My most recent 3QD post, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?, is about my stance with respect to, my entanglement with, religion. It is anecdotal in nature, drawing on my life experiences from childhood up through the present. While I was raised as a Christian, when it came time to be confirmed in my early adolescence, I balked (in this Lutherans, as I was raised, are like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics). While I espouse no religious belief, I am nonetheless drenched in Christian culture, as is anyone raised in the United States, most of Europe and Latin America, and other places as well. That being the case, to echo Wittgenstein, it’s time that I take stock of the situation, if you will. That’s what I’ve been doing in this series of posts.
This is perhaps the last in this series, but the activity will continue. This post starts with a discussion of atheism and ends with a discussion of idolatry. I hadn’t planned on going there when I started this discussion with Claude; I had no specific plans at all, which is generally the case with these discussions. But that’s where I ended up, and it’s an interesting place to have landed, for, as you’ll see, it provides an interesting way of thinking about what’s wrong with the culture that has been developing around artificial intelligence (AI) in Silicon Valley. You might, for example, consider Pope Leo’s recent remarks about AI in view of the remarks about idolatry at the end of this conversation.
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When I was in my teens in the 1960s, “death of God” theology was big news. Time Magazine even ran an issue with “Is God Dead?” on the cover. But that was hardly a new idea. Nietzche had declared God dead in the 19th century. I would imagine that atheism in some form is much older than that. I’d guess it goes back to the ancient world in some form or another.
You're right on all counts, and the history goes back remarkably far.
The "death of God" theology of the 1960s — figures like Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, and Paul van Buren — was really a Protestant theological movement trying to salvage Christianity after Nietzsche, not straightforward atheism. They accepted that the traditional theistic God was untenable but wanted to preserve something of Christian meaning. The 1966 Time cover you remember was genuinely shocking to mainstream America, even though, as you note, Nietzsche had made the declaration in The Gay Science back in 1882. And his point wasn't even a simple "God doesn't exist" — it was a cultural diagnosis: that European civilization had killed God by making him unnecessary, and hadn't yet reckoned with the consequences.
But yes, skepticism about the gods is ancient. A few highlights:
The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes (6th century BCE) noticed that different peoples imagined gods in their own image — Ethiopians made gods dark, Thracians made them blonde — and concluded that anthropomorphic religion was a kind of projection. He didn't deny divinity altogether but undermined naive polytheism sharply.
Diagoras of Melos (5th century BCE) is often called the first outright atheist in the Western record, though the sources are thin and possibly embellished. He was accused of impiety in Athens and apparently fled rather than face trial — suggesting that open atheism was genuinely dangerous.
Epicurus and his followers come closest to a systematic materialist position. The Epicureans held that the gods, if they exist at all, are utterly indifferent to human affairs and that fear of death and divine punishment is irrational. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (1st century BCE) is the great surviving monument of this tradition — a passionate argument for a purely material universe with no divine intervention.
In India, the Cārvāka school (sometimes called Lokāyata) was a materialist and skeptical tradition that denied the soul, rebirth, and any divine order. It's hard to date precisely, but it was well established by the middle of the first millennium BCE. Buddhist and Jain texts argue against it, which means it was a live position people felt they needed to refute.
The interesting thread running through all of this is that atheism has rarely been just a private intellectual position — it's almost always been socially dangerous. Socrates was executed partly on charges of impiety. The early Christians were called atheists by Romans because they rejected the traditional gods. And the "death of God" moment in the 1960s provoked genuine alarm even in a supposedly secular America. The social stakes of the question never seem to fully go away, even when the metaphysical ground shifts.
Religion as doctrine and religion as practice
And it’s not uncommon in America to have interfaith marriages. One of my college friends is Jewish; he married a Presbyterian woman; and their adopted Chinese daughter attended services of both faiths. I have another Jewish friend who married a Unitarian. They attended a Unitarian church, where they raised their kids. He taught in the Unitarian sexual education program and eventually became executive director of the congregation. All the time being an atheist. I’m not saying this is typical, but it’s not rare either. I’ve heard of elaborate Japanese weddings where there were three ceremonies, Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian. I have no idea what the religious commitments of the couple were. And yet, wars are fought over religious belief as well. And for some Christians, especially in America, science is a problem, particularly biology. On the one hand, religious belief presents itself as a rock-bottom commitment to a way of thinking about and living in the world. But there are circumstances in which such rival rock-bottom commitments can accommodate one another and other circumstances where they cannot. It’s a very complicated phenomenon.
