Apologies to John Gray for any mistakes.
The New Atheism
“Thank you very much for that very generous and accurate
introduction, I mean I speak here as a Skeptic, not as a Believer, I don’t
belong to or practise any religion, and whatever disadvantages that may have,
it has certain advantages that go with it, which is that I think I’m able to
observe the current pattern of debate over the last few years about religion,
with a certain degree of, I won’t say objectivity (that may be impossible), but
with a certain degree of perhaps often amused detachment.
And one thing I note about it [the debate] is that – I mean
I myself have found, in the sense that I’m here tonight I think illustrates
this – is that the so-called “New Atheism” [NA] is an extremely dogmatic, and
in certain respects fundamentalist, phenomenon.
And so what I want to do tonight really is just to suggest a
few thoughts about the so-called NA, to ask what’s new in it, if anything, and
to try and explain it. And before I do that, though, I want to make rather an
important point, which is that the type of atheism which we now have in the
writers that Nick [person who introduced the lecture] mentioned, is by no means
the only type of atheism that has existed, and it’s not to my mind the most
interesting, or the most challenging or certainly not the most profound.
What we have now is another round, another version, of
Scientific atheism. Very few of the writers on atheism today who are themselves
evangelists for atheism know very much about the history of thought. The only
one I would recommend as knowing about that is one who has not written
originally in English, Michel Onfray, I
mean his book - he wrote a manifesto on atheism - I mean whether or not one
agrees with it (and there are lots of things in it that I don’t agree with)
[he] has a good comprehensive knowledge of modern thought and that’s certainly
not true of Dawkins, for example, or most of the philosophers who have written
on this subject in recent times. And what that means is that they miss out the
fact that there have been some types of atheism which really have nothing to do
with science at all. I’ll give you an example (some of them have been widely influential
in art and literature and culture). A philosopher I’m rather fond of, Arthur
Schopenhauer, was undoubtedly, by any standard an atheist. But his atheism was
not based in science, he wasn’t a materialist, he was what philosophers call an
Idealist (capital ‘I’), he thought the ultimate reality in the world was
spiritual; he thought science was a kind of pragmatic project which came up with partial truths -
essentially about a world of illusion; he was as sceptical of human free will,
and indeed of the specialness of humans, as he was of the existence of the God
of Christianity. But he had a profound impact on writers, painters, musicians.
Among writers, for example, Joseph Conrad was deeply influenced by him. One of
his lesser-known novels, “Victory”, is a kind of tribute to Schopenhauer’s
philosophy, while at the same time an ironical criticism of it; Thomas Hardy
[was] a long way from conventional Christianity – I think he’d have to be
described as a kind of agnostic or atheist - [and was] deeply influenced by
Schopenhauer; and even in the case of Nietsche, a figure who’s sort of missed
out by many of the contemporary atheists today, they hardly even mention
Nietsche, which is odd because I think he is the most influential 19th
century philosopher, and I think in the 20th century (by the way)
surveys have been done (though I can’t speak for their veracity) which say that
he’s the second-most quoted philosopher in the world in the 20th
century (the most-quoted being Aristotle). [Nietsche was] enormously
influential, yet although he mentions Darwin here and there, the roots of his
atheism were not in science – he had a pragmatic view of science as well - but really in philosophy, in Schopenhauer,
and in his studies of the ancient Greeks, he started as a Classicist. So the
first thing to understand is that the present type of atheism that’s having
such an impact, that’s making such a lot of noise, is only one type of atheism,
and to my mind a rather retrograde, atavistic type, and I’ll try to identify, in
a moment, where it particularly comes from.
