How to Deny the Gods

In describing ‘atheism’ – provocatively – as a Christian sect I am inviting the rejoinder that ‘atheism’, as mere absence of belief, is not itself a creed. Atheists, in the abstract, need not share – and many do not share – any particular ethical, political or aesthetic tastes. They need not even share any particular cosmological or metaphysical views. Some atheists are materialists, and others are idealists. Some are socialist in orientation, and others anarchist, capitalist or conservative. There isn't even one clear thing that they reject: the very same confusion and ambiguity exists for ‘theists’ in general, or even within particular theistic traditions. If the vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision's greatest enemy,Footnote ² those who deny ‘Christ’ may be denying quite different things, depending on their social and historical circumstance. Christians themselves, in the early days, were denounced as atheistical, because they refused to honour the gods of the Roman Empire, without even the excuse that they were honouring the God or gods of their own natural tribe instead. Epicurean philosophers were considered atheistical – although they clearly stated that all the usual gods existed, somewhere in the infinite expanse of being – because they rejected the usual cultic rituals. It is no accident that ‘atheism’ has often been considered anti-social (as both Christians and Epicureans were), since the rituals that atheists rejected were ones that validated the existing social order. But of course those atheists often had their own ideas about what social order to create or to preserve – they had, in short, gods and a cult of their own, and once they won through to power themselves they imposed the cult on other people with almost as much ferocity as ever was used against them!

Those who don't believe in, or don't worship, the gods of a particular tribe may still have gods, ideals and rituals of their own. So ‘atheism in the abstract’ is not my chief concern: what can be said of modern Western atheism, especially as it is presented by its modern publicists and their followers in the online commentariat? What is it that they are opposing, and what does their opposition – both its content and its manner – reveal about their own commitments and priorities?

There are distinctions to be made even here. Before we can know what it is to disbelieve in God or the gods, we need some notion of what God or the gods might be, and what it is to believe in them. Might we reject all gods, all ideals? Is atheism the same as nihilism, the assertion that there is nothing sacred, nothing pure or holy, nothing beautiful and maybe nothing even true, except in the most pragmatic sense? There are certainly moments when it seems that this is what is meant.

So Bertrand Russell, in a fine piece of fundamentally incoherent rhetoric:

Russell went on to insist, however, that his own ideals, and putatively our ideals, both could and should be maintained against the monstrous march of time.

How or why we should attempt this fruitless task is not something, as far as I can tell, that Russell ever explained. It was apparently enough to assert that he had lofty thoughts, and especially the high-minded thought that we could know the truth, however painful our disillusionment. Jacques Monod, in his Chance and Necessity,Footnote ⁴ at least acknowledged that this deliberate disillusionment, this refusal to consider anything but the material, was our ‘free’ choice, not something that we ought to do, by any standard but ‘our’ own (or rather, his). That we might be happier with fewer lofty thoughts like this was a thought to be rejected with contempt. Russell and Monod both, in fact, were following an older creed, once labelled Stoic, but without openly declaring that the truth of things, the fateful material cosmos, was itself, in effect, God. Put aside all your parochial and personal concerns – they said – and let your heart and mind be moulded by a vision of the Truth, even though you can be sure it will do you and yours no good at all (except the comforting conviction that you are superior to the poor fools who imagine that there is a better world than this). At least the ancient Stoics hoped that this vision would enable them to bear all seeming evils, and rejoice in the Way Things Are – more easily perhaps because they were persuaded that everything was really for the ‘best’. The less comforting, more consistent, proposal is that we are not, after all, the central point of things, but unimportant accidents – and why then should we put any trust in merely human reasoning about the world? This was also Darwin's doubt: ‘With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’Footnote ⁵ Nor are we really free to ‘make our own decisions’ about how to treat our predicament, nor brag about our ‘ideals’, unless we suppose (as older theorists have sometimes done) that the human spirit is an alien intrusion into the world of matter. But that is another story.

