This is the final entry in my series on Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian. You can read my general summary of this book; where also at the bottom is a TOC linking to all the follow-ups, in which I delve more deeply into specific subjects covered. The general takeaway is the same in every entry: Brierley is honest and well-meaning, but keeps resting his Christian faith on failures of fact and logic. Here I’ll illustrate the same point in respect to his closing chapters, “My Ten Minutes with Richard Dawkins” (pp. 167-88) and “Choosing to Live in the Christian Story of Reality” (pp. 189-206). In these he tries to argue that Christianity is just better for the world than alternatives. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Let’s Review

I already made relevant points about this claim in previous entries. So let’s revisit what I’ve already pointed out before delving any further in.

In my general summary I noted that Christianity has no coherent notion of atonement. Which is why Brierley avoids the subject. Yet this incoherence is fundamental to it as a worldview. Jesus cannot die for your sins. That is literally a moral impossibility (see Ken Pulliam, “The Absurdity of the Atonement” in The End of Christianity). On any honest, logical, evidence-based analysis, forgiveness can only be received from the wronged (and you never have any right to receive it), and atonement can only be achieved by righting what you did wrong (insofar as you can), and sincerely committing to never doing it again. Even forgiving yourself can only be honestly realized by admitting the harm you have done and genuinely committing to doing better. The only way to fix the problem of having been a bad person is to become a good person. Period.

Which does require adopting a rational, evidence-based idea of what it even means to be a good person. For example, “moral perfection” won’t be on that list. And Christianity does real human psychological harm for preaching that it should be. As likewise it does by causing you to hate yourself for things that aren’t even wrong, but simply for being genuinely who you are (sexual; gay; doubtful; hedonistic; ambitious; self-respecting; self-capable; iconoclastic; nonconforming; nonmonogamous; almost everyone has something about themselves it targets, usually several). It even promotes societal hatred on those same axes. And though liberal varieties of Christianity are less toxic in this respect than conservative, there is even less biblical basis for those varieties; they are even more made-up than every other false religion, and grounded in next to nothing (see What’s the Harm and Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies). If you base your moral wisdom in evidence and reason, you don’t get liberal Christianity, or conservaive; you get godless Humanism (see Sense and Goodness without God, especially but not only Part IV). And why, again, would we want to base our moral wisdom on anything other than evidence and reason?

The same problem is evinced by Christians’ failure to resolve crucial “denominational” disputes; which range well beyond theological or organizational trivia, into serious matters of deep moral and societal concern (another problem Brierley avoids). The Christian worldview provides no way whatever to resolve such disputes. You can’t phone God. And everyone’s intuition is declared to be an inspiration of the Holy Spirit. When Secular Humanists have disputes, they are either resolvable with evidence and logic, or else the disputants admit that they lack sufficient evidence and logic to hold one position against another with any relevant confidence. Disputes may still remain because one side or another abandons evidence and reason; but that problem plagues Christianity as well, and in fact any other worldview. So that “people sometimes won’t listen to reason” is not a peculiar defect of any worldview. It can only be overcome by preaching a more sincere and total commitment to reliable epistemologies; of which Christianity has none.

Christianity’s holy text is actually too repulsive to be the basis for any humane civilization. It must be discarded. We need to build on something far better informed and more ethically and wisely constructed. And we aren’t going to do that if we keep promoting Christianity instead. Christianity is an ancient barbaric superstition. It’s time to let it go. It needs to be replaced with an ethical, rational, evidence-based worldview, like contemporary Secular Humanism, which by design abandons all indefensible, illogical, unevidenced conclusions and promotes only what abundant evidence confirms: human beings matter, and should be the standard by which we measure all our goals and designs; and the best way to make society a better place for all of us to enjoy and realize our potentials—a good place, even the best place, to live a life we can find worth the bother of living—is to cultivate and promote above all else honesty, justice, empathy, joy, and reason.

A Factual Moral Comparison

To illustrate what I mean: in Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life, I pointed out that his God literally left us “with his commandments to hoard sex slaves and murder people who speak their mind or pick up sticks on Saturday.” That’s not a joke. Those are in the tablets inscribed by God himself that Moses is said to have carried down the mountain. No moral being would put that in their book. Which illustrates a broader problem with the entirety of Christianity as an approach to societal progress:

[B]eing false, it is easily attached to all manner of immoral ideologies, as the entire history of Christianity demonstrates, then to now. And this makes Christianity all too often toxic, the most common basis still for adopting countless hostilities to both progress and investment in actual technologies of immortality and an actually better future world (see What’s the Harm). Google it and you’ll find Christianity is pervasively opposed to transhumanism of any variety, the only actual way anyone can ever live indefinitely; and pick any issue, you’ll find the people who are standing in the way of every attempt to improve the social welfare in any real way are always predominately Christians.

