Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, and a team of PSU students have created a new app called Atheos to facilitate respectful debates between atheists and people with different religious beliefs.
Atheos, available on iTunes and Google Play, helps users conduct difficult conversations by teaching them how to explore the underlying evidence for various beliefs.
“There are ways to have productive, civil conversations about contentious issues such as religion, faith, supernatural beliefs, even politics,” says Boghossian (pictured left).
Boghossian, author of “A Manual for Creating Atheists,” says that his goal with the app is to give users the confidence and tools to have challenging conversations about beliefs. “How do we help people think critically when there are so many forces aligned against that? It’s through reason and rationality.”
The app’s methodology is rooted in the Socratic Method, a technique championed by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, which relies on asking questions to help respondents critically examine their stated claims. Atheos teaches the method through gameplay: Ten levels of quizzes, progressively increasing in difficulty, present users with faith-based statements regarding beliefs from astrology to Zoroastrianism, followed by possible responses, and immediate feedback on why some of those responses might be more effective than others.
Each level except the first concludes with an extensive set of resources and essays. The app also contains a glossary that includes terms from classical philosophy, along with newer ones such as “deepity” (a term coined in 2009 by author and philosopher Daniel Dennett, meaning “a statement that looks profound but is not”).
Atheos was developed in partnership with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, an organization that promotes scientific literacy and a secular worldview. An introductory version of the app is free; the full version costs $4.99. For additional information, visit www.atheos-app.com or https://www.facebook.com/atheosapp/ or @Atheos.