Before I even do that, I want to make one further
preliminary remark, or thought, which is that if one thinks of atheism as
embracing any view which rejects the Creator God of the Bible, that’s to say
rejects the view that the world has been created by some kind of divine power,
which is in certain fundamental respects similar to human persons (which is the
kind of view that ‘personality’ of the kind that exists in humans [in] some
sense pervades the universe and that the world has been created by a divine
person, lacking the imperfection of humans, but none-the-less a person) - if
one thinks that anyone who denies that is an atheist, then of course there can
be, and are, ‘Atheist’ religions. Buddhism would be an ‘atheist religion’ in
that sense, because Buddhists (or Hindus or Daoists) don’t believe was created at all, actually, by anything, or anyone,
and they don’t think the universe is permeated by anything like human
personality, on the contrary, they think like Schopenhauer that human
personality is in some sense an illusion. So there could be an atheist
spirituality, an atheist religiosity, and atheist religions if we take this
broad view of religion.
In fact that leads me to one of my themes, which is that current
atheism is really a reaction against Western Monotheism. The atheism we have
now is modelled on certain aspects, not to my mind the most valuable or
interesting aspects, not the most profound aspects, of Western Monotheism, by
which I mean principally Christianity and Judaism, although in the larger
scheme of things probably Islam also belongs, although it sounds odd to say,
within that tradition of Western Monotheism. Atheism, especially of the kind we
have now, is a rejection of that set of beliefs, monotheistic beliefs, and in
fact most atheists that I’ve spoken with seem to think that in rejecting
monotheistic beliefs, they’ve
rejected religion. They get
tremendously angry - by the way they always get tremendously angry, I found,
they’re very good at being angry. I think they think that if they’re angry
intensely and for long enough then religion will go away. It won’t. I think one
of the reasons I think they think that is they don’t understand that they can
reject the religious beliefs but continue with the categories of thinking. And
many of the categories of thinking, and even many of the values - including
some of the (to my mind) precious values - that go with at least liberal
civilisation, for which they claim to stand (because, unlike an earlier
generation in which atheists were communists, Leninists and some were even Nazis, the present
generation of atheists all claim to be some kind of liberals), one of the
things they suppress, I think, in their thinking and in their public utterances
- and they genuinely believe this – is they suppress the fact, which I believe
to be historically demonstrable, that liberal conceptions of toleration in
religion come from within Christianity and Judaism. They do not come
principally from a criticism or attack on religion. I mean in the English
tradition, I suppose, on the the great, I mean you could think of Milton and
John Locke, both of them belonging within the Christian tradition, and in the
case of Locke, whom I studied a lot when I was working as a political
philosopher, his entire philosophy is saturated from top to bottom with a
particular version of Christianity. On the European continent, one of the great
proponents of toleration of religion was Benedict Spinoza, a Jew who was
ostracised from his religious community, a Rationalist but also a mystic, I
think one can find some of the best arguments for toleration in Spinoza I think
he was a critic of his own religious tradition - he certainly was shaped by it.
And in fact I think it’s just demonstrable that modern ideas of toleration,
which go back well before the French Enlightenment – they go back to the 17tgh
century if not before, together with a profound tradition of scepticism which
one finds in writers such as Pierre Bayle [1647-1706] – Christian sceptic – of
Michel de Montaigne – my favourite writer on these subjects – all of these came
from within Western religious traditions and didn’t attack them, although they
sometimes criticised them for inhumane
practices that they’d taken up.
So one of the kind of oddities of the current wave of
atheism is first of all by its own ignorance of earlier types -.of the history
of thought and of earlier types of atheism. I think that blocks out
consideration of more interesting types of atheism that have gone on in the
past, which didn’t have very much to do with science, but it also involves a
more fundamental error that the New Atheists make, which is by not studying how
they acquired the concepts and categories they themselves use – how they emerged,
how they’ve grown up and developed in the Western tradition. They think that by
merely rejecting religious belief they are rejecting religion, and they tend
systematically to suppress the extent to which modern ideals of toleration came
from within religion.
This is true, for example, of American secularism. American
secularism might not have been terribly successful in dividing religion from
politics: you can have a secular constitution without having a secular
politics. I think we’ve learnt that from recent times in America. But in many
other ways American secularism has been successful, but it’s the secularism
which emerges not from, principally, from Deistic writers such as Benjamin
Franklin or Thomas Payne in the 18th century, it emerged in the 17th
century, a hundred years before from religious dissent, that is to say from a
certain type of religion, not from an attack on religion, but from a type of
religion, which had suffered persecution in Britain and other parts of Europe.