This is also no joke. As I further noted:

Not all Christians are the enemy of society; but in the West, nearly all society’s enemies are Christians. Their ideology throws at us countless immoral ideas about how to control people and blind them to the truth and hinder society’s progress. “But some of us don’t” is no evidence against that fact, as it is a fact about the net aggregate effect of Christianity on the world, not about individual outliers whose exceptionalism, by its very rarity, proves the rule.

And that is why Christianity is a poison pill, no matter how much sugar coats its outer shell. Until it stops giving us PragerU, the GOP, the Armageddon Lobby, racism and sexism, laws and teachings against abortion, birth control (often even condoms and vaccines), critical thinking, sex education, gay rights, public welfare, even climate science, and every other evil it’s saddling us with, from opposing teaching of the truth about history in schools to perpetuating the immoral and misery-multiplying prosecution of so-called “vice” crimes (including even, when it can achieve it, the state murder and oppression of gay people), Christianity clearly is not a functional worldview. If it can’t protect you from all those false ideologies, it is itself bankrupt as an ideology. A genuinely rational, evidence-based humanism is the only real cure (though atheism alone, not being a specific worldview, doesn’t cut it). 

I then mentioned a case in point:

Brierley worries, for example, about the “drug addicted prostitute” seeing atheist bus signs telling her she should stop worrying about the threat of hell and get on with enjoying her life; how is she supposed to do that? That’s actually a question the theist needs to answer. God isn’t doing jack all for her. The rest of us are busy offering real solutions to her (state health care and rehab; legal help; food and shelter), and fighting to provide even more, usually by fighting Christians (because it’s usually Christians) who are too busy selling her on some vain ideological drug, like Jesus (which cures none of her actual problems), while making her life more miserable by cutting programs that would help her, and by criminalizing prostitution and drugs, rather than defending her professional rights (thus prosecuting abusive bosses and clients instead of honest businesswomen) and access to healthcare (thus ensuring she can seek real medical treatments for ailments like substance addiction, as well as any underlying causes in mental illness she may need society’s help treating). That’s what we should be doing.

After that I gave another example, of what we should be doing when confronted with the actual and future potential loss of things we care about and build our lives upon. As with literally anything else, the answer comes from making logically sound inferences from the evidence, of what actually helps with that; not from false superstitious fantasies.

In Justin Brierley on Jesus I reiterated and expanded on this point:

[The Bible is loaded with] often repulsive moral teachings (e.g. recommending even mutilation, tearing apart families, and oppressing women, to upholding slavery as a moral model, and more—as I discussed before), and profound ignorance (e.g. Jesus didn’t even know about germs, as I also pointed out earlier on; he thus didn’t know the catastrophic importance of recommending rather than condemning personal hygiene).

Which brings us to the greatest failure of Christianity’s sacred texts: they completely fail to teach us even what logic and science and democracy are, much less their vital importance toward securing all human goods and welfare. The authors of the Bible, even Jesus himself, knew nothing of this, and therefore cannot make any claim to wisdom. And this is proven out by their completely barbaric and ignorant failures of moral wisdom.

As I also there wrote:

Brierley is suckered in by the false declarations of Tom Holland, claiming Holland’s “research had shown him how the concern for the poor and marginalized demonstrated by the first generation of Christians was unparalleled in the ancient world” and “the idea that human rights, welfare provision and equality will naturally prevail in any educated society was a secular myth” (p. 84). Every single thing said here is false.

… [F]act is, the ideas of human rights, state welfare provision, and equality were invented by secular pagans centuries before Christianity, and are nowhere to be found in the entire Christian Bible. There is likewise no evidence Christian empires have ever been more concerned for the poor and “marginalized” than even the pagan Roman Empire that preceded them; and quite a lot of evidence that they were considerably less so—as the loss of women’s rights, gay rights, rights to free speech and freedom of religion, the creation of a de facto enslaved peasantry, global expansion of chattel slavery, and a wild thousand-plus-year increase in worldwide income disparity all exhibit. 

Brierley is sucked in by “the lies of Christian Nationalists and propagandists” because Christianity does not teach him how to critically evaluate claims. It does not teach him how to defend himself against falsehood, or discover the truth about anything. It does not teach him how to think logically or check fact-claims before believing them, much less basing further beliefs on them. (Indeed, it’s worse, as Christianity teaches against any sound epistemology, even critical thinking; and it has been that way since the beginning.) I covered this before in:

• No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West
• Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy
• That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation)

Everything else is a lie. And we should not be promoting worldviews based on lies.

I continued:

Even insofar as you try to defend the point by admitting actual Christians never significantly practiced any of the supposedly novel moral ideas Jesus developed (thus admitting Christianity is completely ineffective at transforming the world and thus not a hot recommendation, and thus likely false on that account alone), even that is based on myths about what the Gospel Jesus said and taught that don’t align with the reality (see the opening paragraphs of my analysis of this point in The Real War on Christmas: The Fact That Christmas Is Better Than Christ).

