The myth of the God-shaped hole
This article was also published in The Spectator on January 3, 2025.
In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian,” and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.
Of course, I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible, at least well enough to take an allusion when I encounter one. I love medieval cathedrals. I’ve never met a parson, of either sex, that I didn’t like.
But none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.
An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which G.K. Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly, Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite, but for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:
“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin… By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”
And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organization that’s been taken over by the trans cult:
“An atheistic organization worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker, and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”
And from the comments following her article:
“Why is Richard Dawkins surprised that people who reject Christianity have rejected its moral values also? Those values have stood us in good stead for two thousand years.”
Christianity provides reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Therefore Christianity provides the only reasons for rejecting trans nonsense. Some syllogism!
The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation, or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again, but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions, it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body.” The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.
Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).
How patronizing, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.
Back Story
In November 2024, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) published a rather silly article by one of their staffers, Kat Grant, called What is a Woman. The indefatigable Jerry Coyne took the trouble to write a very sensible reply, called Biology is not Bigotry, which FFRF reluctantly agreed to publish, albeit with a disclaimer, making clear that it did not represent their views. It also didn’t represent the views of some of their more emotional employees, whose version of disagreeing with something was the now fashionable one of suppressing it rather than debating it. In response to these emotional howls, the leaders of FFRF took down Jerry’s article almost immediately after they put it up, and without informing him that they were going to do so. They offered a public explanation of their reason, which was that it hurt people’s feelings. Fortunately, Jerry’s article has now been published in several places (see here, here or here), so anyone can judge whether the censorship was justified. His own take on the affair can be seen in several places on the Why Evolution is True website, e.g. here and here. Jerry, Steven Pinker and I all resigned from FFRF’s Honorary Board. Our letters of resignation are here, here and here. My avowal of personal affection for Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, the leaders of FFRF, is totally sincere. It makes me particularly sad that they have chosen to depart from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state.
The story has been taken up in various places, for example by Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels, and by Ron Lindsay, in a Free Inquiry Editorial. In Britain, the right wing Spectator ran an article by Debbie Hayton, a trans woman, called How some atheists fell for the new religion of gender identity. She invoked the now familiar trope of the “God-shaped hole”. This stimulated me into sending the attached essay, The Myth of the God-shaped Hole, to the Editor of The Spectator, who posted it the very next day. Although provoked by her article, it is written to be read in its own right, not as a response.
Richard Dawkins
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Can we get back to talking about gender as a cultural concept, as distinct from sex as a biological one? That is all.
To better understand why human rationality is NOT sufficient to allow all of us to see through The God Delusion deeply enough to be able to maintain one's sense of meaning without the false comfort of religion, please try Ralph Lewis MD's lovely book Finding Purpose in a Godless Universe. Dr. Lewis is a GP and Psychiatrist and he is very clear on the central position in their emotional self-experience that the god-projection holds for a great many people.
His practical humility shows through in the statement:
"Although I need to help people correct their distortions of reality, I have to be cautious about just how much reality I impart to my more vulnerable patients. For many, I need to reinforce their distorted beiefs (including religious beliefs if these are important to them) in the service of helping them to be functional, which is ultimately a more important goal of my work than instilling realism".
As much as I esteem and value Richard and his tireless and valiant work in explaining and attempting to enchant the scientific (in Lewis' terms "realisic") ways of viewing the world, the proportion of humans able to rest comfortably in that worldview is regretably small.
As neurological and psychological research has shown (viz Damassio and Schore as examples), rationality arises from affective processes. Without a sound affective foundation of selfhood, we humans grasp at wishful thinking that, for all their unreality and perils, allow us to function in our social worlds.