My suspicion is that even those ‘atheists’ who most openly proclaim their own fidelity either to the Truth of the Material Cosmos or to the Indomitable Human Spirit don't actually live like that. They live, like the rest of us, within a merely human, merely parochial world, consoled by the usual hobbies – and that has always been the principal charge against all high-flown metaphysicians. The Syrian satirist, Lucian of Samosata, mocked those who signed up to the Philosophical Schools which promised to deliver equanimity and well-balanced knowledge. In the dialogue Hermotimus a long-term student of the Stoic school is shown that he has not achieved the calm and purity of mind the Stoics offered, and that his teacher – who often gets drunk and quarrelsome – hasn't either! Why exactly did he pick the Stoics, and spend twenty years of his life, and money, on that path?

The same charge, of course, applies to theists of whatever school. Hardly any of us manage to live all the time in conscious awareness of God's presence, and may find ourselves quite as overmastered by sudden misfortune or temptation as any simple sensualist! Even those who say they believe in life eternal may still be afraid of dying, just as many of those who don't can be unmoved by threats of mortal harm. We aren't moved entirely and consistently by conscious reasons, nor by whatever creed we publicly endorse. We may say that we serve our God, or the Truth of Material Science, or whatever, but in practise we will usually subside on more familiar icons: the little idols we have made to guide our conduct.

There is a familiar ambiguity about Religion, in most of its manifold varieties. On the one hand, the divine is inconceivably vaster, older, and more potent than any of the powers that ordinarily rule our lives. The point of divinity is that it exceeds our grasp,Footnote ⁸ and that we usually hope to hide ourselves from it even though we know this is impossible. The Truth – aphoristically – is what we cannot escape because it never sets, because there is no other thing than truth to take its place (as darkness replaces light) – as Heracleitos said.Footnote ⁹ The Truth, so our Greek predecessors suggested, is – allegorically – the all-seeing sky in which – and not just under which – we live.Footnote ¹⁰ On the other hand, most of us prefer to acknowledge only the familiar icons, the little gods of family and local streams or forests. Saying that ‘religions’ are human fictions is a familiar atheistical tactic, but it misses the point completely. Of course they are fictions – and so are scientific theories and the nation-state! It does not follow that we easily dispense with them – and yet, perhaps, we should. The prophet Isaiah sometime in the eighth century BC mocked those who cut down a tree and shaped it for different aims: ‘some of it he takes and warms himself; some he kindles and bakes bread on it; and some he makes into a god and prostrates himself, shaping it into an idol and bowing down before it’.Footnote ¹¹ Conversely, there can hardly be ‘anything more wretched than for a man to be in thrall to what he himself has made.’Footnote ¹² But the milder sort of atheist may amuse herself with songs, dances and conversations as easily as most unthinkingly ‘religious’ persons: this indeed may be the main sort of atheism worldwide – hoping for nothing more than a quiet mind, without any grandiose expectations for the future. What is intriguing is that this is not the form of atheism that is now most vocal.

Those who insist on following where Truth – the one thing greater than our Reason, so Augustine saysFootnote ¹³ – leads are endorsing a dictum well known to Platonists: ‘where both are friends (the Truth and one's beloved teacher) true piety is to prefer the Truth’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is always likely to be uncomfortable, and often surprising: ‘truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.’Footnote ¹⁵ It is correspondingly not unreasonable that people charged, by accident or deliberate choice, with the care of human multitudes will sometimes wish them not to be disturbed by any outrageous claims about the larger world. What effect will it have on people if they learn, or are convinced too rapidly, that the earth is moving beneath their feet, or that the blue sky above them is really an unprotected window on an unimaginable immensity? If the blueness of the blue sky and the stolid certainty of earth are both illusions might one rational response not be to try and forget it? Or at least to keep it quiet until there is no rational doubt at all?

Is remembering that larger world a good thing or a bad? Might the stewards have a point after all? Maybe even Galileo's opponents did! Many moderns, at any rate, seem equally reluctant even to consider, for example, whether there might be important natural differences between one race, or gender, and another: better not say such things unless they can be absolutely proved – and these issues are considerably less significant.Footnote ¹⁷

So far I have managed merely two sides to the argument: on the one hand, most of us, most of the time, are content to serve the little gods of house and land and family; on the other, there are those who – some of the time at least – prefer to remember a larger world, even if it is one that will end in ruin: a chance emergence from the conflicting powers of fire and ice that will at last be overthrown by ice and fire. The Norsemen at least might hope to fight their losing battle and make a little difference to the outcome. At least they – and their imagined gods – might ‘die well’ if die they must, and even if no-one remembered them.Footnote ¹⁸ But there is a further stage in atheistic detachment: the whole enterprise is pointless, and the wish for ‘honour’ or the impulse to ‘die well’ are as futile, as much a product of propaganda, as any other. Not even pleasurable sensation wholly escapes the acid. Stoic philosophers sought to deconstruct such pleasures and concomitant desires, so that they could be ‘free’ and immune to any threat or bribe. So Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor:

