Chapter 5 Musings of a Lapsed Atheist
Chapter 5
Musings of a Lapsed Atheist
The New Atheism made its dramatic appearance over the period 2006–2007, topping bestseller charts and provoking a huge and often highly charged public debate over the rational basis of faith and the place of religion in contemporary life. The leading representatives of this movement—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens—offer an aggressive, blistering attack on religion.1 Like the Italian army major in Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (1929), they are adamant that “all thinking men are atheists.”2 While the New Atheism is light on rigorous evidential analysis, often asserting opinions as if they were facts, it excels in the use of rhetoric. Religion is portrayed as being intrinsically and characteristically dangerous, poisonous, and evil. There is no allowance that religion might have even one or two redeeming features. This aggressive and dismissive approach resonates deeply, perhaps at a sub-rational level, with the fears of many secularists in Western culture. Lurking within every religious believer there lies a potential terrorist. Get rid of religion, and the world will be a safer place.
Why the intense anger? Part of the explanation lies in the refusal of religion to die out in the West, as the great secularists of the recent past predicted. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, part of the received wisdom of the age was that religion was on its way out. As a social influence, its days were numbered; as a credible worldview, it was a “dead time’s exploded dream” (Matthew Arnold). Its stubborn persistence and continuing influence, especially in the United States, has alarmed atheists and secularists. A good example of this concern is found in a short speech given in 2006 by the anti-religious writer Ian McEwan, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.3 McEwan speaks of his surprise and dismay at the resurgence of religion, and he argues that there is an urgent need to put it back into its proper place—which, for McEwan, is in the private thoughts of backward individuals, kept safely away from any public places.
I used to think that as well. During the late 1960s, a surge of secularist euphoria swept across Western Europe and North America. In April 1966, Time magazine’s cover story was the death of God. Sociologists were predicting the dawn of a new secular era, in which belief in God would die out and be replaced by secular ideologies, such as Marxism. A tidal wave of anti-religious feeling was sweeping across the face of Western culture. The commentator and novelist Tom Wolfe caught this cultural mood well in his essay “The Great Relearning,” based on his experiences in San Francisco in 1968. Everything was to be swept aside in a frenzy of dissatisfaction and rebuilt from ground zero.4 Never before had such a radical Promethean reconstruction of things been possible. It was time to seize the moment and break decisively with the past! Religion would be swept aside as the moral detritus of humanity, at best an irrelevance to real life, and at worse an evil, perverse force which enslaved humanity through its lies and delusions.
That was the cultural mood of the late 1960s. And I shared it. Everyone likes to feel that they are somehow connected with the great stories of history, and I came to see myself as part of this anti-religious vanguard. Marxism was the oxygen of the cultural atmosphere of the day throughout much of Western Europe at this time, even in my own native Northern Ireland. Yet for me, the Marxist critique of religion was supplemented by something just as powerful and persuasive: the scientific view of reality.
Science explained everything. It gobbled up the conceptual space once occupied by God and replaced it with the sane, cool rationalism of the scientific method. Only scientific claims are meaningful. Anything that lies outside the scope of science is simply superstition or delusion, no matter how understandable. The sciences were, for me, the bright lodestar of my intellectual and moral endeavours, the only true way to acquire reliable knowledge about reality and the order of things. Atheism was my creed, and science was its foundation.
I won a scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry, seeing this as both immensely satisfying in its own right and also as a means of consolidating and extending my atheism. While preparing to go up to Oxford, however, I began to read works dealing with the history and philosophy of science. This turned out to be a baptism of fire. My mind was assaulted with ideas that battered at the roots of my faith. I read about the under-determination of theory by data, and radical theory change in the history of science. I was forced to confront the difficulties in devising a “crucial experiment,” and the enormously complex issues associated with determining what was the best explanation of a given set of observations.
The seeds of doubt were planted in my mind. Was my atheism really some kind of logical fallacy based on a misunderstanding of the proper scope of science, or a misunderstanding of the nature of scientific claims? It was a deeply unsettling thought, and I tried not to think about it too much. Nobody likes their personal worlds of meaning to be disturbed too much. I was tempted to dismiss this sort of stuff in much the same way that Dawkins still does—as ignorant, unscientific “truth-heckling.”5 But my doubts would not go away.
