Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig. Ihre Gottheit steht außer Zweifel. Ihr, Faust.
I do apologize. It seems that everything I write these days is anti-atheist. And who can blame my unbelieving brethren for assuming I am fighting for the other side. Perhaps I should be, since modern atheism is hardly worth defending.
To be brutal, I cannot imagine a time in the history of unbelief when atheism has appeared more hamfisted, puling, ignorant or unappealing.
Is this because its savants are also described by those adjectives, or because their fans are just being fans, merchandising the cause: t-shirts, coffee mugs, quick fixes, blasphemy competitions, and billboard campaigns? (Axial tilt is the reason for the season: Honest Jethro, I thought I’d never stop laughing). I mean, who are we unless someone is offended by who we are? What good is blasphemy if no one is getting their knickers in a knot anymore, for Christ’s sake. How can we “come out” when there’s no one standing outside the closet to yell “Surprise!” at? And, by the way you churchy jerks: we are victims.
Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important. And that is a shame, because God was a big idea, and the rejection of the existence of God was also a big idea, once upon a time.
There was nothing “mistaken” about belief in God, and the fact that there is probably no god does not lessen his significance. No distant galaxy of more intelligent beings has sent us an error message about the God thing. God is no more “wrong” than a carriage is wrong in relation to a JAG XKR-S. Expensive strokes for modern folks, but as carriage is to sleek design and comfortable travel, so god is to modern understanding. Notice: I did not say science. I said modern understanding, because only a portion of modern understanding is shaped by science and god is not an object of scientific thought. If the question of God could be reduced to a simple scientific verdict, the eminently nasal Richard Dawkins could shut his repetitive trap. As it is he has to keep talking.
Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus. These people tend to think that there are two kinds of questions: the questions we have already answered and the questions we will answer tomorrow. When they were even smaller than they are now, their father asked them every six weeks, “Whadja get in math and science?” When they had children of their own, they asked them, “Whadja get in science and math?” Which goes to show, people can change.
They eschew mystery, unless it’s connected to a telescopic lens or an electron microscope or a neutrinometer at the Hadron Collider at CERN. “Mystery” is not a state to be enjoyed or celebrated like a good wine or a raven-haired woman with haunting and troubled eyes: it is a temporary state of befuddlement, an unknown sum, an uncharted particle, a glimpse of a distant galaxy, the possibility that Mars supported microbial life.
I get excited by all of these things, incidentally. They are the sorts of things that put the sapiens (twice) in the name of our species. Our ability to figure things out is almost mysterious, but not at all miraculous. In fact, a crucial part of modern humanism is the celebration of our continued and accelerating ability to make sense of the universe and where we are in it.
Strictly speaking we do not need to know as much as we already do to survive and there is no guarantee that knowing more will guarantee our survival. So it’s wondrous indeed that we care enough to put knowledge at the top of the human agenda. The same mysterious attitude it was that pricked us into turning the vast and starry skies into the creation of a divine being who loved us, cared for us, and saved us from oblivion.
We have gradually concluded that this is probably not true: there is no such being–yet the vast and starry skies remain. But we have not yet learned to love the universe as much as we once loved God because, as Stephen Crane once said, we know the universe does not love us back.
We lived before there was science, and we may live at some distant point–come hell, high water, nuclear catatsrophe, plague, and asteroids that don’t miss–after it. I do not regard an umimaginable future unlikely because nothing is more unlikely than that we should understand the world as well as we do now.
Atheism has been of practically no use in formulating this world view. It is certainly true that a majority of scientists are either unbelievers (of some sort) or unconventional believers. But being an atheist was never a prerequisite to good science. Understanding the natural world makes good science, a world in which the mysterious exists but the miraculous does not.
Science reified (with its consort, Reason) has become the convenient alternative deity of small atheists. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of the greatest advances in science were made by “believers.” Without getting into the mud over Einstein (who whether a believer or not was not an atheist), Newton, Mendel, Galileo, Kelvin, Darwin, Faraday, Boyle, Planck, and on and on. But the score at the end of this risky game is not to stack theists against atheists. Most smart people, some of whom are scientists, are not religious in the way religious people want them to be religious or irreligious in the way atheists want them to be atheists.
