‘through their own words / they will be exposed / they've got a severe case of / the emperor's new clothes.’ – Sinéad O'Connor, ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’ (1990)
With the publication of The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006) Richard Dawkins became enthroned as the unofficial ‘Emperor’ for a cadre of writers advancing a rhetorically robust form of anti-theism dubbed ‘The New Atheism’ by Wired Magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf. Many have cheered Dawkins and his court, seeing in their writings just what they long to see. For, after the fashion of the fairy-tale Emperor's fabled new clothes, the ‘new atheism’ has seen naturalism wrapping itself in a fake finery of counterfeit meaning and purpose.
The fake meaning comes in the guise of moral outrage at the over-generalised behaviour of people who believe in God. Most fundamentally, there's outrage at believer's supposed failure to live up to their intellectual obligations. This outrage is encapsulated by the (unsubstantiated) claim that ‘faith’ means belief without, or even contrary to, evidence and reason. It's this misunderstanding of faith (which means ‘trust’, and is compatible with evidence) that leads Dawkins to argue: ‘Non-fundamentalist, “sensible” religion… is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching… that unquestioning faith is a virtue.’Footnote 1 The fake purpose comes in the form of an intellectual-cum-socio-political crusade against theism and for a naturalistic worldview. In this way, Dawkins' neo-atheism offers an apparently valuable meaning and purpose to people's lives, a daring intellectual identity and a community of like-minded fellow-pilgrims. And the Emperor's new weavers offered him the finest robes that ever he did see…
The sense of meaning offered by Dawkins' new atheism is a fake because he denies the reality of any objective moral values capable of justifying such outrage. According to Dawkins:
there is a non-overlapping and exhaustive distinction between ideas that are false or true about the real world (factual matters, in the broad sense) and ideas about what we ought to do – normative or moral ideas, for which the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ have no meaning.Footnote 2
How can anyone fail to live up to their normative intellectual obligations if there's no such thing as a normative obligation; if there is (as Dawkins writes) ‘no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’Footnote 3? Indeed, how could anyone feel an intellectual obligation to agree with a worldview that denies any reality to intellectual obligations?
Moreover, when we ask how the new atheism conceives of our intellectual obligations, we discover a theory of knowledge so narrow as to be self-contradictory:
Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.Footnote 4
Dawkins limits what counts as evidence so tightly (conflating evidence with empirical evidence) that his encouragement is self-defeating, because it can't be justified with anything that he'd count as evidence. The assertion that all beliefs must be justified on the basis of other beliefs before they count as rational entails an infinite regress of justifications that can never be accumulated. Dawkins' own statement implores us not to believe a word he says – a fine example of sawing through the branch upon which one is seated.
The purpose offered by the new atheism is counterfeit because naturalism is the pre-eminent metaphysics of nihilism. William Provine proclaims his atheistic creed: ‘There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death… There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either’.Footnote 5 Dawkins likewise rejects God, inherent cosmic purpose, life after death and any objective value, as well as libertarian free will and responsibility:
As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.Footnote 6
But how can anyone (e.g. a religious believer) be responsible for not living up to their intellectual obligations if they aren't free to be responsible for anything in the first place? If everything about a person is ‘governed by the laws of physics’, blaming them for their intellectual failings would make as much sense as Newton blaming gravity for giving him an apple-sized bump on the head. Indeed, if all beliefs are caused by nothing but the laws of physics, how can we rationally privilege one effect of these laws (e.g. belief in atheism) over another (e.g. belief in theism)?
The Emperor's rhetorically fine new clothes are logically incoherent; which is as much as to say that they have no substance in the land of truth. Despite appearances, the Emperor is naked. Agnostic John Humphrys is ready to take up the call of Hans Christian Andersen's innocent child in the crowd:
The atheists… must prove, rather than merely assert, that mainstream religion is a malign force in the world [but how can they do this whilst denying any objective reality to moral malignancy?]. They cannot rely on a small minority of religious extremists to do that for them or hark back to the brutality of earlier centuries. And they must offer an alternative to the millions who rely on their beliefs to make sense of their lives [but how can they do this whilst denying any objective reality to our intellectual obligations?]. Unlike the militant atheists I do not think people are stupid if they believe in God. For vast numbers of ordinary, thoughtful people it is impossible not to. Of course, this may be the result of indoctrination at a very early age – but it may also be a considered reluctance to accept that the material world is all there is.Footnote 7
In Anderson's fairytale, the Emperor allows himself to be deceived by the swindlers who sell him a delusion of grandeur. In the case of the new atheism, it is the Emperor (Dawkins) who is both selling and buying his own delusion. Dawkins' atheism rests upon self-contradictory claims about rationality, morality and responsibility. The Emperor of the new atheism has nothing on at all.