Brierley is a far more wise and moral a person than the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. And everything making him a better, wiser person comes from secular Enlightenment values, to which Christianity has simply slowly adjusted itself to, when its pushback against it became increasingly unpopular—yet still the majority of Christendom remains entrenched against those values, thus continuing to exhibit the fact that it is the enemy of world human good, not its benefactor. There are more effective medicines—as in, beliefs (factual knowledge and understanding) that actually do transform the majority of those who embrace them into better people. And none of those beliefs is a superstition or in any way dependent on the supernatural (see “Religion as Medicine,” Sense and Goodness without God, IV.2.2.4, pp. 270-72).

In Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge & the Problem of Evil, I repeated the point that the Christian God’s “revelations and scriptures are full of individually and societally toxic, often even horrifically immoral advice” while Christianity entails that their own God’s “behavior” as evinced in the amoral, unjust, and capricious design and governance of the world “is even worse,” and thus no example to follow. Humanists don’t believe the world is designed or ruled by a moral being, so they don’t face this contradiction. They know better.

Hence:

Brierley’s “God” commanded and endorsed slavery, indeed for centuries even genocidal sex slavery. We now know that is a disastrously toxic moral value to endorse or embrace. Realizing that is good for us (apart from how long it took us to empirically admit it), because it means we were thereby then able to build a better world for ourselves. But this conclusively proves Brierley’s God does not exist. No moral being can have had anything to do with the morality pushed in the Bible.

The Old Testament is especially evil. It therefore is certainly bogus. But if the Old Testament is bogus, and the New Testament is based on it (and it is), the New Testament must be bogus as well. And we have moral verification of that from all the immorality it, too, still promotes, proving none of its content can have come from any morally perfect God either. Slavery is still nowhere condemned in it. Women are still deprived of human rights therein, and their oppression commanded as righteous. The mass genocide of nonbelievers, to be performed by God’s angelic armies, is still promoted as a morally just outcome. If there is a morally perfect God, he can’t have had anything to do with the Bible. Which means he can’t be the Christian God.

And this is now “why the entire Western world has abandoned every actual Biblical morality,” because “radical pacifism is actually immoral; criminalizing blasphemy and sexuality, immoral; endorsing the entire Torah law code, immoral; subordinating women, immoral; slavery, immoral; condemning or executing gay people, immoral.” No God told us this was the case. To the contrary, this all had to be “empirically discovered.” Brierley’s God’s moralities are “simply dysfunctional” and we have seen this “across countless sad lessons of history.” Worse, the contradiction between Brierley’s high moral values (little of which come from the Bible, but rather from secular philosophies) and the reality of the way the world actually works and was made has even trapped him in defending evil as good, already a sure proof that his religion has to be false.

And Christianity is not merely false, it has nothing to offer. Anything good about it can be had and advocated without it. And we don’t need it for anything. We don’t need it to find meaning in life. We don’t need it to discover what moral truth is and why we should conform our lives to it. We don’t need it to explain why or how we exist. And it can’t even logically work anyway. There is no evidence any of its rewards even exist, nor any evidence that those rewards go to those whom Brierley claims, rather than someone else. That’s why every evil is taught using Christianity: with no evidence of who goes to heaven, people can use Christianity to promote any vile or toxic ideology they want by claiming they go to heaven. This is what makes this religion fundamentally bankrupt as an ideology. It must be abandoned. It must be replaced with an evidence-based humanism.

Does Christianity at Least Make People Better?

No. There is no evidence it has any such effect, more than any other false religion—or, more importantly, than a sincere commitment to Secular Humanism would. Among all free democracies, always the more secular their society, the more moral. By every metric (health, crime, personal satisfaction, economic justice, human rights; even unwanted pregnancies and STDs). Christianity thus appears to have a negative effect on the moral welfare of society; but even at best, it does nothing good for it. In my discussion of Brierley’s attempt to address evil I noted that every broad survey yet made of the Moral Fruits of adopting Christianity finds that they are truly Meagre (once again, for the best examples of the Argument from Meagre Moral Fruits, see Jonathan Pearce and Emerson Green and their mutual discussion).

I covered this before, in The Carrier-McDurmon Debate: Which Worldview Produces the Better World? I there cite the science and studies confirming all the above; adding as well the point that “the United States is actually founded on rejecting, indeed outlawing, most of the Bible’s guidelines for morals and law,” by “observing how much the world sucked for so many centuries until we did” (see my article That Christian Nation Nonsense). Instead of relying on Christianity as a worldview, “Constitutional morals and policy were based on evidence,” they were not based “on scripture or revelation.” And we know this, not only because none of the principles of rights and aims and justice our Constitution is based on are to be found anywhere in the Bible, but also “because its very writers and framers explicitly told us” what they were doing: abolishing the evils of Biblical society, and replacing them with empirically-ascertained, human-engineered goods. Brierley’s U.K. is very much built on the same ideas now, having learned their lesson from us on exactly the same points. In every case throughout history and the world, society improved only when it abandoned the Bible as any kind of guide for how to organize and govern it.

