10 Does religion poison everything? The new atheism and religious belief
Does religion poison everything?
The new atheism and religious belief
Is religion intrinsically evil? This view, energetically affirmed with an almost religious enthusiasm in Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion,1 has achieved widespread circulation in recent years. It is vigorously reasserted in Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.2 ‘Religion poisons everything’ is a rhetorically charged message, which appeals to a certain type of middle-class liberal rationalist. The faults of the world are to be laid at the door of backward-looking superstitions which hold the world back from its rational and scientific destiny. Eliminate religion and the world will be a better place. Religion has led only to violence, intellectual dishonesty, oppression and social division.
These attitudes are, of course, shaped by a controlling metanarrative which is characteristic of the new atheism. At the philosophical level, this holds that metaphysical austerity is a reliable indicator of truth, and that all ‘unevidenced beliefs’ represent a deluded ‘blind faith’. At the sociological level, it is held that religion is socially divisive, and leads to oppression and violence. At the personal level, it holds that those who entertain religious belief are deluded and potentially dangerous to society at large. This simplistic metanarrative can only be sustained by doing violence to the facts of history, the norms of evidence-based argument, and the realities of contemporary experience. Hitchens achieves this feat largely by ignoring any evidence to the contrary, and papering over the many cracks in his ‘argument’ with aggressive bullying rhetoric which intimidates those who wish to challenge him on rational or historical grounds.
Yet it is the sociological aspect of the new atheist critique of religion that appears to have gained most cultural traction. On this view, religion is intrinsically and necessarily dangerous, poisonous and evil. This somewhat crude soundbite is ideally attuned to a media-driven culture which prefers breezy slogans to serious analysis. It resonates deeply, perhaps at a sub-rational level, with the fears of many in Western culture. The suicide attacks by Islamic fanatics on the World Trade Center in New York and elsewhere, now universally referred to as ‘9/11’, are seen as a surefire demonstration of the intrinsic evil of religion. Lurking within every religious believer lies a potential terrorist. Get rid of religion, and the world will be a safer place.
Generalizations like this are found throughout Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith.3 Harris offers his own readings of central religious texts – such as the Bible and the Qur’an – to demonstrate that they possess an innate propensity to generate violence. Yet there is no attempt to analyse how these texts are interpreted and applied within their respective religious communities.
For example, Dawkins tells us that to take the Bible seriously is to ‘strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anyone who chose not to’. Or to ‘execute disobedient children’.4 It is a simple fact that Christians do not interpret, and have not interpreted, these Old Testament injunctions as binding for the Church. Dawkins appears to assume that his religiously alienated readers know so little about Christianity that they would believe that Christians are in the habit of stoning people to death if they work on a Sunday. A reality check is clearly in order.
Furthermore, the new atheism simply assumes, without any serious argumentation or appeal to evidence, that the naturalistic worldview proposed as a replacement for religion will generate more happiness, compassion or peace than religion can. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith bristles with the curious and highly problematic idea that scientists have a keener or deeper appreciation than religious people of how to deal with personal or moral problems. Yet such is the force of his rhetoric that such evidential deficits are airbrushed out of the picture.
So what is ‘new’ about the new atheism? An innocent reader might assume that this movement had discovered new scientific evidence or fresh philosophical arguments that demonstrated that God was the arbitrary and meaningless construction of the human mind. Yet it soon becomes clear that there are no new lines of reasoning here. The old, familiar and somewhat tired arguments of the past are recycled and rehashed. What is new is the aggressiveness of the rhetoric, which often seems to degenerate into bullying and hectoring. It serves a convenient purpose, by papering over the obvious evidential gaps and argumentative lapses that are so characteristic of this movement. But it does little to encourage anyone to take atheism with intellectual seriousness. The philosophical roots of Dawkins’ atheism, for example, are easily exposed as shallow, unformed and severely vulnerable.5
Let us look more closely at this core claim that religion is evil. Such is its cultural power, that it tends to be assumed rather than demonstrated by those who advocate it. This I think tells us rather more about contemporary cultural prejudices and biases than about religion itself. In fact, it turns out to be an article of faith, a belief which can only be sustained by highly selective use of evidence and what comes close to manipulation of history for the purposes of advancing an aggressively atheist agenda.