Aurelius did this, of course, so as to allow the mind to take a larger, longer view, but the purer sort of nihilist will consider him deluded too. Aurelius consciously deconstructed the ‘apolaustic’ life, the life merely of sensation. His own life and career effectively deconstructed the ‘active’ life: his efforts to keep the Imperial Peace and hand it on to his heir, Commodus (one of the many insane Emperors), were futile. ‘What profit does one who works get from all his labour?’Footnote ²⁰ Even the ‘theoretic’ life he preferred to live by must gradually lose its charm. If the beauties that we see around us are unreal, the effect of nature's enchantment, are not the larger beauties just as much illusion? We think the photographs taken from the Hubble Telescope are often beautiful – but the scenes they depict of episodes long ago and far away did not occur because we should find them beautiful, any more than flowers or cats or prospective sexual partners are ‘beautiful’ in themselves. All these things are illusion, and so are the charms of honour and achievement. Is anything immune? ‘Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, all is empty’.Footnote ²¹

Worshipping Human Reason

I shall return to that bleak judgement, and its underlying message. But first consider the less nihilistic sort of ‘atheist’, one who seeks to follow Truth and Reason where they lead, and happily expects this pursuit to bring her comfort of an ordinarily physical as well as a psychological sort. In times past to be atheistical was simply to be irreligious, impious. Piety lay in respecting the authorities of our day, and our ancestral traditions. Religion lay in obeying both moral and ritual requirements (not always easily distinguished). It might require us to respect, even if not obey, a child, a stranger, a sacred spring, a healthy animal. All such presences impose themselves upon us: showing contempt for them, our ancestors supposed, would earn the anger of more powerful gods. Obviously, those who pretended to swear by gods in whom they did not believe, and whose judgement they did not fear, could not be trusted to keep their vows. Obviously, those who feared no immortal judgement could not be expected to treat suppliants or other powerless strangers well. Obviously those who thought that the only good was pleasure, the only evil pain, were defenceless in the face of threats and bribes. ‘Theism’ was not a theoretical position, but a practical determination to acknowledge what was sacred in our lands and tribes. It was not – and is not – merely an explanatory hypothesis, but an inspiration. In Durkheim's words, ‘the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live’.Footnote ²² This isn't the whole truth about ‘religion’ (as Durkheim himself acknowledged), but it is a central truth.

Some of the practices our ancestors devised to remind themselves and others of their civil and personal duties, and of the terrors they faced in the larger world, are ones that we here-now deplore: they reminded themselves that we – realistically – own nothing by surrendering what they most loved to the gods of their time and place; they made each moment of the year significant by repeated and often bloody rituals; they erected monuments and memorials around the land to reinforce the stories that they told together. Alien tribes might desecrate and destroy those markers precisely to destroy native morale. And any native cynics who mocked the markers could expect rough treatment – as Alcibiades, on the mere suspicion of having defaced the city's herms, was forced to flee the city (in 415 BC).Footnote ²³ We still maintain exactly these responses – witness the abuse and the prison term for one who seemed to disrespect a war memorial, or for someone who ‘stole’ the flowers left in Diana's memory. To blaspheme is to offer public insult to something or someone that others hold in honour, and to do so precisely because they hold it in honour. It is probably better nowadays, in a pluralist society, that there should be no legal offence of blasphemy, but those who say so most vehemently sometimes forget what they themselves find blasphemous.Footnote ²⁴ This is clearly rather odd. We cannot simultaneously say – as mainstream atheists say – that there is no objective, rationally obligatory way of life and thought, that ‘right and wrong’ are only ‘social constructions’, and that our way of life and thought is obviously right! Or rather (since this is exactly what so many people say) we cannot say this without self-contradiction.

