Why a Secular Commitment to Science Warrants Pride, not Humility

Scientific thinkers take pride, not humility, in their intellectual honesty and objectivity.

Originally published August 7, 2024. Modest revisions were made to this essay in May 2026.

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“Then there’s the accusation of arrogance, of claiming to know everything. But science is humble, it has to be. We love what we don’t know because it gives us something to do.”¹ That’s what Professor Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist, said in the fall of 2023 at the premier secularist conference in Las Vegas.

I saw Dawkins give the talk live, and in the rest of the talk, he went on to describe the glorious achievements of science in advancing human knowledge, making it the “jewel in humanity’s crown.” Why then is Dawkins, probably one of the world’s most vocal and influential scientists, not only portraying a passion for scientific knowledge as an idle pastime, but dressing up his reverence for science with the value of humility?

Dawkins isn’t the only secular thinker who’s invoked the language of humility. Carl Sagan did too: “Science is part and parcel humility. . . . We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.”² This rhetoric has lately become widespread among secular thinkers, from Steven Pinker to the online “rationalist community,” who claim that intellectual or epistemic humility is a cure for intellectual arrogance.³

Dawkins uses the humility rhetoric specifically to ward off the charge that secularists themselves are arrogant for daring to challenge religion. The pressure to answer the arrogance charge comes from the critics of secularism. But, as I will argue, using the humility rhetoric that religious critics are pushing is a self-destructive habit for the secularist movement that is already losing ground in its battle to advance science and rationality in the culture.  

Unscientific “humility” studies

We see the humility rhetoric on display in a 2020 article by the late Scott Lilienfeld in Skeptical Inquirer, a leading publication for atheists and agnostics. It alleges that religious skeptics themselves have alienated too many through their “take-no-prisoners” approach. He offers intellectual humility as an alternative approach for skeptics to “embrace as guiding credo.”⁴

In Lilienfeld’s approach, humility looks like the only alternative to arrogance because he’s fallen for a fraudulent definition of “humility.”  

Lilienfeld references a series of scientific studies that purport to show the psychological benefits of “intellectual humility” understood as “an awareness of one’s intellectual limitations and biases.” One such study finds a correlation between measurements of subjects’ level of humility and their “openness to learning about opposing perspectives, even during disagreements about highly charged topics.”⁵ The humility it seeks to measure is “a willingness to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge and appreciate others’ intellectual strengths.” To measure the subject’s “humility,” authors asked subjects to self-report agreement or disagreement with such statements as these:

1. I am willing to admit it if I don’t know something

2. I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths

3. I try to reflect on my weaknesses in order to develop my intelligence

4. I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical

5. I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a certain subject

6. I sometimes marvel at the intellectual abilities of other people

Subjects are then given a series of tasks in which they are evaluated to see if they practice what they preach: are they open to learning from people they disagree with, especially from political positions they disagree with?

But treating agreement with the attitudes on this list as measures of “humility” is perplexing. A straightforward dictionary definition of “humility” (the first that appears on Google) is “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.”⁶ Notably the study doesn’t even measure if subjects used the word “humility” to describe themselves. It simply stipulates that agreement with the attitudes on the list is the same as humility. Only through a very sloppy, unscientific recoding of subject responses as “humble” in some other elusive sense can one think it applies to the attitudes expressed on this list.

There’s no reason to code these attitudes as “humble” when there are clearer ways to categorize them, ways that reflect their methodological importance in a scientific worldview.

If Sagan and Dawkins acknowledge there are some things they don’t know, they’re being intellectually honest and objective about the state of their knowledge, not humble.

If Dawkins compliments Sagan for knowing more about astrophysics than he does, or even marvels at his abilities, he’s being intellectually honest and just toward Sagan, not humble about his own importance as a biologist.

If Sagan thinks his knowledge of evolutionary biology is weak compared to his knowledge of astrophysics and seeks feedback from Dawkins on his explanations of evolution, he’s being honest about his weaknesses in one area, not humble about his accomplishments as a physicist.

If both want to learn more about new fields, they’re being ambitious in their pursuit of new knowledge, not humbly recognizing some “limitation.”

