Can a Skeptic Believe in God?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2026

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christopher Beha grew up Catholic in Manhattan, walked away during the New Atheist era, and spent years trying to build a secular worldview sturdy enough to live inside. It didn't hold. So he kept reading—Hume, Kant, Russell, the existentialists—and kept chasing the questions that don't let you sleep: what counts as evidence, what belief even is, and what you do when reason can't answer the things you still have to decide.

In this conversation with Michael Shermer, Beha makes a case that skepticism and belief aren't enemies—and that some debates go nowhere because people are arguing about the "branches" while standing on totally different foundations.

Christopher Beha is the former editor of Harper's Magazine and the author of four previous books, including The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, which was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award. His new book is Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Richard Dawkins is as far away from a skeptic as one could possibly imagine. He has enormous confidence
0:05.5	about the power of human reason to answer any question that is truly worth asking in the first place.
0:11.5	That's simply not what skepticism is. There's a particular version of radical skepticism that's absolutely
0:16.4	paralyzing. And by radical skepticism, I want to make clear that what I mean is something like an absolute doubt about any human knowledge of any form, apart from the immediate knowledge of this thing just happened that I witnessed.
0:28.9	And then, of course, you doubt that because you doubt the possibility of your senses to deliver to you any truth about the outside.
0:35.5	You had three big questions in the book you set out to answer on your journey.
0:38.3	How am I to live?
0:39.3	What do I owe to other people or myself?
0:41.3	And what is the meaning of life?
0:43.3	Okay, just answer the last one.
0:45.3	I actually think I do have a pretty good answer to the meaning of life at this point.
0:49.3	It's an answer that then raises a whole bunch of other questions.
0:56.5	Alrighty everybody, it's Michael Sherman. that then raises a whole bunch of other questions. Alrighty, everybody.
0:57.7	It's Michael Schumer, and it's time for another episode of the Michael
1:00.0	Shermer show.
1:01.0	Mike, as usual, brought to you by the Skeptic Society.
1:04.0	And if you want to give us some support, subscribe to the show,
1:06.6	subscribe to the magazine, and so forth.
1:08.2	Go to skeptic.com or skeptic.com slash donate or skeptic.com slash subscribe.
1:16.5	As you can tell, I'm not really adept at giving the commercials here for our very products.
1:21.5	But in any case, most of you already know what we do here.
1:24.5	My guest today is Christopher Bihaw.
	...

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