Does God Exist? Response to Alex O'Connor and Richard Dawkins

For those who have been reading my substack, this is not a regular post. I’m not responding to the Bible. I’m responding to a recent podcast by Alex O’Connor and Richard Dawkins. View it here.

As a former atheist, it’s very interesting to listen to Alex O’Connor interview Richard Dawkins. Both of them are very smart atheists. In the interview, they say perfectly reasonable things about the existence of God, reiterating the classic atheist arguments. It was nostalgic for me, because I came of age in the era of the new atheists, when Dawkins published The God Delusion. I watched hundreds of debates between atheists and religious people, and became very familiar with the arguments of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Matt Dillahunty. And I was 100% in agreement with them. I was a full-on atheist for at least ten years.

I know you’re wondering why I now call myself a former atheist. That’s a long story, and I hope my response to this interview will help you understand a part of it.

Motivated reasoning: believing what you want to believe

I think I saw Dawkins engage in motivated reasoning. What’s motivated reasoning? Here’s how I understand it.

When we encounter a piece of evidence that goes against our worldview, we rarely respond reasonably. We don’t consider the evidence, rather we decide the evidence must be false because it goes against our view. This happens regardless of whether the evidence is good. Then, we use our brain to make up a reason that piece of evidence is false. Our brains are good at making up these reasons. The reasons we come up with don’t have to be true, they just have to be convincing enough to fool ourselves and, hopefully, people around us. The belief comes first, and the reasons come second. That’s motivated reasoning.

I believe I saw Richard Dawkins do this a few times during the interview. Alex, playing devil’s advocate, presented interesting arguments for God, and Dawkins immediately dismissed them. At one point, he scoffed at an argument a microsecond after he heard it. He spent no time considering the argument. When humans have instant reactions like that, they aren’t being reasonable. They are reacting out of instinct, which means they’ve already decided the truth before hearing the argument. If the argument goes against their previously held beliefs, they dismiss it without giving it thought.

Dawkins did that, then he said something that seemed reasonable to justify his reaction. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying he’s not immune to the pitfalls of being human.

The reason I mention this is that he said he only cares about religious truth claims. He doesn’t care about whether religion is good or bad. He only cares about whether it’s true or false. For him, it’s purely a scientific question. But I don’t think it’s possible for a human being to only care about the truth of a claim. Especially not if the claim is about God. Dawkins has to actually care about whether God exists. He has to have hopes and desires about the question.

I think his immediate negative reaction to arguments in favour of God shows he doesn’t want God to exist. Our immediate, pre-rational judgments reflect only what we want to believe, not what’s actually true. He is very fond of saying things like “just because you want it to be true, doesn’t mean it is”. Well, he could say that to himself. Just because he doesn’t want God to exist doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.

In myself, I’ve noticed that it goes deeper than simply what we want to believe. It’s about what we need to believe. Many people need to believe in God because it makes life bearable. Is it such a stretch to think Dawkins needs God not to exist? The man who has spent much of his intellectual career claiming religion is stupid? If he suddenly switched sides, his reputation would be ruined.

He would probably assert that what he wants doesn’t affect his ability to think. But here’s the thing: people who engage in motivated reasoning don’t think they’re being unreasonable. They just think they’re explaining their beliefs. Humans aren’t perfectly reasonable creatures, and Dawkins is no exception. What you believe has a lot to do with what you want to believe, whether or not you’re religious. When I was an atheist, I didn’t want God to exist. If a Christian asked me, I probably would have said I wanted God to exist, but I would have been lying to myself.

So why am I no longer an atheist? If we all engage in motivated reasoning, how can we know anything is true? I’ll get there. First, we have to talk about meaning and purpose.

Atheism only works if you have a meaningful life

Being an atheist is all fine and dandy if you’re living a good life. If you’re like Richard Dawkins, world famous biologist and author, you can follow your passion and be confident you’ve had a positive impact on the world. Thousands of people listen to you or read your books every day. You are an important person and life is worth living. The same can be said for Alex O’Connor, with his large podcast following.

The same was true for me back when I was an atheist. I was young, and the world was my oyster. Sure, I didn’t have a meaningful life yet, but I had dreams, and I pursued them. I probably would have said life is ultimately meaningless. I might have even said that all my dreams and daily activities are pointless. Little did I know my life was saturated with meaning. Sometimes, you don’t know what you have until you lose it.

Atheists say that life has no ultimate purpose, but you can create meaning through your day-to-day activities and interactions. But what if you can’t? What if your life is a failure? What if you dedicated your entire life to pursuing a music career, and now you’re 31, and you’re still doing renovations for a living, which was supposed to be a temporary job to pay the bills while your music career gets started? What if you can’t honestly say that you’re having a positive effect on the world? What do you do when life has no ultimate purpose and you’ve failed to create purpose and meaning for yourself?