As explained earlier, when I was an atheist myself, things seemed admirably clear. Growing up in Northern Ireland, infamous in the late 1960s for its religious tensions and violence, it appeared obvious to me that if there were no religion, there would be no religious violence. I bought into the now outdated Enlightenment view, which we have seen charmingly yet not a little uncritically echoed in the manifestoes of new atheism, that humanity was innocent and disinclined to violence until religion came along. Get rid of religion, and humanity could rediscover a golden age of reason and toleration. This theme is particularly evident in Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.
It’s a neat idea, which makes for great rhetoric. Yet it is indefensible in the face of the evidence, rather like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. A core belief of the new atheism, which it persistently tries to represent as scientific fact, is that religion is the cause of the ills of humanity. But what is the evidence for this assertion?
‘Religion’ a false universal
The first point to make is simple: ‘religion’ is a false universal. Individual religions exist; ‘religion’ doesn’t. The Enlightenment was characterized by a love of universals, most famously stated in the idea of a universal human reason, whose fundamental characteristics were independent of history and culture. For the Enlightenment, this universal human reason could be the basis of a true, global ethic and philosophy, which would sweep aside irrational superstitions as relics of a barbarous past. In the end, this noble idea proved to be unworkable, in that human patterns of reasoning turned out to be much more culturally conditioned than had been realized.
The key point here is that the Enlightenment understandably yet wrongly regarded ‘religion’ as a universal category. During the period of colonial expansion, many Europeans came across worldviews that differed from their own, and chose to label them as ‘religions’. In fact, many of these were better regarded as philosophies of life, such as Confucianism. Some were explicitly nontheistic. Yet the Enlightenment belief in a universal notion called ‘religion’ led to these being forced into the same mould. It is increasingly agreed that definitions of religion tend to reflect the agendas and bias of those who propose them. There is still no definition of ‘religion’ which commands scholarly assent.6 Indeed, the noted English philosopher Mary Midgley argued that evolution, as developed by Richard Dawkins and others, had itself become a religious belief system.7
Religion clearly belongs to what the philosopher Donald Brown calls ‘universals of classification’ rather than to ‘universals of content’.8 ‘Universals of content’ have shared core beliefs; ‘universals of classification’, on the other hand, share common patterns, but not necessarily individual beliefs. They have fuzzy boundaries, and lack easily distinguishable core convictions.
For these reasons, there has recently been concerted criticism of this unhelpful and deeply problematic approach, which underlies ‘pluralist’ approaches to religion as much as atheism.9 In its more naïve forms, pluralism holds that all religions represent equally valid responses to the same divine reality; in its more naïve forms, the new atheism holds that they all represent equally invalid and delusional responses to a fictional non-reality. In reality, the porous and imprecise concept of ‘religion’ extends far beyond those who believe in God, embracing a wide range of beliefs and values.
Religions and worldviews
It is also vitally important to make a distinction between a ‘religion’ and a ‘worldview’. This is a distinction that the new atheism singularly fails to make or defend. Both religions (such as Christianity) and secular worldviews (such as Marxism) demand allegiance from their followers. The most successful worldviews incorporate religious elements, even if they are fundamentally secular in their outlook – as in the Soviet Union’s use of quasi-religious rituals to mark essentially secular events.
The historian Martin Marty, noting the lack of any viable definition of religion, identifies five ‘features’ that he holds to be characteristic of religion; all five, he notes, are also characteristic of political movements.10 It is not unreasonable to point out that, if religion is dangerous on this count, then so is politics. There can be (and are) political fanatics, just as there can be (and are) religious fanatics. The problem is fanaticism, not religion or politics themselves. The dark and aggressive tone of the new atheism critique of religion suggests that fanaticism may not be limited to the ranks of those who defend religion.
The new atheism, of course, argues that religious worldviews offer motivations for violence that are not paralleled elsewhere – for example, the thought of entering paradise after a suicidal attack. Yet this conclusion is premature, and needs very careful nuancing. For Harris and Hitchens, it is obvious that religious belief leads directly to suicide bombings. It’s a view that Hitchens’ less critical secular readers will applaud, provided they haven’t read the empirical studies of why people are driven to suicide bombings in the first place.11 Even Dawkins is cautious at this point, suggesting that religion may only be one of the factors involved.
