Why Rational Atheists and Religious Fundamentalists Make the Same Mistake

I'm going to say something that will annoy people on both sides of the religion debate: the New Atheists and religious fundamentalists have more in common than either would like to admit.

Not in their conclusions, obviously. One side believes God exists and scripture is literal truth. The other believes God doesn't exist and religion is dangerous nonsense.

But in their epistemology and in their fundamental assumptions about how knowledge works and what counts as truth, they're making the same error.

And that error is preventing both groups from understanding what religion and spirituality actually are and do.

The universe is full of wonder and can handle both religion and science.

The Shared Assumption

Here's the assumption that both rational atheists and religious fundamentalists share:

Religious claims are primarily factual assertions about objective reality that should be evaluated the same way we evaluate scientific claims.

From this shared premise, they reach opposite conclusions:

Religious fundamentalists say: "Religious texts make factual claims about reality. Those claims are true. Therefore, evolution is false, the Earth is 6,000 years old, and miracles literally happened as described."

Rational atheists say: "Religious texts make factual claims about reality. Those claims don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Therefore, religion is false, and religious people are irrational."

Both sides treat scripture as if it's trying to do the same job as a science textbook. Both evaluate religious language by the same standards you'd use to evaluate a physics paper.

And both are fundamentally misunderstanding what religious language is for.

What Religious Language Actually Does

Religious myths, scriptures, and practices aren't primarily trying to make factual claims about the external world. They're doing something else entirely.

They're:

• Providing frameworks for meaning-making

• Encoding wisdom about human nature and ethics

• Creating narratives that give shape to experience

• Establishing practices that transform consciousness

• Building communities around shared values

• Addressing existential questions that science can't answer

• Using metaphor and symbol to point toward truths that can't be captured literally

  
  

When Genesis says God created the world in six days, is it making a claim about geology and biology? Or is it providing a narrative framework for understanding humans' relationship to the sacred, to nature, to work and to rest?

When Jesus says he is "the way, the truth, and the life", is this a literal claim about being the only valid path? Or is it a statement within a particular tradition about ultimate reality and how to approach it?

When the Buddha teaches about rebirth, is this meant to be a falsifiable scientific hypothesis? Or is it part of a larger system designed to reduce suffering and increase wisdom?

The fundamentalist and the atheist both insist these must be read as literal factual claims. And in doing so, both miss what's actually happening.

The Literalism Trap

Religious fundamentalism is a relatively modern phenomenon. For most of human history, religious communities understood that sacred texts operated on multiple levels: literal, allegorical, moral, mystical.

Medieval Christian theologians knew Genesis wasn't a geology textbook. Buddhist teachers knew the cosmology wasn't meant to compete with astronomy. Jewish scholars developed elaborate interpretive traditions precisely because they understood sacred texts required interpretation, not just literal reading.

Fundamentalism emerged partly as a reaction to modernity and scientific materialism. When science began providing powerful explanations of the natural world, some religious communities felt threatened. Their response was to double down on literal readings, turning scripture into competing scientific claims.

This was a defensive move, but it was also a capitulation. It accepted the premise that scientific truth is the only kind of truth that matters. Instead of saying, "Religion addresses different questions than science", fundamentalists said, "Religion provides scientific facts that contradict your scientific facts."

This made religion vulnerable in a new way. If you claim the Earth is literally 6,000 years old, you can be definitively proven wrong. If you claim evolution is false, the evidence will contradict you. If you treat miracles as violations of natural law, you're in tension with everything we know about how nature works.

Ironically, by trying to make religion more 'factual', fundamentalism made it less defensible.

The Atheist's Mirror Image

Rational atheists - I'm thinking of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and their followers - make the exact same error from the opposite direction.

They take fundamentalist literalism at face value and assume that's what religion is. Then they quite reasonably point out that these literal claims don't hold up.

The God hypothesis isn't supported by evidence. Prayer doesn't work statistically better than chance. Miracles violate natural law. Scripture contradicts itself and makes false claims about history and nature. Religious explanations have been replaced by scientific ones.

All true. But only if you think religion is trying to do what science does.