So even secularism, which I suppose goes all the way back to the statement of
Jesus “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render up to God what is God’s”
(Caesar and God are separate, a distinction later theorised by St Augustine) -
even though, I think, the modern ideal of secularism (problematical as it is in
many ways) can be seen as a development from Western religion and not from the
attack on religion. So my first point, just to repeat, is that there are many
types of atheism only one or two have really been fundamen... connected with
science (I’ll talk a little bit about the present one in that way); some more
interesting ones have nothing to do with science, and the present type of
atheism is distinguished not only by its view of science, and particularly of
Darwinism, but also by its suppression of its own religious heritage: it’s
suppression of the fact that many the categories of thinking that are adopted
within it, human history for example, the [idea of the] human animal as being
separate from the rest of life, really come from within Western Monotheism.”
[Average Protestant thinks here of the idea that humans are
endowed with the ability to make radical choices in their actions, and so
consciously alter their environment, and this is what gives rise to the notion
of ‘history’. We don’t think of animals as having ‘history’.]
“So having said that, where does this atheism really come
from? I think there are two separate things: what’s evoking it now, and what
are its antecedents in thought (in other words what does it most resemble in
the past, in human thinking).
The first thing is something that I think Nick said at the
start. Contemporary atheism, 21st century atheism, is primarily a
media phenomenon. Now that’s a very important point to grasp, although it still
sounds a slightly kind of cheap crack, but it’s very important, because that
was not true in the 20th century. In the 20th century
there were large, mass political movements and organisations all over the world
of which atheism was an integral part. Now of course we tend to forget now, as
if it was a long time ago, but it was only in 1989-1991, that communism
collapsed. But we tend to forget that throughout the 20th century
there were, not only in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after WWII but also
in France and Italy and many other countries, Japan, Latin America, there were
mass communist parties. Now if you read their manifestos, if you read Marx, if
you read Lenin, if you look at all of them, there were one or two
fellow-travellers, Christians and others who were Communists, but for the vast
majority of 20th century Communists atheism was an integral feature
of being a Communist. The goal was a world in which there would be no religion;
religion would have died out or been transcended. And all communist countries
and all communist states have systematically persecuted religion, whether that
be Christianity in predominantly Christian countries or Buddhism or Daoism in
China or the Tibetan form of Buddhism in Tibet, they have all launched
perpetual war on the religious traditions, Islam and Judaism included, of the
people they have ruled.
So that in the 20th century there was at least
one global ideology which was predominantly atheist, and that’s gone pretty
well now, completely collapsed; there are some Maoist movements in Nepal, Peru,
in Sri Lanka there are Marxist-Leninist movements which the Tamil Tigers (who,
by the way, were the first to develop and perfect the technique of suicide
bombing, not Muslims, not even religious, they’re Marxist-Leninist, they
recruit mainly from the Hindu population of the island, although they’ve also
recruited from former Christians, and they are devoted to the old
Marxist-Leninist idea of a world without religion, so that when they blow
themselves up – and until the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the organisation which
had produced the largest number of suicide bombings in the whole world was the
Tamil Tigers, not an Islamic organisation – when the do that it’s not because
they are going to go to heaven, nor even to a place in which they listen
eternally to ten seminars on Marx and Lenin. They think that death is the end,
the complete end, yet they’re willing to give up their lives, in the act of
killing others, in order to bring about a better world, a world that’s better
than their existing [world], but in general… so there are these outposts,
Marxists-Leninist and so forth, here and there, but the vast movements in
Western countries, in Western Europe,
they’ve all gone. The largest movements now in the world are either single-issue
movements, about climate or wildlife or whatever, or religious. The largest
single organisation, political organisation in the world, I think, is an
organisation of moderate Islam in Indonesia of about 30 million members. So the
vast, mass secular movements of the past are gone.”
[Average Protestant thinks here of China. Presumably John
Gray – like Slavoj Zizek – would regard China as state-capitalist, and the
lives of individual Chinese as not Communist-atheist but secularised
Buddhist-Daoist?]