As Robert Pape showed in his definitive account of the motivations of such attacks, based on surveys of every known case of suicide bombing since 1980, religious belief of any kind does not appear to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition to create suicide bombers.12 The infamous ‘suicide vest’, for example, was invented by Tamil Tigers back in 1991, leading to a large number of suicide attacks from this ethnic group. Pape’s analysis of the evidence suggests that the fundamental motivation for suicide bombings appears to be political, not religious – namely, the desire to force the withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an oppressed people, who have seriously limited military resources at their disposal.
The new atheism offers a superficial explanation for suicide bombings, designed to resonate with cultural anxieties about the heightened profile of religion in the United States and many parts of the world. Yet it is not a sustainable analysis, and does little to help us understand why these bombings arise and what can be done to prevent them. They have simply been hijacked as part of a crude atheist apologetic, rather than taken seriously as a cultural and social phenomenon. Happily, there are many serious studies, particularly from an anthropological perspective (including the important work of Scott Atran of the University of Michigan),13 which point in more realistic and informed directions. For Atran, the way to stop suicide bombings is not the excoriation of religion, still less its suppression, but the empowerment of religious moderates.
As Richard Wentz points out, the real issue here is absolutism.14 People create and sustain absolutes out of fear of their own limitations, and people react with violence when others do not accept them. Religion may have a tendency toward absolutism, but the same tendency is innate in any human attempt to find or create meaning, especially when it is challenged. The key thing here, it seems, is not the ideas or values, but the dedication, even fanaticism, of those who follow them.
Atheism and modernity
As we shall see in Chapter 11, the new atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative – a totalizing view of things, locked into the worldview of the Enlightenment. The new atheism wants to take us back to what it portrays as the cool rationalism and sanity of the Enlightenment. Yet it fails to confront even a representative sample of the many contemporary critics of Enlightenment rationalism. It is much easier to defend a position when its critics are ignored. The new atheism is widely dismissed on account of its deeply flawed and biased account of religion; it seems we must extend that criticism by pointing out its total failure to confront the deep flaws, all of which have been known for some time, in its positive proposals.
Philosophical and cultural critics of the Enlightenment have exposed its intellectual indefensibility on the one hand, and its intolerance towards alternative worldviews which it declares to be ‘irrational’ on the other. Modernity, its critics argue, created an intellectual context which legitimates suppression of what it regards as aberrant or ‘irrational’ beliefs. The new atheism is thoroughly modernist, excoriating postmodernism precisely because it challenges and subverts its core assumptions.
The new atheism advocates a ‘return to the Enlightenment’ without any attempt to confront the dark side of modernity. Where in the manifestoes of the movement is there any attempt to deal with the influential view, set out by Adorno and Horkheimer, that the sources of twentieth-century totalitarianism lie in the European Enlightenment – specifically, in its allegedly instrumental and totalizing conception of reason?15 The same Enlightenment that the new atheism asks us to accept as a model of toleration and excellence is now charged by its postmodern critics with having fostered oppression and violence, and having colluded with totalitarianism. The new atheism deals with this by ignoring it. Hitchens, for example, woodenly and somewhat implausibly persists in locating the roots of totalitarianism in religion. There is no recognition of the deeper truth that a significant incentive to oppression and even violence lies to hand in precisely the worldview that he advocates as the solution to our ills.16
Religion and violence
If there is a serious point to be made by the new atheism, it is that religion – or, if we avoid exaggeration, certain forms of religion – possess a capacity to transcendentalize normal human conflicts and disagreements, transforming them into cosmic battles of good and evil, in which the authority and will of a transcendent reality is implicated. If God tells you to kill someone, who can argue with that? Although this point is often made in a muddled and overstated manner, there is a serious point that needs to be considered: why might someone think that God would order them to kill someone?
Now, as a Christian, I regard the idea that all religions teach pretty much the same thing as fatuous, but it is curiously favoured both by political and theological liberals (anxious to elevate the generic concept of ‘religion’ above any specific religious system to facilitate an inclusionist agenda) and atheists (who are anxious to show that religion is generically and intrinsically evil, by singling out a single religion as representative of all, as in Sam Harris’s stereotypical account of Islam).