So Christianity is of no use to individuals, and it is of no use to society. And as all the facts just surveyed show, it can even make everything worse for both. If you want individuals to be better people, then improve their education and conditions (particularly in childhood), and provide them with the mental health skills (like R.E.B.T.) that are empirically proven to improve human decisions and conduct without any false, superstitious, ever-potentially toxic baggage. Because this is what the evidence shows actually works. Likewise, if you want society to improve, start stumping for and electing honest leaders who genuinely believe in evidence-based policy (or: run for office yourself; be that leader); or at least start advocating to your legislators and peers the advancement of policies that have already been shown to improve the world.

For example, you should stop evangelizing for Christianity and instead put all that energy and resources into evangelizing for Universal Basic Income. One of those two things, when adopted across a society, will actually change everything in society for the better. Brierley has already seen an example of this, as he lives in a nation that has embraced Universal Health Care (itself a limited form of UBI). Will the United States be better for everyone in it if it had more Christian believers; or if it had Brierley’s health care system? The facts already establish the answer. Every metric would improve; including moral. Even something as seemingly trivial as retooling our energy economy on a broader foundation of nuclear power would make everyone’s lives better (less death, less disease, less war, less income disparity, less economic loss and societal disorder from ecological damage).

Even something as particular as making IUDs universally free and available would have a bigger impact on reducing abortion than attempts to outlaw abortion ever have or will. So, let’s say you believe the world would be a better place with less abortion in it. Well, evidence-based reasoning tells you what policy you should be advocating; whereas faith-based policy-making will cause you to make everything worse—by your own metrics! Similarly, you know what has had a substantial positive impact on reducing rape, sexual assault, and the spread of STDs? Yeah. Legalizing prostution (example, example, example, example). Give women their rights; treat them with respect; treat their profession like a respectable business rather than a dangerous sin. And then everything improves—including the treatment and lives of prostitutes, their clients, and their communities. You can go down the line of things Christians “want,” and case after case, evidence typically shows their policy ideas have the opposite effect. Because they place their false beliefs ahead of any interest in the evidence, or the actual betterment of society. This is why Christianity has to go.

Brierley’s Attempts to Get Around This

Brierley basically ignores all this, actually. You won’t find it ever mentioned or discussed. Possibly no one has ever told him any of this. Although, as I have noticed he “forgets” a lot of things that people tell him, maybe he has been told this, and he has just blanked on it, too. Because it definitely would be bad for his cognitive dissonance to remember it. Instead we get bad logic and worse facts.

The Dawkins Conversation

For instance, Brierley once asked Richard Dawkins (who is not a philosopher, much less an expert in moral philosophy; so really, the worst person to ask a question like this of) why he thinks rape is wrong. His answer, that essentially “rape is wrong” for the same “arbitrary” reasons as “we’ve evolved five fingers rather than six” (p. 171), gets much quoted by Christians online now. Though none of them understand what Dawkins actually meant by that—including Brierley. This is a common problem I already noted in this subject is partly, too, the atheists’ fault: Dawkins also didn’t understand what question Brierley was asking. So his answer was completely unhelpful.

Brierley was asking for what reason we can declare rape wrong “other than” just mere aesthetic whim. In other words, what makes it a fact rather than an opinion. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, mistook him as asking why the ontology of human beings developed in such a way as to entail rape is wrong. In other words, why rape even exists. These are not the same questions. And because Brierley doesn’t know that, he doesn’t understand what Dawkins actually said to him. This also means he never asked Dawkins the question he actually wanted his answer to—because he incorrectly assumed he already had; so really, Brierley still doesn’t know how Dawkins would have answered that question. Of course, he should be asking an expert in moral philosophy a question like that, not a biologist. But still.

To illustrate how they are talking past each other, imagine two scenarios:

1. Aliens evolve on another planet who reproduce by random aerial spooring. They don’t “have sex” and consequently have neither the organs nor any intelligible drives that would ever make “rape” even logically possible among them. They will never even have heard of such a thing, and might have a hard time understanding it if we met them and tried explaining it to them. They’d keep thinking we are talking about just attacking someone, an unjustified assault, or some kind of offense of inflicting physical humiliation, or something like that, and wonder why we make a special category for it. We’d have to explain to them what sex was, what lust was, what sex organs were—even what misogyny and toxic masculinity were, and because these beings have no sexes nor any genders, that would be a long conversation all by itself.
2. Aliens evolve on another planet who can only reproduce through rape: one sex must surprise and dominate the other without their express prior consent, lest conception not occur (due to some random way their reproductive neurochemistry developed). As they build a civilization, they develop a kind of culturally regulated rape, like an ethic of “consensual nonconsent,” whereby receivers who are interested in conceiving wear a certain kind of signaling regalia, and others dress conspicuously differently to signal the reverse, and everyone is pleased with the overall resulting outcome—even the ones “being raped” in order to have kids. This species, unlike the first, would understand rape as a crime, but only as violating the ettiquette of whom to pounce upon; whereas quite a lot of what we would call rape would otherwise be moral for them, indeed even morally necessary.