When I arrived at Oxford, I decided to look into these things properly, to set my mind at rest. I expected to find my atheism reinforced so that I could dismiss such intellectual distractions. I wanted closure of this question so that I could get on with more important things. Yet while I had been severely critical of Christianity, I realized that I had yet to extend that same critical evaluation to atheism, tending to assume that it was self-evidently correct and hence was exempt from being assessed in this way. During October and November 1971, I began to discover that the intellectual case for atheism was rather less substantial than I had supposed. Far from being self-evidently true, it seemed to rest on rather shaky foundations. Christianity, on the other hand, turned out to be far more robust intellectually than I had supposed.
Finally I realized that atheism was actually a belief system, although I had assumed it to be a factual statement about reality. In the end, I turned my back on one faith and embraced another. I turned away from one belief system that tried to deny it was anything of the sort, and accepted another which was quite open and honest about its status. My conversion was an act of free-thinking. I believed that I had found the best way of making sense of things. And that remains my view today. Although I now appreciate that Christianity has emotional, imaginative, and ethical dimensions that I had yet to discover at that time, I continue to see the “sense-making” dimensions of faith to be profoundly important and significant.
When I first read the leading works of New Atheism of 2006–2007, my initial reaction was one of deep nostalgia. I found myself smiling at the bold, aggressive, and dismissive declarations of the evils of religion and the delusion of faith. It reminded me of my own youth, when I used to share both these beliefs, and the arrogance which arose from them. Yet what interested me most was the way in which so many of the New Atheist writers made the natural sciences a core element of their atheistic apologetics.
The New Atheism frequently makes a rhetorical appeal to the natural sciences as the sole basis of reliable truth—a view now widely known as “scientism”6—and the concomitant rejection of religious belief as evidence-free superstition. On this view, science demands no commitments of faith; in fact, its emphasis on truth is the enemy of faith. The critical role of fiduciary judgements in the scientific method is simply airbrushed out of the picture.7 Although this theme is rhetorically echoed in the works of Harris and Hitchens, it finds its fullest discussion in the works of Dawkins and Dennett.
Curiously, Dawkins and Dennett remain firmly committed to the outmoded notion that science and religion are permanently in conflict—an idea often referred to as the “warfare” thesis. This is now regarded as quite unacceptable by historians of science, chiefly because it is so difficult to reconcile with the facts of history.8 It is one of many points at which the “New Atheism” is seriously out of line with modern scholarship. The idea that science and religion are in a state of permanent conflict became highly popular in the late nineteenth century, largely for sociological reasons. Though it remains persistent in the popular media, it has lost scholarly support as a result of our growing knowledge of the historical interactions of science and religion. Yet Dawkins is so unswervingly committed to this obsolete warfare model that he has been led to make some very unwise and indefensible judgements. One of the most foolish of these is the ridiculous idea that scientists who promote a positive working relationship between science and religion can be compared to the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in his attempt to appease Adolf Hitler.9 It is a bizarre suggestion, to be set alongside Dawkins’s more recent assertion that creationism is comparable in its intellectual and moral depravity to Holocaust denial.10 The derision with which this suggestion has been greeted suggests that the New Atheism sometimes seems to occupy a fantasy world, isolated from the real world around it.
The idea that science and religion were in a state of permanent conflict became highly popular in the late nineteenth century, largely for sociological reasons. Though it remains persistent in the popular media, it has lost scholarly support as a result of our growing knowledge of the historical interactions of science and religion.
One of the central themes developed by both Dawkins and Dennett is that Darwinism is a universal theory, capable of explaining far more than developments within the biological realm. Religion, both argue, can be accounted for within a Darwinian context. It is easily understood as an “accidental by-product” or a “misfiring of something useful.”11 So why does Dawkins believe that religion can be explained in terms of a Darwinian model? Dawkins’s analysis rests on the “general principles” of religion that he finds in Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough—a highly impressionistic early work of anthropology, first published in 1890. At first sight, this seems to be a highly puzzling strategy. Why would Dawkins make his theory of the origins of religion depend so heavily on the core assumptions of a work which is well over a century old, and now largely discredited? Isn’t he meant to be bringing things up to date, rather than lurching back into the past, digging up old and discredited approaches?
Yet it soon becomes clear that Dawkins depends upon Frazer’s theory of religion to make his case. Frazer’s insistence that religion may be reduced to some single universal trait opens the door for Dawkins to propose a Darwinian explanation. By presenting religion as something that possesses universal characteristics, it is open to Darwinian analysis, and hence to reductive explanation. “Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.”12
Most anthropologists now cite Frazer as an example of how not to study religion. Religion does not exhibit the “universal features” that Dawkins’s preferred approach demands, and which late Victorian works of the anthropology of religion erroneously regarded as axiomatic. Frazer’s strategic assumption of “the essential similarity of man’s chief wants everywhere and at all times” may suit Dawkins’s anti-religious agenda, but it does not fit the facts.