As a Christian, I hold that the face, will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth.17 And Jesus of Nazareth did no violence to anyone. He was the object, not the agent, of violence. Instead of meeting violence with violence, rage with rage, Christians are asked to ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘not to let the sun go down on their anger’. This speaks of more than the mere elimination of the roots of violence; it relates to its transfiguration. Does the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ command anyone to kill in his name? Certainly some Christians argued so, especially during the age of the Crusades. But that belief is deeply problematic when confronted with the person of Christ. Christ commanded the sword to be put down, not to be taken up, in his defence. The contrast with Islam is particularly telling at this point.
The importance of the witness of Christ on this matter can be seen in a tragic event in North America, which took place in October 2006, within a week of the publication of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A gunman broke into an Amish school in Pennsylvania and gunned down a group of schoolgirls. Five of the young girls died. The Amish are a Protestant religious group who repudiate any form of violence on account of their understanding of the absolute moral authority of the person and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. When those unfortunate schoolchildren were murdered, the Amish community urged forgiveness. There would be no violence, no revenge – only the offering of forgiveness. The gunman’s widow spoke, gratefully and movingly, of how this provided the ‘healing’ that she and her three children ‘so desperately needed’.
Richard Dawkins is nauseatingly condescending about the Amish in his The God Delusion. Yet I cannot help but feel that he misses something rather important in his blanket dismissal of their significance. If the world was more like Jesus of Nazareth, violence might indeed be a thing of the past. But that does not appear to be an answer that Dawkins feels comfortable with.
Atheist violence against religion
At this point, we need to explore another theme, which is conveniently glossed over by the new atheist manifestoes. What about atheist violence against religion? As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know about religious violence only too well. There is no doubt that religion can generate violence. But it’s not alone in this. The history of the twentieth century has given us a frightening awareness of how political extremism can equally cause violence. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have ‘disappeared’ as a result of ruthless campaigns of violence by right-wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated millions in the name of socialism. Worldviews, whether religious or secular, have the power to inspire people to the use of force, violence and repression.18
The rise of the Soviet Union was of particular significance. Lenin regarded the intellectual, cultural and physical elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and put in place measures designed to eradicate religious beliefs through the protracted use of violence. One of the greatest tragedies of this dark era in human history was that those who sought to eliminate religious belief through violence and oppression believed they were justified in doing so.19 They were accountable to no higher authority than the state.
This problem was anticipated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his great novel Devils. The most important character in the novel is Kirillov, who argues that the non-existence of God legitimates all forms of actions. The importance of this theme for Dostoyevsky is best appreciated from his 1878 letter to Nikolai Ozmidov, in which he sets out the implications of atheism for morality:20
Now assume that there is no God, or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds, if I am to die entirely on earth? … And if that is so, why shouldn’t I (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught by the law) cut another man’s throat, rob and steal?
In Devils, Dostoyevsky places a similar line of argument in the mouth of the somewhat eccentric character Alexei Nilych Kirillov: if there is no God, it follows that he, Kirillov, is God. This puzzles Pyotr Stephanovich, who asks him to explain what he means. Kirillov responds as follows:21
If God exists, then everything is His will, and I can do nothing of my own apart from His will. If there’s no God, then everything is my will, and I’m bound to express my self-will.
Since the idea of God is a pure human invention, Kirillov reasons that he is free to do as he pleases. There is no higher authority to whom he is ultimately accountable, or who is able to negate his totalitarian moral self-assertion.
The first decades of the Soviet Union witnessed a deliberate attempt to eradicate religion in the pursuit of a secular communist state.22 When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the elimination of religious belief was a core element of their revolutionary programme. This was not accidental or incidental; it was seen as an essential aspect of the new state that was to come into being. While some areas of the Soviet Union enjoyed relative freedom in matters of religion at times, this was more due to inefficiency in the execution of central directives.
Churches were closed; priests imprisoned, exiled or executed. On the eve of the Second World War there were only 6,376 clergy remaining in the Russian Orthodox Church, compared with the pre-revolutionary figure of 66,140. The most significant period of executions of priests was 1937–8. On 17 February 1938 alone, 55 priests were executed. In 1917, there were 39,530 churches in Russia; in 1940, only 950 remained functional. The remainder had been closed, converted for secular use or destroyed, often by dynamiting.