A really radical, nihilistic atheism denies that anything is sacred – not even that shibboleth of liberal modernism, the ‘happiness’ of the greatest number (in practice, the health and pleasure of the greatest number of human beings in a particular political region). ‘Human beings’ are only the current survivors of the hominid branch of mammalian evolution, with no special claim on the cosmos and no intrinsic value as ‘images of God’. Many of those who think that they are ‘atheists’ somehow retain a conviction that ‘human health and happiness’ – though perhaps not human life – is so obviously a good that everyone (every rational being, that is) must immediately acknowledge it. Lacking any reason to believe that each human life is sacred this conviction easily mutates into some form of collective hedonism, modified – as before – by an insistence on knowing and telling the Truth (usually as it is conceived by modern scientific materialists, and sometimes – it is difficult not to suspect – with malicious pleasure in discomfiting ‘believers’). A human creature that neither feels nor gives any pleasure has no value: is – precisely – redundant. A really radical atheism might prefer to remodel all our habits, all our customs, in the expectation that a properly scientific outlook will be able to devise a coherent plan of life acceptable to all (or at least to themselves), once we have broken free of the demons of our past: a project that Edmund Burke rightly deplored when it was initiated by French lawyers! ‘When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer’.Footnote ²⁵ And those who think that they are ‘properly scientific’ may be as self-deceived as any prelates who suppose that they are true Christians!

But I shall put the really radical atheist aside. Instead let me consider the currently most fashionable sort, whose gurus are such as Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and the like. In a recent gathering of self-styled atheists in Washington DC, the initial claim – one I acknowledged earlier – was that ‘atheists’ as a class have no other identifying feature than simply that they don't believe in gods. But it was quickly clear that there was at least a preferred opinion:

‘Reason, science and the power of the human mind’ are to be our guides, and the ruling assumption is that ‘the religious right’ is wrong. So also in Daniel Dennett's definition: a Bright, we are told, ‘is a person who has a naturalistic world-view, … free of supernatural and mystical elements, [whose] ethics and actions … are based on a naturalistic world-view’.Footnote ²⁷ ‘Naturalism’, it is assumed, is either established or assumed by scientific reason, and the assumption vindicated by the empirical success of ‘science’. ‘Science’, it is supposed, is at odds with ‘religion’ for at least three reasons: first, ‘religion’ is associated with an established – and perhaps tyrannical – social order that may be disarranged or ruined by ‘scientific’ discovery; second, ‘religion’ – at least in the favoured atheistical accounts – depends on a belief in ‘supernatural’ elements, while ‘science’ deals only with ‘nature’ (that is, with whatever can in principle be described as a natural, mathematically calculable transformation of what happens somewhere close in space or time); third, that ‘religion’ requires its adherents to repeat all and only what they are told, while ‘science’ is perennially self-critical and self-correcting.

It should already be clear that all these claims are dubious. Religious ritual and story are indeed often used to authorize and defend an established social order: they are also often used precisely to disrespect and deconstruct it. Conversely, ‘science’ can also be used to lend authority to the most oppressive and tyrannical regimes – witness the grand American Eugenics movement in the early part of the last century – a movement that is probably one reason why the American poor often distrust ‘scientists’ and their ‘scientific’ aims.Footnote ²⁸ Spokesmen for the great global religions have never been in any doubt that ‘religion’ is often dangerous, and that ‘religious’ story and practice often exist, exactly, to support some wicked social order. Religion is at least as dangerous as curiosity and sex. Religious devotion may have unworthy ends as easily as erotic infatuation, and may last longer. All human tribes have tried to channel it into convenient ways, and recognized the possibilities of pride, delusion, violence and greed. Hellenic Paganism also recognized, equivalently, that the gods were immortal powers who rarely cared for us: Sex, War, Curiosity and Humour (to give them their abstract titles) are powers we have to deal with. Maybe we can conceive that Zeus, the bright and overarching sky (sometimes concealed in cloud), can somehow contain and master all of them.Footnote ²⁹ Olympian religion served many ends, providing rituals to unite or purify the city and the soul, and allegories to intimate that there is one world, one justice. Those who had a different devotion, to the God of Abraham, preferred to think the Olympians themselves were devils. They were as literal-minded in their mockery as militant atheists nowadays, and very nearly as ignorant. Over in India a similar plot played out: the Hindu gods provided ceremonial to unite and purify the nations and the soul, and allegories to suggest that all things come from Brahman, the unknown absolute. Buddhist missionaries taught that even the gods were bound upon the wheel of time, and that escape was by Enlightenment, by giving up the stories and finding Nothing there (or was there Something after all, an Indestructible?). Organized religion is at once the effort to contain and harness gods (or at least religious devotion to those gods), and itself a dangerous and fissiparous institution (as fissiparous indeed as nationalism). If we are fortunate some seed of charity and proper devotion will survive the many dreadful forms religion takes, but it is absurd to suppose that disorganized religion has any better promise, or ‘to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology and human sacrifice’!Footnote ³⁰ Sex too is immensely dangerous (though some moderns apparently think this claim is almost blasphemous), and some attempts to harness it are also harmful, but no-one can seriously imagine that we should therefore all both seek and do whatever sex we please! Nor that we should all abandon it.