Intellectual honesty and objectivity are far from the same as humility. It’s possible, for example, to be proudly intellectually honest, to be steadfast in one’s unwillingness to pretend to know things one doesn’t, to unflinchingly admit when one makes mistakes and needs to learn more, and of course to refuse to compromise one’s scientific integrity no matter what. None of these is the hallmark of humility. They are the essence of taking pride in one’s commitment to an evidence-based, scientific method.⁷ The practice of science is not an idle pastime to satisfy indifferent curiosity. It’s the passionate pursuit of truth.

The temptation to call these scientific virtues a form of “humility” comes from the fact that its definition has recently been given a makeover from its uglier original meaning. The concept traditionally defined as a “low view of one’s importance” has been transformed into “an awareness of one’s intellectual limitations and biases.” A scientist genuinely passionate about the value of the truth who is concerned to eliminate bias then sees this concept as a positive. But he doesn’t recognize that this sugarcoating is being used to get him to swallow a poison pill.

An important clue to the nature of the poison can be seen in who is pushing the humility pill.

It cannot be a simple coincidence that the overwhelming majority of studies Lilienfeld cites (and much of his own work) were sponsored by grants from the Templeton Foundation. Importantly, this includes the major philosophical work he cites for his definition of “humility,” a book by Ian Church and Peter Samuelson, Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science. Templeton is a major humanities foundation devoted to injecting religious values into the culture, expressly including the value of humility.⁸

Support by a religious foundation doesn’t necessarily compromise a study’s underlying data. It does, however, give us strong reason to examine the interpretation of the data, including especially the definitions it offers as tools for that interpretation. Templeton has now created an enormous financial incentive for philosophically inexperienced researchers to reclassify their findings to fit under the heading of “humility” research. It would be easy for even atheistic scientists, otherwise unsympathetic to Templeton’s objectives but hungry for grants, to concede the idiosyncratic definition of “humility” as what they see as a mere linguistic stipulation to make their studies eligible for Templeton funding.

But the consequence of Templeton’s influence is to incentivize the misrepresentation of the actual attitudes of experimental subjects in support of a religious agenda. It is ominous that the influence of this agenda has (likely unwittingly) made its way into the pages of a renowned atheist magazine. And the temptation to recast objectivity and intellectual honesty as humility is not merely financial. It appeals to another bad intellectual habit, which many philosophically inexperienced secularists have unwittingly fallen prey to for centuries.

Cognitive original sin

The most obvious symptom of the bad habit in question is the description of objectivity and intellectual honesty as forms of recognizing the “limitations of knowledge.” It’s actually a grossly inaccurate description, but there’s an influential intellectual tradition that helps rationalize this inaccuracy.

To honestly and objectively recognize that we don’t know everything, that we’re not infallible omniscient gods, is not to recognize a limitation in any meaningful sense of the word. A limitation to our knowledge would be some upper bound or restriction past which we know our efforts must fail. There is no such known limit to scientific knowledge. To number the billions of stars in the cosmos, measure the inner workings of the atom, plumb the depths of primordial natural history, and predict the heat death of the universe — all were once thought inconceivable. The history of science is one of progress, in which scientists have continually transgressed prejudices about the limits of what can be known. Science is glorious because it knows no upper bounds, no limits.

The Templeton-funded pushers of intellectual humility sell it by packaging intellectual honesty and objectivity with the same “limitation” smear. In the introduction of their book, Church and Samuelson also rely on the language of cognitive “limitations,” even suggesting that they are innate, because evolutionary psychologists speculate that we have a disposition to confirmation bias that may be “embedded within our cognitive architecture in ways that can systematically lead us to biased thinking.”⁹

To be sure, confirmation bias exists. Anyone who engages in sloppy thinking, who defaults on the practice of scientific methodology, is capable of all manner of error. And it’s true that sloppy thinkers commit these errors using their innate cognitive mechanisms to commit them. So, of course, do scientists who discover important truths. The difference between the dedicated scientist and the sloppy thinker is that the first learns to effectively ratchet up the value of the mechanism while the second does not. The adaptive value of our cognitive mechanisms derives from their optimal use, not from deficient, degraded, sloppy use. Nothing innate stops us from using our brains to their fullest potential, by developing and using the scientific methods that allow us to check for bias. Nothing innate causes any “limitation.”

