The New New Atheism
Attacking "God" has become a lucrative book business. But there's
not much substance behind the latest atheist tracts.
BY PETER BERKOWITZ
Monday, July 16, 2007 12:01 a.m.
"There is nothing new under the sun," proclaims the Book of
Ecclesiastes. The rise of the new new atheism confirms this ancient
biblical wisdom.
Of course the famous words of Ecclesiastes should not be taken in a
slavishly literal sense, a technique that is all-too-common among
those who think they can refute belief in God by showing that the
Bible abounds in demonstrably false and self-contradictory
statements.
But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating
atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent
article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months
atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some
500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins's "The God
Delusion" (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens's "God Is
Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (2007); 185,000 copies
of Sam Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation" (2006); 64,100
copies of Daniel C. Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a
Natural Phenomenon"; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's "God:
The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist"
(2007).
Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's
fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have
arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus
and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of
pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the
name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality.
Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose
in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently
went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new
atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly
and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism
of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a
catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss
of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good,
lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding
once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine
presence in history.
So Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair
claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that
from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral
progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can
now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and
organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the
bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their
major arguments is astonishing.
The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently
and most forcefully and wittily in "God Is Not Great" by my friend
Mr. Hitchens. It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable
of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that
only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the
gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart.
But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence
or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil. Consider Mr.
Hitchens's contention, elaborated at length and with gusto, that
religion by its very nature compels people to behave cruelly and
violently. According to Mr. Hitchens, religion educates children to
hate nonbelievers, encourages grown-ups to engage in slaughter and
conquest for God's greater glory, and obliges the "true believer"
to restlessly circle the globe subduing peoples and nations until
"the whole world bows the knee."
The bloody history of oppression and war undertaken on behalf of
the gods and God, from time immemorial, makes all decent people
shudder. But Mr. Hitchens knows perfectly well that human beings
are not born in Rousseauian purity and freedom, and then made
savage by the imposition of the chains of religion. Therefore, he
should have asked whether and to what extent the varieties of
religion have inflamed or rather disciplined humanity's powerful
built-in propensity, attested to by social science, to fight and
kill. But he didn't.
Such a question opens intriguing possibilities. Mr. Hitchens mocks
the crudity of the biblical principle known in Latin as lex
talionis, or an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a
hand, a foot for a foot." But suppose, as Jewish teaching suggests,
that the biblical principle put an end to the practice of taking a
leg for a foot and a life for an eye, and in its place established
a principle that, though differently interpreted today, remains a
cornerstone of our notion of justice--that the punishment should
fit the crime.
Similarly, Mr. Hitchens heaps scorn on the biblical story of
Abraham's binding of Isaac, in which, at the last moment, an angel
stays Abraham's hand. What kind of barbarian, wonders Mr. Hitchens,
would prepare to sacrifice his son at God's command, and what kind
of morally stunted individuals would honor such a man, or the deity
who made the demand? Yet Mr. Hitchens's categorical claim that
religion poisons everything is undermined by the common
interpretation according to which God's testing of Abraham taught,
among other things, that the then widespread practice of
child-sacrifice was contrary to God's will, and must be put to an
end forever.
At the same time, Mr. Hitchens has next to nothing to say about the
historical role of religion, particularly Christianity,
particularly in America, in nourishing the soil in which our widely
and deeply shared beliefs in liberty, democracy and equality took
root and grew strong--a subject dealt with perceptively by Yale
professor of computer science David Gelernter in his recent book
"Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion."
Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes
against humanity, dwarfing religion's sins, committed in the name
of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the
challenge with sophistry: "It is interesting to find that people of
faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than
fascists or Nazis or Stalinists." But who is behaving defensively
here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that
religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out
the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity's evil
propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
Nor is his case bolstered by his observation that 20th-century
totalitarianism took on many features of religion. That only brings
home the need to distinguish, as Mr. Hitchens resolutely refuses to
do, between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious
teachings. And it begs the question of why the 20th-century embrace
of secularism unleashed human depravity of unprecedented
proportions.
Even were he to concede that religion doesn't poison everything,
Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the
findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to
the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually
operates--in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and
modern physics--he concludes that "all attempts to reconcile faith
with science and reason are consigned to failure and
ridicule."
This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay
Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a "great
paleontologist" and whose authority he invokes in support of the
proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution.
Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are
religious, Gould commented amusingly that "Either half my
colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism
is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs--and
equally compatible with atheism."
These lines are quoted in "The Dawkins Delusion," by Alistair
McGrath, who holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Oxford,
where he is now professor of historical theology, and by his wife
Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who studied experimental psychology at
Oxford and is currently a lecturer in the psychology of religion at
the University of London. According to the McGraths, Gould was
correct to think that both conventional religious belief and
atheism are compatible with natural science, in part because "there
are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to
lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method." Such
questions--toward which the mind naturally wanders, though it is
susceptible to ambush by the crude scientism of which Mr. Hitchens
occasionally avails himself--include: Where did the universe come
from, and is it governed by purpose?
As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and
contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw
man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the
Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story
of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth
and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr.
Hitchens's readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame.
However, isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible
from the communities and interpretive traditions that have
elaborated its teaching is invalid. It is like deriving the meaning
of the Constitution today by reading its provisions without
reference to "The Federalist Papers," which provides authoritative
commentary on its principles; without reference to the two
centuries of cases and controversies through which the Supreme
Court has sought to construe its meaning; and without reference to
the two centuries of experience through which the American people
have sought to put the institutional framework it outlines into
practice.
In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be
wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge
consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an
educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his
atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly
dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it
colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.
Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new
new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the
whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political
consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow
citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world
wide.
Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today,
the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and
equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in
America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great
evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial
distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast
majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this
very moment is pledged to America's destruction.
Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in
wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings
themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings,
none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is
set apart because all human beings--woman as well as man the Bible
emphasizes--are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).
That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true.
But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in
the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and
women--a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for
which they provide no compelling alternative foundation--is reason
enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is
reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings
struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.