Interview – Dr Nathan Johnstone on New Atheist Bad History
My guest today is Dr Nathan Johnstone. Nathan is the author of the excellent 2018 book, The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion. Like me, Nathan is an unbeliever. And, like me, he has been concerned at the way many of our more anti-theistic fellow atheists have misused history in their arguments. His book covers many of the same examples of this as the articles on my site History for Atheist, so it was a great pleasure to get the chance to sit down with him and discuss this subject. We talk less about the examples of anti-theistic bad history and more about why the New Atheist movement tends to bungle history so badly and the sources and motivations of the flawed historiography their arguments depend on. We also discuss whether the New Atheist moment has passed.
For those who prefer the audio version, the Podcast edition is now up on Buzzsprout or available on most podcast platforms. Or you can listen to it on the History for Atheists podcast page.
10 thoughts on “Interview – Dr Nathan Johnstone on New Atheist Bad History”
Really excellent discussion between yourself and Nathan Johnstone particularly about how history is done. Thank you.
The written word is so much more efficient than video interviews
Then you will be delighted to know he wrote a book. I tried having a conversation with it, but it refused to answer. So that’s why I interviewed the author intead.
Do not feel bad for stepping away from the anger mill that is Social Media. Not being able to take it anymore is not weakness, it is being a normal human being.
His book would be interesting, but unfortunately both the paperback and hardcover each cost over $100 on Amazon. Even the Kindle version is just under $100. Maybe someday when the price is a little lower, I can buy one or the other.
Making the division between those who have studied STEM subjects and those who have studied humanities like history is not entirely correct. Taking the New Atheists who have come from the sciences side (as opposed to the polemicists) they have mainly been from the biological sciences (e.g. Coyne, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris), rather than the physical sciences (Victor Stenger is the exception). In physics we can carry out highly accurate calculations using the equations of quantum mechanics, but there are more than 10 interpretations of what the equations of quantum mechanics mean. As physicists we have to live with that uncertainty (in both senses). Physicists may believe that there is a deeper theory that will one day resolve the uncertainties, but that is on a level with belief in God; we don’t know that there is anything deeper. In contrast, biologists are still living in a Newtonian world of certainty about cause and effect because the uncertainties of quantum mechanics are too small to affect them; Schrödinger’s cat was purely a thought experiment. I think that we really need to draw the dividing line between biologists on one side and physicists and humanities scholars on the other.
I think you’ll find Johnstone and I both note that we are generalising. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, where I note that the division between the humanities and the sciences is not as hard as is often made out. But there is still, generally speaking, a different approach to inquiry and outcomes in the humanities and the sciences. And there is definitely a lack of understanding of how the humanities work among many STEM people. Which is what we’re talking about here.
This is interesting, but could one reason that biologists are more likely to produce atheist pronouncements about religion is that – possibly – they are more likely to be atheists? Friends of mine, all atheists themselves, used to tell me that they were astonished to find so many non-atheists in physics, while biology seemed to attract a student body that was rather solidly atheistic. Now that is of course data, not anecdote, but it’s worth considering. I wonder (if it *is* true), whether it might be because the abstraction of thinking necessary for physics might make it easier for some of them, no doubt a minority, to accept the possibility of God. Of course, it could also be that Arab and other near-Eastern students were very common in physics departments at one time, and they were and are much more likely to be believers.
An excess of Arab and Middle-Eastern students in Physics, but not in Biology in the first decade of this Century (when the New Atheists came to the fore) would be very easy to test just by looking at their names. I suspect you would not find any evidence for this.
Actually, I was thinking of the last decades of the 20th century (not the first two decades of the 21st), when I knew both physics students and physics professors. My acquaintance with biology students was limited then, but in more recent years I knew a few. They often told me that believers were not to be found in their fields of knowledge. I didn’t attempt to make a systematic study of the matter, which seemed unnecessary in this context. I was offering a suggestion that someone else might find interesting enough to take up, or not.