Calvinism Without God

Whenever some evolutionary atheist starts talking about how everybody’s brain but his is “hard-wired” to believe in God by evolution, I can’t help but get the sense that I am in the presence of a slightly less consistent sort of Calvinism. At least the old Calvinists included themselves as part of the human rabble being mown down by the Inexorable God. But the new and godless Calvinist seems to think he’s found a better way by telling everybody else that the three pound piece of meat behind their eyes is the mere product of evolutionary forces such that they can’t help believing in God while he himself is some sort of exemption from all this “hard-wiring” and can see all round the rest of us with his all-knowing wisdom.

Of course, all he really means is “I inexplicably place unquestioning faith in the three pound piece of meat behind my eyes as an infallible oracle of ultimate reality.” It’s a deeply religious–and deeply irrational–faith in Reason. But it does have the consolation of pride. After all, what else but pride *could* account for such an idiotic proclamation as, “Religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems,” he said. “By contrast, disbelief is generally the work of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.”

Yes, observe the holy martyrdom of Richard Dawkins as compared with those “path of least resistance” folk like Jesus of Nazareth, Socrates, Savonarola, or Edith Stein.