“What has happened to consistent, coherent atheism?” is the question being asked by Michael Robbins, who’s reviewing Nick Spencer’s book Atheism: The Origin of the Species for Slate [1].
Spencer’s book examines what he calls the ‘creation myth’ of the orgin of modern atheism, different versions of which are embraced by most of the ‘New Atheists’ – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and others.
Once upon a time, people lived in ignorant superstition, offering sacrifices to monsters in the sky. Then some clever folks used special weapons called “science” and “reason” to show that the monsters had never really existed in the first place. Some of these clever folks were killed for daring to say this, but they persevered, and now only really stupid people believe in the monsters.
Robbins is a Christian, (as is Spencer), but he’s not
interested in attacking atheism, but in bemoaning its decline. He points out that popular atheism rarely even shows up to the important disputes about God’s existence, instead resorting to straw-man arguments, misunderstandings and factual errors that are so egregious that they almost seem willful, and blithe dismissals of the holes and lacunae in materialist accounts of being.
It’s this last problem in particular that leads Robbins to despair of the New Atheists, and long for the clarity of Nietzsche on morality and its origins.*
Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority of the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of the Übermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary has lost the contexts from which its significance derived, and no amount of Dawkins-style hand-waving about altruistic genes will make the problem go away.
…
The point is not that a coherent morality requires theism, but that the moral language taken for granted by liberal modernity is a fragmented ruin: It rejects metaphysics but exists only because of prior metaphysical commitments. A coherent atheism would understand this, because it would be aware of its own history. Instead, trendy atheism of the Dawkins variety has learned as little from its forebears as from Thomas Aquinas, preferring to advance a bland version of secular humanism. Spencer quotes John Gray, a not-New atheist: “Humanism is not an alternative to religious belief, but rather a degenerate and unwitting version of it.” How refreshing would be a popular atheism that did not shy from this insight and its consequences.
Neither Robbins nor I are arguing here that “the Problem of Good” is necessarily unsolvable for atheists (I think it ultimately is, but that’s for another day!). But it is undoubtedly a real problem, and any atheist committed to rationality and consistency needs to confront it (in the same way that believers cannot simply ignore the Problem of Evil). The New Atheists do not, and this is to everyone’s detriment.
I’m a practising Catholic, and think that classical theism offers a vastly more coherent and convincing account of the universe as it actually exists than does naturalism. But I also agree with the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart when he says that [2] “Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions.” But the self-contradictory, triumphalist parody of non-belief offered by the New Atheists is not such a manifestation.
Some of the sharpest, most deep-thinking people I know are atheists (indeed, I’m going out with one!). They deserve better from their populists than they’re getting – as do we all.
* A cynic might point out that if one is nostagalgic for the clarity of Nietzche on any topic, things must indeed be bad…