Neither of these beings describes us. Yet, adding now us, that makes three different ways a species could have evolved with respect to what Brierley means by “rape” (at least logically; even if not probably). Which of them that “we” turned out to be would indeed be as arbitrary—as in, random, undesigned, unchosen—as how many fingers we have. This is what Dawkins was saying. And he is right. Because obviously, we aren’t like either of those two other species, and no one decided that for us. It was just a random accident. But this wasn’t the question Brierley was asking. He wants to know why, let’s say, that second species with morally necessary rape developed the ethic it did—he might ask them why, for example, is it only right “to rape” persons who are signalling they are okay with it? Why is breaking that rule wrong?

I made a similar point regarding torture and murder in my discussion of Erik Wielenberg also missing the point of Brierley-style questions here. What is and is not moral is always going to be an arbitrary product of how we physically developed, and how our world actually physically works. But that doesn’t mean “it doesn’t matter” how we physically developed or how our world actually physically works. To the contrary, that is precisely what does matter. It’s the very thing that causes the moral facts to be what they are.

Brierley is using the word “arbitrary” in a completely different sense. He means “whimsical,” a judgment that has no basis. Dawkins means it, instead, only in the sense of historical contingency: it may be happenstance that I win a lottery, but it does not then cease to be a fact that I won the lottery. Winning a lottery is not “arbitrary” in the sense of “If I just feel like I won the lottery, then I did.” It’s not a subjective opinion. Once it happens, it has happened. And that’s just that. Similarly, that rape is immoral for humans is arbitrary in the developmental sense, like my winning the lottery would be; but it is still a justified true fact that it is wrong, just as it is a justified true fact that I won the lottery.

This has to do with the reasons why anything is immoral at all, which I already covered. So I won’t go into that again here. You can get into it there. The salient point here is that, if Brierley understood what Dawkins was saying, Brierley would have to agree the same answer holds for Christianity. It is a completely arbitrary fact that Brierley’s God made us like we are, rather than like either of those two other hypothetical species. Brierley thus also has to say that, in terms of ontological contingency, that rape is wrong is indeed still arbitrary even if Brierley’s Christianity were 100% true. It’s just some weird random thing God decided, to make us have sex at all, from which decision rape then becomes a realistic possibility that can then be adjudged wrong, on the same standards anything is. God could have just made us into spore creatures; or made us morally dependent on rape—neither outcome at all like ours. Those decisions would have been just as arbitrary. Yet the resulting moral facts would remain just as true.

For example, being a peer-reviewed moral philosopher myself, in The Christian Delusion I commented for John Loftus on this same “rape” question as follows (p. 101):

[A]ny rational would-be rapist who acquired full and correct information about how raped women feel, and what sort of person he becomes if he ignores a person’s feelings and welfare, and all of the actual consequences of such behavior to himself and his society, then he would agree that raping such a woman is wrong.

All the same goes for rape crimes when men are the victims, or women the perps. This is why Brierley is making no sense when he tries to argue that animals rape each other (p. 102). That is literally impossible because animals have no cognitive capacity to comprehend anything like these things. They therefore lack mens rea, or “criminal minds.” Since most animals are incapable of comprehending what they are doing—the entire basis for all moral reasoning—most animals are incapable of moral conduct. Moral behavior is only a property of humans; and perhaps some other animals of near-comparable cognitive ability, like apes, but even that is contingent on conditions most don’t undergo: it takes quite a lot of deliberate human enculturation to even get an ape to comprehend morality. Otherwise they are more comparable to a human toddler, whose innate capacity for moral reasoning is quite limited. If a toddler cannot even comprehend what rape is, then they are incapable of committing the crime. They literally know not what they do. And moral reasoning consists of knowledge.

Moral facts thus arose from the arrival of humanity’s ability to comprehend the material facts from which they arise, which are facts about who any given behavior affects, and facts about the physical world they have no choice but to inhabit.