In one of his more bizarre credal statements as an atheist, Dawkins insists that there is ‘not the smallest evidence’ that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things.23 This is an astonishing, naïve and somewhat sad statement. Dawkins is clearly an ivory tower atheist, disconnected from the real and brutal world of the twentieth century. The facts, as we have just seen, are otherwise.
Similarly, Dawkins’ puzzling remark: ‘I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame’,24 says more about his personal credulity than the reality of things. Similar outrages to those which took place in the Soviet Union are detailed in the postwar history of the German Democratic Republic. Surely Dawkins knows about the dynamiting of the University Church in Leipzig on the orders of the atheist authorities in 1968? Completed in 1240, this architectural masterpiece was demolished to avoid the awkwardness of having to tolerate symbols of the divine in the new ‘Karl Marx Platz’ (now happily renamed the ‘Augustinerplatz’, following the collapse of this grim and miserable Marxist state, which embodied precisely the austere dogmatic atheism that some seem to regard as an intellectual virtue). Dawkins’ special pleading that atheism is innocent of the violence and oppression that he associates with religion is simply untenable, and suggests a significant blind spot.
Let me give an example from the pen of an Oxford scholar who comes to very different conclusions to those asserted (for they are certainly not argued) by Dawkins. In his outstanding study of the Romanian Christian dissident intellectual Petre Tutea (1902–91), Alexandru Popescu documents the physical and mental degradation Tutea suffered as part of systematic persecution of religion in Romania during the Soviet era until the downfall and execution of Nicolae Ceaucescu.25 During this period, Tutea spent 13 years as a prisoner of conscience and 28 years under house arrest. His personal story is enormously illuminating for those who want to understand the power of religious faith to console and maintain personal identity under precisely the forms of persecution that Dawkins asserts do not exist.
Dawkins gives every impression of being in denial about the darker side of atheism, making him a less than credible critic of religion. He has a fervent, unquestioning faith in the universal goodness of atheism which he refuses to subject to critical examination. Yes, there is much that is wrong with contemporary religion, and much that needs to be reformed. Yet the same is also true of atheism, which still needs to subject itself to the self-searching intellectual and moral criticisms that religious systems are willing to direct against themselves. Why is it that so many atheists apply moral standards to their critique of religion which they seem reluctant to apply to atheism itself? It has often been pointed out that the new atheism applies one set of evidential criteria to its own beliefs, and a more rigorous and demanding set to those of its opponents. Is the same also true of its moral critiques of religion?
The problem of human nature
Secular humanism insists upon the goodness of human nature. Yet this is an unevidenced belief, which seems empirically incompatible with the violence and horrors of human history. The reality here is clearly that human beings are capable of both good and ill, moral excellence and violence – and that both these may be provoked by worldviews, whether religious or otherwise. It is not a comfortable insight, but one that alerts us to the shortcomings and dangers of identifying any one people-group as the source of violence and the ills of humanity. This facile approach may facilitate scapegoating; it hardly advances the cause of civilization.
Furthermore, Dawkins fails to appreciate that when a society rejects the idea of God, it tends to transcendentalize alternatives – such as the ideals of liberty or equality. These now become quasi-divine authorities which none are permitted to challenge. Perhaps the most familiar example of this dates from the French Revolution, at a time when traditional notions of God were discarded as obsolete, and replaced by transcendentalized human values.
Madame Rolande was brought to the guillotine to face execution on trumped-up charges in 1792. As she prepared to die, she bowed mockingly towards the statue of liberty in the Place de la Révolution, and uttered the words for which she is now remembered: ‘Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!’ Her point is simple, and I believe it to be irrefutable. All ideals – divine, transcendent, human or invented – are capable of being abused. That’s just the way human nature is. And knowing this, we need to work out what to do about it, rather than lashing out uncritically at religion. The problem lies in human nature. The Christian doctrine of original sin has a lot to say about this significant failure of humanity to live up to its ideals.
