On April 12, The New York Times ran an interesting opinion post about atheism. In it, Christian scholar David Hart tells interviewer Peter Wehner that he could never, ever be an atheist because he thinks atheism can’t ‘answer’ philosophical arguments against it. It’s an interesting interview for a number of reasons, not the least of which are Hart’s constant, unending unsupported claims about his own religion.
Today, let’s cover this interview, see why David Hart thinks Christianity should be the Last Ideology Standing, and helpfully show him that he’s got Descartes before his horse. Because you see, he latches onto beliefs before he figures out what’s real, when he really should be doing it the other way around.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 4/22/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! From introduction: That fine-tuning post from First Things.)
SITUATION REPORT: Atheism totally can’t answer these zingers!
On April 12, Peter Wehner interviewed David Hart for the New York Times. In the interview, Hart—billed as “an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, a philosopher, a cultural commentator and a fiction writer”—discusses the big problems that Christianity can’t solve, Jesus’ totally for real historicity, the supposed weirdness of Christianity, and—most relevantly for us—atheism’s apparent inability to defend itself against Christian apologetics.
Regarding atheism, Wehner asserts that “the so-called new atheists [. . .] are materialists, meaning they believe that all aspects of life including consciousness can be explained by physical scientific processes. There’s no room in their worldview for an immaterial soul.” (Don’t worry! In a minute, we’ll be covering why there’s no room for it.) Continuing, Wehner says: “materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged given their materialistic presuppositions, and you believe, too, that the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.”
Of course, this is a strawman Wehner builds. Those using the scientific method can’t yet explain that, but there’s a reason why Wehner has to blame “materialistic presuppositions” for that failure and not what’s really behind it.
But Hart clearly agrees with Wehner’s mischaracterization. In response, he immediately says:
The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable.
Hart goes on to complain that despite the Scientific Revolution’s vast advances in medicine, everyone went totally overboard by ignoring “metaphysical causes” as explanations. Now, he thinks, we don’t have a way to incorporate his religious beliefs into anything scientific. He concludes:
The straightforward materialism of the new atheists with its mechanistic prejudices is the most self-defeating project there is.
But is it, though? Atheism doesn’t defeat itself, because it neither attacks nor defends. It does not bear any burden of proof whatsoever. However, Hart does bear it, though he tries his best to avoid it in this interview.
Today, I’ll show you what the burden of proof is, how it applies to atheism and Christianity, and why Christians like these two guys can’t shoulder that burden at all (and how we know they kinda know that, deep down).
The burden of proof, revisited
First, let’s check out the burden of proof itself. (BTW: The High Desert Atheists group has put out a great pamphlet about this topic.)
If someone wishes to persuade another about anything’s existence, they bear the burden of proof in that exchange. Thus, they must provide support for their claim.
If you don’t know what the capital of Turkey is, then you’re in a null state about it. That’s the state someone is in when a claim either hasn’t been made or hasn’t been supported in a compelling way.
Should I tell you it’s Paris, you remain in a null state because you know that’s not true. My statement, by itself, is not compelling enough to overcome your preexisting knowledge of where Paris is. Perhaps I could tell you instead that Turkey’s capital is Istanbul, and you might find your belief swaying in that direction. After all, you’ve heard of that city. You know it’s a major one in Turkey. But your belief will certainly waver if you look the question up online and find that authoritative sources say it’s Ankara!
So the support must be compelling. Not all support is. If the person bearing the burden of proof fails to provide this support, then the other person remains unconvinced. Here’s how unconvincing support looks in conversation:
Prima: I believe this thing and you should too.
Secunda: Oh, and why is that?
Prima: Here is why you should believe the same thing I do.
Secunda: Hm, that’s not terribly convincing.
To continue shouldering the burden of proof, perhaps Prima could ask what convincing support might look like and try to provide it, or else concede it cannot be provided. (Of course, in religious conversations neither usually occurs.)
Unfortunately, the Christians who bear the burden of support seem to know they cannot meaningfully support their claims. Instead of just admitting they lack compelling support, they instead try to shift their burden onto those they seek to persuade—often trying to force the other person to defend their state of disbelief!
