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Fear of Irrelevance

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Fear of death gets a lot of attention. Fear of irrelevance mostly doesn’t. Yet if you look at how humans actually behave, that quieter fear—the dread that when we are gone it will be as if we never existed—seems to drive much of the machinery. It is this fear that religion, spirituality, secular philosophies, and even celebrity culture all, in their different ways, are built to soothe.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in The Denial of Death that human civilization is essentially a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. We are the animal that understands we are going to die, and we find that fact intolerable, so we build stories that insist our lives have enduring significance. Terror Management Theory (TMT), a later development in social psychology, puts this into experimental form: awareness of death creates deep anxiety, which we “manage” by embracing cultural worldviews that tell us what the universe is about and how someone like us can count as a person of value within it. Self‑esteem, in this framework, is not just a pleasant feeling; it is the sense of being significant in a meaningful world, and studies suggest it helps buffer us against the distress of mortality reminders.

From this perspective, the key human problem is not simply that we die. It is that death threatens to expose our lives as negligible. To counter that, TMT distinguishes two broad strategies: literal immortality and symbolic immortality. Literal immortality is religion’s core promise: the soul survives and goes on to Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, the next incarnation, or some all‑embracing oneness. Symbolic immortality takes over when that story no longer convinces; in that mode, we “live on” in children, nations, artistic or scientific work, institutions, or the memory of our name. Becker called these “immortality projects”: efforts to secure the sense that we were not just biological accidents but contributors to something enduring.

Once you see this, religion stops looking like a separate mental category and starts looking like one point on a spectrum of answers to the same question: “How do I matter?” At one end are formal doctrines of Heaven and Hell. Moving along the line, you encounter looser spiritualities in which “the universe has a plan for me” or “everything happens for a reason.” Farther still are nationalistic stories that promise relevance through being part of a chosen people or a “great nation,” and activist narratives that promise a place on “the right side of history,” another way of saying one will not be erased. Even overtly secular philosophies can function as immortality projects by promising that one’s work contributes to progress or to humanity’s “march forward.”

This is why simply stripping religion away and expecting rational enlightenment to flourish is naïve. The underlying need—to feel connected to something larger and more lasting than a single nervous system—does not vanish with doctrinal belief. Becker and TMT theorists are explicit on this point: the urge to secure meaning and symbolic permanence is built into our condition and cannot simply be “given up.” Secular people and atheists are not exempt; if anything, they are under more pressure to find non‑supernatural ways to meet the same need. Remove religion “cold turkey” without offering better ways to manage fear and irrelevance, and people are likely to trade familiar myths for newer ones: New Age movements, conspiracy cults, political messianism, or other systems that again place them at the center of some cosmic or historical drama.

The chapter “The Tao of Science” in Pandemic of Delusion addresses one common objection: that religion has a monopoly on the feeling of being connected to something greater. Classical Taoism, as described there, seeks oneness with the universe by suspending reason, treating rational thought as a barrier to harmony. Science takes the opposite route: it insists on reason and evidence, yet if that path is followed as far as knowledge allows, the sense of connection it delivers can be at least as powerful—and, crucially, grounded in fact.

Carl Sagan’s remark that “to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe” stands as a compact expression of this scientific “Tao.” It compresses 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution into an everyday act, reminding us that the ingredients in a pie are the products of a long chain of natural events: post‑Big‑Bang matter condensing, stars forging heavy elements, planets forming, life evolving, agriculture emerging, and human culture inventing recipes. In that story, flour and sugar are star‑stuff, and the baker is a temporary arrangement of atoms produced in stellar interiors, briefly self‑aware, rearranging other atoms into dessert.

Science shows that the universe has a history and a kind of life cycle; it has been evolving in structure and complexity and will eventually “grow old and die.” Human evolution is not separate from that story but contiguous with it: atoms now organized as human bodies were forged in stars and cycled through countless organisms before taking this form, and they will return to the larger system. In that sense, we are not guests in the universe; we are the universe, in a particular configuration, looking back at itself. Recognizing this does not require any supernatural additions, yet it can provide precisely the sense of oneness and embeddedness that religious and spiritual systems promise.

