The sad epilogue of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, once a leading light of scientistic atheism, now banned by the Humanist Society for the “crime” of defending biological sex.

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From a symbol of Enlightenment rationalism to a disgrace among humanists.

That is the fate of Steven Pinker, a renowned Canadian cognitive psychologist and long-standing intellectual figure in the landscape of atheist thought.

 

Steven Pinker Against Religion

For a long time, Pinker was one of the so-called knights of the “new atheism”, allied with Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens in the epochal battle against religious faith.

In his book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” (Mondadori 2018), he claimed nothing less than that all of human history up to the early modern age was a chronicle of superstition, backwardness, barbarity, and relentless inhuman cruelty.

Then, wrote Pinker, suddenly in Western Europe during the early modern period, people rejected religion and began to civilize themselves until the salvific advent of the Enlightenment, the true watershed between the cruel past and the radiant future.

In 1997, according to the Washington Post, Steven Pinker even theorized the killing of newborns.

He wrote that “they possess no morally significant traits any more than do rats”, observing that “several moral philosophers hold that newborns are not persons and therefore infanticide should not be classified as murder”. He accepted this view, maintaining that “the facts make it difficult” to legitimately forbid the killing of newborns.

For years, the well-known cognitive psychologist also fiercely fought his greatest enemy, the Christian geneticist Francis Collins.

It was insanely intolerable to him that Collins served as director of the National Institutes of Health in the United States—not due to any lack of competence, but because “Collins claimed to have come to accept the Trinity and the truth that Jesus is the Son of God”¹S. Pinker, cited in J.A. Coyne, Steven Pinker on Francis Collins, Why Evolution is True, personal blog 11/07/1999.

Furthermore, Pinker continued, Collins “claimed that God interacts with creation, designing the evolutionary process to ensure that human intelligence, morality, and Judeo-Christian religious faith would evolve”. Convictions he considered primitive and “deeply anti-scientific” since “the purpose of the scientific revolution is to abolish this animistic thinking”²S. Pinker, cited in J.A. Coyne, Steven Pinker on Francis Collins, Why Evolution is True, personal blog 11/07/1999.

 

The New Battle Against Gender Ideology

After the epic failure of the intoxicating “new atheism,” Pinker too became sober again and slowly repositioned himself on less fundamentalist ground.

Indeed, like many of his former comrades-in-arms, he has embarked on a new scientific battle: that against gender ideology and in defense of the importance of biological sex.

In January 2025 we reported how Pinker, along with Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, resigned after 20 years from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), the world’s largest atheist congregation.

The FFRF had, in fact, censored an article by biologist Coyne titled “Biology is not bigotry”, which defended the biological definition of woman in opposition to a queer activist’s article claiming that a woman is anyone who identifies as such.

Announcing his resignation in protest from the honorary committee, Pinker declared that “the FFRF is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the enforcer of a new religion, complete with dogmas, blasphemy, and heresies.”

 

Steven Pinker Banned by the Humanist Society

Already banned by American Atheists and having voluntarily resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in recent days Steven Pinker was also abandoned by the Humanist Society of Australia. The very same man who, in 2006, was named Humanist of the Year!

Indeed, the main Australian humanist association has withdrawn its sponsorship of his 2026 tour, citing his public positions on biological sex and sexual identity as the reason.

For the Humanist Society, it is unacceptable to assert that biology plays a role in determining human sex, and moreover, Pinker’s presence was considered highly divisive as it was criticized by the group “Rainbow Atheists”.

Very recently, Steven Pinker spoke of his fight against intellectual conformism, arguing that freedom of debate is under pressure from “woke” extremism.

 

As a clinical psychologist, Pinker must have certainly realized that he is now experiencing in his own house what he once falsely attributed to religions: irrational fanaticism, censorship of dissenters, and intolerant dogmatism.

Voltaire’s apostle has discovered firsthand that the only true cultural witch hunts take place among Enlightenment humanists.