Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Atheism is big these days. Have you noticed? And by “big” I don’t mean that a lot of people don’t believe in god (that’s been the case for a while); I mean that a lot of people are going around proselytizing for the non-church of atheism. You see this a lot on internet dweebgroups like Reddit, where many posters seem positively militant about their nonbelieving. Now, I’m someone who has always sort of leaned towards disbelief where higher powers are concerned. And yet this militant atheist stuff strikes me as being pretty weird. For one thing, I wonder if these kids realize that they’re being just as obnoxious as the do-gooding Christian busybodies they claim to detest. For another, there’s a strain of elitism in their proselytizing that I find off-putting. These guys actually think they’re smarter than everyone else because they’ve taken the supposedly bold step of casting off religion. Reminding them that Newton and Einstein both believed in a god of some kind, or at least in the possibility of such a thing, fails to impress them. They either believe that Newton and Einstein were just putting on believin’ airs or, well, they think they’re smarter than Newton and Einstein. (Where scientists go, these folks tend to favor Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, often with an intensity that rivals the love of teenage girls for Justin Bieber.)
[Note: As Peter Winkler’s helpful comment makes clear, there is considerable controversy regarding what Einstein actually believed (or didn’t believe). The stuff I’m seeing online indicates that he was more or less agnostic — he didn’t subscribe to the idea of a personal god, but he believed in an overarching order of the universe, which he thought might be synonymous with a god-like presence. He also seems to have been sympathetic to Buddhism. The bottom line is that he was not a self-satisfied atheist.]
Of course, these folks (let’s call them the New Atheists) have their own set of beliefs. (Quick tip: everyone has his own set of beliefs, no matter how religious or non-religious he claims to be.) They’re liberals, basically, and I’m far from the first to point out that liberalism constitutes its own sort of religion, albeit one that is mostly non-mystical in nature. What’s funny about this is that the New Atheists don’t see themselves as adhering to a set of beliefs which may or may not be correct. No, in their minds the values they hold dear have been scientifically proven to be correct. Everyone, to their mind, really is equal. And race really doesn’t exist. And gender really is a cultural construct. And diversity really does equal strength. And birth control really is a universal human right. If you question any of these tenets, the liberal will likely tell you that “studies have shown,” which is the hardcore liberal’s version of pointing to his priest and saying, “See, he thinks so too.” (I stole this last idea from some blog commenter, whose handle I can’t recall at the moment.)
I don’t mean to suggest that these liberal values are either wrong or bad, just that they aren’t supported by anything aside from liberal ideology. There’s no more proof to support the belief that diversity equals strength than there is to support the notion that taking Yahweh’s name in vain constitutes a sin. Both beliefs derive from value systems, not from the scientific method. On the liberal side, the value in play is, I guess, that of anti-nationalism, which seems to be an outgrowth of the recent unpleasantness concerning those Nazi guys. On the Judeo-Christian side, there’s the value of modesty, as well as an exhortation to avoid getting too big for thy britches.
Are either of these values wrong? I wouldn’t say that, though the liberal disdain for nationalism and political organization along racial lines seems almost too new to judge thoroughly. (It’s like someone came up with these ideas about 70 years ago, and we’ve all been forced to swallow them without complaint, regardless of how they’ve worked out in the short-term.) In fact, I think there’s some significant overlap between the liberal and Christian belief systems. They both stress compassion and charity, for instance. And they both love to hate on heretics. It’s also worth noting that both evolved to be inseparable from the political systems of their day — they’re bureaucratic to their very cores. The Catholic Church, remember, was in many ways the successor to the Roman Empire, and it was only through the church that Europe was able to maintain a somewhat unified cultural-political identity during the Middle Ages. In some ways, it’s probably accurate to say that the European Union — that most liberal of political entities — is today trying to fill the very same role that the Catholic Church filled over 1000 years ago. It’s funny to think about, isn’t it?