Seen this way, science and fact‑based thinking do not leave a person forlorn and disconnected; they offer a way to feel relevant and connected without pretending the universe is designed around us. Our existence becomes meaningful not because a cosmic plan singles us out, but because a 13.7‑billion‑year chain of events has produced beings able to understand and influence a small part of that chain. For many, that realization can be not only intellectually satisfying but emotionally sustaining—an honest alternative to the fake constructs that proliferate when the need for relevance is denied rather than redirected into more grounded perspectives.

Modern culture adds its own twists to how we seek permanence. Contemporary information systems make it easier to spread comforting falsehoods and harder to maintain a disciplined, fact‑based view of the world. The same networks that propagate conspiracy theories and miracle cures also propagate stories about personal significance: follower counts, likes, and shares become continuous, numerical feedback on “do I matter?” in an attention economy. Celebrity culture intensifies this further. Commentators have noted that celebrities often seem to inhabit a kind of secular afterlife; their images and narratives remain visible and emotionally potent long after their deaths, sustaining fantasies of immortality for those who identify with them. Fame becomes a form of symbolic immortality in which the worst fate is not moral failure but obscurity.

If irrelevance is the real terror, this makes celebrity an especially seductive immortality project. It reframes significance as visibility: to be constantly seen is to count; to be forgotten is to vanish in a deeper sense than physical death. In that environment, it is unsurprising that many people’s immortality projects center on building a “personal brand,” collecting followers, or “going viral” at least once—even when these projects rest on distortion or spectacle rather than substance.

Donald Trump is a vivid example of a particularly toxic part of this spectrum. Over decades of interviews, his comments regarding an afterlife have been all over the map. What has been consistent is not any theology but an intense focus on visibility, branding, and ratings. His preoccupation is marking every enduring structure of society with his name. He wants history to remember him, and one is justified in concluding that, if given the choice of being remembered for a hundred years as a good president, or a thousand years as an infamous one, he would choose the latter.

In one reported exchange about Washington, D.C. monuments, he remarked that a previous leader “should’ve put his name on it” because “you’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” That line could serve as a plain‑language gloss on symbolic immortality: physical objects and institutions become canvases on which to inscribe “I was here” in as durable a way as possible. From a TMT standpoint, this is not mysterious pathology but an especially visible form of the same underlying process: the self turned into an immortality project, seeking not divine approval but inescapability in the human story.

Becker and TMT theorists are clear that this drive to secure meaning and permanence cannot simply be relinquished. The question is not whether people will engage in immortality projects, but which ones they will choose, and with what consequences. Religion, nationalism, celebrity worship, and various spiritual or ideological movements can all function as such projects—some relatively benign, others demanding denial of evidence or hostility toward those who threaten the story. Fact‑based thinking and science do not abolish the need but they do offer a way to satisfy it in ways more compatible with reality and with living alongside others.

From this vantage point, the most constructive stance is not simply “against religion,” but “for fact‑based thinking.” If habits of evidence, critical self‑correction, and scientific curiosity are cultivated, the appeal of fake constructs tends to weaken on its own, because it no longer feels necessary to sustain them. A person who understands themselves as a conscious fragment of a 13.7‑billion‑year‑old universe, embedded in networks of ancestry, ecology, and culture, does not need a fabricated cosmic destiny to feel that life matters; they can locate meaning in contributing to understanding, reducing harm, and leaving behind structures—ideas, practices, institutions—that continue to function after they are gone.

The call to action, then, is both personal and social. Personally, it is to recognize the fear of irrelevance in one’s own life—not as a flaw to be ashamed of, but as a feature of being a symbolic animal that knows it will die—and to choose, deliberately, which stories will be allowed to answer that fear. Socially, it is to build cultures, institutions, and educational practices that direct our hunger for significance toward projects that are reality‑based and humane: science, art, honest public service, durable communities, and fact‑anchored inquiry.

No one gets to opt out of the need to matter. But it is possible to decide that the ways we seek to matter will not be based upon delusions. In that sense, advocating for fact‑based thinking is not about taking away people’s sense of meaning; it is about offering a way to secure it that does not require golden idols, invisible plans, or committing mass shootings. Taking joy in being a brief, conscious expression of a very old universe is already a remarkable kind of relevance; the task is to let our stories, and our actions, appreciate and take comfort in that fact.