The idea that something innate imposes some restriction on our perfectibility should sound familiar. If you’ve read Plato, you’ll recognize the idea that physical matter is a source of corruption that stops us from reaching perfect knowledge in another dimension. You may also remember a story about a prideful quest for knowledge of good and evil going before a fall. In the hands of St. Augustine, a Christian philosopher also influenced by Platonism, the story of Genesis became ready fodder for the doctrine of original sin.

Claims of original sin have always gone hand in hand with calls for humility (“a modest or low view of one’s own importance” is the religious view of humility). The idea of intellectual humility arises from a view of cognitive original sin.

As the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil suggests, the idea of original sin was from the beginning a view of cognitive original sin. It is about the sinful pride of trying to escape the cognitive shackles of human nature. St. Augustine characterized our sinfulness as originating a motive by which “efforts are made to scrutinize the secrets of the natural world that lie beyond our sight,” what he calls “the lust of the eyes.”¹⁰ He rails against the pagan thinkers who, in their prideful pursuit of worldly knowledge, “draw away from you [God] and lose your light, because these scholars who foresee a future eclipse of the sun long beforehand fail to see their own in the present, for want of inquiring in a religious spirit.”¹¹

Influencing both Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and its Platonic predecessors is a model of the knower as an infinite omniscient being. In this (unscientific) model, a mere mortal who doesn’t know everything is taken not to know anything. Hence “limitation,” which would otherwise only denote finitude, gains the connotation of imperfection, error, corruption. The same model has influenced numerous secular thinkers from Freud to Popper, who all infer forms of corruption or versions of skepticism from the mere fact that we possess natural cognitive faculties.¹²

The original meaning of humility is to recognize the alleged fact of original sin, and to attempt to avoid the sin of prideful scientific inquiry. In the same way, the intellectual humility view describes our fallibility as a “limitation” beyond which we cannot see. This smuggles in the same religious smear against human nature. By wrapping honesty and objectivity in the packaging of “limitations,” intellectual humility pushers smuggle in the original religious meaning of “humility,” “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.” To recommend cognitive lowliness is to join Augustine in chastising science for its attempt to uncover the “secrets” of nature.

To take humility seriously is also to encourage the worst possible alternative to the scientific method, what Augustine describes as inquiring with a “religious spirit.” The humility that Augustine celebrated most was faith. In a sermon, he proclaimed “faith belongs not to the proud but to the humble.”¹³ Faith is indeed the ultimate embodiment of humility: it means regarding one’s own means of knowledge as inadequate — as “limited” — and thus submitting to the arbitrary edicts of pseudo-authorities. ¹⁴

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It’s thus not an accident that the Templeton Foundation opens its research page on intellectual humility with a reference to St. Augustine, noting how he saw humility as “the foundation of all other virtues.” Championing humility, especially on the grounds of some version of original sin, is essentially religious in origin. (No ancient Greek moral philosophers [not even Plato] regarded humility as a virtue.) And ultimately, humility demands religious faith.

Secular thinkers committed to intellectually honest, objective inquiry should realize that they are also subject to philosophical biases which are not innate, but the products of powerful, unscrutinized philosophical traditions of the past. In this case, their unwitting acceptance of the rhetoric of cognitive original sin is what’s tempting them to swallow the poison pill of intellectual humility.

Atheist arrogance?

Atheists and other secularists are a minority in our intellectual culture. This makes some of us easily subject to another (avoidable) bias: fear of taking a radical stand contrary to the long-cherished doctrines of the majority, and a temptation to jump on what bandwagons we still can. Critics of secularism can and do play upon this fear, by charging the secular minority with “arrogance.”

Church and Samuelson, the humility-pushing authors, openly name their opponents: “whether it’s Christian fundamentalism, Islamic jihadism, or militant atheism, religious dialogue remains tinted by a terrifying and dehumanizing arrogance, dogma, and ignorance” (my emphasis).¹⁵ This is the very criticism that secularists like Dawkins seem to fear and want to appease.

