http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1932066/posts
What the New Atheists Don't See, To regret religion is to regret
Western civilization
cerc ^ | 2007 | THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Posted on 11/28/2007 7:54:23 PM PST by Coleus
The British parliament's first avowedly atheist member, Charles
Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out
his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds.
God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later
atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it
proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter.
He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched
fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his
existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up
with a memorable line: "God doesn't exist -- the bastard!"
Sartre's wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is
not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God.
(Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.)
At the very least, Sartre's line implies that God's existence would
solve some kind of problem -- actually, a profound one: the
transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we
grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full
of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers
tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is
only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death
as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say
that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning
of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in
existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we
should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the
first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of
them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.
Of course, men -- that is to say, some men -- have denied this truth
ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life
based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the
attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can
never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy.
The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by
human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible
evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books
has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the
inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel
Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist
Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have
all written books roundly condemning religion and its works.
Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of
authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear
to think that they are saying something new and brave.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear
to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine
themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in
1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then
wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to
agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand.
Yet with the possible exception of Dennett's, they advance no argument
that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14
(Saint Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence gave me the
greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of
the argument from design).
I first doubted God's existence at about the age of nine. It was at
the school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to
understand that if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart
the assembly hall. I wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I
opened my eyes suddenly, I would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw
instead, it turned out, was the headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the
prayer with one eye closed and the other open, with which he beadily
surveyed the children below for transgressions. I quickly concluded
that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he said about the need to keep
our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that, why should I believe in
his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs often originate, to be
disciplined later in life (if we receive enough education) by
elaborate rationalization.
Dennett's Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new
atheist books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people.
Dennett argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms -- for
example, by our inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our
survival on the African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to
threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to
show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a
necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs,
including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the
same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either
we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of
their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or
all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only
evolutionary adaptations -- and thus biologically contingent rather
than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox
of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products
of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be
known to be true.
One striking aspect of Dennett's book is his failure to avoid the
language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation,
despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence
One striking aspect of Dennett's book is his failure to avoid the
language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation,
despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence: the
coyote's "methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for
efficiency." Or: "The stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we
look." Or again: "This is a good example of Mother Nature's stinginess
in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the
methods." I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. (And Dennett
is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto, so
rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a book as long as
his to correct them, says on its second page that religion prevents
mankind from facing up to "reality in all its naked cruelty." But how
can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or
transcendent purpose?)
No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the
layman and that he could translate all his statements into a language
without either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he
would argue that his language is evidence that the spell still has a
hold over even him, the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity.
But I am not sure that this response would be psychologically
accurate. I think Dennett's use of the language of evaluation and
purpose is evidence of a deep-seated metaphysical belief (however
caused) that Providence exists in the universe, a belief that few
people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of existence itself,
escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to condescend to
those poor primitives who still have a religious or providential view
of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable than
Dennett's metaphysical faith in evolution.
Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of
Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist
website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require
commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their
metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist's Ten
Commandments ends with the following: "Question everything."
Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad
infinitum?
Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George
Washington died in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it
and find myself still, at the end of my efforts, having to make a
leap, or perhaps several leaps, of faith in order to believe the
rather banal fact that I had set out to prove. Metaphysics is like
nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always
returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right to
question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all
possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible
occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.
For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to
be: "Who is genociding whom?" To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting
from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption
of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness
and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris's book The End of
Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book's nastiness; it makes
Dawkins's claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look
sane and moderate.
Harris tells us, for example, that "we must find our way to a time
when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other
future worth wanting." I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not
see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by
the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted.
Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical
imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-
will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt,
but not open to a generous interpretation.
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the
following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have
read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: "The link between
belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions
are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing
them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates
an ordinary fact about the world in which we live."
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three
sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about
genocide would seem to be: "Who is genociding whom?" To adapt
Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at
universal madness.
