There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to figure out what reality is like. Some of my best friends are real. The problem is that reality isn’t fixed. It is not merely complex, as liberal handwringers point out incessantly. It is contradictory, riven by forces pulling it in different directions. It changes, and it changes not least because we change it. In trying to freeze reality into a cudgel that can be used to assault political opponents, the New Atheists and the liberal pundits who consciously and unconsciously imitate them end up committing the sin they claim to hate the most: They deny the observable evidence in front of them. It is entirely backwards to try to determine whether sex is immutable “in reality” in order to assess whether it’s “really possible” to change sex. In reality, people change their sex, so it cannot possibly be the case that sex is immutable.

For the same reason, it is a mistake to fault advocates of justice in Palestine for failing to understand the “reality” of the conflict, because it is this reality that they are participating in and reshaping. There is no essential thing called “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” There is just a place between the river and the sea, and the reality there is dependent, for better or for worse, upon the outcome of political struggle. Reality is a historical process, as Lewontin and Gould argued against the sociobiologists long ago. New Atheism will continue to haunt us for as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the way things are always includes the possibility that things could be different.