There probably are atheists who’ve exhibited irrational arrogance. But it’s patently absurd to associate atheism with fundamentalist Christianity, especially with the true militants, Islamic jihadists. Outspoken, passionate advocacy for reason and science is the antithesis of deranged irrationality, especially the kind that leads to violence.

And are “militant” atheists arrogant in the way that Church and Samuelson imply? They do not name the atheists they regard as offenders against humility, but we can guess whom they might have in mind. Another scholar influenced by the same religious theorists of humility as Church and Samuelson is Craig A. Boyd, who writes an entire scholarly journal article attacking the arrogance of New Atheists like Dawkins.¹⁶

Boyd argues that the atheist’s “faith” in the scientific method is intellectually arrogant because it abjures the possibility of learning from religious people, and singles out Dawkins for criticism.¹⁷ Dawkins, he claims, “categorically closed his mind,” rejecting beliefs not based on empirical evidence, and claiming that no evidence could ever change his mind about the supernatural (because such claims make no difference for the evidence).

Dawkins has closed his mind to something. When, for example, Dawkins and many other secularists tell us they know that evolution is a fact, not “just a theory,” they are ruling out the opinions of even many credentialed “intelligent design” theorists whose religious views have been dressed up in fancy pseudoscientific garb. Likewise, when Dawkins and other New Atheists rule out the idea that there can be knowledge of a supernatural “higher” reality through incomprehensible means, they are refusing to learn from other people: from those who make claims with no definite meaning because they defy the need for evidence. It’s true: Dawkins is not humble.

But Dawkins’s confidence in ruling out arbitrary claims about the supernatural is also not arrogant. Arrogance is unearned confidence, the embrace of baseless prejudice in defiance of the value of honest, objective inquiry. Dawkins’s confidence in the efficacy of science has been earned, paid for by decades of study and systematic assembly of evidence — not to mention the centuries of work of the giants on whose shoulders he stands. One who properly rejects arbitrary supernatural claims does so out of appreciation for the price of earned confidence, a price supernatural claims have never paid.

Secularists who want to try to appease criticisms of science by hiding behind the garb of humility are fighting a losing battle. Religious thinkers created that garb; they know how it works and will still recognize the shape of the accomplished, outspoken scientists it doesn’t fit. Instead secularists should reject the false choice of arrogance or humility and explain the difference between arrogance and earned intellectual pride.

To beat them, don’t join them

To see why it’s fighting a losing battle to beat the humble religious on their own terms, look no further than a recent event between Dawkins himself and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In a recent conversation between them in New York in May 2024, Hirsi Ali accused Dawkins of being arrogant:

Like you I did mock faith in general, probably Christianity in particular, but I don’t do that anymore. And again that’s where humility comes into it. . . . I’ve come down to my knees to say perhaps those people who’ve always had faith have something that we who lost faith don’t have.¹⁸

Hirsi Ali, once an atheist herself, now says she chooses to believe in Christianity because it is supported by the “wisdom of millennia” and serves as a spiritual bulwark against personal depression, the “woke mind virus,” and the geopolitical challenge of Islam. Dawkins repeatedly points to irrational Christian doctrines that no scientific thinker can take seriously (including original sin). Ali simply responds that she subjectively believes Christianity stands for love.

Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity from atheism has been a major publicity coup for religion, and she did it by embracing humility. In her article announcing her conversion, she appealed to the value in Christianity of “humility for the believer.”¹⁹ And she has now fully swallowed the humility pill, not just by criticizing Dawkins’s alleged arrogance, but by getting “down to [her] knees” to take the fully humble approach to her own cognition: by accepting the authority of her religious friends and their scriptures on blind faith. And she is now pushing that pill on others.

However much Dawkins and other secularists value Hirsi Ali’s past courage, they should refuse to take what she is pushing. It’s dishonest to evade humility’s religious origins, and it’s cowardly to appease the values of one’s enemy — especially an irrational value like humility that falsely presupposes that all confidence is unearned.