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the
kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-
disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents
sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can
be summed up in Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great:
"Religion spoils everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The
emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow
Airport bomber -- a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone
communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news,
except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn't be interested
in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often
been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous
atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have
had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it
amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior,
neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime
and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and
IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced
machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and
then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen
creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious
sense), there is always much to find.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our
civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To
regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its
monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the
absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not
murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human
character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it
one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate)
of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for
both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily,
replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is
hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will
become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish
still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on
the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even
gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The
painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of
Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string,
forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century
Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for
this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of
those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated
your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble
cabbage -- or of anything else -- quite so much for granted, but will
see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent
call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it
arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to
quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life
painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between
Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and
massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet
something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence,
an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a
representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of
transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists
with those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. I was visiting some friends at their country house in
England, which had a library of old volumes; since the family of the
previous owners had a churchman in every generation, many of the books
were religious. In my own neo-atheist days, I would have scorned these
works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity and containing nothing of
value. I would have considered the authors deluded men, who probably
sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have enumerated.
God doth not always strike with an intuition of sin: sometimes he
regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes, the glory of his mercy in
our cure.
But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself
moved: much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the
books of the new atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of
Norwich; though a moderate Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the
English civil war and lost his see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was
still Lord Protector.
Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I
opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the
Principal Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on
the sickness of Hezekiah:
Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is
surprised with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his
enemies, smites him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all
afflictions, when he redeems us from one.
To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his
deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a
favour, were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an
uncharitable censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood
can avoid the just desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not
always strike with an intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the
benefit of our trial; sometimes, the glory of his mercy in our cure.
Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however
unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our
sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the
existential reality of human life that we shall always need
consolation, no matter what progress we make. Hall continues:
When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to
succeed him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his
death: "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live."
It is no small mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our
end. . . . No soul can want important affairs, to be ordered for a
final dissolution.
This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something
much deeper -- a universal respect for the condition of being human.
For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of
controlling man's pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his
ill fortune. Here is an extract from Hall's Characters of Virtues and
Vices:
...upon whom, all smaller crosses light as hailstones upon a roof;
and, for the greater calamities, he can take them as tributes of life
and tokens of love; and, if his ship be tossed, yet he is sure his
anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he could be no other than
he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in his carriage;
because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he hath, but
in the mind that values them.
He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than
all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget
it: that knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many
traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and
stands now equally armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at
home; so as he can cross his will without a mutiny, and so please it
that he makes it not a wanton: that, in earthly things, wishes no more
than nature; in spiritual, is ever graciously ambitious: that, for his
condition, stands on his own feet, not needing to lean upon the great;
and can so frame his thoughts to his estate, that when he hath least,
he cannot want, because he is as free from desire, as superfluity:
that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of prosperity;
and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller crosses
light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he
can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship
be tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were
his, he could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no
whit higher in his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies
not in the things he hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is
not original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who
believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than
mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this
world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this
world are all that there is.
In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary scenes --
ordinary, of course, for his times -- and derives meaning from them.
Here is his meditation "Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse":
How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and
there sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling
with the other sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues
of detractors: if a man have any infirmity in his person or actions,
that they will be sure to gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his
commendable parts and well-deservings are passed by, without mention,
without regard. It is an envious self-love and base cruelty, that
causeth this ill disposition in men: in the mean time, this only they
have gained; it must needs be a filthy creature, that feeds upon
nothing but corruption.
Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded
moments) that the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured
horses, but rather that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us
to reflect imaginatively on our morality. He is not raising a
biological theory about flies, in contradistinction to the theory of
evolution, but thinking morally about human existence. It is true that
he would say that everything is part of God's providence, but, again,
this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in
natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
Let us compare Hall's meditation "Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted"
with Harris's statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed
for their beliefs:
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose,
prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls;
prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we
live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well
as the prose; and I prefer Hall's charity to Harris's intolerance.
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this
sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than
clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by
some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten
eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of
less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no
uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who
have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may
have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough,
that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these
public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled
under the sense of my own.
Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound,
more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord
bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose
that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of
the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could
ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose;
and I prefer Hall's charity to Harris's intolerance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Theodore Dalrymple. "What the New Atheists Don't See." City Journal
(Autumn, 2007).
City Journal is published by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank
whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster
greater economic choice and individual responsibility.
THE AUTHOR
Theodore Dalrymple is a former psychiatrist and prison doctor. He
writes a column for the London Spectator, contributes frequently to
the Daily Telegraph, is a contributing editor of the Manhattan
Institute's City Journal. He lives in France and is the author of In
Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, Our Culture,
What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Life at the Bottom:
The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, and So Little Done.
