The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that
religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing
In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the
Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter
the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation
of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe.
Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most
influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies
in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages.
Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel
devised his own “religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated
an anthropology that divided the human species into a hierarchy of
racial groups. Though he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been
founded, his ideas, and widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably
helped to create an intellectual climate in which policies of racial
slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science.
The Thinker’s Library also featured works by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog”
for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A proponent of
“evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without
revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including
advocacy of eugenics.
In 1931, Huxley wrote that there was “a certain amount of evidence that
the negro is an earlier product of human evolution than the Mongolian
or the European, and as such might be expected to have advanced less,
both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then commonplace:
there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG Wells, also
a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a time
when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else
vanish from the world.
But by the late 1930s, these views were becoming suspect: already in
1935, Huxley admitted that the concept of race was “hardly definable in
scientific terms”. While he never renounced eugenics, little was heard
from him on the subject after the second world war. The science that
pronounced western people superior was bogus – but what shifted Huxley’s
views wasn’t any scientific revelation: it was the rise of Nazism,
which revealed what had been done under the aegis of Haeckel-style
racism.
It has often been observed that Christianity
follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands
apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the
prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers
shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the
status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the
liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while
looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned
religion. The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been
consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists
would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following
the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the
conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal
values which receive that accolade. There are disputes, sometimes
bitter, over how to define and interpret those values, but their
supremacy is hardly ever questioned. For 21st century atheist
missionaries, being liberal and scientific in outlook are one and the
same.
It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable
connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and
liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of
the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic
regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former
Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of
them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science.
All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in
atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be
scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.
Fortunately, this type of atheism isn’t the only one that has ever
existed. There have been many modern atheisms, some of them more cogent
and more intellectually liberating than the type that makes so much
noise today. Campaigning atheism is a missionary enterprise, aiming to
convert humankind to a particular version of unbelief; but not all
atheists have been interested in propagating a new gospel, and some have
been friendly to traditional faiths.
Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging
global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been
committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction. Atheism
comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety
being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial.
In itself, atheism is an entirely negative position. In pagan Rome, “atheist” (from the Greek atheos)
meant anyone who refused to worship the established pantheon of
deities. The term was applied to Christians, who not only refused to
worship the gods of the pantheon but demanded exclusive worship of their
own god. Many non-western religions contain no conception of a
creator-god – Buddhism and Taoism, in some of their forms, are atheist
religions of this kind – and many religions have had no interest in
proselytising. In modern western contexts, however, atheism and
rejection of monotheism are practically interchangeable. Roughly
speaking, an atheist is anyone who has no use for the concept of God –
the idea of a divine mind, which has created humankind and embodies in a
perfect form the values that human beings cherish and strive to
realise. Many who are atheists in this sense (including myself) regard
the evangelical atheism that has emerged over the past few decades with
bemusement. Why make a fuss over an idea that has no sense for you?
There are untold multitudes who have no interest in waging war on
beliefs that mean nothing to them. Throughout history, many have been
happy to live their lives without bothering about ultimate questions.
This sort of atheism is one of the perennial responses to the experience
of being human.
As an organised movement, atheism is never non-committal in this way.
It always goes with an alternative belief-system – typically, a set of
ideas that serves to show the modern west is the high point of human
development. In Europe from the late 19th century until the second world
war, this was a version of evolutionary theory that marked out western
peoples as being the most highly evolved. Around the time Haeckel was
promoting his racial theories, a different theory of western superiority
was developed by Marx. While condemning liberal societies and
prophesying their doom, Marx viewed them as the high point of human
development to date. (This is why he praised British colonialism in
India as an essentially progressive development.) If Marx had serious
reservations about Darwinism – and he did – it was because Darwin’s
theory did not frame evolution as a progressive process.
The predominant varieties of atheist thinking, in the 19th and early
20th centuries, aimed to show that the secular west is the model for a
universal civilisation. The missionary atheism of the present time is a
replay of this theme; but the west is in retreat today, and beneath the
fervour with which this atheism assaults religion there is an
unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the new
atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.
Sam Harris,
the American neuroscientist and author of The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror and the Future of Reason (2004) and The Moral Landscape: How
Science Can Determine Moral Values (2010), who was arguably the first of
the “new atheists”, illustrates this point. Following many earlier
atheist ideologues, he wants a “scientific morality”; but whereas
earlier exponents of this sort of atheism used science to prop up values
everyone would now agree were illiberal, Harris takes for granted that
what he calls a “science of good and evil” cannot be other than liberal
in content. (Not everyone will agree with Harris’s account of liberal
values, which appears to sanction the practice of torture: “Given what
many believe are the exigencies of our war on terrorism,” he wrote in
2004, “the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to
be not only permissible but necessary.”)
Harris’s militancy in asserting these values seems to be largely a
reaction to Islamist terrorism. For secular liberals of his generation,
the shock of the 11 September attacks went beyond the atrocious loss of
life they entailed. The effect of the attacks was to place a question
mark over the belief that their values were spreading – slowly, and at
times fitfully, but in the long run irresistibly – throughout the world.
