Understanding atheists
By Mark Vernon on Saturday, April 7 2007, 11:10 - Personal observations - Permalink
For a long time something has puzzled me about evangelical forms of atheism. What is it they are really objecting too? For I suspect it is not actually belief in God.
My puzzlement stems from the way the otherwise rational, intelligent, even charming advocates of godlessness seem blinded when the searchlight of their minds turns to religion.
Sure, religion has cultivated violence and harm, but so have materialist ideologies. Sure, there is no indisputable evidence for God, but then the study of empiricism suggests that there is at least a question-mark over what sensory evidence can achieve when it comes to the divine. Sure, believers tend to respect religious authorities, but they go to church for far more profound reasons than simply to be told what to do; witness Catholics and contraception!
But listening to the Intelligence Squared debate crystalised something for me. The atheists there had the better arguments, bar perhaps those put forward by Roger Scruton. But I suspect the thing that fires their passion is not ideas about God. After all, although they could, they simply don't take theology seriously. Rather, it is what they fear religion implies about being human that raises their ire.
Implicit in their reaction to religion is a model of human being that is an idealised Enlightenment figure: rational, autonomous, mature and independent. They fear that religion makes people irrational, herdish, infantile and dependent.
Now sometimes, at the very least, people are irrational, herdish, infantile and dependent. And the best Enlightenment figures recognised this. What are Kant's Critiques if not careful assessments of where reason falls short? What is Hume's sympathy and fellow-feeling if not dependency as a moral principle? What are de Sade's fantasies if not warnings against infantile desire ignored? Personally, I dislike herdishness most, though only because I recognise the herd instinct in me.
So the risk these atheists run is propagating a deluded humanism. Their figure of 'Enlightenment Man' is a distortion of Enlightenment insights. Conversely, religion, riddled with ambiguities, is so precisely because it can take the irrational, herdish, infantile and dependent tendencies of human beings seriously. At best, it mitigates their excesses and provides means for redeeming them. At worst, of course, it does exactly the opposite.
This is why the great challenge for believers today is to cultivate good religion over bad. To those, like myself, who are ambivalent about religion, it is to come up with an alternative that is humanly as rich. I don't believe it has been done yet!
It is this that the evangelical atheist seems to have given up on. Instead, they adopt an anthropology that is radically simplified, Richard Dawkins' 'people as gene-machines' being a good example. With their undoubted cleverness, displayed as a force of rational will, the hope seems to be that human beings can simply sidestep their supposed 'Enlightenment failures'. That people don't, can't and at least in part shouldn't - because these qualities are integral to human loving, laughter and lament - is actually what annoys them. This puts them in a bind, since, being humanists, they don't want to appear misanthropic. So they take their frustration out on religion instead.
Which is ironic. Since it is precisely then that their own most irrational, infantile tendencies become clear to on-lookers, manifest in their rhetoric. Though at least we then see them as human too.
Comments
Just as a for instance, being beaten with a cane for refusing to sing a hymn in school assembly does little to enhance one's tolerance of what is anyway quite obviously primitive superstitious claptrap.
I will always be interested in payback for the lying, brainwashing, punishment, discrimination and bullshit that was visited upon me as a child and young adult in the name of God, and continues to be inflicted on other vulnerable minds to this day.
Hostile? Absolutely!
i agree entirely with you (Mark) 100%. Preach it! The main problem with these very intelligent atheists is that they get all emotional when talking about religion. They completely forget that they will only succeed in their quest to destroy religious belief if they do so slowly, carfully and rationally - just like they have to do in their respective scientific fields of work when disproving a competing, widely accepted theory. The atheists will never win by fighting religion with religion's own weapons: rhetoric, emotions and doomsday scenarios. They need to concentrate on what they do best: reasoning.
But if they do so, they just might find that religion is not as easy to wipe away as they thought. But that wouldn't be a bad thing for them as they are supposedly not fighting god but rather searching for the truth ... right?
The entire post could be re-written almost word-for-word from exactly the opposite perspective.