How the burden of proof applies to atheism
Atheists don’t make any claims about their state of disbelief. That’s because atheism is the null state for religious beliefs. So in apologetics, the burden of proof applies to the Christians seeking to gain buy-in for their religious claims.
As the null state, then, atheism does not make claims of any kind. Thus, it does not need to defend itself against apologetics. There’s literally nothing to defend.
Rather, it’s the folks making religious claims—like David Hart—who must defend those claims. Religious people may find atheism to be a disappointing mindset after the wondrous fantasies of supernatural derring-do that their religion provides, but so far it does seem to be the one that plays most readily with the workings of reality.
So when Hart declares in the interview that “the philosophical arguments against it [atheism] are unanswerable,” he’s dead wrong. Perhaps that’s why he then dives right into apologetics wordplay about materialism. He could just as coherently claim that the philosophical arguments against Paris being the capital of Turkey are unanswerable. His claim, that Christianity’s claims are true, has just as much compelling support as my facetious capital-of-Turkey thing does, which is to say none.
Indeed, the interview is full of Hart’s uncompelling reasons for his own belief: He likes his own personal conceptualization of Jesus, which is just one of many developed over many centuries by people specifically trying to craft an ethereal character; he doesn’t understand that Christianity’s origins are completely understandable and earthly; and oh, he does love his Arguments from X logical fallacies—especially the Argument from Beauty.
David Hart worships a god who doesn’t matter to matter
For a while, Hart dips his toe into potential reality-based reasons to believe. Here is where his interview reveals the depth of his intellectual dishonesty. This is why we don’t take science notes from theologians with no science education or training. But since it’s a big part of why Hart thinks atheism needs to “answer” religious claims somehow, we’ll check it out.
Hart appears to think that scientists are way too “materialist” and “mechanistic.” We often see Creationists and evangelicals make this same complaint. It just means that nobody involved in legitimate science accepts Christians’ supernatural claims, preferring instead explanations based upon what can be observed and measured. There’s a reason for that preference, of course.
To get to the truth about reality, science people ask questions, predict answers via hypotheses, test those hypotheses, refine the questions and ask and test again. Ideally, they end up with something that accurately describes what’s happening and predicts what’ll happen next. This is the scientific method in a nutshell.
And this process cannot exist in Christianity, because nothing about Christianity can be objectively described—and certainly never be predicted. Worse, nothing supernatural has ever even been objectively shown to exist. It literally makes no difference to the explanation-seeking process either way. So either it’s irrelevant or it’s nonexistent, and so it is left out.
Trying to knock down the very method of truth-seeking that he aches to justify his own beliefs
That irrelevance really bothers David Hart. He wants his own supernatural explanations to make it into the scientific method. So he tries very hard to paint his supernatural explanations as compatible with reality-based phenomena. He describes physics as not “mechanistic in a comprehensive way for more than a century now,” living cells as having “levels of intentionality,” and Richard Dawkins’ idea of the “selfish gene” as something that “just as the logical level, fails” and “was decades out of date when it first appeared.”
In particular, Hart tries to make human consciousness itself into PROOF YES PROOF of his supernatural beliefs. He’s very upset that actual scientists don’t reach for anything supernatural to explain or test questions related to human consciousness. As he says (emphases from original, as always):
The problem is that we’re still using a model that was perfected through the exclusion of all the properties of the mental. It is impossible, using that model, to make sense of the phenomena of consciousness. So what you have to do instead is say that the phenomena of consciousness aren’t real. They can be reduced to mechanical processes. The more you try to do this, the more absurd it becomes. You do end up with, say, Dennett, who said that consciousness is an illusion.
In reality, consciousness can be both real and reduced to mechanical processes. Regardless of its nature, nothing about it speaks to it being supernatural. Scientists have been studying the evolution of consciousness for some time now, and a lot of it sounds very promising. Not knowing all the answers doesn’t mean we resort to religious explanations. It’s okay not to know everything. That just means we have more questioning and testing and refining to do before we do understand it.