When did atheism cease to be a big idea? When atheists made God a little idea. When its idea of god shriveled to become a postulate of a new intellectual Darwinism. When they began to identify unbelief with being a woman, a gay, a lesbian, or some other victimized cadre. When they decided that religion is best described as a malicious and retardant cultural force that connives to prevent us being the Alpha Race of super-intelligences and wholly equal beings that nature has in store for us. When they elevated naturalism, already an outmoded view of the universe, to a cause, at the expense of authentic imagination.
Atheism has become a little idea because it is based on the hobgoblin theory of religion: its god is a green elf with a stick, not the master of the universe who controls it with his omniscient will. –Let alone a God so powerful that this will could evolve into Nature’s God–the god of Jefferson and Paine–and then into the laws of nature, as it did before the end of the eighteenth century in learned discussion and debate.
Atheism until fairly recently has been about a disappointing search for god that ends in failure, disillusionment, despair, and finally a new affirmation of human ingenuity that is entirely compatible with both science and art.
That’s the way Sartre thought of it. –A conclusion forced upon us by the dawning recognition that we are both the source and solution to our despair. That is what Walter Lippmann thought in 1929, when he described the erosion of belief by the acids of modernity. This atheism was respectful of the fact that God is a very big idea, a sublime idea, and that abandoning such an idea could not take place as a mere reckoning at one moment in time; it had to happen as a process that included hatred, alienation and what Whitehead saw as “reconciliation” with the idea of God. That is what Leo Strauss meant in 1955 when he wrote in Natural Right and History that the classical virtues would save the modern world from the negative trinity of pragmatism, scientism and relativism, what Irving Babbitt (Lippmann’s teacher at Harvard) meant in declaring war on modernity and science in favour of the “inner check” of classical humanism.
In 1914, on the eve of World War I, a very young Lippmann surveyed the situation in America: “The sanctity of property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste, the dogma of sin, obedience to authority–the rock of ages, in brief, has been blasted for us.” A disllusioned soldier on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen asked poetically in the same year, “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” Ortega y Gasset observed that the goals that furnished yesterday’s landscape with “so definite an architecture” have lost their hold. Those that are to replace them have not yet taken shape, and so the landscape “seems to break up, vacillate, and quake in all directions.” And Yeats, elaborating on the kind of apocalyptic imagery he used in “The Second Coming” recalled: “Nature, steel-bound or stone-built in the nineteenth century, became a flux where man drowned or swam.” We all know the verdict: “Things fall apart,” because the god at the centre could not hold. The image was highly appropriate because it was atomic and prophetic.**
My current Angst, to use that hackneyed word correctly, is that most contemporary humanists don’t know what classical humanism is, and most modern atheists won’t know the references in the last paragraph, and what’s more will not care.** Their atheism is an uneven mixture of basic physics, evolutionary biology, half cooked theories from the greasy kitchen of cognitive science, assorted political opinions, and what they regard as common sense. They fell into atheism; they did not come to it.
That’s the way recent atheism has been, an old fiddle with one string and one tune to play: We are the world. Get over God. If the almighty being and his raggedy book are relevant at all, it’s simply as a record of all the stupid things human beings can think of: superstitious sorghum, toxic drivel that stopped being relevant in the century its superstitious, toxic tropes were composed.
Was it only ten years ago that relatively dumb people were saying “Duh” to obtuse comments that they were afraid equally dumb people might miss without the exclamation, usually prefaced with, “I mean like.…” The fad was almost as annoying as the similarly valenced interjection “Hello?” which had to be said with the speaker four inches from your face, head tilted. Modern culture, this is to say, has survived the tyranny of not very bright bright-lovers, the opinionated, the anti-obtusity of the obtuse. That’s what the atheist militia, the campaigners, the billboard mongers are: people who just say “Duh” when they are asked about the existence of God.
“In all philosophic theory,” said Whitehead, with Russell the author of Principia Mathematica and thus no slouch when it came to close reasoning and logic., “there is an ultimate which is capable of characterization only through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.” Hello?
As I completed this blog, a friend forwarded to me an appreciation of a recent meeting of a group called Skepticon, a confederation of compatible atheist groups.
The piece reminds me of nothing so much as the scene in Roald Dahl’s The Witches where the hags come together, disguised under itchy wigs as ordinary housewives, to exchange ”recipes.”