It seems to me that what the New Atheists reject are not the values of religion (or not all of them, at any rate) but the myth and mysticism of it — the backstory and the incense, basically. They point out that a man can’t possibly walk on water, then use that to refute the whole of Christianity. All of that miracle stuff — it strikes them as hogwash, as fantasy. And yet ours is a culture in which fantasy plays a major and ever-increasing role, in which grown men and women are interested in superheroes and role-playing in a way that people would have regarded as grotesque and developmentally backwards as recently as the 1970s. What to make of this contradiction?
My very rough and rather poorly thought-out take is that modern man, in elevating himself and his desires to the very center of the universe, has set himself outside of (and perhaps even over) the matrix of meaning in which the men of earlier epochs saw humans as being integral players. Thus, fantasy has become something wholly external and little more than entertainment. To the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, fantasy really meant something. The gods — the superheroes of their day — were synonymous with states, with values, with attributes, even with creation itself, and to invoke a deity like Dionysus — to become, in a sense, possessed by him — was to tap into something elemental and larger than yourself. This was a belief system in which man’s spiritual needs — for order, for meaning, for values, for stories, for ritual, for art, for wonderment — were all accommodated, overlapped, and constantly embroidered upon, in which no element of existence could be shunted into a corner or compartmentalized in a neat little experiential box. I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as being a pretty sophisticated — perhaps even more sophisticated than our current system, in which snarky nerdmeisters act like they know more about the Great Mysteries than all the wise men and women of history combined. (C’mon, face it: you don’t know what’s going on any more than I do. And neither did Carl fucking Sagan.)
Maybe religion would be easier for the New Atheists to take if they considered the myth and the mysticism in context. It also might help if they considered their own set of beliefs as being at least semi-equivalent to religion rather than as the very definition of non-religion. There’s some good precedence for this. One of the principal religious figures of China, Confucius, was basically just a teacher with some bitchin’ ideas — sort of like Mr. Miyagi with a whole nation of Daniel-sans. (Yes, I know, Mr. Miyagi was from Okinawa and blah blah blah. Quit being such a nitpicker. And now show me wash the car.) Confucius had some thoughts on the afterlife, but there wasn’t much mysticism to be found in his teachings. The Buddha can be viewed similarly, though, obviously, his teachings had a lot of mystical stuff grafted onto them after he’d croaked and his essence had been Dropboxed off to Parinirvana. In Western terms, these figures were closer to philosophers than messiahs. And yet today they’re taken as founders of religions.
In the West we seem to require our religions to have a more overtly miraculous component. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps something in our nature yearns for mystery, for mysticism. But by so stringently segregating philosophy and religion I think we’ve made some of these issues rather difficult to talk about. We’ve also fostered a situation in which fanatics can push an ideology while pretending it’s scientific rather than quasi-religious.
So, what do you think: should figures like Plato (and Socrates), Nietzsche, and Marx be seen as some of the most important Western religious figures? If not, why not?
Related:
- Reddit’s atheism discussion group
- An interview with James Kalb which focuses on the liberalism-as-religion idea
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
There’s an inversion of order with these New Atheists: the self is seen as the actual center of the universe, rather than illusory, in the case of eastern religions, or something submissive to divinity in the western case. It’s beyond solipsistic, it’s like hair-shirt hedonism. It’s also extremely common among teenage boys, one of mine is somewhat into this.
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And at least, with prostelytizing Christians or Muslims, their hearts are in the right place – they are (however misguidedly), trying to save my soul, despite my protestations that I’m already a Christian (i’m not the right kind, it would seem). But what is the excuse of a prostelytizing atheist? If I believe in Dawkin’s Word, will I enjoy paradise in an atheist Heaven? Will seventy atheist virgins (assuming such exist) minister to my every need? Will Gautama Sagan teach me the Eightfold Path, that I may cast off religious desires, and enter into Atheist Nirvana? What’s the point, other than proving the superiority of the atheist in question?
Personally, I prefer Bible-thumping Christians to Dawkins-thumping atheists. The former are at least thinking of someone besides themselves, and are more entertaining.
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“hair-shirt hedonism”
Great phrase, Sir Barken – describes my atheits brother in law to a “T”…
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I also used to consider “new atheism” etc. as a new religion, a secular religion, or some other form of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Yet they truly are different systems in kind, not contemporary variations on an ancient theme.