“And so have the secular ideologies, at least the large,
radical comprehensive ones like Communism. I ought to mention Nazism because
there’s a lot of ignorance… I’ve dealt with this in some of my writings on
Nazism, as having been connected with- it made deals, of course, with various
churches, and I think the history of the church, of the different churches, in
its relations with Nazism is certainly not beyond sharp criticism, I think it
can be criticised in many ways, but having studied the subject for some time
now, I mean I’m pretty clear in my own mind that the leadership of the Nazis,
the elite, the political elite, were nearly all atheists, and were nearly all
pretty well strongly influenced by Nietsche and a certain vulgarised type of
Darwinism. In fact the very idea of race which the played with, turning it into
a pseudo-scientific category, came from a vulgarised form of eugenics theory
and Darwninian theory which was floating around in the 19th century
and got taken up by a variety of thinkers in the early 20th century.
It was killed off, I’m happy to say, by the second world war. In other words,
their world view was shaped by tremendous hostility to traditional religion,
especially Judaism, but also Christianity, secondly many of them (not all) were
pro-scientific, especially Hitler, and thirdly they were all pretty much
influenced by vulgar versions of Darwinism, that was their world view. Now it’s
pretty obvious to me, but it’s adamantly denied by today’s atheists, that this
[Nazism] is an atheist world-view, and I also think it can be reasonably said,
it’s pretty straightforward to argue that this world view in some way opened
the way to their worst atrocities, because the moment you think of human beings
as belonging to biological races and you even then have another argument which
says that some races are superior to others then you open the way to racial
slavery and to genocide, you’ve gone beyond the demonisation of for example
Jews in mediaeval Christianity, you’ve gone beyond that to something which has
the mantle of pseudo-science. So I think Nazism, although it tried to revive in
Wagnerian comic opera-terms forms of
European Paganism, was basically anti-religious but certainly opposed to the
traditional religions of Europe since Europe was Christianised.
So that’s all gone. Not that there are no neo-Nazis, not
that there are no racists. There are. Not that there are no Communists and
Leninists. There are. But that great period of secular ideology has gone, so
what I think is that we’re in a period of de-secularisation, we’re in a period
which in certain respects at least is post-secular, and that’s true even though
some societies have become more secular, like Ireland has become more secular,
Italy and France are more secular than they have been in the past and even
Poland I would say is more secular that it has been in the past. But in spite
of that the large ambitious secular projects of the past are gone. And I think
that’s produced, it’s part of what has produced at least, the wave of atheism,
because most of the people who argue it now are from a generation that were
brought up in universities and reading social scientists and philosophers for
whom thought there might be zig-zags along the way, the world was inexorable
bound, humanity was inexorably bound, on a process of secularisation. If you
read not only Marx, but pretty well the vast majority of 19th
century and 20th century social scientists, social theorists,
sociologists, they all assume that a secular world, or a world without religion,
or in which religion has become marginal, at least in politics and life, a
world in which religion is trivial, if it still exists, is inevitable. Why did
they think it inevitable? Mostly, this gets me on to my main point, because
they think that science drives religion out of life. The more and more
societies become dependent on science the less religious they become. And of
course the oddity of this is that it’s never been true in the United States.
The US remains a society of a tremendous amount of scientific technology and
invention and virtuosity and in many respects it continues to be a world’s
leader, but it’s as religious now as it was when de Tocqueville went there in
the early 19th century, there’s no ongoing process of secularisation
going on there. That’s a big counter-example.
But we have the other examples of places where religion was persecuted
by regimes which aimed not just to make it marginal, but to eradicate it, to
wipe it out, to persecute it out of existence, like the former Soviet Union,
and anyone who’s travelled recently in the former Soviet Bloc will know that
not only has religion not disappeared, but in many contexts it’s in a profound
period of revival, especially in younger people, especially in people who were
not comprehensively shaped.. I mean you go into a church you don’t just find
half-a-dozen old people. If you go to a synagogue, you don’t just find a few
old people, you find lots of young people. And actually you find a lot of new
religious architecture going on in various parts, new monasteries, churches and
so forth are going on in various parts of the former Soviet Bloc. So the kind
of secularisation that people of my age expected isn’t happening.