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But it’s not enough to reject the trendy call for religious humility. Atheists need an alternative moral framework. The alternative can be found by embracing what won me and others over to atheism in the first place: taking pride in the glory of science. What made Dawkins’s speech in Las Vegas so inspiring to me (and I think many others in the audience) was his survey of all the great truths science really had discovered, and that they were truths, not just postmodern “constructs.” Dawkins has long made a career of explaining the glory of science as a sublime human achievement. In an earlier article, before talk of scientific humility became modish, he realized that this is an achievement of which scientists should be proud, not humble:

Pride can be justified, and science does so in spades. So does Beethoven, so do Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren. So do the engineers who built the giant telescopes in Hawaii and in the Canary Islands, the giant radio telescopes and very large arrays that stare sightless into the southern sky; or the Hubble orbiting telescope and the spacecraft that launched it. The engineering feats deep underground at CERN, combining monumental size with minutely accurate tolerances of measurement, literally moved me to tears when I was shown around.²⁰

If Dawkins and the secular movement think more about what scientific pride in knowledge entails, they will realize that it contains the seed of an alternative moral code that can fill the moral vacuum.

Let’s hear more of this pride in their knowledge coming from Dawkins and from secularists more generally. Let’s not fear baseless accusations of “arrogance” from the faithful and feel that we need to appease them through unconvincing odes to “humility.” As Dawkins himself said in his Las Vegas talk, “There is much that science doesn’t know. There’s also plenty that we do know, and let’s not be shy of proclaiming it.”²¹ What he should have said was: let’s not be humble about proclaiming it.

1. Richard Dawkins, “Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity’s Crown,” Center for Inquiry YouTube channel, February 15, 2024. Talk originally delivered October 26, 2023, at CSICon, Las Vegas, NV.

2. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 32.

3. Some of the arrogance they want to oppose they see in the wider culture. In his book Rationality, Steven Pinker celebrates a form of “epistemic humility” that he says means that “perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained” (Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters [New York: Viking, 2021], 40). Pinker is inspired by the online “rationality community,” which sees its reliance on the mathematics of probability as helping it become “less wrong” (but never fully right) (149). Such rationalists offer epistemic humility as an antidote to the arrogant political tribalism they see on both the left and the right.

4. Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle for the Skeptical Movement?” Skeptical Inquirer 44, no. 5 (September/October 2020).

5. Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann, “Intellectual Humility and Openness to the Opposing View,” Self and Identity 17, no. 2 (2018): 140.

6. Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg, eds., New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “humility.”

7. Humility theorists argue that humility is just a mean between arrogance and lowliness, such that humility is simply “thinking of oneself as one ought” (neither too well nor too poorly) (see Ian Church and Peter Samuelson, Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016], 6–7). But in the history of philosophy, Aristotle also sought to identify a mean between two vices that concerned this subject: his vices were vanity and humility, and his “mean” between them was magnanimity, sometimes translated as pride. To take something Aristotle identified as a vice and turn it into the new mean is to bias the scale significantly in favor of self-effacement (self-effacement still comes out as good, just not too much of it).

8. Nineteen papers in Lilienfeld’s bibliography deal with the topic of intellectual humility. Of those nineteen, fourteen all acknowledge Templeton funding: Mark Alfano et al., “Development and Validation of a Multi-Dimensional Measure of Intellectual Humility,” PLoS ONE 12, no. 8 (2017); Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson, “The Semantic Neighborhood of Intellectual Humility,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Social Intelligence, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 1283 (2014), 40–49 [Funded by a grant from the Thrive Center, which is funded by Templeton]; Ian M. Church and Peter L. Samuelson, Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Don E. Davis et al., “Distinguishing Intellectual Humility and General Humility,” Journal of Positive Psychology 11, no. 3 (2016): 215–24; Megan Haggard et al., “Finding Middle Ground between Intellectual Arrogance and Intellectual Servility: Development and Assessment of the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale,” Personality and Individual Differences 124 (2018): 184–93; Joshua N. Hook et al., “Intellectual Humility and Religious Tolerance,” Journal of Positive Psychology 12, no. 1 (2017): 29–35;
Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso and Steven V. Rouse, “The Development and Validation of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale,” Journal of Personality Assessment 98, no. 2 (2016): 209–21; Mark R. Leary et al., “Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43, no. 6 (2017): 793–813; Stacey E. McElroy, Kenneth G. Rice, and Don E. Davis, “Intellectual Humility: Scale Development and Theoretical Elaborations in the Context of Religious Leadership,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 42, no. 1 (2014): 19–30; Stacey E. McElroy-Heltzel et al., “Embarrassment of Riches in the Measurement of Humility: A Critical Review of 22 Measures,” Journal of Positive Psychology 14, no. 3 (2019): 393–404; Benjamin R. Meagher et al., “Contrasting Self-Report and Consensus Ratings of Intellectual Humility and Arrogance,” Journal of Research in Personality 58 (2015): 35–45; Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann, “Intellectual Humility and Openness to the Opposing View,” Self and Identity 17, no. 2 (2018): 139–62; D. Rodriguez et al., “Religious Intellectual Humility, Attitude Change, and Closeness Following Religious Disagreement,” Journal of Positive Psychology 14, no. 2 (2019): 133–40; Dennis Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94, no. 3 (2017): 509–39.