Sophisticated Arguments for Preposterous Propositions

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Intelligence does not immunize against delusion, and intelligent people can produce sophisticated sounding arguments to support their delusional claims. This has always been epidemic amongst the intelligentsia who believe in, and need to rationalize, the existence of a god that cannot and therefore does not actually exist.

The latest delusional religious reasoning comes from theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in a long New York Times interview (see here) where he announces that the only reason he is not an atheist is that “the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.” It’s an impressively confident conclusion, especially given how weak the actual arguments look once you strip away the prose and the piety. Underneath the erudite-sounding facade, what we are dealing with here is just more misrepresented and logically flimsy pseudo‑intellectual religious nonsense.

Hart warms up with a casual swipe at Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, dismissing it as “decades out of date” when it first appeared and a logical failure. That isn’t just wrong, it’s the kind of wrong you get when you start from “atheists must be idiots” and work backward. Whatever you think of Dawkins’s metaphors, the 1976 book was not peddling obsolete biology; the gene‑centric view it popularized is still one of the basic perspectives in population genetics, even though it has since been supplemented by multi‑level selection and systems thinking, and that’s exactly how its serious critics treat it. Biologists like Denis Noble argue that talking as if genes are little agents oversimplifies a complex causal web, and they argue for reframing and extending, but clearly not for declaring the whole thing “decades out of date” at birth. When Hart actually engages Dawkins elsewhere he mostly attacks the cartoonish way Dawkins talks about “selfish genes” and “lumbering robots,” that is, his metaphors and metaphysics, not the math or the lab work. At no point does he demonstrate that the science was obsolete; he just sneers at a popular book written by an atheist and hopes the insult will do the work of argument. If a Christian apologist wrote a lively popularization of cosmology and an atheist waved it away as “decades out of date” with no evidence, we’d call that what it is: rhetorical BS. If you want to claim modern science has destroyed materialism, you should at least show you can accurately summarize modern science.

The heart of Hart’s case is his insistence that a “mechanistic” view of nature can never explain consciousness, that the scientific picture of the world was built precisely by excluding mental properties, and that trying to add mind back in breaks the machine. He leans toward an idealist picture where consciousness, or “mind,” is fundamental and matter is in some sense derivative. There are at least three big problems with how he plays this. First, he treats “mechanistic” science as if we were still doing physics with brass gears and clockworks. He’s right about one historical point: early modern physics modeled nature as a soulless machine and bracketed talk of purposes and minds to get a clean method going. That was sort of a brilliant move. But he then writes as though that coarse mechanical picture is still the only game in town. It isn’t. Contemporary physics is explicitly non‑mechanistic in his sense; quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and information‑theoretic approaches do not imagine the universe as billiard balls banging around in absolute space. Contemporary biology is likewise not stuck in clockwork mode; it routinely analyzes feedback, homeostasis, regulatory networks, and even minimal forms of goal‑directedness at cellular and organismic levels without smuggling ghosts into the machine. So when Hart admits that “our sciences are not strictly mechanistic” and yet somehow uses that as a weapon against materialism, he’s trading on an equivocation. Materialism in 2026 does not mean “Descartes’s res extensa forever.” It means that whatever exists is ultimately describable in terms of physical fields, structures, and dynamics—even if those structures are richer than 17th‑century clockwork.

Second, Hart treats “no explanation yet” as if it means “requires a spooky extra force.” He is genuinely offended by the idea that a purely physical story could ever explain why there is “something it is like” to be you. Fine; lots of philosophers share that intuition. But “I don’t see how that could work” is not evidence that it cannot work. Physicalist theories of consciousness—from higher‑order thought theories to global workspace models and integrated information approaches—don’t invoke new metaphysical forces bolted onto physics; they identify consciousness with specific kinds of information‑processing and global availability in the brain. Even critics of those theories generally argue about their completeness or conceptual clarity, not about physics needing to invent some non‑mechanical pixie dust. So there is exactly zero empirical requirement for some mysterious non‑mechanistic “force” to explain consciousness; the conceptual puzzles are real, the data gaps are real, but the demand for a supernatural‑ish add‑on is not. Hart’s move is not “maybe we’ll need a modest additional ingredient.” He jumps from “current models leave an explanatory gap” to “the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.” That’s not filling a gap with legitimate science; that’s exploiting any temporary gap to stuff an entire theology into it.

