Fundamentalists are not stupid

One thing I've learned as an atheist who listens to Christians is that there are two types of believers - one kind is the tolerant, gentle, wouldn't dare try anything so rude as to try and convert a neighbor, doesn't believe in a literal hell, theistic evolution supporting moderate, and the other kind is the rude, ignorant, bigoted, proselytizing, fire and brimstone preaching, young earth creationist fundamentalist. And, concomitant with this distinction is the request that we not tarnish the good reputation of the first kind of believer, by confusing them with the second.

It's a request most atheists are pretty good about honoring, most of the time. Of course, when atheists make the mistake of asserting their arguments too forcefully (or, more likely, too effectively), these liberal theists waste no time in lumping atheists in together with the bad sort of Christian (personally, I don't think this is because liberal theists are necessarily bad people, I think it's because the irony is amusing, even if it's not particularly accurate). When they do, it is both intended and understood as an insult - but why?

I think the reason atheism is able to survive as an idea, despite the active hostility of powerful religious factions and the majority of the populace, is because it says something true about the universe, and in a society that is even moderately free, a true idea will always find a way to survive. It is on the power of this truth that atheism has found its way to intellectual respectability.

It is the intellectual respectability of atheism, and of atheist explanations of natural phenomena (and here I'm using "atheist" in its strictest technical sense) that makes "fundamentalism" an insult. In order to capture (and in some cases co-opt) a portion of that respectability, liberal theists like to position themselves as being far from fundamentalism and close to atheism (although never actually so close as to deny the existence of god).

This is not merely some self-aggrandizing theory, either. I've seen it happen. Criticize the Bible for its primitive account of human origins, and you will have liberal theists tell you Genesis is just a metaphor. Point out that Jesus was apparently okay with slavery, and liberal theists will tell you that times were different (as if treating humans as property were any less of an injustice 2000 years ago). Scientific empiricism and progressive humanistic ethics (things that are not uniquely atheist except in the sense that god is deleterious to both) are the hallmarks of good opinions, and special revelation and divine command theory are the hallmarks of bad opinions.

Yet the irony is that, despite being the strongest advocates of these pillars of modern civilization, atheists are not allowed to show pride in these beliefs, or to get angry when they are violated - because to do that would be to play into the theists' worst stereotype about us - that atheists think all believers are stupid.

That's why comparing so-called "militant atheists" to fundamentalists is such a satisfying way of silencing us. It takes the liberal theists' most primal insecurity - that their embrace of modern values like science and progressive ethics makes their continuing belief a mark of stupidity - and turns it around on atheists. It is not that their shared belief in the supernatural makes liberal theists resemble fundamentalists, but rather, it is the uncompromising and unambiguous nature of strong atheists that makes them resemble fundamentalists.

The deeper irony is that for all their angst about being condescended to by atheists, liberal theists think fundamentalists are stupid.

But that's not true.

See, the question you have to ask is "why do people believe in God?" And by this, I do not mean, "what emotional imperatives drive people to seek comfort in organized religion," I mean why do people believe specifically in the Abrahamic God of the Torah, Bible, and Qur'an, and not in other uplifting fantasies like the glorious communist revolution or the advent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

The only intelligible reason is because the existence of this god is spoken of by a book and a tradition. It is conceivable, that even if people had access to all the benefits of modern knowledge, they might still invent a deity (after all, just about every society has), but there is no way that it would have been anywhere close to the Christian God. A modern god, based on careful philosophy and observation, would not have created the world in six days. It would never have required animal sacrifice. It would not have given its only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to redeem the sins of mankind. It would not have chosen Israel as its favored people (indeed, it would not have had any favored people whatsoever).

These strange, specific details, which any honest person will agree are accurate identifiers of the Christian God, would not have emerged without the Bible. It doesn't matter what sort of philosophical argument you use, you cannot go from "everything with a beginning has a cause" to "the first mover impregnated an Israeli virgin in 0 BCE."