The following four are Lilienfeld publications or projects supervised or coauthored by Lilienfeld: Shauna M. Bowes, “Expanding the Nomological Network of Intellectual Humility: An Examination of Personality Traits, Cognitive Styles, Critical-Thinking, and Self-Perception” (master’s thesis, Emory University, 2019); Shauna M. Bowes et al., “Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated with Reduced Political Bias?” (poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, New Orleans, LA, February 2020); Scott O. Lilienfeld and Shauna M. Bowes, “Intellectual Humility: Ten Key Questions,” in Handbook on the State of the Art in Applied Psychology, ed. Peter Graf and David J. A. Dozois (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2021), 449–68; Scott O. Lilienfeld et al., “Epistemic Humility: An Overarching Educational Philosophy for Clinical Psychology Programs,” Clinical Psychologist 70, no. 2 (2017): 6–14.

For more on Templeton’s support for humility research see “Intellectual Humility,” Templeton.org. See Templeton’s report on its grant to Lilienfeld for research on intellectual humility, “Intellectual Humility: Implications for Political and Religious Polarization,” Templeton.org.

Of the nineteen papers, only one on intellectual humility did not acknowledge any Templeton funding (it was funded by the Gates Foundation). It does, however, cite fully half of the Templeton-funded articles listed above: Leor Zmigrod et al., “The Psychological Roots of Intellectual Humility: The Role of Intelligence and Cognitive Flexibility,” Personality and Individual Differences 141 (2019): 200–208.

For a skeptical review of Templeton’s mission, see John Horgan, “The Templeton Foundation: A Skeptic’s Take,” Edge, April 4, 2006.

9. Church and Samuelson, Intellectual Humility, 5.

10. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), X.35.54, 234.

11. St. Augustine, Confessions, V.3.4, 78.

12. See James Boyce, Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2015).

13. St. Augustine, Sermon 115.2, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle, III [1–11] (Brooklyn, NY: New City, 1990), 199.

14. Even modern Templeton-funded theorists like Church and Samuelson follow Augustine in thinking that humility is compatible with baseless faith. They liken faith to the experience of “just knowing” that 2 + 2 = 4 (papering over many obvious differences between accepting basic math and believing in supernatural beings). They think baseless belief in God is humble because in their circular argument, “just knowing” that God is real is a capacity given by God, and so thinking this doesn’t go beyond one’s otherwise severe cognitive limitations. (See Church and Samuelson, Intellectual Humility, 288–316.)

15. Church and Samuelson, Intellectual Humility, 4.

16. Craig A. Boyd, “Humility, Virtue Epistemology, and the New Atheism,” Theology and Science 15, no. 2 (2017): 162–76. Notably, Boyd draws on contemporary religious philosophers like Robert Roberts and Jay Wood’s account of intellectual humility, as Church and Samuelson do. In his portrait of virtue ethics more generally, he also draws on Linda Zagzebski, another religious philosopher Lilienfeld cites.

17. Boyd, “Humility, Virtue Epistemology,” 168.

18. “Richard Dawkins versus Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Political Christian or Truly a Christian?” The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins YouTube channel, June 3, 2024.

19. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I Am Now a Christian,” UnHerd.com, November 11, 2023.

20. Richard Dawkins, “The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism,” RichardDawkins.com.

21. Dawkins, “Science, the Poetry of Reality.”