Random Weird Mistakes

Brierley’s eighth chapter, despite its title, abandons this conversation with Dawkins rather quickly. It descends instead into a bunch of weird non sequiturs. He starts by trying to argue that atheism is in decline, therefore belief in God is more likely correct (pp. 175-78). This is already a straightforward ad populum fallacy: by this logic he would have been pro-slavery were he just “by chance accident” writing in the year 1600, and a flat-Earther were he just “by chance accident” a European peasant in the year 1300. Which illustrates again that he can’t reason logically. You need more than a mere pop vote to determine the truth of a thing; that vote has to be sufficiently informed and competent to argue for it, and “indiscriminately asking global randos” doesn’t cut it. But it’s also false—illustrating again that Brierley can’t do facts, either. He gullibly cites only a whitesheet at a Christian propaganda mill, the Gordon Conwell Seminary, which claimed “atheists” shrank from 4.5% of the world population to (it was then projected) 1.8% between 1970 and 2020.

In actual reality, global atheism has been significantly increasing, especially in first world countries—as in, countries with the best educations and freedoms and nutrition and access to information, and every other thing that matters to competence and sound judment. That does not bode well for Christianity, which only grows in proportion to the decline of those assets in a community. Indeed, even as third world countries rise in wealth and resources, atheism begins to grow there. For example, in Mexico, still a poor and traditionally Catholic country, atheism is now growing nearly three times faster than Catholicism. In the United States, one of the most religious nations in the first world, Christianity is in precipitous decline. In other first world nations, it has already declined to far lower levels.

In Brierley’s own UK, only half the population is Christian now and if the trend continues (as it likely will; the decline has continued for decades) Christianity will soon be a minority belief there. Already, at least 40% of Brits are declared atheists. Every other first world country is in or fast getting to pretty much the same place. And the US is on track to join them. It’s already around a quarter atheist; the more so the younger the generation. But even globally, full-on atheism (whether people use that word or not) is on a measurable rise. Contrary to Brierley’s ill-chosen propaganda, real data suggest the percentage of atheists globally is now between 9% and 25%, and likely higher (as not everyone uses the words “convinced atheist” to describe their unbelief).

Which should not surprise. Even after some (mildly) increased freedoms allowed more citizens of once-or-current communist countries to declare for a religion, they remain majority atheist. China and Russia together comprise a fifth of the world’s population—and are mostly atheists. First world nations range between, more or less, a quarter to three quarters atheist, and growing. It’s only the third world where we find Christianity still growing—which means, again, in the poorest nations with the least access to education and information. If Christian belief only correlates with ignorance, it’s not likely to be true. Whereas if we just track belief in God, we’re now including nations that even lack the freedom to choose (like much of the Middle East). And if you have to force people to believe in God, there clearly isn’t enough evidence to warrant believing in God.

So this argument tanks for Brierly as soon as you apply logic and facts. Brierley stumbles into the same errors when he tries to push back against the fact that belief in his God is demonstrably a cultural construct—because no one is born to it, it didn’t even exist until fairly recently in human history, and no one arrives at it as a conclusion apart from contact with a culture pushing it (pp. 178-80). Therefore atheism (or agnosticism if you prefer) is, indeed, the default position, away from which one has to be persuaded (which usually happens in childhood). That’s why Christianity has little popularity in the Middle East. Christianity here is as much a cultural putsch as Islam there. This does not argue for either being true, but more the reverse. See John Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith for the problem here. I’ve also covered the correct way to frame the question of “burden of evidence” and defining “atheism” elsewhere, so I won’t elaborate on Brierley’s muddled forray into those questions either. You can get all you need by way of de facto response in Who Is an Atheist? and Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof.

Brierley is right that we all have some worldview by the time we are adults, whether it’s well-considered or not (p. 180). But that doesn’t address the problem he is facing. The question is whether the worldview one has adopted is well-considered or not. Which just gets us back to the same old problem of whether the worldview one is selling is based on evidence or not, or is illogical or not. And as we have seen throughout this series, Brierley has no logical defense of his own belief, and also rests it on numerous false beliefs about the world. Like all apologetics, when we put back in all the facts he leaves out, we get the opposite conclusion. We see this in his attempts to argue against the fact that god-belief is demonstrably a byproduct of poorly evolved cognitive deficits and their cultural appropriation (pp. 180-81) and the fact that the vast proliferation of false religions is a rather potent argument against the probability of his religion being the lone exception (pp. 181-83). He leaves out all the actually relevant facts in both cases, and invents in their place a bunch of poorly-informed excuses to ignore them as a problem (see my discussion of this already in my opening summary). That’s apologetics. Not hypothesis-testing.