The inescapable consequence of this is that if you believe in the Christian God, then you must also believe that the Bible contains true information about this god and his earthly activities. With this in mind, it is easy to see how the fundamentalists' reputation for stupidity is richly undeserved:

Fundamentalists believe their magic book is true.
Liberal Theists believe part of their magic book is true.

Fundamentalists believe there is an invisible mind which tells them what to do.
Liberal Theists believe there is an invisible mind which tells them what to do, but it doesn't always mean what it says.

Fundamentalists believe that revelation trumps empiricism.
Liberal Theists believe that revelation happens when no one is looking.

Liberal theism tends towards views that are closer to reality, but it is by no means a more intelligent way of looking at the world. It is still rooted in the same basic irrationality as fundamentalism, but it has the advantage of being inconsistent enough to be able to retreat gracefully from inconvenient facts.

In fact, I would say the primary difference between liberal theism and fundamentalism is that each one has half of a properly skeptical world view - liberal theists can change their minds when the facts prove them wrong, and fundamentalists can extrapolate the implications of their own beliefs. One makes a better neighbor, but the other is more likely to win at chess.

A good example of this difference is in the varying theistic explanations for the origin of life. Liberal theists like guided evolution. Fundamentalists like young earth creationism.

Guided evolution is consistent with the facts as we currently understand them, but it is a terrible scientific theory. It proposes no mechanism, it suggests no experiments, and there is literally no possible discovery that could prove it wrong without also demolishing the theory of evolution as a whole. This is good if you want to avoid ever having to defend the existence of god, but bad if you actually want to learn new information about the world.

By contrast, Young Earth Creationism is a great scientific theory that is completely at odds with physical reality. This may seem like a contradiction, but it really isn't. If you take YEC at its word, it is possible to place the creation at a specific time in history, and to infer a plethora of ideas about the world that can be tested with relative ease. If YEC were true, there would be no light from stars more than 6000 light years away, all fossils would be of anatomically modern species and found in the same geological strata, there would be no common DNA between species, and so on.

Now, it might seem like the liberal theist's way of doing things is better, because to maintain counterfactual beliefs in the face of evidence is kind of embarrassing, but once you get past the embarrassment, the fundamentalist way of thinking makes a lot more sense. Both kinds of theism are rooted in a contempt for empiricism, a belief that there is a way of knowing at least some true things without relying on the senses. Neither respects the notion that a systematic approach to knowledge ceases to be systematic when you explicitly carve out exceptions. The difference is that liberal theism says "you'll never find the exceptions," whereas fundamentalism says, "you don't recognize the exceptions."

All of this is not to say that all fundamentalists are geniuses. Rather, the relationship of intelligence to religious belief is not that the first dilutes or weakens the second. Any degree of belief in the literal reality of characters from human mythology, unsupported by physical evidence, is a form of delusion - and delusion can afflict the stupid and the intelligent alike (Indeed the intelligent are often more vulnerable, because they can defend their beliefs better).

A stupid liberal theist will advance an intellectually vacuous form of tolerance that treats all viewpoints as equivalent. A smart liberal theist will create an elaborate philosophical argument that only the most educated can identify as sophistry.

A stupid fundamentalist will parrot Genesis. A smart fundamentalist will have an enormous collection of ambiguous fossils that only an expert paleontologist will be able to debunk.

(And just to be fair - a stupid atheist will say "god sucks" because that's what the cool kids are doing. A smart atheist will say "god does not exist" because that is what all the historical, astronomical, geological, biological, philosophical, and ethnographic data suggests).

In conclusion, it is not necessarily the case that atheists engage with fundamentalists because they want to attack a straw-man version of liberal theism, or because they see fundamentalist arguments as low-hanging fruit. Sometimes, the fundamentalist arguments are simply better.

If a liberal theist can't see that, it can only be because they treat fundamentalists with the same condescension that they accuse us of exercising towards them.