It may initially seem puzzling that The God Delusion depends on discarded nineteenth-century assumptions to make a twenty-first-century case against religion.13 But the reason soon becomes painfully obvious: when care is taken to define “religion,” it turns out not to fit the simplistic categories upon which Dawkins’s analysis depends. Religion clearly belongs to what the philosopher Donald Brown calls “universals of classification” rather than to “universals of content.”14 “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.
Both Dawkins and Dennett believe that the natural sciences exclude metaphysical commitments, especially of a religious nature, holding that these are ultimately spurious. Yet when properly and legitimately applied, the scientific method is religiously neutral—neither uniformly supportive nor uniformly critical of religious beliefs. Since the scientific method clearly does not entail atheism, those who wish to exploit the sciences as a weapon against religion have to supplement their case in certain ways to increase its plausibility. One way is by using aggressive rhetoric, heaping ridicule on those who challenge its obvious inaccuracies. Another way is to rewrite the narrative of science, incorporating atheistic presuppositions into the narrative of the scientific method.
Dawkins is a master of smuggling metaphysics into science, rewriting the neutral and often inconclusive scientific narrative so that it leads to a rigorous atheist conclusion. The way in which he imposes an atheistic meta-narrative on a scientific description of things can be explored by examining a passage from Dawkins’s early masterpiece The Selfish Gene (1976). This supplements overt scientific description with a covert metaphysic which represents genes as active agents in control of their own destiny and the destinies of their hosts:
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.15
This passage presents a completely defensible scientific statement—”genes are in you and me”—with a series of equally indefensible metaphysical assertions. We are told, for example, that the preservation of our genes “is the ultimate rationale for our existence.” A scientifically illiterate reader of this passage might assume that Dawkins was providing an answer to the age-old question of the meaning of life. On this reading of things, the reason for existence is the preservation of our genes.
This is, however, simply a presentation of a “gene’s-eye view”—a hypothetical metaphysical way of interpreting scientific observation. This approach, which arguably reached its zenith in the early 1980s,16 conceived of the gene as an active controlling agent, which could be regarded as “manipulating” the destiny of biological entities, including humanity. Yet the empirically verified facts in this statement are limited to the brief statement that genes “are in you and me.” The rest is speculative. Metaphysical presuppositions have been smuggled in and portrayed as if they were scientifically verified facts.
Consider now the same paragraph, as rewritten by the Oxford systems biologist Denis Noble. Noble retains what is scientifically valid and verifiable in Dawkins’s prose. Then, in a masterly piece of ideological subversion, he identifies and inverts Dawkins’s non-scientific statements. Noble playfully portrays genes as passive, where Dawkins depicts them as active:
[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.17
It will be clear that Dawkins and Noble represent the status of genes in completely different ways. The same limited scientific information is interpreted in totally different manners: in both cases, however, the metaphysical interpretation is being presented as scientific fact, on the same level as empirical statements. The point here is that both Dawkins and Noble cannot be right. Though both base themselves on the same observational statement, they import and impose quite different metaphysical assumptions upon it.
Their statements are thus “empirically equivalent,” having equally good grounding in observation and experimental evidence. So which is right? How could we decide which is to be preferred on scientific grounds? As Noble observes, “no-one seems to be able to think of an experiment that would detect an empirical difference between them.” The real problem with the way in which recent atheistic apologies use science as a weapon against religion has to do with the smuggling in of atheistic metaphysical assumptions, which the sciences themselves neither demand nor legitimize. As Noble’s little piece of theatre shows us, some of what is presented as “science” by the New Atheism isn’t really science at all: it actually amounts to the subversive manipulation of science by grafting on a patina of metaphysical naturalism.
So where does this leave us? The rhetoric of the New Atheism tries to characterize the movement as based on reason and science, dismissing all other alternatives—and especially religious alternatives—as outmoded irrational superstitions. This, however, is a position that can only be maintained by doing violence to both science and reason. The scientific method, when legitimately applied, simply does not take us to the destinations envisaged by the New Atheism. Science raises questions that it cannot answer, forcing us to ask deeper questions about this world and our place in it than the rather shallow rhetoric of recent populist atheism suggests.
So what happens if we try to trespass beyond the scientific horizon? What happens if we try to draw aside a curtain that was meant to stay closed? What lies beyond the scope of the scientific method?