As society became ever more reliant on science, they had assumed,
religion would inexorably decline. No doubt the process would be bumpy,
and pockets of irrationality would linger on the margins of modern life;
but religion would dwindle away as a factor in human conflict. The road
would be long and winding. But the grand march of secular reason would
continue, with more and more societies joining the modern west in
marginalising religion. Someday, religious belief would be no more
important than personal hobbies or ethnic cuisines.
Today, it’s clear that no grand march is under way. The rise of
violent jihadism is only the most obvious example of a rejection of
secular life. Jihadist thinking comes in numerous varieties, mixing
strands from 20th century ideologies, such as Nazism and Leninism, with
elements deriving from the 18th century Wahhabist Islamic fundamentalist
movement. What all Islamist movements have in common is a categorical
rejection of any secular realm. But the ongoing reversal in
secularisation is not a peculiarly Islamic phenomenon.
The resurgence of religion is a worldwide development. Russian
Orthodoxy is stronger than it has been for over a century, while China
is the scene of a reawakening of its indigenous faiths and of
underground movements that could make it the largest Christian country
in the world by the end of this century. Despite tentative shifts in
opinion that have been hailed as evidence it is becoming less pious, the
US remains massively and pervasively religious – it’s inconceivable
that a professed unbeliever could become president, for example.
For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into
question the belief that history underpins their values. To be sure,
there is disagreement as to the nature of these values. But pretty well
all secular thinkers now take for granted that modern societies must in
the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never well founded, this
assumption is today clearly unreasonable. So, not for the first time,
secular thinkers look to science for a foundation for their values.
It’s probably just as well that the current generation of atheists
seems to know so little of the longer history of atheist movements. When
they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they overlook the
many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way.
There is no more reason to think science can determine human values
today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the
divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any
essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any
increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality
and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In
fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time argued, these
quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism.
The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do
it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas
are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an
unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in
science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of
contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has
with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of
so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist
should serve.
It’s a familiar question in continental Europe, where a number of
thinkers have explored the prospects of a “difficult atheism” that
doesn’t take liberal values for granted. It can’t be said that anything
much has come from this effort. Georges Bataille’s
postmodern project of “atheology” didn’t produce the godless religion
he originally intended, or any coherent type of moral thinking. But at
least Bataille, and other thinkers like him, understood that when
monotheism has been left behind morality can’t go on as before. Among
other things, the universal claims of liberal morality become highly
questionable.
It’s impossible to read much contemporary polemic against religion
without the impression that for the “new atheists” the world would be a
better place if Jewish and Christian monotheism had never existed. If
only the world wasn’t plagued by these troublesome God-botherers, they
are always lamenting, liberal values would be so much more secure.
Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern
liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a
classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason
had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged.
Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but
this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal
principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of
God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief
sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why
he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in
large part because he rejected liberal values.
To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism
needs any support from theism. If they are philosophers, they will wheel
out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert that those who think
liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion are
guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John
Locke and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are
not falsified because they originate in errors. The far-reaching claims
these thinkers have made for liberal values can be detached from their
theistic beginnings; a liberal morality that applies to all human beings
can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are
continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense
of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of
what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism. The belief
that the human species is a moral agent struggling to realise its
inherent possibilities – the narrative of redemption that sustains
secular humanists everywhere – is a hollowed-out version of a theistic
myth. The idea that the human species is striving to achieve any purpose
or goal – a universal state of freedom or justice, say – presupposes a
pre-Darwinian, teleological way of thinking that has no place in
science. Empirically speaking, there is no such collective human agent,
only different human beings with conflicting goals and values. If you
think of morality in scientific terms, as part of the behaviour of the
human animal, you find that humans don’t live according to iterations of
a single universal code. Instead, they have fashioned many ways of
life. A plurality of moralities is as natural for the human animal as
the variety of languages.
At this point, the dread spectre of relativism tends to be raised.
Doesn’t talk of plural moralities mean there can be no truth in ethics?
Well, anyone who wants their values secured by something beyond the
capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If you
set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you
have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually
warring values.
This isn’t the relativism celebrated by postmodernists, which holds
that human values are merely cultural constructions. Humans are like
other animals in having a definite nature, which shapes their
experiences whether they like it or not. No one benefits from being
tortured or persecuted on account of their religion or sexuality. Being
chronically poor is rarely, if ever, a positive experience. Being at
risk of violent death is bad for human beings whatever their culture.
Such truisms could be multiplied. Universal human values can be
understood as something like moral facts, marking out goods and evils
that are generically human. Using these universal values, it may be
possible to define a minimum standard of civilised life that every
society should meet; but this minimum won’t be the liberal values of the
present time turned into universal principles.
