendency to turn methodological assumptions into factual claims (see columns 586 and 593). Scientific methodology ignores God, and rightly so. That is the correct way to do science. But that is a methodological assumption, and turning it into a factual claim is a philosophical mistake.
Moreover, as someone once said, there are absurdities so great that only intellectuals can say them. The sophistication required to be a heretic is considerable, and so scientists and philosophers are the ones who arrive there. They are drawn to sophisticated theories, even when those theories contradict common sense.
In addition, the correlation between atheism and science may also run in the opposite direction. Someone who is an atheist goes on to become a scientist, not vice versa. In the Jewish world this is certainly true, since in religious society many of the most talented people devote themselves to Torah study.
Of course there is also environmental influence and drift, except that this cannot be the fundamental explanation, because the question still remains why the social pressure was atheist in direction to begin with.