The opposite is happening. Religion is back at the centre of
politics. And of source it’s always been in politics, in Northern Ireland and
elsewhere, but I think it was assumed by many people, Marxists, Liberals and
others, types of secular Humanists, that over time it would become less
central, it would not become a pivotal factor of politics, it would not be a
central feature of politics, it would not be a part of war. Just four years ago
– I won’t name the journal – I was asked by a scientific journal to write
something, I said: what should I write about? They said: what would I like to
write about? I said, religion. They said no, no you can’t write about that. I
said why not. They said, because nobody’s interested in it. Just four years
ago. In other words the assumption was it’s on the way out, maybe there’ll always be believers, but it
won’t be central in life, it won’t be central in politics, it won’t have
anything to do with war, it won’t be part of the conflicts of the world, it’s
on the way out. And this has turned out to be false as anyone could have
predicted who’s looked at the last couple of hundred years with a fairly
dispassionate eye. I think if you stood outside these great secular projects
you’d think first of all that they will fail, Communism is impossible, even
Nazism is impossible in the sense in which the Nazis wanted it because they
wanted to generate a new type of human being using non-existent science, they
did the negative part of it, that’s to say they murdered millions of people and
enslaved millions more, but they couldn’t develop a new type of human being,
they simply produced rather hideous types of the old human being; so you could
know that they would fail at whatever cost, couldn’t know that they’d be
defeated – but they were defeated – it was pretty obvious that this was an
illusion, the modern illusion, or one of
the key modern illusions or myths, is the notion that science drives out
faith.
Now the reason I think that’s illusion is not that I believe
in Creation Science, or anything like that, I don’t. It’s not because I take
part in arguments about Darwinism. I don’t do that either. It’s that I actually
think science and religion are separate spheres of human life and that a wide
variety of attitudes to religion can be reasonably adopted by scientists and a
wide variety of attitudes to science can reasonably be adopted by religious
practitioners and thinkers.
So where does this leave us?
The present type of atheism comes really from 19th
century atheism, from what’s often called Positivism (capital ‘P’), the French
movement which was founded in the early 19th century by Henri de
Saint-Simon and later on taken over by [Auguste] Comte, and this type of
atheism has two features in common with present day atheism. First of all it’s
the idea that all of human history all of human society is pressing towards a
global civilisation based on science: there was a period of religion, they say,
which was confused with magical thinking, then there was what they called
“metaphysical” thinking, which was the middle-ages, then there was the modern
period based on science, and the ultimate end of history – I mean the very idea
that ‘history’ has a direction, by the way, comes of course from within Western
theism, it’s not in pre-Christian Europe, not in Homer of Plato, or the Roman
historians, but they think that history has a kind of direction and that as
science presses ahead we eventually have a world based on science. So theirs is
a kind of scientific atheism and I think most of the contemporary atheists are
not sufficiently familiar with the history of thought to recognise the fact
they’ve revived this slightly atavistic type of 19th century
atheism. But there’s a second feature they have in common, which is that
Positivism was a cult of Humanity. In fact the Positivists called their view
the “Religion of Humanity”. And they said that having worshipped God, we must
now worship a new supreme being, ourselves basically, Humanity. So it’s a kind
of project of the divinisation of Humanity, and I think you get a bit of that
in some of these atheist writers now, that’s to say Humanity without limits,
knowledge will emancipate humanity from its earthly limitations, if we can
know, if we can have a complete theory of everything, then we can exercise our
power on the world and on our lives, perhaps we can even escape death, and stop
being mortal and finite.
A lot of that is in the 19th century. But in some
respects the Positivists, crude as they were, were subtler than the
present-day, contemporary atheists, because the Positivists recognised that
Humanity has religious needs. They don’t say that religion is just a passing
phase in human history, they don’t say that religion is just an intellectual
error, or wicked priests, or low levels of education or political oppression.
