A Manual for Creating Atheists
Related
- Peter Boghossian (2013)
Overview
A guide to talking believers out of their faith using Socratic questioning. Boghossian defines faith as "pretending to know things you don't know" and as "belief without evidence", argues that it is an unreliable way of forming beliefs rather than a set of wrong conclusions, and proposes that the atheist's job is to treat the method rather than the content. The conversational technique, which asks the believer how they know what they claim to know and whether that method would work for anyone else, became Street Epistemology. The later chapters move from conversation to policy: faith is described as a "virus" and a "cognitive sickness", there is a chapter on "containment protocols", and Boghossian suggests that faith should be listed as a mental disorder in the psychiatric manual.
Notes
The method survives; the book does not deserve it. The questioning technique in the middle chapters is genuinely good and is more or less what Socrates does in the Apology: ask how someone knows, and keep asking. But Street Epistemology works precisely because the practitioner has no destination in mind, and this book has one in its title. A manual for creating atheists is evangelism with the sign flipped, and a believer who reads the cover has every reason to treat the questions that follow as a sales technique rather than an invitation.
The definitions are the first problem. "Pretending to know things you don't know" is not a definition of faith that any believer would accept, so the book begs its own question on page one and then spends two hundred pages congratulating itself on winning. If I want to understand why someone believes, I have to start from what they think they are doing, not from a caricature that makes my conclusion automatic. That is the whole point of Steelmanning, and the book never does it.
The second problem is the medical framing. Calling faith a virus, a disease, or a disorder is not an argument, and the chapter on containment, which proposes stigmatising faith and stripping religious exemptions as a public-health measure, is the kind of thing I would object to loudly if a believer proposed it about atheism. People do not revise a model because they have been diagnosed. They revise it when one of its predictions fails in front of them, which is what the questioning technique is for, and which the rest of the book undermines by casting the believer as a patient.
My own view of religion is that it is false and mostly harmless, and that the people who hold it are not sick. Read the chapters on the technique, then go and watch Anthony Magnabosco do it properly, with no target and no diagnosis.