Comprehensive overviews of atheism as a philosophical position are rare. Until the publication of this varied and interesting volume, the most substantive collection to have appeared was Michael Martin's Cambridge Companion to Atheism in 2007. Interdisciplinary inquiries into atheism are virtually non-existent. This state of affairs contrasts sharply with the impressive array of synoptic treatments of the various positions against which atheism defines itself – natural theology, philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, analytic theology, and so on. In fact, it is a mark of its vigour as a discipline that contemporary philosophy of religion has entertained and scrutinized atheistic rejoinders at a level that have made synoptic treatments of atheism redundant.
Given the profusion of work in philosophy of religion in the last half-century, how are we to explain the relative absence of attention to atheism as a philosophical movement and system? One of the editors of this work, Stephen Bullivant, would answer this question by citing the definitional vagueness at the heart of atheism. He settles in chapter 1 on construing the term as denoting ‘the absence of belief in the existence of God or gods'; and, as he implies, any system of thought that defines itself with an alpha-privative will struggle to develop a unified, constructive philosophical position. This explains why the range of tensions and differences among atheists is at least as great as those that arise among theistic philosophers.
In an effort to adopt some sort of methodological rationale for reviewing a volume of forty-six substantive essays, I have taken the liberty of focusing on those likely to be relevant to the readership of this journal, leaving to one side alas the eighteen interesting pieces contained in part V (Atheism and the Social Sciences), part VI (Global Expressions), and part VII (Atheism and the Arts).
One of the virtues of the historical inquiry into atheism with which the collection begins is that it throws into sharp relief how rare a position it was in western thought until the seventeenth century. Even beyond this point it is not quite clear what those who were accused of atheism really did believe, since a charge was little more than a devastatingly effective slogan to wield for settling political scores. Some point to this as evidence that genuine atheists were few and far between well into the early modern period, others as explaining why, in spite of the absence of evidence, atheism may have exerted a subterranean influence on philosophers for much longer than is commonly realized. It is difficult to know quite what to do with these arguments from silence. Suffice it to say that, as David Sedley and Mark Edwards cogently demonstrate, to the extent that atheism did exist as a distinctive philosophical position prior to the medieval period, it looked very different indeed from the variety of views that came to be espoused in the French Enlightenment.
It is perhaps inevitable that the contributions to part I on the philosophical merits of atheism cover ground that has been thoroughly tilled elsewhere. That said, the section contains some insightful and rigorous tours d'horizon of terrain that, incontestably, looks very different when glimpsed through an atheological prism. Tim Mawson takes issue in chapter 2 with Bullivant's slender definition of atheism as the mere absence of theistic belief: if it is to be of any interest at all, atheism must show that such belief is not reasonable. A. C. Grayling nicely enumerates the most well-known criticisms of the main theistic arguments in chapter 3, though it was somewhat disheartening to find a public intellectual of his stature claiming in print that the argument for God's existence from moral realism was ‘refuted by the existence of good atheists'. As an objection, this is too obviously flawed for many formulations and critiques of the argument to address it. It hardly improves matters for Grayling to cite the Euthyphro Dilemma as a second decisive objection to the argument. Now he may well be correct in his judgement that this ancient objection succeeds. But, to understate matters a little, this problem has been the focus of some discussion in the intervening millennia, and this has moved the debate to an undeniably rigorous philosophical level. And, although it is impossible to cover everything in these compressed surveys, it is quite remarkable nonetheless that – with the exception of a response to Plantinga's ontological argument – the most contemporary theistic defender Grayling invokes is William Paley. The refusal to open any kind of conversation with the sophisticated exponents of analytic philosophy of religion does not inspire confidence.
By contrast, one of the finest living philosophical atheists, Graham Oppy, offers a characteristically rigorous – if necessarily condensed – survey of both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ arguments for atheism. Included within it is one of the best taxonomies of atheological arguments this reviewer has come across. As Oppy defines them, direct arguments for atheism point to some inconsistency or internal incoherence in a theistic claim. This might be with respect to the coherence of religious language (‘meaningless' for the linguistic positivist; ‘ungrammatical’ for the Wittgensteinian), or to logical consistency (divine attributes jointly and/or severally contradict themselves or some empirical fact). Arguments of this sort may also claim that theism is untenable in light of philosophical analyses of the nature of causation, laws of nature, spacetime, and so on. Indirect arguments, by contrast, would be arguments for a position that is incompatible with theism – most obviously, metaphysical naturalism. Oppy then sets out in admirably compact form nine arguments for why certain features of reality are better explained on such a framework.