In-groups and out-groups
This line of thought may be developed further. Suppose Dawkins’ dream were to come true, and that religion were to disappear. Would that end the divisions within humanity? And the violence that ensues from them? Certainly not. Such divisions are ultimately social constructs which reflect the fundamental sociological need for communities to self-define, and identify those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’; those who are ‘friends’, and those who are ‘foes’. The importance of ‘binary opposition’ in shaping perceptions of identity has been highlighted in recent years, not least on account of the major debate between different schools of critical thought over whether such ‘oppositions’ determine and shape human thought, or are the outcome of human thought.
The ‘binary oppositions’ which are held to have shaped modern Western culture include the pairs ‘male–female’ and ‘white–black’. Group identity is often fostered by defining ‘the other’ as an enemy – as, for example, in Nazi Germany, with its opposition ‘Aryan–Jew’. At times, this binary opposition is defined in religious terms – as in ‘Catholic–Protestant’, or ‘believer–infidel’.
This clearly points to religion, at least in theory, as a potential catalyst for rage and violence in some contexts. In concurring, Dawkins makes a significant concession in recognizing the sociological origins of division and exclusion. ‘Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language, or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not.’26 In other words, religion is only part of the problem – a judgement that few would find questionable. Yet even here, Dawkins’ core anti-religious beliefs lead him to some problematic judgements.
Dawkins assumes that the formation of in-groups and out-groups is potentially divisive and dangerous, and ought to be discouraged or prevented. Dawkins thus critiques Jesus of Nazareth for encouraging in-groups. He does not appear to know about Christ’s command to love enemies, nor the inclusivism of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, to mention only the most obvious responses to this whimsical criticism. But at least it is clear that Dawkins is critical of the formation of ‘in-groups’, and hence of the role of religion in causing such divisions.
It is therefore ironical, to say the least, that Dawkins and others now associated with the new atheism, such as Daniel Dennett, have encouraged the formation of precisely the same ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ by their unwise endorsement of the notion of ‘Brights’ in 2003. For those who missed this diverting episode in American cultural history, a Bright was defined as someone who holds ‘a naturalistic worldview’ which is ‘free of supernatural and mystical elements’.27
Just as ‘gays’ was seen as a better word to designate homosexuals, ‘Brights’ was coined as a term for atheists – except the choice of the term ‘Bright’ turned out to be a public relations disaster, reeking of intellectual and cultural arrogance. If atheists were really so smart, how could two of their leading representatives fail to see that the ‘Brights’ label would backfire so spectacularly?
When launching the Bright movement in the New York Times back in 2003, Dennett insisted that telling people that he was a Bright was ‘not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view’. Well, that’s not how anyone else saw it. The opposite of Bright is dim, a mildly offensive word that translates as ‘stupid’. By choosing to use the label ‘Bright’, atheists were widely seen to be claiming to be smarter than everyone else. As ABC’s commentator John Allen Paulos remarked, ‘I don’t think a degree in public relations is needed to expect that many people will construe the term as smug, ridiculous, and arrogant.’28
It may have been a public relations disaster; nevertheless, the idea of Brights is completely consistent with the new atheist metanarrative. According to this controlling set of ideas, people who believe in God are intellectually and morally deficient. The atheist is the Übermensch, someone who is able to transcend the limitations of the human condition which cause less intelligent and discerning individuals to believe in God. To its critics, this comes across as nauseatingly arrogant; within the new atheist movement itself, as I have discovered from numerous conversations, it is seen as self-evidently true. Outsiders are fools or knaves; true enlightenment is only found within its hallowed walls. Believing that the rest of humanity are deluded does, I fear, generate a certain unpleasant smugness on the part of these ‘true believers’.
The notion of the Bright, however arrogant and smug it may be, is an essential element of the new atheist worldview. The new atheism vigorously asserts the fundamental moral and intellectual autonomy of humanity. Human beings are intelligent and rational beings who can shake off superstitious beliefs and exult in the triumph of reason and science. But where do these beliefs come from? If there is no God, it follows that religion is the creation of human beings. Hitchens and Dawkins excoriate what they see as the delusional, irrational and immoral lies of religion. Yet, from their atheist perspective, these ideas were invented by human beings – the same human beings who they exult as models of rationality and morality. Hitchens appeals to human rationality and morality in making his case for atheism; yet that same rationality and morality gave rise to religious ideas and values which he regards as degenerate, pathological and oppressive.