Third, he leans heavily on caricaturing “illusionist” talk about consciousness. Hart loves to quote people like Daniel Dennett saying that “consciousness is an illusion” and then pointing out, correctly, that if you take that literally you’ve sawed off the branch you’re sitting on: if there is no experience whatsoever, there is no one left to be “under an illusion.” But here again he stops at the cheap false victory. Most illusionist or deflationary physicalists mean something much more specific: there is experience, but our naive model of that experience—as a private inner theater with atomic, intrinsic qualia and a simple “self” watching the show—is badly mistaken. On that view, the brain builds a simplified, user‑friendly representation of its own activity and mistakes that representation for a little inner soul; the “illusion” is the brain’s self‑description, not the existence of experience itself. That is not “we gave up on explaining consciousness.” It’s one kind of mechanistic explanation of how an evolved biological control system might misdescribe itself. Saying that consciousness is “in some sense an illusion” is not a concession that mechanistic explanations failed; it is a mechanistic explanation. Hart either does not understand that distinction or finds it more convenient not to. This is not a case where illusion talk admits defeat; it’s a case where Hart is punching a straw man and declaring victory.

Once you clear away the rhetorical fog, the “unanswerable” anti‑atheist case looks very familiar and age old. The pattern goes roughly like this: define “materialism” as a crude, outdated, 17th‑century billiard‑ball picture plus Dennett at his most provocative; show—correctly—that this caricature struggles to account for rational thought, moral value, and consciousness; then declare victory for a vaguely classical‑theist or idealist picture where “mind” or “spirit” is metaphysically basic. The trouble is that many contemporary naturalists explicitly reject the crude “mechanistic” straw man he keeps fighting. They are physicalists, not cartoon mechanists, and they work within a physics that already moved past that picture. Non‑theist philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised similar worries about materialism’s ability to capture value and reason without concluding “therefore, theism,” and Nagel’s critics have shown in detail how you can respond to those worries from inside a broadly naturalistic framework. There is no valid path from “explaining consciousness is hard” to “the God of Eastern Orthodox Christianity exists,” any more than from “we have not yet fully explained crop circles” to “this proves that aliens created them.”

Hart’s move boils down to this: if he defines “atheism” as commitment to a simplistic metaphysics he dislikes, then his arguments against that metaphysics are “unanswerable,” and therefore atheism is irrational. Sure. And if I define “Christianity” as the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that God personally scripts every toddler’s cancer, I can prove Christianity is evil before lunch. Both maneuvers are lazy. If you want to refute atheism, you have to interact with the best naturalist positions on offer today, not with the weakest airport‑paperback atheism plus your favorite 17th‑century straw man.

None of this means Hart is stupid. He’s obviously not. He’s well read, rhetorically gifted, and very good at exposing shallow, popular atheist arguments. But brilliance in one direction doesn’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning in another. What shows through in that Times piece, and in the wider body of his work, is someone starting from a deep emotional and aesthetic commitment to a Christian‑Platonic picture—beauty as a transcendental, Jesus as uniquely “uncanny,” consciousness as a window into a mental foundation of being—and then retrofitting “philosophical arguments” to protect that picture from contact with a godless universe. Along the way he mischaracterizes contemporary science, caricatures naturalist positions he doesn’t like, and leans hard on loaded definitions (“God” as necessary being; “materialism” as crude mechanism) that atheists simply do not have to grant.

From the outside, this is not a rigorous refutation of atheism; it’s a very educated, very eloquent catechism for people who already want Christianity to be true but don’t want to sound naive. As an unabashed atheist, I have no problem with people finding Christianity emotionally or aesthetically compelling. Believe whatever myths get you through the night. What I object to is pretending that this is where logic forces us to go, that atheism has somehow been rendered philosophically childish by “unanswerable” arguments that fall apart as soon as you stop being impressed by the adjectives. If you want to believe in God, own it as a choice, an intuition, a story that works for you. Just don’t try to tell the rest of us that we’re being irrational for declining to share your delusion.