They don’t say that. What they say is that there are human religious needs
which are pretty near universal, and which in the past have produced religions
of the traditional kind, and in future should produce a new religion, the
religion of Humanity, and they even did have, by the way, Positivist Churches
in Liverpool, Manchester, London, a lot in Latin America, they recruited
extensively among scientists, in particular engineers.
(Several of the great canal builders, including the man who
built the Panama Canal, was a Positivist. They shared the view, by the way,
they said things then about the canals that people say now about the internet.
They said that, now that we’ve got canals, bigotry’s going to wither away, now
that we’ve got canals humanity will stop fighting eachother, there’ll be no
more tyranny, well there was, as we now know. In other words there were great
Canal Utopians, just as professor [Daniel C] Dennet has said that with the
Internet and portable televisions and radios, he says, in 25 years religion
will have transformed, it will have almost vanished. He obviously hasn’t looked
at television evangelism, he hasn’t heard of the Taliban with their mobile
phones, he hasn’t looked at the way various sects and cults, and some of them
very valuable, others dreadful, are traded on the internet, he hasn’t noticed
that any more than it occurred to the evangelists of canals that canals can
take terrible things up and down them like ships containing slaves or weapons
and so forth. They’re neutral basically, ambiguous, ethically, like any other
technological advance, they’ll be used by humans, canals were used in certain
ways, railways, the telegraph, now the internet, simply used by humans with all
their conflicting needs and desires).
But the Positivists did have this one advantage that they
understood that humans have religious needs and that’s not going to change. And
therefore they came up with this absurd project of a new religion of Humanity,
there was even a Positivist Pope for a while. Of course they were French so he
lived in Paris. There were Positivist rituals and liturgies based on the
science of phrenology, you had to touch your forehead several times each day on
the points of Progress, Benevolence and Order, and if we all did that long
enough and faithfully enough we would all become more progressive benevolent
and orderly. It all sounds very absurd but very important figures in the 19th
century were very much influenced by them for example, George Eliot, John
Stuart Mill, although he came in the end to reject Comte’s system, wrote a
rather good book about it, but even called his own view the religion of
humanity, and I think, I’ll conclude at this point, the present atheism is a
reversion to 19th century Positivism, although most of them never
heard of it, that’s to say it’s a mixture of the belief that atheism is based
in science and that the world is inexorably moving to a civilisation based on
science, with the idea of the divination of humanity, that’s to say that
Humanity is a fit object of worship, that instead of worshipping a God or Gods
or some spiritual reality, we should worship and ideal version of ourselves.
Now of course this is not explicit in New Atheism, and they would probably
indignantly deny it, but if you look at their writings what is key in them is
that Humanity is imagined to be a sort of collective actor, Humanity does
things, Humanity advances and then retreats.
Well if you think as I do, that what there are are billions
and billions of separate human beings with their own dreams, desires,
illusions, fantasies, hopes, needs, and choices, then Humanity doesn’t really
advance or retreat at all. I mean it doesn’t go around doing things, you don’t
wake up one morning and say “I see Humanity has got to stage 5 now. Let’s get
at it and we’ll be at stage 6 in about twenty years”, it’s not like that. I
think this is a kind of Positivistic notion that you can interpret history as a
kind of advance of Humanity. Of course it also has the implication that we, or
rather they, are the privileged representatives of Humanity, because they can
look back at all the earlier generations, struggling in darkness, the pathetic
benighted medi-aevals, the ignorant Greeks, the uncivilised Chinese, all these
ridiculous caricatures of previous civilisation, they can say “We’re superior
to all of those”, even though, of course, we wage greater wars, kill more
people in genocides and civil wars than they ever did, and we’ve now reverted
to Barbaric practices such as torture.
So.. my main point is that for Christians, challenging forms
of atheism really isn’t this, it’s not terribly challenging, it’s all been said
before. As far as I can tell there’s nothing new in it at all, it’s 19th
century Positivism regurgitated. If you want to read atheists, you have to read
other people. Thank you.”
[End]
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