We are assured that skepticism is “a humanism” by one of the keynoters, whatever that is supposed to mean; P Z Myers and Greta Christina justified their rancid approaches to belief by saying that religion “hurts human beings” (well, that’s something to suppose, which is better than nothing to suppose), and a writer named James Croft praised the meeting’s “profoundly humanist…no cop-out approach” while David Silverman, the head of the American Atheists warned that calling yourself a humanist is, in fact, a cop out.
I mention Skepticon because to my mind the meeting is further evidence of the crisis that besets atheism. It cannot quite embrace humanism at the margins, the solution to which for certain ecumenical atheists is to fiddle with the definition of humanism by rolling out the dough ever thinner. It cannot represent skepticism in a methodological way because science and philosophy and even theology have been there and do it. It cannot lay claim to helping people in a direct and positive (as opposed to a merely rhetorical way) because it isn’t, after all, a social welfare movement.
It wants like Pirandello’s lost characters, a cause, an author, something that defines it and sets it apart: science, reason, empathy, concern for human health, but ends up sounding like a nightmare version of a Miss America contestant prompted to give her world peace response.
What atheism and humanism have needed for a long time and once came close to having was a think tank to deal with the theoretical issues of these different movements. It may say worlds about the nature of atheism that this project failed, under the name of secular humanism. Think, O ye of little faith and proud of it, how many temples of learning religion has built. No don’t: you’ll get it wrong.
But for a think tank, you need thinkers. What the atheists are left with is a stage and a microphone.
**Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History; Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York, 1914), xvii; Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems (“Move him gently into the sun”); Ortega y Gasset, “Signs of the Times” in The Modern Themes [1921-22; rpt. New York, 1961], 79. Yeats is from his “Introduction,” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse [New York, 1936], xxviii; Babbitt, “What is Humanism,” http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/the-smart-set/
Don’t apologize. “[W]ho can blame my unbelieving brethren for assuming I am fighting for the other side”… Critical thinking and independent minds are anomalies in simplistic worldviews. “Everyone has observed how much more dogs are animated when they hunt in a pack, than when they pursue their game apart. We might, perhaps, be at a loss to explain this phenomenon, if we had not experience of a similar in ourselves.” David Hume, clearly pondering the new atheist phenomenon. “You are either with us or you are against us” (George W Bush). “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt 12.30). I think it’s sweet of them to ‘accuse’ the unsympathetic of being ‘religious’. But I still wish they’d all shut their repetitive proverbial traps.
“God is no more “wrong” than a carriage is wrong in relation to a JAG XKR-S.”
Clever. But this is the wrong analogy. A more apt one would be: God is no more “wrong” than treating heart disease with leeches is wrong in relation to the artificial heart.”
Actually “wrong” is probably the wrong word as well. The idea of God isn’t exactly wrong so much as it is superfluous. In the same way that we have made genuine progress in medicine, by improving upon failed hypotheses, we can also make genuine progress in reasoning by disregarding atavistic wish-fantasies in favor of the only real tool we have; our improving brains.
Analogies are weak arguments, but yours alas is weaker because while carriages and cars are categorically similar leeches and artificial hearts aren’t. In any case, your point is irrelevant because you are arguing an identical point about growth in understanding. You only want to use your analogy because you think it works in relation to the silly idea that God is a failed hypothesis, which itself is flawed–as I’m sure you’e smart enough to know.
I can agree with this, and while I agree with Hoffman that “Gnu Atheism” has much that is not right about it, I think a robust nontheism of today, not just a “cultic” one, can and should incorporate more of the sciences, as well as literature and the arts, than did the atheism of, say, d’Holbach, arguably the original “Gnu.”
Per the superfluousness, I am reminded again of Laplace to Napoleon: “I have no need for that hypothesis.” And, while I would not call him, unlike d’Holbach, a progenitor of Gnu Atheism, I would note that he was a scientist.
So, I’d ask Hoffman not to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because most Gnus base their anti-theism primarily on scientific grounds. Rather, let’s all hope that a humanistic AND scientific secularism can arise based on healthy doses of both classical and modern humanism plus modern scientific learning, including modern neuroscience. Why shouldn’t we celebrate how science is “informing” philosophy today?
