Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate
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Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate<br>...
Scott Alexander<br>Aug 19, 2026
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I.<br>Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham’s Bulldog) and Richard Chappell debate the existence of God. So do JP Andrew, Benjamin Tettu, Sangwon Lee, Ethan Muse, other Ethan, and “Atheistic Journals”, all within this month! I thought the omnipresence of the early ‘00s online atheism debate was a time-bound historical phenomenon. But now that the blogosphere has reincarnated as Substack, it’s back, nearly as strong as ever.<br>I enjoyed participated in the early 00's version, but the current incarnation leaves me cold. I can’t get as interested as I once did in the details of the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Miracles, et cetera. It’s not just that I’ve already served my time in the theology mines. My lack of belief in God intuitively feels like it precedes all of these things.<br>Consider by analogy a society where people regularly debated whether aliens assisted the rise of Napoleon. There are many reasons to believe in such assistance: Napoleon’s rise from Corsican nobody to Emperor and would-be world conqueror was a bizarre deviation from the usual pattern of history. He won battles outnumbered 4-to-1, when everyone knows victory usually goes to the larger army. He became monarch of France immediately after it had declared eternal enmity against the concept of monarchy and resolved to murder anyone who didn’t hate monarchy enough. And the arguments against such intervention are comparatively flimsy. True, nobody saw aliens, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could conduct its interventions in secret. True, our prior for alien intervention is generally low, but maybe this is unjustified: we have no idea how many historical events the aliens have intervened in; Alexander the Great was pretty strange too. True, Napoleon finally lost, but this is not decisive; maybe the aliens only wanted him to blaze brightly for a few years before his eventual defeat, or maybe stronger aliens were backing the Duke of Wellington.<br>In a world where this hypothesis somehow entered the space of serious debate, it would be hard to dislodge. Our own historical community is protected from it not because they can precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against each of these considerations and conclude its falsehood, but because common sense precludes entertaining it in the first place. This isn’t to say that Reason doesn’t work - if someone could precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against these considerations, they would get the right answer - but as a historical matter, this type of delicate reasoning wasn’t how our society resolved this question.<br>My atheism is more deeply rooted in whatever prevented us from considering this question in the first place than in the type of delicate reasoning that could get us out of it. I admit this is dangerous. It risks degenerating into insult-slinging - “your religion is just as stupid as believing aliens caused Napoleon!”. Even if it avoids that failure mode, it would at best come out as the absurdity heuristic, a dangerous fallacy where someone concludes that they can dismiss a matter without careful consideration because it feels absurd to them. This would have dismissed nuclear weapons in 1900, heavier-than-air flight in 1850, and atheism throughout most of history (surely it’s absurd that complex life could come to exist just by random chance). It’s also useless: religion obviously doesn’t feel absurd to religious people, so it can do no work convincing them. So rather than stop here, we should dig in further: why do we exclude the Napoleon scenario from consideration, and what can we learn from it?<br>The “aliens caused Napoleon” scenario fails because of overfitting. Anything at all can be explained by “there was a powerful hidden entity trying to make that specific thing happen”. Why does the location of the Great Pyramid encode the speed of light to seven decimal places? There was a powerful hidden entity involved, and it aimed at that specific outcome. How did Donald Trump come from behind to win the 2016 election? Well, there was a powerful hidden entity, it wanted Donald Trump to win, and so it arranged to make that happen. These pseudo-explanations aren’t merely as good as real explanations, they’re strictly better. Trump rode a wave of right-wing populism, but why didn’t that show up in earlier polls? How did Napoleon win all those battles? The “powerful hidden entity trying to make that specific thing happen” explanation plows through objections like these easily. Any reasoner who ever wants to get past that to a more useful model will need to give the “powerful hidden entity” story a preemptive penalty.<br>We usually apply this penalty under the term “conspiracy theories”. Since no individual human is powerful enough to unilaterally choreograph the course of history, it...