Atheists sometimes feel compelled to answer these questions. The most common answer goes something like this: “Ancient people were superstitious and ignorant about nature. When they saw things that they didn’t understand, they invented explanations, projecting their own psychology onto nature, in a process known as “anthropomorphism”. Lightning strikes a tree near you? God must be angry!”

This explanation of theism is far from satisfying, though. What evidence do we have to support such a narrative? The most ancient scriptures of theistic religions describe very different motivations and mechanisms for their beliefs. Nowhere in the Torah, for example, do we find a patriarch asking himself “what is the cause of lightning?”, and then hearing the voice of God answering in explanation. In the Torah and the Vedas, we find the ancients obsessing over issues of justice, agency, love, and responsibility — nowhere do we see them appealing to God to explain some natural or cosmological process. If theism is a fiction created to explain the cosmos, the ancient theists were cunning in their concealment of this fact.

Likewise, the theory doesn’t match with our empirical experience of modern theists. How many Christians do we know who started by asking, “why does lightning happen?”, and ended up at Christianity? The very idea is ludicrous! It would take a truly special sort of idiocy to believe that modern Christians adopt their faith as a way to explain lightning, so why would we assume any differently about the ancients?

And this leads us to the real problem with this common atheist response. We’re expected to swallow this narrative about how theism was “invented”, with no real evidence past or present. Since there is no evidence to back up the story, atheists project their own psychology to support their chosen narrative. They explain, “people today always ask ‘why?’ and invent answers, so the ancients must have done the same”. Besides the fact that the atheist is inventing a narrative to explain theism, the idea that the ancients cared so much about explaining natural phenomena is pure projection. It is modern materialistic reductionists who are obsessed with detailed explanations of minute natural phenomena. Nowhere do we see such an obsession among ancient theists.

When faced with a series of unexplained facts, humans love to invent narratives to explain those facts. Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls this the “Narrative Fallacy“. Atheists would have you believe that theism is simply a gigantic example of narrative fallacy, backed up by anthropomorphism, and concealed with lies. But this explanation itself reeks of narrative fallacy and relies on projection of motivations that apply primarily to atheists. When faced with narrative fallacy, you don’t combat it with your own narrative fallacy. And you don’t back that narrative up with psychological projection — especially when you are accusing your opponents of doing the same. You combat narrative fallacy with evidence and empirical tests.

Why do atheists rely so frequently on narrative fallacy and psychological projection when explaining theism?

The book plays to people’s vanities.  When humanity as a whole has arrived at no consensus about the validity of Torah, Vedas, or Marxism, it’s more than a little presumptuous to think that one can arrive at an objective appraisal of these systems by reading a little book.  But this is exactly what the readers of this book claim to have achieved.

I flipped through the book and read a number of random passages, and the author certainly strives to appear unbiased.  But the book is filled with speculation, half-truths, and even outright lies.  One particularly startling passage was when the author solemnly reported that “Christianity arose from the Greek system of philosophy known as Gnosticism”.

I thought that people stopped making this absurd claim.  Having read several books on the topic, it is clear that there is absolutely no support for this lie (rather, Gnosticism was a perversion of Christianity).  And most people have stopped parroting it.  Such casual repetition of untruth damages Watson’s credibility; although he makes the same sort of errors in talking about the Vedas and Quran.

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Even if we dispense with the claims about “Gnosticism”, there is a more subtle form of this error alive today.  I recently came across this quote on a Christian web site, which many people would take for common sense:

“Christianity began as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. When it went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business.”

But this isn’t common sense; it’s simpleton’s thinking.  It presupposes that all cultural advancement is an evolution or “progression” forward; from backwards, ignorant thinking to more enlightened thinking.  Anyone with a modest IQ can look at the history or Greek philosophy, and see that it was Greek philosophy that was influenced dramatically by Judaism in the form of Christianity, rather than the opposite.  And why not?

The truth is, all of these things were deeply diseased when Christ arrived.  The nature of our personal relationships, our philosophies, our political organizations, and our business practices were hopelessly corrupted. 

The quote implies that Christianity drew sustenance from, was built upon, and adapted to, these human institutions.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  These human institutions were built imperfectly upon the foundation set by Christ before time began, and by the time Christ arrived, they were hopelessly corrupt and diseased.  Christ reformed and healed them, and breathed new life into them in the form of Christianity.  And this isn’t just theology: it’s plain facts for anyone who cares to actually look at the history.