Atheism is not an idea, big or small. It is the rejection of a fairly specific set of ideas.
Big or small ideas might form in the wake of that rejection. By rejecting God as the source of moral good, you might then ask what other sources there are and thus form some variant of Humanism. Humanism is the idea, then, not atheism.
Not an idea? Surely I’d need something in my head before i rejected or accepted it. I call those things ideas and the rejecting or accepting follows, doesn’t it?
You are so aewomse for helping me solve this mystery.
Atheism is an idea with a history that the idea or ideas of God can be rejected. There is no ‘fairly specific set’ of ideas of God. Ideas of God have histories and evolutions. Not all ideas of god include the attribution of ideas of moral good. Holders of ideas of god can be humanists. Humanism is not about ideas of god or no ideas of god – ideological or political or social movements. Humanism is an idea about the cultural spirit focused on the quest for knowledge and meaning on the works of men and women rather than on the works and commandments of God, but atheism is not a sufficient description of its content. From the time of its earliest practitioners in the west, humanism has been a celebration of human achievement in all spheres of learning, art, craft, and ethics.
I didn’t believe I had to spell it out, but apparently I do. First, my analogy is fine because the author was suggesting that there isn’t an ethical, qualitative, difference between the carriage and the Jag, and that an apprehension of God is similar. But belief in God has had many detrimental repercussions in ordinary life and is consequently much more like early medicine as it relates to our more modern medical sophistication. So, very much like the well-intentioned but uniformed doctors who prescribed a leech oriented treatment for heart disease that was later supplanted by a more informed and objectively better approach, those who believe in a God would do well to move beyond such patently absurd and frankly pernicious ideas to a more enlightened and realistic world view.
Ethical and qualitative differences aren’t the point of the analogy: it suggests that God is an explanatory phase the race went through on the way to better and more serviceable explanations. You are being moralistic; you say that people who still believe in god believe in pernicious things and frankly absurd things, and I would agree that there are believers who belong to that category. I think i have spilled plenty of ink remarking on their ignorance over the years. I am not interested in making that obvious point, nor in stating that religion/God “has had many detrimental repercussions in ordinary life.” But ordinary life was what it was–pretty much the way Hobbes described it speaking of a much earlier period–and religion in keeping learning alive during the darker chapters of the middle ages performed double duty, the better part of which was the scribal tradition and founding the universities that eventually moved beyond religion and God to other concerns. You paint a very stark and for that reason insupportable and unnuanced difference between religion and science, ignorance and enlightenment–which is why your analogy works for you but not for me. But ultimately we agree: “Those who believe in a God would do well to move beyond such patently absurd and frankly pernicious ideas to a more enlightened and realistic world view….” -More likely, the world will move on without them and gradually they will find themselves (to go back to my analogy) intellectual Amish on the highway of ideas.
Also, and I shouldn’t have to say this, a carriage and a Jag are both forms of transportation and illustrate advances that have been made in a particular field, while leeches and artificial hearts are both treatments for illness and represent advances in another field. Categorically similar? C’mon man.
Fair enough. To be honest I only came to this article through a twitter tweet and don’t know the full body of your work. Having said that, I am a little confused by your attitude toward science. Why would we want to move beyond science rather than continue to improve upon it and consequently to improve upon ourselves?
It’s not a wish, Steve: just saying that stranger things than the end of civilization have to be postulated. I suspect that the worst case scenario is a disaster in which only the Bible belt was spared–the best case, they die and asteroid misses Cambridge, Mass.
I rlealy wish there were more articles like this on the web.
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Interesting article, but I’m left somewhat bemused by it. If you’re saying that the atheists of today (in comparison to atheists of the past) are incapable of having a meaningful discussion on religious topics because they don’t approach the concept of God with enough seriousness, then I think a number of issues need to be addressed by you for me really understand the point you’re trying to back.