Nowadays, for example, they are called ‘memes’ or mental microbes! Brights suppose that those who disagree with them have been infected by parasitic memes which encourage, so they suppose, a ‘mindless devotion’ to outmoded theories of life, the universe and everything. Rationalistic science is a meme-eater, a demon exorciser – but one that suffers from the defect identified by Chesterton, that it also destroys itself.Footnote ³²

That the ‘religious’ only repeat what they are taught and that the scientifically minded are perennially self-critical is not a claim that I need spend much time deconstructing. The history of every religious tradition is so full of vehement and often violent argument between ‘believers’ as to make it obvious that the religious aren't quiescent. And my own experience of dealing, for example, with the scientists involved in animal experimentation is that they are very unwilling to consider whether they are really wrong, or even that there is a real question! Scientific institutions may be, to some extent, self-correcting, but individual scientists are as doctrinaire as the rest of us! Religious institutions are also, patently, self-correcting, even if the process sometimes takes rather longer than a human lifetime to bear fruit.

The geneticist Steve Jones recently commented that young Muslims left his lectures when he began to talk about neo-Darwinian evolution, and suggested that this was an example of the way ‘religious’ people refuse to listen to reason.Footnote ³³ I cannot comment on the precise episode, not having been there and not knowing what those young Muslims intended by walking out, but it is worth insisting that theism – and especially Abrahamic theism in its various guises – gives us a reason for valuing truth, and for thinking that it is, in the end, coherent and such as we can at least in part conceive. A.O.Lovejoy spoke of ‘the inexpugnable faith of humankind’: that there really is a truth which is not dependent on our wishes or our reasonings, and that this truth is nonetheless attainable – in part – by those who follow the right way.Footnote ³⁴ R.M. Rorty rejected both ideas as absurd.Footnote ³⁵ How anyone could sanely believe him I do not understand – but he was merely applying the logic of current naturalistic, evolutionary theory. Current evolutionary theory on the other hand suggests that we are likely to believe only what will be socially and reproductively useful (and that is therefore all we should do): the Muslims perhaps calculated accordingly that it would do them no good to let themselves be infected by a socially disadvantageous meme. And if J.B.S. Haldane was correct in thinking that ‘the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose’Footnote ³⁶ it might seem reasonable to conclude that the queerer account might be true! Chesterton better represented the orthodox Christian position in an early Father Brown story: the master criminal disguised as a Catholic priest blows his cover by attacking reason, which is, as Father Brown tells him, bad theology.Footnote ³⁷

The success, so far, of rational enquiry does not prove that this is true: we can never be sure that we have read the signs correctly, or that the very next moment will not reveal that the pattern of events has been entirely other than we supposed. Even our notion of what counts as a resemblance, or what will count as ‘doing the same thing’, has no basis in any merely logical understanding. Robert Chambers, writing in Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation, employed Charles Babbage's argument in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.Footnote ³⁹ The ‘very same computer program’ (as we would now call it) may conscientiously progress from 1 to 2 to 3 to every number up to 100,000,001. The obvious inference is that it will continue ‘in like fashion’ – yet the numbers that follow are instead 100,010,002; 100,030,003; 100,060,004; 100,100,005; 100,150, 006 ‘and so on’ until the 2672^nd term. A less imaginative scientist might have concluded only that the program was ‘defective’: Babbage recognized that the defect had only been in our perception. But though we cannot prove that we are on the right track, we may still hope we are, and continue – there being no rational alternative – in faith: a faith that is much more reasonable on theistic principles than atheistic:

Why God does not “exist”

A further interesting claim that should be questioned is that ‘religion’ essentially involves a belief in ‘supernatural’ entities. It should indeed be questioned intensively, on a variety of grounds. Not all religious traditions even have a category of ‘the supernatural’: the gods of most Mediterranean peoples, for example, emerged over time from emptiness, from nothing, and were subject to the same laws, both physical and moral, as any other creature. The God of the Platonic philosophers and the Hebrew God alone (and also His later versions) are beyond such laws, themselves the origin of all law, and the ‘place’ (so to speak) where everything takes place. As Epimenides of Crete declared, ‘in Him we live and move and have our being’.Footnote ⁴¹ As later thinkers expressed it: ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere’.Footnote ⁴² ‘We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment’.Footnote ⁴³ We cannot escape from it, and all the worlds of our imagining are here.

This God, or this account of God, is clearly – in a way – ‘supernatural’, but He is also clearly not ‘an entity’ at all, not a distinguishable individual, with component parts and dependent on good relations with the rest of reality. Theists of this stamp are characterizing and explaining Reality as a whole, not talking about Superyeti. In MacIntyre's words:

We cannot explain existence as a whole by referring to some one thing that happens also to exist. Either there is no explanation (things ‘just happen’) or it lies – as Plato said – beyond existence.Footnote ⁴⁶ But though there is a disagreement here about the nature of ‘Nature’ itself, it may still be true that theists of this stamp will prefer a ‘naturalistic’ reading of our evidence. When critics speak of ‘supernatural entities’ they may be thinking of fairies, spirits, ghosts and other such real or imagined presences that seem to transcend or ignore the usual material limitations, whether or not their natures are bound up in the same ‘natural order’. Some people report such presences, but they would, if real, be as easily assimilated to a ‘naturalistic world-view’ as any exotic beasts or extraterrestrial aliens. Other religious people, and perhaps especially those within the Abrahamic fold, distrust all such stories: either they are simply false, or else they record the effort of demons – which are also not ‘supernatural’ – to unsettle us!

Naturalism, the thesis that the cosmos works according to its own internal rules without being constantly reset or interfered with by its transcendent creator, was a theological doctrine in its beginnings, and there is no way of proving that it is true by an empirical enquiryFootnote ⁴⁷. So also was the Enlightenment decision to neglect ‘final causes’ in our account of what occurs in nature: since we do not know God's purposes, nor His techniques for realizing them, we should content ourselves with describing what occurs, and trusting to our rational – and God-given – insight to uncover useful patterns. Christians also explicitly rejected animism, and so provided the spokesmen of experimental science with their characteristic rhetoric.

Thomas Sprat, in writing his proleptic History of the Royal Society, wrote vehemently of the Real Philosophy:

He was imitating Athanasius of Alexandria (c296–373 AD):

The Christian Gospel in this interpretation determined that the spirits of groves and streams were phantoms, to be dispersed by the ‘divine appearing of the Word’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This feature of the tradition has been denounced by environmentalists who would rather that we had continued to ‘respect’ those groves and streams – but it does not seem in fact that our pagan predecessors were environmentally respectful. And the spirits that Jews, Christians and Muslims chose to ignore or exorcise were more like human projections than real alien presences: ignoring them allowed us to begin to see what other animals, other living creatures, are really doing with their lives, and perhaps to respect them as potential friends and equals rather than as dangerous spirits. Modern Atheists, in any case, seem less concerned about the damage that we routinely do to other creatures in the world – though Richard Dawkins is unusual in respecting the (other) Great Apes. Way back in 1976 he even expressed his greater concern for whales than for the human homeless.Footnote ⁵¹ His genetically determined nepotism can apparently be overridden by his rational sympathies – or by a persuasive meme!

