Proud Atheists: Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein

Part of the problem with our current debate about the intellectual and moral superiority of atheism has to do with semantics. Atheism is simply defined as the disbelief in God. Yet are the bestselling atheists in our midst — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — only arguing against the argument from design, or is there more to their collective plaint than that? Spinoza used God and Nature interchangeably and synonymously, which has led modern readers of his Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to surmise that he was a closet atheist. It's true that Spinoza's life work sought to debunk and discredit emotion and faith– not for nothing did the non-Jewish Jew rank imagination as the lowest form of cognition — in favor of Pure Reason or a priori truth. Sub specie aeternitatis does not mean everything that endures by the will of heaven but rather by the known (and unknown) laws of the cosmos.

What do we really mean in modern parlance when we refer to an "atheist"? Is this someone who reflexively laughs away the notion of an invisible man in the sky as prima facie absurd, or someone who uses a centuries-old methodology to arrive at the same conclusion? (Orwell once admitted that it would take him a while to combat a flat-earther because all the evidence of the earth's roundness had to be remembered or relearned on the spot.) What we're talking about is the difference between a lazy heckler and a careful investigator, an irascible dogmatist and a cool-headed scientist. The former takes it on faith, as it were, that there is no God; the latter sets out to prove it.

Joseph Stalin's atheism came cheap. Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker's did not.

In your book on Spinoza, you talk about your own religious education in an orthodox Jewish school, and how Spinoza was trotted out by one of your teachers as precisely the kind of heretical thinker that good Jewish girls should avoid. But this seemed to make you especially interested in him. Why do you still like Spinoza so much? 

GOLDSTEIN: It's interesting. It's almost like there are two different Spinozas. And I really didn't bring them together until I wrote the book. At my very orthodox all-girls high school, Spinoza was presented to us as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what can go wrong if you ask the wrong questions. I was in a school that discouraged one from even going on to college. And philosophy was absolutely the worst thing you could study because it does ask you to question everything. Then there was the Spinoza I came in contact with when I was a professional philosopher. Spinoza is a metaphysician of a very extravagant sort. He wants to deduce everything through pure reason. And that was a kind of philosopher that I was also taught to dismiss and disdain. So both sides of my training — the orthodox Jewish training, the analytic philosophy training — pushed me to dismiss Spinoza.

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it's through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that's what it is about Spinoza. He's just such a rationalist.

Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he'd been exposed to. Do both of you consider yourselves atheists?

[pause] GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

PINKER: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.

PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]

So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?

PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States, so it's no small matter to come out and say it.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that's overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books — at least that kind of highbrow trade book — are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don't just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to." I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It's a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who've been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they're not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a religious background — perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background — are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, "Letting Go of God," would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.