Brierley doesn’t want to confront the fact that the cognitive machinery he wants to trust in respect to universal but contradictory god-beliefs is the same machinery that proliferates beliefs in astrology, ghosts, faeries, magic, and lucky charms. If it clearly performs so poorly with regard to the supernatural—and an honest individual must admit it quite demonstrably does—we should conclude it is also performing just as poorly with respect to gods. That’s why modern civilization abandoned faith-based methods and replaced them with science and reason. Once we did that, accurate knowledge of the world exploded. One might want to get a clue. This is why Brierley’s argument that “the Christian might equally respond” to the atheist, “So out of the thousands of beliefs about the nature of the world, yours just happens ro be right?” (p. 182) is illogical. He is missing the very difference we are pointing out to him: our worldview is based on evidence and reason. It derives from the most reliable methods proven to ascertain the truths of the world. His religion is based on avoiding those methods and ignoring their results. Like all other religions. That is why it is probably just as false as they are.

Other weird things here I already covered before. For example, Brierley’s strange contradiction on “prayer science,” first denouncing it as impossible, then trying to use an even worse version of it to defend his faith in his closing chapter (pp. 189-92). Likewise Brierley’s asking what evidence would convince us God existed (p. 192)—after we’ve explained what would suffice countless times. For example, in my article on Bayesian Counter-Apologetics I outline what evidence in each of ten arguments actually would make a God’s existence more probable, and how in fact what we observe is exactly the opposite. The world simply isn’t what we’d observe if God existed. And that’s that. The theory is dead as door nails now. That’s why we need to move on.

That Illogical Free Will Defense…Again

Brierley’s illogical (but typical) attempt to argue that God cares more about our free will than evincing his existence adequately (p. 193) is a model example of what I mean. Of course the reverse is the case. “So much for compassion or free will,” I already pointed out, “if God won’t even speak to someone freely choosing, indeed outright begging, to hear him.” To the contrary, “Decent people with infinite resources always answer calls for help.” This argument of his is so illogical in fact that it exposes, as I said before, “an internal incoherence” of “Christianity in regards to whether or how we can have free will in heaven.” Because, “either we won’t, which means it’s not morally important to have it” and thus that can’t be an excuse for God making the entire world look exactly like a world with no God in it, or “we will” have free will in heaven and therefore having adequate evidence that God exists won’t violate it.

Brierley can’t escape here. His argument can’t be salvaged. No matter which way he turns, he can’t get this to work. Yet he has still convinced himself with this. By not thinking any of it through, it “feels” to himself like he has answered the problem, and can then go on telling himself he’s sorted it out. Which is typical of delusional cognitive dissonance avoidance. But what’s really bad here is that this means he doesn’t realize depriving people of crucial information deprives them of free will, not the other way around. It’s not consent if it’s not informed consent. So Brierley’s attempt to rescue his faith from the facts here has led him to endorse a horrible and immoral principle about evidence and obligation. If anyone applied that principle to anything else, we’d have a ruinous society of consent violations, resulting in a quite widespread destruction of human free will.

For example, Brierley says providing adequate evidence of God’s existence, qualities, and desires would “rob humans of their ability to choose him, trust him, and love him” (p. 193). Imagine if we actually followed that principle in any other personal relationship. Providing adequate evidence that a woman someone is telling me about even exists, much less actually has any personal qualities and desires claimed for her, would “rob me of my ability to choose to marry her, trust her and love her.” Um. Eeesh. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Isn’t it fairly obvious exactly the opposite is the case? Likewise, imagine we said this of business partners, war allies, politicians? This would destroy society, by literally destroying, not enhancing, our ability to choose freely. Giving us sufficient information by which to choose whether to trust and love someone is fundamental to freely choosing to.

That Brierley doesn’t realize how illogical this defense of his own faith is, or how easily his defense can be used to promote grossly immoral social principles, should disturb him—and you. Indeed, Brierley actually lets his Bible tell him to consider as “blessed” those who choose to believe things without evidence (p. 194; citing of course John 20:29). His religion has literally taught him to praise the rejection of evidence-based reasoning! That is dangerous as all hell. This is a disastrously bad effect his religion has had upon him. And he thinks it’s cool. Which exemplifies everything I have been saying about how Brierley, like all sincere Christians the world over, has trapped himself in a delusion; and no mere delusion, but a delusion frought with societal danger—as the entire history of Christianity proves has routinely been the case. This is why we need to abandon it.

Trying to Dodge Hell

We find a similar weird evasion of the problem when Brierley gets to the problem of hell (pp. 183-85). He wants to insist none of the usual Christian hell talk “is correct” but doesn’t realize that he has no way of knowing that. He just “declares” how hell works, without a shred of evidence that that is how it works. Worse, even, for his own Bible is full of declarations that it doesn’t work the way he claims. This is why most Christians the world over denounce his soft version of the faith and insist hell is indeed real and works exactly as he claims it doesn’t. That Christians can’t prove this, or otherwise, is how we can know it’s false. Brierley just argues from how he “wishes” Christianity worked. He doesn’t work from any evidence of how it actually works. And that’s the difference between atheism, which can build worldviews on evidence and reason, and false faiths like his, that don’t.