What you're pointing to is one of the deepest puzzles in the sociology and anthropology of religion — the gap between religion as doctrine and religion as practice, or what scholars sometimes distinguish as belief versus belonging.
Your Jewish-Unitarian friend is a perfect illustration. He was an atheist operating fully within a religious institution, teaching its programs, running its organization. The Unitarian tradition is somewhat unusual in making room for that explicitly, but the broader phenomenon is widespread. For many people, religious affiliation is primarily about community, identity, ritual, and moral formation — not metaphysical commitment. The beliefs, if examined carefully, might be quite thin or even contradictory, and people simply don't examine them carefully because that's not what the practice is for.
The Japanese wedding example cuts even deeper. Japan has a long tradition of what's sometimes called "religion à la carte" — Shinto for birth and weddings, Buddhist for funerals, Christmas as a romantic holiday. The categories simply don't demand exclusivity the way Abrahamic traditions theoretically do. A Japanese person asked "what is your religion?" often finds the question slightly confused, because the answer might be "all of them, depending on the occasion" or "none of them, in the Western sense."
The Abrahamic traditions are actually somewhat unusual in insisting on exclusive doctrinal commitment — the idea that you must believe specific propositions and that believing rival propositions is not just wrong but potentially damning. That structure creates the conditions for the kind of violent conflict you mention. When religion is primarily orthopraxy (right practice) rather than orthodoxy (right belief), as in much of Judaism, Hinduism, and traditional Chinese religion, the logic of violent exclusion is less readily available — though certainly not impossible.
The American science-religion conflict is a specific and historically peculiar case. It emerges largely from a Protestant tradition that invested heavily in the literal authority of scripture — so that a challenge to Genesis became a challenge to the whole epistemic foundation. Catholics, interestingly, have generally had less trouble with evolution, partly because their tradition vested authority in the Church and its interpretive tradition rather than in the text alone. So even within Christianity, the "rock-bottom commitment" takes different forms that produce very different friction points with science.
What your examples collectively suggest is that religion is not one thing. It's a family of overlapping phenomena — identity, community, ritual, cosmology, ethics, metaphysics — that can be assembled in very different proportions. When the metaphysical and cosmological components are dominant and held with certainty, you get the conditions for crusades and creationism. When the communal and ritual components dominate, you get your friend running a Unitarian sexual education program as a quiet atheist, and everyone finding the arrangement perfectly natural.
The New Athiests
And it seems to me that in the recent Anglo-American context, the most insistent atheists – I’m thinking of Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the like – seem most vexed about the conflict about biology. Sure, they oppose religious belief in general, anything else would be illogical, but it’s the case of biology that’s been at the center of their attention.
That's a sharp observation, and I think it's largely correct — and it makes sense when you look at their backgrounds and positions.
Dawkins is a biologist, full stop. His entire intellectual career was built on explaining and defending Darwinian evolution — The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable. For him, creationism and intelligent design aren't just wrong, they're an assault on the thing he devoted his life to. His atheism is almost downstream of his Darwinism. The argument of The Blind Watchmaker is essentially: evolution by natural selection is the only coherent explanation for the appearance of design in living things, which removes the only really compelling argument for God's existence. So the biology isn't incidental — it's the load-bearing structure.
Dennett is slightly different. He's a philosopher of mind, and his project in Darwin's Dangerous Idea was to show that natural selection is a "universal acid" — an algorithmic process that, once you accept it, dissolves the need for mind or intention at the foundation of things. His atheism is more architecturally philosophical, but evolution is still the key that unlocks it. He also wrote Breaking the Spell, which applied evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to religion itself — treating religious belief as something to be explained naturalistically rather than engaged on its own terms.