Religion is the serpent in the rationalist Garden of Eden, the seducer of otherwise reasonable people. The contradictions and failures of recent ‘enlightened’ human history – which include the awkward arrival of Nazism and Stalinism, not to mention weapons of mass destruction – are put down, somewhat implausibly, to the resurgence of religion. Not even the rhetorical skills of the greatest new atheists have been able to weave Stalinism into their narrative of the obstinate persistence of religious belief. The real problem for secular rationalists is that having made human beings the ‘measure of all things’ (Alexander Pope), they find themselves embarrassed by the wide range of beliefs human beings have chosen to hold – most notably, a widespread belief in God. If belief in God is a human invention, and if the crimes committed in the name of religion are thus of human origin, humanity appears to be rather less rational than the new atheist worldview allows. The new atheists criticize religion as the enemy of humanity, hoping that nobody will notice that their own theory holds it to be a human creation. You don’t need to be very bright to make this connection.
The only way of getting out of this impasse is by dividing humanity into two groups: those who, from an atheist perspective, are able to break free from the thrall of religion; and those who remain locked in its lethal embrace. The former, of course, are the Brights, and the latter the deluded fools who believe in God. Sure, it’s arrogant and nasty. But how else can Hitchens and his colleagues escape from the impasse of the human origins of religion? If religion is evil, and religion is a human invention, what does this say about the humanity that Hitchens exalts as possessing supreme rational and moral authority? There’s only one way out of this mess, and it’s the invention of the Bright. If the Bright didn’t exist, atheism would need to invent it.
My concern, however, is not the intellectual smugness, cultural arrogance or political foolishness of the new atheism at this point, but its fundamentally divisive nature. This crude belief system divides the world between the ‘Brights’ and the ‘dims’, creating a damaging polarity which the new atheism asserts is the characteristic of religion. Atheism, it seems, is just as bad as its alternatives in this respect, having now added intellectual snobbery to its vices, and nothing obvious to its virtues.
Conclusion
We need realism in any discussion about religion and its alternatives. It is a quality found in the writings of Michael Shermer, President of the Skeptics Society, who made the significant point that religions have been implicated in some human tragedies, such as holy wars. Indeed, this is what history tells us. But Shermer goes on to emphasize that there is clearly a significant positive side to religion:29
However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go unreported … Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.
This is also what history tells us. Only someone who offers a highly selective or prejudicial reading of history could argue otherwise. Yet that is precisely the selectivity which we find in the new atheist metanarrative.
The pejorative and hostile attitude towards religion on the part of the new atheism asserts that it is a universal, unambiguous evil, which is a dangerous threat to civilization. Yet just where is the balanced and judicious analysis that Shermer rightly demands? Why is it so conspicuously absent? I fear the answer is simple: because it doesn’t make for the slick and simple soundbites that will reassure the Godless faithful at a time of religious resurgence. True atheist believers may be relatively few; but at least they can console themselves that they are ‘bright’.
Secular humanism appeals to the best of humanity in defining itself. So why should it not also examine the best in religion in defending itself? Of course religion can go wrong; but so can science. The forms of ‘social Darwinism’ developed in Nazi Germany are an abomination30 – but I am perfectly prepared to accept that this is bad science. Both science and religion can spawn monsters. But they need not, nor are they to be judged by their pathological forms. As Voltaire (1694–1778) pointed out in his Treaty on Toleration (1763), ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy – the very foolish daughter of a very wise mother.’31
The belief that religion poisons everything is simply childish. Of course religion can lead to violence and evil. But so can politics, race and ethnicity … and an aggressive and dismissive atheist worldview. In his Treaty on Toleration, Voltaire argued that we should not tolerate intolerance. What, then, of the aggressive intolerance of religion that some fanatics now seem to see as an intellectual virtue? All of us who are concerned for the creation and preservation of a human civil society want to put an end to discrimination, violence and oppression. Yet the new atheist attempt to demonstrate that religion is intrinsically and necessarily evil has led its many critics to conclude that it uses history simply as a weapon against religion, rather than as a means of illuminating the problems that we face. Surely the time has come to stop this implausible discriminatory stereotyping, and deal with the real problems faced by the world?