Atheism has no answer. I think Dawkins himself would agree. Atheism on its own does not provide a path to a meaningful life. But humans need a meaningful life. In practical terms, the search for meaning is a life or death situation. When you truly believe that life has no meaning, ultimate or not, it causes severe depression. Relying on the meaning you create for yourself is a dangerous thing.

So that’s what happened to me. Life felt meaningless and atheism provided no answers, so I started turning to religion. The story is much more complicated than that, but that’s life. All our stories are much more complicated than what we can explain in a reasonable amount of time. Many things happened to me that made me think things aren’t as they seem. The world isn’t so simple as the atheists want to believe. Some things can’t be explained.

But I don’t have time to tell all those stories. Suffice to say that now, I want God to exist. When I was an atheist, I didn’t want God to exist. And because I didn’t want God to exist, I found excellent reasons to believe God didn’t exist. Now that I want God to exist, I’m finding reasons to believe. I want God to exist so life can have meaning. And life has to have meaning. It’s not optional.

Reasons to believe

I have reasons to believe in God, but I also have a decade of training as an atheist, so I can debunk any argument for God if I want to. I’m familiar with all the classic arguments for God, but none of them convince me because I know all the classic atheist rebuttals. I’m in this in-between space where I want God to exist, but I can’t logically prove it because of my atheist education. I have Dawkins to thank for that.

Here’s how I think of it. I think the likelihood that God exists is about 0.0001%. But the likelihood that the universe as we know it exists is also 0.0001% (probably less, actually). So either way, you have to believe something impossible. To be an atheist, you have to believe that everyone who’s ever had a miraculous experience in the entire history of the world is delusional or lying. You have to believe that consciousness arises out of unconscious materials. You have to believe that the universe suddenly sprang into existence for no reason. You probably have to believe in the multiverse, to explain why our universe is so perfect for life. You have to believe that life sprang into existence out of non-living materials. You have to believe that the Bible was written without divine guidance (if you study the Bible closely, it’s amazing how intricate, complex, and unified it is even though it was written by thousands of people over a thousand years).

To be an atheist, you have to believe a long list of unlikely things. If you’re not an atheist, the list is one item long. God is very unlikely, but he explains all the other very unlikely things in one fell swoop. This is the motivated reasoning that happens in my brain now that I want God to exist. I have a pretty good brain, don’t you think?

Another thing that happens when you want God to exist is you interpret the Bible differently. Dawkins said the old testament is appalling from a moral perspective. Of course he thinks that. He is reading the Bible as an atheist, so he’s already decided the Bible is false. His brain can easily come up with reasons to say the Bible is morally appalling. I can do that too. It’s easy.

But when you believe in God, you study the Bible in deeper detail. You notice things you wouldn’t have noticed before. All the evil things in the old testament have an explanation. It’s complex, but when a good God tries to work with extremely flawed people, it doesn’t always turn out so well. This is another subject I don’t have time to talk about in detail, but you can read my other posts to see how I’ve been interpreting the old testament. Here’s one about the book of Joshua, which Dawkins hates.

Faith is the point

I suppose a pessimistic summary of my argument is this: humans are irrational beings who believe what they want to believe, so believe in God if you want to. I admit, that doesn’t sound great. But here’s where my budding belief in God makes things interesting.

What if God is real, but he doesn’t want to force us to believe in him? What if he also doesn’t want to force us to believe he is good? What if our job is to choose God, rather than be forced by reason and evidence? That’s certainly how the universe looks to me. If God wanted to create a universe where it was impossible to prove whether God exists, he did a wonderful job.

Where does that leave us? We have a choice. Is life meaningful or not? Does life have meaning even if you fail to achieve all your goals, have the worst luck, and contract an incurable disease? Is life meaningful even if you’re not a famous author like Dawkins? Is life worth living even if all the evidence says your efforts will come to nothing? Is it good to battle against impossible odds? Is it really better to be a good person, or would I enjoy life better if I behaved like a psychopath? Is it good that the world exists, with all it’s suffering? Would it be better to destroy it all?

None of these questions can be answered with only reason and evidence. In fact, reason and evidence often suggest that death is better than life. All the evidence in my life says that it’s pointless to try anything, because failure is inevitable. Sometimes, it’s best to go against the evidence. That’s faith.

We have a choice, and we’re meant to choose life, not death. Maybe God purposely didn’t prove his existence once and for all, because he doesn’t want robot minions blindly obeying him. He wants a universe with real choice. Our choice matters. Because there’s nothing more beautiful than a flawed being choosing love, goodness, and God, even though none of it is certain.