As I wrote before:

In a rare instance of making a controversial confessional admission, Brierley declares himself an annihilationist. So his idea of hell is simply ceasing to exist when dead. But this is still the same ad baculum fallacy, albeit a “kinder” one than most of Christendom (Christ included) has endorsed. Brierley intuitively recognizes there can be no reason to care about what behavior God wants unless there are physical consequences that the moral agent wants (or wants to avoid) more than any alternative outcome. “Hey, being a callous, selfish, dishonest person means you’ll miss out on eternal paradise” is just another “Hey, you’ll have a richer, more satisfying life.” The question then is: who is giving actual empirical evidence that their causal model is true? There is zero evidence of anyone (much less people who engaged themselves in any particular behavior over others) ending up in an eternal paradise. So Brierley has no empirical facts to offer. 

If people are drowning and a shipmate nearby will only throw them a lifeline if they pledge allegiance to his vainglorious superstition, you can’t go on claiming that that shipmate is a good person. This contradiction already destroys Christianity. But when you add to this that the boat is empty—you can plainly see there is no shipmate, no lifeline even to throw you—you should most definitely dismiss the drowning sailor next to you insisting there is. He is clearly deluded, and not offering anything real worth the taking. More importantly for the present point: if you have to sell your religion with false promises of pie in the sky when you die, you have already proved your religion is false. True beliefs require no such con. What Brierley doesn’t understand here is that chucking hell from your sales pitch does not change this fact. It’s still “believe what I say or die.” It’s still a threat.

And that you need to threaten people with death to get them to agree with you is a bad sign (to say the least). It gets even more face-palming when Brierley tries to up-sell heaven by claiming “It’s all about living under the perfect rule of the King” (p. 184). So much for free will. But we already addressed that contradiction in his worldview. Unless God is going to offer us all (universally, without exception) a truly liberating multi-simverse (and then govern it with perfect moral judgment—which the evidence already of how he’s governing this world suggests he won’t), he’s a murderer. He will simply kill off anyone he dislikes, anyone who doesn’t pledge allegiance to his vainglory. He is essentially Eldon Tyrell in Bladerunner, only “generously” giving us (usually) a few more years than four before his own deliberate built-in time-bomb takes us out. This isn’t a good sell. You might want to rethink pledging your soul to someone so evil. It’s only to the greater good that there is no evidence this horror of a person even exists.

Conclusion

In the end, Brierley attempts to defend the merits of his superstition by excusing away all the evils religion has caused us (pp. 186-88), provoking our eventually attempting to ban it from government decisions and outlawing half its moral commandments. I needn’t spend much time on that, as Hector Avalos already refuted these typical apologetic arguments in Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence. As I already noted (reiterated above), religion does cause a great deal of bad things such that we would be better off without it; and it is simply false that “religion” gave us “the modern benefits of healthcare, education, social provisions, human rights, and even literature, art and music” or “hospitals or schools” (p. 187). Those (including even “universities”) were all developed by pagans acting on secular principles of reason, not faith-based decisions, much less “Christianity.” That religion falsely takes credit for all the good things of the world is actually one good reason to conclude it’s false. You don’t defend truth with lies. And you can’t establish your merits by stealing someone else’s glory.

Brierley’s argument here is also a non sequitur. Hezbollah also runs charities. Its faith is still false and evil. There is a reason Fry & Hitchens completely destroyed Catholics attempting to claim the Church was a force for good in the world, swaying nearly their entire audience to the conclusion that it isn’t. And indeed, it isn’t. The world would be better off had it never existed. Even just in lives saved from the AIDS crisis in Africa alone. But in so very much more. The Vatican ran an international child rape scheme, in case you forgot. But it’s been like this for thousands of years. How many “heretics” and “sinners” had it murdered before we took away its power to kill people? And you can’t just throw Catholics under the bus here. Remember Salem? Uganda? The Southern Slave Trade? The Ku Klux Klan? The destruction of Oscar Wilde? Christianity has been a net force for evil in the world ever since it acquired social dominance. It only declines in harm as it declines in influence—or when we outlaw all the evils Christianity has been historically inclined to inspire.

In the end Brierley resorts to the usual fallacious apologetic tactic here of tu quoque, complaining that godless communist regimes also did evil things. But that actually isn’t a defense for him. It’s proof of our point: false worldviews tend to produce evil outcomes. Atheism is not Stalinism. We are not here defending “Stalinism” but “Secular Humanism.” Not the same thing. You won’t find any wars, or much in the way of any major evils, caused by Secular Humanism. But you will find thousands of years of serious evils caused by Christendom. And this means behaviors sustained over decades and centuries, and many still ongoing; not occasional “episodes” as Brierley claims. This is proof positive of its failure as a worldview. Rational, evidence-based humanism is the only way forward; while Christianity is a barbaric superstition we would have long been better off without.