Some atheists, it seems safe to conclude, wish to deny that the world is packed with fairies, spirits, ghosts and goblins: at the very least our fantasies and fears do not themselves have any direct effect on the way things work. They may wish that the world be governed by ‘natural law’ (that is, that it go on doing ‘the same thing’, whatever that may be) or by the operation of ‘physical nature’, and fear what they take to be the implication of a robust theism: that natural law and the present nature of the things they deal with could suddenly be suspended. Modern atheists of the sort that I am chiefly considering will also wish to deny that the world is governed by final causes, whether of an anthropocentric or a more cosmic sort.Footnote ⁵² So do many theists – or at least they would not suppose that we could ever identify such causes, or make predictions on the basis of even our likeliest guesses.Footnote ⁵³ Atheists are also often incurably literal-minded in their consideration of such ‘religious’ doctrines and stories that they cite – and so have been many theists, especially when arguing with theists of a different clan or sect! When Dawkins, at the rally in Washington that I mentioned earlier, instructed his atheistical audience to ‘ridicule and show contempt’ for religious doctrines and sacraments, including the Catholic doctrine concerning the EucharistFootnote ⁵⁴, he spoke to much the same effect as many Protestant critics of ‘transubstantiation’, without any serious consideration of what that doctrine meant, why it was ever proposed, and what other readings of the sacrament are possible. His rhetoric rather resembles that of the Cambridge Circle, as described by John Maynard Keynes:

Even philosophers – perhaps especially philosophers – use non-rational means to persuade, or at least to silence, their opponents! But philosophers especially should certainly not do this. ‘If the fungicide shares the vices of the fungus, something seems to have gone wrong’!Footnote ⁵⁶

Justice to Come

So modern atheistical critics of ‘religion’ have learnt rather too much of their manners and method from the more openly and conventionally religious, and from very bad habits in other would-be philosophical circles. And much of what they criticize or renounce has also been criticised and rejected by Abrahamic believers, perhaps especially by Protestant Christians. Have they learnt anything else from Christian tradition?

It may be true in some parts of the United States that self-proclaimed ‘atheists’ forfeit respect, and are also supposed to be ‘un-American’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘libertine’ in their sympathies: it is understandable, for reasons I gave before, that this might be true. That they are willing to endure this scorn rather than going along with the social norm suggests that they really are moved by more than their own convenience and the welfare of their kin. If atheistical critics really believed the neo-Darwinian story, would they not be doing all and only what will earn them the respect they need to reproduce and prosper? Even if they also believe that the openly religious are delaying scientific progress by objecting, for example, to the use of human embryos in research, or denying the ‘right’ of every woman to control her own reproductive destiny, there are easier ways to deal with these – precisely – religious disagreements than openly to reject ‘religion’. If ‘religious’ opinions have no place in the public sphere, after all, then neither do any contentious ‘ethical’ opinions: all legislation and all public actions to promote or to prohibit any particular practice should be based entirely on the most minimal consideration of what counts as an acknowledged public good (or better still, an acknowledged public harm). The fact that very few people – and especially very few people who oppose the ‘religious right’ – seriously adopt these libertarian or at best ‘minarchist’ policies suggests that they wish that their own contentious conception of the human good have a considerable effect on what is done.

The principles that good atheists wish to see applied – reason, science and the power of the human mind – are ones that they have imbibed from two millennia of Hebrew and Hellenic culture. The criticisms that they mount against ‘religion’ – that religious people have persecuted minority opinions, bullied unbelievers, humiliated women, waged war against the infidel and so forth – make little sense as criticisms rather than observations if there is no transcendent standard of behaviour and motivation of the sort we learnt from that supposedly wicked book Leviticus (supposed, that is, by Dawkins):

Of course the critics are entitled to charge the conventionally religious with inconsistency – but that, after all, is exactly what evolutionary theorists predict for all of us: ‘scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed’.Footnote ⁵⁹ What's wrong with being inconsistent, especially if it earns us a quiet life and healthy progeny? Again, one of the strongest and most frequently used arguments against – especially – Christian conceptions of divinity is that God's supposed omnipotence and supposed benevolence are incompatible with the existence of real evil. Critics are not interested in the careful examination of what Christian doctrine actually implies about this ‘puzzle’. The existence even of real evils is not in fact inconsistent with the claims that God ‘hates nothing that He has made’Footnote ⁶⁰ and that His power lies behind all other manifestations of power, that we all live by His agreement, and that His intentions will in the end prevail. God's power, by Rabbinic judgement, ‘is revealed in His ability to restrain himself from destroying the wicked’!Footnote ⁶¹ The real charge is not that the Christian doctrine seems to involve a contradiction (as other forms of theism don't), but that the supposed behaviour of the Christian God, as it is conceived by His critics, is simply, absolutely wrong. The appeal in fact is to a transcendent standard, by which all rulers are in the end to be judged. The Apostle Paul agreed!