"For a long time something has puzzled me about evangelical forms of theism. What is it they are really objecting too? For I suspect it is not actually disbelief in God. My puzzlement stems from the way the otherwise rational, intelligent, even charming advocates of God seem blinded when the searchlight of their minds turns to science."
Ultimately, both are the same: a series of empty assertions and ad hominems. It will serve to make people feel better about their own beliefs and they can cheer on the author ("I agree 100%!"), but it accomplishes nothing. Both either talk down to people the author pretends to be talking to, or are simply efforts is self-validation.
I'll bet you felt better about yourself and your beliefs after you wrote this, and you'll make a few others feel better about themselves, but that's all you accomplish. No one gains any more information, insight, or understanding from yours than you would from the counter-example I started above.
Even worse, I don't for a second think that you'll believe me. When people begin writing self-validation pieces like this, it's been my experience that they have already closed themselves to others. Such pieces are usually part of a closed community that is only listening to itself anymore.
Blunderov: It is horrid to hear of such violence. I could not claim to have been beaten in the name of religion but as a gay man I felt a sense of psychological violence for many years as a result of what the church says about homosexuality, not least when I was in the church. However, I am now sure that the only way to put such abuse behind you is to take responsibility for yourself - or learn to live without resentment, as it has been put, though it is hard to do.
Joe: Of course, it is nice to find support, such as Michael kindly offers. However, this is not a closed debate: in my post I say that the complexity of human beings is a challenge to agnostics too. Thinking that evangelical atheism is not actually about theology but is about what you take to be the fundamentals of being human is genuinely a possible step forward for me. It is not just another stick with which to prop myself up, or beat the evangelicals.
This is my uneducated guess, but sometimes I wonder if it's a political reaction (at least in part, perhaps). Theism fundamentalizes itself, politicizes itself, so on??"atheism has to adjust, right? But I want that "old time atheism"??"where the conversation was open and they kept the theists thinking and on their toes. And now that the theists are thinking, and that sectors of their own ranks are just as disgusted with the fundamentalization of what was their parent's religion, the atheists have forgotten to have a good conversation with the "next generation". Now it's just two fundamentalized sides bashing their heads against a common brick wall.
Sometimes I feel that the arguements posed in favor of atheism are only as strong as the weakness of fundamentalized theists arguements??"and those aren't winning anyone over to the theist side in the first place. It's the magnification of a small minority of right-wing nuts to be the whole of "religion" which is obviously the "root of all evil." The only thing going for it is the epistemological perspective (rationality is the only way to truth??"not mysticism, not wonder, not theology, maybe not even philosophy!)??"so it forgets any contributions religion (or anything else, for that matter) may give to the human experience, past present or future, simply because of an epistemological "error". I find it ironic and sad, and my heart aches for a day when atheism can engage in the dynamic conversation that's burgeoning on the theistic side, and suspend the temptation to make the same mistake minority sectors of religion have done.
What you say seems reasonable to me, Mark. There's probably more to it also. I think that atheists and theists alike are frequently unaware of the extent to which their arguments are founded on metaphors of one sort or another. Most reasoning is post-hoc confabulation to support these metaphors (to which we're already deeply attached). The myth of the enlightenment man is one such (with that of the rational-utility maximising economic unit its latest incarnation); it's been nicely excavated by Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor, amongst others. Much left vs right wing argument is likewise at cross-purposes because the reasoning isn't truly the point, so conversation becomes mostly cross-purposes miscommunication.
What puzzles me most about the militant atheist wing (speaking myself as someone who'd condede to 'being' atheistic if forced to take a bet) is their lack of curiosity about their fellow human beings and their belief systems. This is particularly the case for those (Dennett, Dawkins etc) who work in fields where you'd think curiosity ought be part of their professional ethic. Scott Atran is a good example of an atheist who is at least curious about religion. He wants to know why it has such a hold on people's minds, which seems to me a more defensible approach than just berating others for being irrational. I can't see how it is possible to understand something about which you can't even muster a small modicum of curiosity.