Universal values don’t add up to a universal morality. Such values
are very often conflicting, and different societies resolve these
conflicts in divergent ways. The Ottoman empire, during some of its
history, was a haven of toleration for religious communities who were
persecuted in Europe; but this pluralism did not extend to enabling
individuals to move from one community to another, or to form new
communities of choice, as would be required by a liberal ideal of
personal autonomy. The Hapsburg empire was based on rejecting the
liberal principle of national self-determination; but – possibly for
that very reason – it was more protective of minorities than most of the
states that succeeded it. Protecting universal values without honouring
what are now seen as core liberal ideals, these archaic imperial
regimes were more civilised than a great many states that exist today.
For many, regimes of this kind are imperfect examples of what all
human beings secretly want – a world in which no one is unfree. The
conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs
is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this
conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history
there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their
freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and
other minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many
have been ready to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human
beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for
thinking matters will be any different in future.
An older generation of liberal thinkers accepted this fact. As the late Stuart Hampshire put it:
“It is not only possible, but, on present evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life, which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialised societies will often seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies and even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies … As a liberal by philosophical conviction, I think I ought to expect to be hated, and to be found superficial and contemptible, by a large part of mankind.”
Today this a forbidden thought. How could all of humankind not want
to be as we imagine ourselves to be? To suggest that large numbers hate
and despise values such as toleration and personal autonomy is, for many
people nowadays, an intolerable slur on the species. This is, in fact,
the quintessential illusion of the ruling liberalism: the belief that
all human beings are born freedom-loving and peaceful and become
anything else only as a result of oppressive conditioning. But there is
no hidden liberal struggling to escape from within the killers of the
Islamic State and Boko Haram, any more than there was in the torturers
who served the Pol Pot regime. To be sure, these are extreme cases. But
in the larger sweep of history, faith-based violence and persecution,
secular and religious, are hardly uncommon – and they have been widely
supported. It is peaceful coexistence and the practice of toleration
that are exceptional.
Considering the alternatives that are on offer, liberal societies are
well worth defending. But there is no reason for thinking these
societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular civilisation of
the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
In ancient Greece and Rome, religion was not separate from the rest
of human activity. Christianity was less tolerant than these pagan
societies, but without it the secular societies of modern times would
hardly have been possible. By adopting the distinction between what is
owed to Caesar and what to God, Paul and Augustine – who turned the
teaching of Jesus into a universal creed – opened the way for societies
in which religion was no longer coextensive with life. Secular regimes
come in many shapes, some liberal, others tyrannical. Some aim for a
separation of church and state as in the US and France, while others –
such as the Ataturkist regime that until recently ruled in Turkey –
assert state control over religion. Whatever its form, a secular state
is no guarantee of a secular culture. Britain has an established church,
but despite that fact – or more likely because of it – religion has a
smaller role in politics than in America and is less publicly divisive
than it is in France.
There is no sign anywhere of religion fading away, but by no means
all atheists have thought the disappearance of religion possible or
desirable. Some of the most prominent – including the early 19th-century
poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the Austro-Hungarian philosopher and novelist Fritz Mauthner
(who published a four-volume history of atheism in the early 1920s) and
Sigmund Freud, to name a few – were all atheists who accepted the human
value of religion. One thing these atheists had in common was a
refreshing indifference to questions of belief. Mauthner – who is
remembered today chiefly because of a dismissive one-line mention in
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – suggested that belief and unbelief were both
expressions of a superstitious faith in language. For him, “humanity”
was an apparition which melts away along with the departing Deity.
Atheism was an experiment in living without taking human concepts as
realities. Intriguingly, Mauthner saw parallels between this radical
atheism and the tradition of negative theology in which nothing can be
affirmed of God, and described the heretical medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart as being an atheist in this sense.
Above all, these unevangelical atheists accepted that religion is
definitively human. Though not all human beings may attach great
importance to them, every society contains practices that are
recognisably religious. Why should religion be universal in this way?
For atheist missionaries this is a decidedly awkward question.
Invariably they claim to be followers of Darwin. Yet they never ask what
evolutionary function this species-wide phenomenon serves. There is an
irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically –
as a human adaptation to living in the world – and condemning it as a
tissue of error and illusion. What if the upshot of scientific inquiry
is that a need for illusion is built into in the human mind? If
religions are natural for humans and give value to their lives, why
spend your life trying to persuade others to give them up?
The answer that will be given is that religion is implicated in many
human evils. Of course this is true. Among other things, Christianity
brought with it a type of sexual repression unknown in pagan times.
Other religions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not
with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the
refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable
human animal. Like religion at its worst, contemporary atheism feeds the
fantasy that human life can be remade by a conversion experience – in
this case, conversion to unbelief.
Evangelical atheists at the present time are missionaries for their
own values. If an earlier generation promoted the racial prejudices of
their time as scientific truths, ours aims to give the illusions of
contemporary liberalism a similar basis in science. It’s possible to
envision different varieties of atheism developing – atheisms more like
those of Freud, which didn’t replace God with a flattering image of
humanity. But atheisms of this kind are unlikely to be popular. More
than anything else, our unbelievers seek relief from the panic that
grips them when they realise their values are rejected by much of
humankind. What today’s freethinkers want is freedom from doubt, and the
prevailing version of atheism is well suited to give it to them.