There is, so Christians have in the past suggested, war in heaven, and it is not now the case that all things are done well – even if we are also, hopefully, to believe that ‘all things shall be well’.Footnote ⁶³ One of the morals that can be learnt from the Book of Job is exactly this: that Job was right to complain that justice was not being done, and right to expect that it would be. Without that expectation, without the promise and conviction that there is a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,Footnote ⁶⁴ it is at least rather difficult to sustain utopian dreams even of the transient sort that Russell imagined. There are transhumanist visionaries who seriously imagine that our progeny will be able to remake the worlds a little closer to their hearts' desire – but it can hardly be said that these are visions that owe much to ‘science’ or ‘reason’. If there is no God – if there is, that is, no central eternal purpose devoted to the creation of new partners in what the Delphic oracle once called ‘the dance of immortal love’Footnote ⁶⁵ – then the best that any of us can reasonably expect is to live our lives in moderate contentment while they last. And this too is far more than most of us will ever manage to achieve. Epicurean atheists were content to savour practicable joys, without imagining that there was any world to come, whether in an afterlife or in the years ahead, where all things would be better. The same is probably true of those Buddhist schools that have abandoned metaphysics in favour of meditation. Only people who have internalized a Christian hope for the future are likely to feed upon such dreams. It is right to add that we might not be so eager to see justice done, ‘on the great and terrible day of the Lord’,Footnote ⁶⁶ if we remembered a little more clearly who will be, as it were, in the dock!

Atheistical critics, especially the most vociferous, are, I suggest, motivated by a passionate attachment to ideas of truth and justice that depend historically and logically on mainstream Abrahamic theism – perhaps especially its Christian variety. What they reject in the mainstream, openly theistical, churches is idolatry: the easy beliefs that we are all right as we are, that prosperity is a sign of holiness, that we can change the world to our fancy merely by redescribing it. The very God they reject, the god of a decadent theism, is not the God of the Gospels or the Hebrew Scriptures. The demand that we be ‘objective’ is, exactly, a moral demand.

Atheism of the modern sort is a reaction – heretical no doubt – against an equal and opposite heresy which makes God in our image. The God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is experienced in the demand that we do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God and Maker.Footnote ⁶⁸ And are justice and mercy practices not to be adopted until we can prove them ‘true’? But that dictat is itself both irrational and unscientific. We cannot ‘prove them true’ without attempting them, any more than we can engage in scientific investigation of any theory unless we already believe, or at least provisionally accept, that the process will be worthwhile! Lucian was entitled to mock those who sold themselves to one particular philosophical creed without any good reason to believe it would be worth it – but timidly to refrain from the attempt is itself a choice, a retreat to conventional wisdom, and to the little gods of our tribe. If the Truth is not worth knowing, and we have no reason to expect that we have the power to know it even if it were, then the reasonable decision would be to prefer the fictions. Atheists even of the fiercest and rudest sorts – perhaps especially of the fiercest and rudest sort – are at least to be praised for this: that they can recognize the dangers of their own enterprise, and still wish to approve what they think true and good. But they may still be mistaken.

Whatever denies the possibility of our living our lives in love is to be rejected. Theism in the proper sense is simply that attempt.

Theism as it is widely and ignorantly imagined speaks of God as if He were an object in the outer world. Theism of a more orthodox variety acknowledges God's presence in us – or rather our presence in Him. Atheism of the sort I have been addressing treats ‘Reason’ as the God-in-us. This last sectarian and heretical choice is at least better than to worship Nobodaddy, but ‘Reason’ as we too often practice it has neglected kindness, and also a proper humility. Modern atheists who have absorbed ideas from the Christian and more generally Abrahamic tradition have too often absorbed a proud conviction that they are so much in the right as never to need to listen to any ‘unbeliever’. They have also inherited a strange combination of ideas: on the one hand, the ultimate cause and context of all things is infinite and incomprehensible; on the other, human intelligence can be expected to be raised so far as to speak and act for all things, but perhaps on the condition that it abandons or transforms its own ‘primitive’ or ‘animal’ nature. This is what marks such atheism as a specifically Christian heresy, of a kind that would not easily arise even in other Abrahamic traditions, let alone Hindu or Chinese.