Foremost, your continuous reference to a singular, capital “G”, deity would lead one to the obvious conclusion that you do not take polytheism all that seriously (perhaps you disagree, but I’m merely making a judgment based on the content of the above prose, which solely speaks of the “big idea” of God/god, but never gods). You also seem to want to criticize modern atheists for their unwillingness to mourn over the nonexistence of gods (unlike you, I have no choice but to use the plural since I cannot ignore that fact that the concept is not all convergent across religious lines), like their intellectual predecessors did centuries back. This itself betrays a level of myopia on your part. As someone who is surrounded by a monotheistic conception of God, your subconscious dismissal of polytheism as a viable option in the discussion (one could say you have made “gods” a little idea, when it was once a very big idea) was probably not meant to be intentional–even though, as a nonbeliever, you are probably well aware that no argument has ever been presented that would make monotheism a more serious consideration than polytheism. Yet, you deride atheists who happen not to have any sentimental attachment to religious ideals, who saw no need of going through any sort of “failure, disillusionment, and despair” prior to fully affirming their unbelief, as being intellectually stunted because of their undramatic approach to the subject matter; and as not being serious enough to add anything of value to the discussion. But this to me sounds like the equivalent of someone telling a modern day physicist that he or she needs to take Aristotle’s misguided (and largely false) musings on physics seriously, lest he or she be guilty of turning what was once a “big idea,” into a “little idea.” Just as the modern day physicist can still do physics without feeling any vestigial sentiment towards Aristotle’s Physics, you haven’t brought forth any convincing reason as to why modern day atheists are to first sorrowfully bemoan their unbelief, in order to gain a worthwhile voice in the subject. All I’ve read is a sort of, “Well, I just kinda feel like this is the case”–to which you can’t be too shocked when the due response is, “So what?”
Another pearl of profundity, Dr. H. In respect of your delightful dressing down of atheism as beautifully expressed here and elsewhere on your blog, but not necessarily because of it, I have resigned as President of the local Humanist organization.
Like most of the other Humanist groups I’ve been in contact with, ours too has been invaded by the militant Atheists – the angry, arrogant, vitriolic, judgmental, condescending, holier-than-thou, hate-mongering, immoral, twisted, offensive, bigoted, intolerant, malevolent, contemptuous, and just plain wrong-headed atheists. And that’s just on Thursday.
But, I do like the people in my group. Most are very smart and even have a sense of humor. I have been challenged and thereby learned a lot over the years that I otherwise would not have. So, I’ll stay on as a passive member just so I can lob a few thought grenades from time to time as I am wont to do.
To that point, I sometimes feel like that guy in the old joke that Woody Allen tells at the end of “Annie Hall.” “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And, the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’” I too need the eggs.
HHIS I sohuld have thought of that!
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All good ideas turn little once large numbers of mediocre folk join. The problem with “atheism” today is that it is mostly pseudoscience. Their consistent claim that they are on the side of science actually makes science in turn look bad, and *this* now is an important problem in a technological world that wants to decide by democratic means.
This is my take on how atheism has become little from a scientistic standpoint:
So, if you ignore the best of atheist thought, you’re not left with much. Wow, what a revelation!
None of the atheist thinkers the author references argue against a caricature of religion. Read their works and listen to their speeches and you will find out why they object to religion. Of course, arguing against what they actually say will be much more difficult than having a tilt at a straw man.
Huh? What writers do I “reference”–and do you mean they don’t argue a caricature or against one? You seem to have a reading comprehension issue; I wonder if it also extends to understanding the atheist thinkers you ‘reference”–or fail to,
Who are your “little people with a small focus” by whom atheism is now “avanced”? You even reference Dawkins by name, call him “eminently nasal” and suggest that it would be good if he could “shut his repetitive trap”.
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Atheism, by its own design, should be expected to diminish in relevance as it succeeds.
So, if, as you suggest, atheism is becoming, or has become, a small idea, then we should rejoice! I would think this a good indication that it is succeeding in gaining favor.
I look forward to a day (not likely to happen in my lifetime, to be sure) when atheism is forgotten, as it is no longer necessary. We should all look forward to a day when we don’t even need to think about it, let alone discuss it.
God was never a big idea. Its the idea of cavemen who had been bullied by their father not quite being to realize that they n longer had to fear after he died. It’s really rather feeble. And the Christian god was nothing more than an obscene joke.
I tell Slacktivist all the time that he should give up the name of being a Baptist and call himself after what he acts like: an atheist. You, however, I would encourage to become an Episcopalian.
If I thought the Episcopal church would last through 2015 I would consider, but the Catholic tradition has more variety and hence much better cuisine.
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