The historical section of this collection is especially strong. Taken together, the essays here represent a superb and balanced historical survey of their subject, in particular Alan Kors on the Enlightenment (chapter 13), David Nash on the nineteenth century (chapter 14), and Callum Brown on the twentieth century (chapter 15). Denis Robichaud shows that although humanism is a necessary condition for atheism to gain a foothold, it is by no means a sufficient one (chapter 12). Far from being hostile to theological ideas, Renaissance paeans to humanity of the sort we find in Marsilio Ficino or Pico della Mirandola would be scarcely intelligible without them.
In light of these careful historical analyses, Stephen Law's articulate defence of ‘humanism’ as structurally complicit with atheism (chapter 17) may come as a surprise to some. In addition to reinventing itself as ‘humanistic’, atheism also lays claim to the mantle of a ‘scientific’ vision of the world on the basis of its widespread commitment to naturalism. This is considered in terms of atheism's conceptual connections to the physical sciences (by Victor J. Stenger in chapter 28) and Darwinism (an excellent contribution from David P. Barash in chapter 27). The highlight of part IV, however, is Michael Ruse's survey of naturalism and the scientific method, which draws on the familiar and helpful distinction between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism (chapter 25). Ruse accepts that there are certain givens that might appear not to be easily accommodated – in particular, a libertarian or compatibilist account of free will, which for Ruse is a Moorean fact – but argues that these are perfectly consistent with methodological naturalism. He does not make the same consistency claim, it should be noted, with respect to metaphysical naturalism.
Few specialists on either side of the dispute between theism and atheism take the philosophical arguments of the ‘New Atheism’ with much seriousness. But the editors are to be commended for deciding, in the interests of comprehensiveness, that this collection could not afford to overlook it, if only as a significant cultural phenomenon. Thomas Zenk does an admirable job of laying bare the divergent stances of those who ride together under the banner of the New Atheism (chapter 16), for it is very difficult to find any substantive philosophical common ground between its figureheads. Indeed the term itself is not a happy one. First, it is very difficult to think of any ‘new’ arguments that have emerged against theism or in favour of atheism (or, at least, any new arguments that are more compelling than previous ones). Second, a widespread softening of atheism to the claim that God probably does not exist makes it questionable whether all of the New Atheists qualify for the label ‘atheist’ any more than they would for the label ‘new’.
Despite its indubitably impressive interdisciplinary scope, this volume retains a strong analytic flavour. This is the source of one of its most notable shortcomings, namely the relatively indifferent treatment of deep and persistent atheological currents in continental philosophy. This is in part, no doubt, because of analytic philosophy's widely assumed historical complicity with atheism, of which Charles Pigden offers a witty and insightful overview (chapter 20). Still, even those most hostile to the continental approach may find themselves surprised that there is no mention of Heidegger and the atheological legacy he bequeathed to the phenomenological and existentialist traditions that followed on from him, a generation that Richard Wolin has labelled as ‘Heidegger's Children’. That German thought, and Heidegger in particular, was the wellspring of the more popularizing philosophical atheism of Sartre and Camus is not even alluded to in Alison Stone's otherwise lucid and compact overview of existentialism (chapter 18). Moreover, there are only passing references to Derrida and Foucault, while Badiou and Žižek are examined too cursorily in terms of the role of atheism in their engagement with Marxist thought. Doubtless there was a sound editorial rationale for omitting these distinctive and influential currents, but if this was the case, a volume aspiring to an exhaustive treatment of its subject should probably have explained this to its readers.
One may be forgiven for thinking that this volume is chasing a quarry at least as elusive as that which the quarry itself is supposed to be chasing. This is not due to any shortcomings of its skilful editors or learned contributors, but instructive rather of the serious difficulties involved in setting out a clear conceptual map of atheism. Many ingenious solutions are proposed, but in the final analysis a strong impression arises that atheism in all its varieties must reinvent itself as a constructive philosophical thesis if it is to maximize its credibility. Thus several contributors attempt to alchemize atheism into humanism in the historical chapters and naturalism in the chapters on philosophy and science. This tendency brings the mercurial character of atheism into sharp relief, and underscores a fundamental tension between those who invoke monotheism-free classical utopias in which human beings take centre stage, and those who see that the implications of metaphysical naturalism for this starry-eyed vision of atheological humanism are not at all promising.
In sum, this collection will be warmly welcomed by philosophers of religion, philosophers of science, historians of ideas, and metaphysicians for the many fresh angles it opens up on familiar difficulties with defining atheism (alongside its cousins, naturalism and humanism) and with charting its largely subterranean influences in the historical tradition. Given the poverty of philosophical argument in popular presentations of atheism, the volume provides an especially gratifying richness of reflection on its strengths and weaknesses as a full-fledged philosophical outlook.