Dawkins writes in The God Delusion: "The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." This is the foundational error. He's treating God as a hypothesis like any other: something that either exists or doesn't in a straightforward factual sense.

But what if "God" isn't primarily a claim about whether a super-being exists? What if it's a way of pointing toward dimensions of reality that exceed our conceptual grasp? A way of relating to existence as meaningful rather than arbitrary? A symbol for the ground of being or ultimate reality?

The rational atheist dismisses this as word games. If God isn't a being that exists, then atheism wins by default. But this just reveals the same literalism in reverse.

What Both Sides Miss

Here's what gets lost when you treat religion as if it's making scientific claims:

The transformative function of practice. Meditation, prayer, ritual, contemplation aren't methods for discovering factual truths. They're technologies for transforming consciousness and behaviour. Asking whether prayer 'works' in a scientific sense is like asking whether music 'works'. It's the wrong category.

The role of myth and narrative. Humans are story-making creatures. We organise experience through narrative, live within cultural stories, find meaning through participation in larger narratives. Religious myths aren't false science; they're functioning in a completely different register.

The nature of metaphor and symbol. When a Christian says, "Christ lives in my heart", this isn't a claim about cardiac biology. It's metaphorical language pointing to an experience of transformation and presence. Taking it literally, either to defend it or attack it, misses the point.

The question of meaning. Science can tell us how things are, but not whether existence is meaningful, how we should live, or what we should value. Religion and philosophy address these questions. Dismissing them as 'just subjective' doesn't make them go away.

The limits of propositional knowledge. Not all knowledge can be captured in factual statements. There's embodied knowledge, wisdom gained through practice, insight that comes through contemplation. Religious traditions have developed sophisticated methods for cultivating these.

Community and belonging. Religious traditions create communities with shared practices, values, and narratives. The truth of religion isn't primarily in its factual claims but in how it shapes communities and individual lives.

The Question of Truth

"But is it TRUE?" both sides insist.

This question assumes there's only one kind of truth: factual, propositional, objective.

But consider: Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony true? Is the experience of falling in love true? Is the Mona Lisa true?

These questions feel wrong because we recognise that art, music, love aren't the kinds of things that are true or false in a propositional sense. They're real, meaningful, and profoundly important but not in a way that maps onto 'true or false'.

Religious language often functions more like art than like science. It uses metaphor, symbol, narrative, and practice to point toward experiences and insights that can't be fully captured in literal propositions.

The fundamentalist mistake is insisting it must be literally, factually true.

The atheist mistake is accepting that framing and concluding it must therefore be false.

Both miss that the question "Is it literally true?" might not be the right question.

A Third Way

I work as a researcher at Cambridge, where I value empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and scientific methodology. I also practice shamanism, where I journey to non-ordinary reality, work with spirits, and engage with symbolic and mythic dimensions of existence.

These aren't in conflict because I don't treat shamanic cosmology as competing scientific claims.

When I journey and encounter a spirit guide, I'm not making a claim about whether an autonomous entity exists in objective space. I'm engaging in a practice that produces real effects - insight, healing, transformation - using methods developed over thousands of years.

Is the spirit 'real'? That depends on what you mean by real. Real as in objectively existing independent of my consciousness? I don't know, and more importantly, I don't need to know. Real as in producing genuine effects, conveying authentic wisdom, and facilitating actual transformation? Absolutely.

This isn't having it both ways or being intellectually dishonest. It's recognising that different domains of practice have different standards of truth and different kinds of validity.

What Religion Does Well

When freed from the burden of making competing scientific claims, religion and spirituality offer:

Frameworks for meaning. Science tells us we're collections of atoms governed by physical laws. Religion asks: So what? What does that mean for how we should live? What makes a life worth living?

Practices for transformation. Meditation, contemplation, prayer, ritual are sophisticated technologies for working with consciousness, managing suffering, and cultivating wisdom.

Moral and ethical guidance. Not because God commands it, but because traditions have accumulated wisdom about what kinds of lives and communities flourish.

Community and belonging. Shared practices, values, and narratives create bonds that go deeper than ideological agreement.

The sacred and transcendent. Experiences of beauty, awe, mystery, connection to something larger than ourselves. These are real human needs that materialism alone doesn't address.

