I Don't Care If There's a God or Not

Against the unexamined pursuit of the truth.

A while ago, I spoke with a prominent Substacker who asked me if I am a theist.¹ I answered that I was convinced to believe in “God” after reading his article on fine-tuning, but I don’t know what that tells us about the nature of God, and I don’t know why I should care. Unless you can convince me that believing in God impinges meaningfully on my wellbeing or anybody else’s, I am thoroughly uninterested in the question of His existence. Since I am perfectly satisfied with my secular lifestyle and I don’t find it plausible that the Creator of the Universe would care about such trifling things as whether I believe in Him, I don’t think it’s worth the effort to arrive at an informed conclusion. I am neither a theist nor an atheist, but a secret third thing: I am an apatheist.

Besides religion, I am apathetic about many things, and unless you are perpetually and simultaneously thinking about everything in the universe, I suspect you are as well. I have never been into Black Lives Matter, Stopping Asian Hate, Believing In This House That Science Is Real And Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, or any of the other major performative social movements of our time. Several months ago, I wrote about why I don’t find it worthwhile to think about abortion, even though my pre-reflective intuition tells me that many abortions are murder. This is because:

[R]egardless of what I think or do, the number of abortions that happen in the world is probably going to be the same. I’m not a person of uterus-having experience, and I’m also (pantomimes limp wrist) y’know — not that there’s anything wrong with that — so I can say with pretty high confidence that I’m not going to get anyone pregnant or have a personal stake in whether a partner terminates their pregnancy. All my female friends are lesbians, and even if they weren’t I don’t think they’d be coming to me for reproductive advice. I live in a state that doesn’t have voter-initiated ballot measures, so my opinion doesn’t matter politically, either. And even if my state did have ballot measures, the chance that my vote would be decisive is vanishingly small.

In practical terms, it matters about as much what I think about abortion as it matters what I think about the speed limit in Timbuktu. Maybe I could make a difference if I dedicated my life to the cause. But think about the opportunity cost. How many shrimp would I have to sacrifice to save a single unborn child? On balance, it’s just not worth it.

Most people aren’t this practical. A few days after I wrote about abortion, some busybody who found me through Jeff Tiedrich (who thinks that I’m secretly Glenn Greenwald) did a bad faith reading of the article and concluded that I don’t care about abortion “because it doesn’t affect [me] personally.”

Actually, if you passed reading class in the third grade, you’d know that I don’t care about abortion because I can’t affect it, not the other way around. If I was in a position to cause or prevent a single abortion (without sacrificing a requisite number of shrimp), I would seriously weigh the arguments for and against the practice of terminating a pregnancy and arrive at a reasoned conclusion. But I’m not in such a position, so I won’t.

There are some things I care about that aren’t practical. I don’t think that knowing about the intellectual biography of Murray Rothbard, or the history of the one-act play he wrote about Ayn Rand, is going to help save any shrimp. But I get enjoyment and fulfillment out of studying these things, so I do it anyway. It’s not irrational for me to care about them because I’m not under the impression that caring actually does anything. I just do it as a form of recreation.

I understand that there are people who care about religion recreationally, and I choose to respect and tolerate them from afar. Many of these people engage in interminable debates about the subject on Substack — and some, I assume, are good people.

But I am not one of those people. I find it absurd that someone would care about such inane topics as the origin of the universe and the existence or non-existence of a deity when they could debate the merits of water pollution and fish reproduction. Unless and until I have a reason to believe that what I think about God is going to do anything — for myself or others — I’m not going to think about God.

You might think that I’m not very special in this regard. Nearly 30% of American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, and only 4% say it’s because they’re sure they don’t believe in God. “Nothing in particular” is the third largest religious demographic in the United States (20%), after Protestantism (40%) and Catholicism (21%). Even among people who identify as religious, only around half attend services at least monthly. Fifty percent of American Catholics aren’t even aware of the church’s teaching on transubstantiation.

But aloofness is not the sole commandment of the Church of the Apatheist. There is a subtle difference between the orientation of most of the religiously unaffiliated — who don’t want to think about God — and über-chads like myself — who don’t want to think about God only after having thought about thinking about God and having concluded that expending effort thinking about God doesn’t make sense.

The key difference here lies in the degree of deliberation practiced by someone who ultimately doesn’t care. Simple apathy follows a logic of habit. Deliberative apathy is a purposive, rational cognitive style based in a recognition that mental resources are scarce and some things matter more than others. Since it is important how I apply my limited cognitive faculties, I try to allocate my attention to the most valuable ends first. I care a lot about improving the welfare of fish and shrimp because it actually does matter what I think about the subject. But I don’t care much about angels dancing on the heads of pins or underwater basket weaving, and I don’t care much about abortion or religion, either.

Conceivably, if you suspected that this style of triaging thought — I’ll call it metathinking, but I don’t know if that’s the right word — wasn’t worth your time, you could be a second-degree metathinker who thinks deliberatively about whether it is worth it to think about whether it is worth it to think. That is, you could be someone who reflects upon whether to metathink or to rely on heuristics about what to think about. Or you could think about thinking about thinking about thinking, or think about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking, ad infinitum. The point is, if you’re deliberatively apathetic, there’s some sort of methodical consideration happening somewhere along the line. It’s not all vibes.

I’ve been made to question some of my thinking about thinking about God recently because many smart people, including Bentham’s Bulldog, Scott Alexander, Tyler Cowen, and Richard Hanania, seem to be interested in the question of God’s existence. On second-degree metathinking, this suggests to me that it might be worthwhile to care about God. If the people I aspire to be like are all thinking about God, it’s probably because that kind of person enjoys thinking about God, or they know something about the significance of the question that I don’t. Who am I to think about thinking when my brain trust is just thinking?

But then again, if there was a good reason to think about God, I probably would have heard it by now, or it would feature prominently in the zeitgeist. Ross Douthat’s new book Believe claims to show “Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” But according to the reviews I’ve read, it does no such thing: It only shows the reader why religion is likely to be true. I have little interest in believing true things about topics that don’t interest me just for the sake of believing true things. If that’s the best reason that can be offered for me to care, then I remain unimpressed. Should Douthat ever come knocking on my door like a Jehovah’s Witness and proselytizing God because God is real, I’ll say thanks, but no thanks. There are some shrimp who need me.

1. At least, I think he asked me if I am “a theist.” He may have asked me if I am “atheist.”