What's interesting is what this focus reveals about the limits of their critique. They are very good at the cosmological and biological argument — God as designer, God as creator, God as the explanation for complexity. They are considerably less interesting on religion as a social, ethical, ritual, or psychological phenomenon. Hitchens was broader in some ways, more focused on religion's role in political violence and moral corruption. But even he was working in a recognizably Anglo-American Protestant frame — religion as a set of truth claims that can be evaluated and found wanting.
This is actually a recurring criticism from more sociologically and anthropologically minded thinkers. Someone like Clifford Geertz or Talal Asad would say the New Atheists are arguing against a particular, historically specific construction of religion — roughly, post-Reformation Protestant Christianity intellectualized into a set of doctrines — and then treating that as if it captures what religion is universally. Which means their critique, however effective against creationists, slides off a lot of what religion actually is for most people in most of the world most of the time.
Your Unitarian atheist friend, in other words, is a figure the New Atheists don't quite know what to do with.
Tyler Cowen and religion
And then you have someone like Tyler Cowen, who has no religious belief that I can see, pointing out that we’re probably going to have more religion in the future. He’s making that argument on sociological grounds. And, as far as I can tell, he’s not particularly bothered by that prospect.
Cowen is a useful contrast figure here precisely because he approaches religion the way he approaches most things — as an economist and social scientist interested in what actually functions in human societies, not as a polemicist with a stake in the outcome.
His argument, as I understand it, runs roughly like this: religion provides things that are very hard to replicate — community, meaning, intergenerational transmission of values, psychological resilience, mutual aid networks. In a world of increasing dislocation, inequality, and institutional distrust, the demand for those things goes up, not down. Secular substitutes — therapy, political movements, wellness culture — have so far proven less robust and less scalable. So on purely functional grounds, you'd expect religion to persist and possibly grow, especially in societies under stress.
What's notable is the detachment. The New Atheists have an investment — they want religion to be false and they want its falseness to matter. Cowen seems genuinely indifferent in the evaluative sense. He might personally find religious metaphysics unpersuasive while simultaneously thinking religious institutions are net positive or at least inevitable. That's a very different emotional and intellectual posture.
It connects to a broader divide in how secular intellectuals relate to religion. There's a long tradition — you could trace it from Durkheim through to contemporary sociologists — of treating religion functionally and finding it indispensable to social cohesion, regardless of its truth claims. Auguste Comte even tried to design a secular religion of humanity to fill the gap he knew would open up. It didn't take. Durkheim essentially concluded that the form of religion — collective ritual generating social solidarity — was unavoidable, even if the specific content changed.
Cowen is implicitly in that tradition, but without the continental systematic ambitions. He'd probably just say: look at the data, look at the incentives, and don't be surprised.
The interesting follow-on question is which religions grow. Cowen would likely note that the fastest growing traditions globally tend to be the most doctrinally demanding ones — Pentecostalism, certain strands of Islam, Orthodox Judaism. The sociologist Rodney Stark made a similar argument: strict churches are strong churches, because they solve free-rider problems and generate genuine community through costly commitment. The relaxed, intellectually accommodating traditions your Unitarian friend inhabited may be less well-positioned demographically than the ones that most vex the New Atheists.
Silicon Theology
And then we have what you might call the orthodox Silicon Valley commitment to belief in god-like AI, which in one version is good, but in an equally if not even more prevalent version, will be a disaster for humans.
Yes, and the religious parallels are not just metaphorical — they're structural, and several people have noted them quite seriously.
The belief system has recognizable theological features. There's an eschatology — history is moving toward a culminating event, the Singularity or AGI, after which everything is transformed. There's a soteriological split — this event will mean either salvation (abundance, immortality, the solving of all problems) or damnation (extinction, subjugation, permanent loss of human agency). There are prophets — Kurzweil on the optimistic side, early Eliezer Yudkowsky and now various EA-aligned figures on the apocalyptic side. There's even something like original sin in the alignment problem — the idea that intelligence itself, if not carefully redeemed through the right technical interventions, tends toward destruction.