And when (not if) we do, I guarantee that the nature of human consciousness will not be the very first time that a supernatural explanation has ever turned out to be the real one. No, it will be perfectly natural just like every other explanation that once had a supernatural claim around it—like where the sun goes at night. As Greta Christina wrote almost two decades ago, when we finally figure out stuff that once had a supernatural explanation for it, that supernatural explanation turns out not to be what’s really happening. To my knowledge, no supernatural explanation has ever survived that process of discovery.
Knowing that, it’s so telling to me that the only way that David Hart can make his religious claims sound better is to knock down the apparatus that could legitimize it if it had any reality behind it—but the apparatus keeps not doing that, because it just doesn’t.
Where did all those Christian “multiverse” nuts go, anyway?
Though they seem to be over it now, for a hot couple of years in the mid-2010s many evangelicals latched on hard to “multiverse/metaphysics” apologetics. (This embrace was not, of course, universal.) They were so certain that the multiverse hypothesis would totally form compelling support for their religious claims. Alas, the idea turned out to be just another little gap for their god-claims to scurry into to hide from the big hunters of their day.
I don’t see those guys much anymore. But I do see a lot of Christians trying to knock down real science so their pseudoscience sounds better. They’ve been at it for years, at least ever since Creationists tried to sneak their religious indoctrination into public science classrooms. They even use many of the same strategies.
“Science needs ‘a major conceptual revolution!'” they cry, certain that such a revolution would of necessity include supernatural frameworks. Scientists totally have “an essentially theological worldview” anyway, they complain, so they’re just rejecting Christians’ supernatural explanations for no good reason!
Perhaps that’s why scientists seem, to Hart, like big poopypants meanieheads who ignore the supernatural in their questioning and testing. But he’s wrong. It’s not because they’re trying to personally slight David Hart or Peter Wehner or any one of the other many Christians who need their religious claims to be true in reality.
It’s because that’s where the evidence has always led. Not once has it led to anything “metaphysical,” to use Hart’s description. It can’t. The kind of metaphysical stuff Hart imagines doesn’t really exist. When I promised earlier that we’d talk about why there’s no room for a “soul” in modern science, that’s why. It’s never been shown to exist. Claims about it can’t be tested and supported. And most damningly, it doesn’t matter either way in the explanations we develop using truth-seeking processes like the scientific method.
If anyone ever did discover that anything supernatural really exists, that would just snap whatever it was into natural territory. Either way, it wouldn’t be a theologian or philosopher making that discovery. It’d be someone using the scientific method.
(If it were to ever happen, he’d glom right onto it and then never shut up about it.)
If Christians can’t defeat atheism honestly, they’ll just try to do it dishonestly
For years after I deconverted in the mid-1990s, I stayed theistic in my worldview. Just because Yahweh/Jesus doesn’t exist, I reasoned, that doesn’t invalidate the god-claims of every other religion. I even became a dedicated and devoted pagan for about a decade.
But eventually, I couldn’t help but notice that if I applied the same truth-seeking process to other religions that I had applied to Christianity, every one of them failed. In other words, the explanations I’d adopted could not be supported through objective testing. And so gradually, my faith pool drained entirely. As it drained, those beliefs fizzled out on their own. Consequently, I hold no supernatural beliefs today. Instead, I build my beliefs upon what I know is true. I don’t try (often poorly) to shoehorn reality around my beliefs.
If Hart, Wehner, or any of those other Christians want to change the mind of someone like me, there’s a way to do that. They can shoulder their burden of proof and take it seriously. They can utilize the scientific method and find ways to test their claims, find support for them, and eliminate false and unsupported claims. But that very method would never result in support for their claims. So instead, they try to invalidate that very method of truth-finding so their own paltry, meager, inaccurate explanations sound a little better.
They’re hoping we don’t notice, I guess.
Worse, in the doing they implicitly admit they cannot shoulder their burden of proof. One needn’t wonder long to think of a reason why.
It’s pure moral cowardice, but nowadays I expect nothing less from that crowd.
NEXT UP: Alpha Course #12 promises to teach us all how to make the most of the rest of our lives. (I’m not sure if we should call its first demand surprising or not!) See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
0 Comments