Narrative resources. Stories about meaning in suffering, redemption from failure, transformation through crisis. These aren't scientific hypotheses but resources for making sense of human experience.

What Science Does Well

And when we stop trying to make science do religion's job, science offers:

Empirical knowledge of the natural world. How the universe works, what causes disease, how to build technologies, what happened in evolutionary history.

Self-correcting methodology. A systematic way of testing claims against evidence and updating beliefs when proven wrong.

Practical applications. Medicine, technology, engineering, agriculture: all the material improvements that reduce suffering and extend capabilities.

Rigorous standards of evidence. Protecting us from wishful thinking and false claims about matters of fact.

These are extraordinary achievements. But they don't tell us how to live well, what to value, or whether existence is meaningful. Those aren't scientific questions.

The Real Conflict

The actual conflict isn't between religion and science. It's between:

Dogmatism (religious or atheist) that insists on certainty about matters that remain genuinely mysterious

vs.

Intellectual humility that can hold multiple ways of knowing without collapsing them into each other.

I can do rigorous science while also engaging spiritual practice because I don't confuse their domains. I don't expect physics to tell me how to live well. I don't expect shamanic journeying to explain particle behaviour.

The fundamentalist can't do this because they need religious texts to be scientific authorities.

The rational atheist can't do this because they need all claims to be scientific hypotheses.

Both positions are too narrow for the full complexity of human existence.

What I Tell Religious Fundamentalists

When religious students ask me how I reconcile shamanic practice with scientific work, and they expect me to provide scientific evidence for spiritual reality, I tell them:

"Stop trying to make religion compete with science on science's terms. You'll lose that fight, and more importantly, you'll lose what makes religion valuable.

Scripture isn't a geology textbook. Prayer isn't a mechanism for changing physical outcomes. Faith isn't belief in improbable facts.

Religion is a set of practices, narratives, and communities designed to address existential questions, transform consciousness, and create meaning. That's more important than being right about the age of the Earth.

Let science do science. Let religion do religion. Each has its domain."

What I Tell Rational Atheists

And when atheist colleagues ask how I can practice shamanism while doing serious science, expecting me to defend supernatural claims, I tell them:

"I'm not making supernatural claims. I'm engaging in practices that work, using frameworks that are coherent within their own logic, for purposes that science doesn't address.

Shamanic journeying produces insight and healing. Whether the spirits I encounter are 'real' in an ontological sense is less important than whether the practice is effective.

You don't need to believe in anything supernatural to recognize that:

• Meaning is a human need science can't fulfill

• Consciousness remains deeply mysterious

• Wisdom traditions have valuable insights about human nature

• Transformative practices don't require metaphysical commitments

  
  

Stop treating all religious language as failed science. Some of it is doing something else entirely."

The Liberation

There's something liberating about recognising that not all important questions are scientific questions.

You can value evidence without thinking it's the only path to knowledge.

You can engage spiritual practice without making empirical claims you can't support.

You can recognise the limits of both scientific materialism and religious literalism.

The universe is large enough to contain both equations and myths, both empirical investigation and contemplative practice, both factual truth and symbolic meaning.

We don't need to force everything into a single framework. We can let different ways of knowing address the questions they're equipped to handle.

An Invitation

If you're a religious fundamentalist who's felt pressured to defend every biblical claim as scientific fact: you don't have to. Your faith can be deeper and stronger when it's not hostage to geological timelines.

If you're a rational atheist who's dismissed all religion as irrational: reconsider. The fact that fundamentalists misuse religion doesn't mean religion has nothing to offer.

If you're caught between these poles, uncertain whether you can value both scientific truth and spiritual depth: you can. Just not by making them compete in domains where they don't belong.

The mistake isn't believing or not believing. The mistake is thinking these are the only options.

The mistake is literalism, whether you're defending it or attacking it.

The liberation is recognising that truth is larger, more multiple, and more mysterious than either side wants to admit.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. I work at the intersection of scientific rigour and spiritual depth, refusing to collapse one into the other. If this resonates, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

Where do you find yourself on this spectrum? Have you felt pressure to choose between scientific rationality and spiritual meaning? I'd love to hear your perspective.