You’ve already pointed to the lack of a supernatural or mystical component.
But even more importantly than that, they have no ritual elements at all, nor do they support communal activities. Where is the atheist’s prayer and thanksgiving? Where is the atheist’s holidays of humility and of celebration? Where is the atheist’s weekly get-together with his fellow group members? Let us state the obvious: the atheist thinks alone, the atheist feels alone, the atheist behaves alone. What he yanks out of the ground, he does not replant with new seeds. His ultimate goal is salting the soil of special activities, leaving us to grind our teeth on the dirt of ordinary routine, always in isolation.
Like you, I have the “new” atheists in mind. There are not-too-believing folks who seek to strengthen rather than to corrode the bonds of community, and to stage exciting events that will lift us up out of ourselves and merge into a kind of superorganism, returning afterward to our mundane lives rejuvenated and grateful. In their day, disco dancers, metalheads, and sports fanatics all enjoyed their own mystical, if not supernatural, community-binding and self-forgetting rituals.
Yet the new atheists would feel positively paralyzed in any social situation where you only have to let go and join the crowd. If they feel that awkward around their fellow human beings, they can have nothing to teach us, and they can provide no example for how we ought to live. Let them waste away in their cyber-cocoons, and let us pump each other up face-to-face every once in awhile.
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You might find this atheist has some interesting things to say about this subject:
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2012/05/religion-for-atheists-non-believers.html
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Einstein expressed his skepticism regarding an anthropomorphic deity, often describing it as “naïve” and “childlike”. He stated, “It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.”[6]
On 22 March 1954 Einstein received a letter from Joseph Dispentiere, an Italian immigrant who had worked as an experimental machinist in New Jersey. Dispentiere had declared himself an atheist and was disappointed by a news report which had cast Einstein as conventionally religious. Einstein replied on 24 March 1954:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.[7]
In a letter to Beatrice Frohlich, 17 December 1952 Einstein stated, “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”[8] Eric Gutkind sent a copy of his book “Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt”[9] to Einstein in 1954. Einstein sent Gutkind a letter in response and wrote, “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text.”
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Yes, I’m aware of the controversy regarding Einstein. I thought it was more or less acknowledged that he as a “believer” in Spinoza’s “God,” which is to say not an atheist. But perhaps I’ll change the reference to some other genius.
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But look how carefully Einstein chose his words. He disavowed belief in a “personal God” but not in God per se. For this reason, I’d be inclined to classify him as an agnostic rather than an atheist: he was wise enough to know that there might be aspects of reality that transcend materialism in its coldest sense, and was careful to leave that possibility on the table.
Atheism, when practiced in the manner Fabrizio describes, strikes me as the arrested adolescent phase of metaphysical thought. It’s a step above the arrested childhood phase, but I agree with Fab, it’s really not all that different.
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Einstein is claimed by atheists and theists alike. He made quite a few comments about “god,” and he separated himself from atheism. But, as Peter shows, he also rejected the idea of god as presented by, say, The Bible. I updated the post to reflect this. But the general idea is that he wasn’t an atheist who acted like he had the meaninglessness of everything all figured out.
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I’ve never understood calling oneself an atheist. It’s perhaps the most arrogant intellectual position one can take. At worst, call yourself an agnostic.
As alluded to in the comments around a ‘personal God’, much of the fury and confusion in the debate rests on the idea of God as a person, an infinitely complex being. But as guys like Edward Feser have pointed out, this idea of God is a somewhat recent development, and wasn’t held by Aquinas and his forebears.
Worse, science has been so successful in the last few hundred years that many previously ‘metaphysical’ problems are no longer mysteries. But the rub is that we don’t really know much more than the Greeks when it comes to the most profound metaphysical problems. Science will never answer these questions. The damage that Dawkins et al have done is to present Science as something that has already conquered these problems. They’ve done a great deal of harm to the level of discourse by painting all believers (or even agnostics) as fools who believe in believe in men in the sky.
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Yes, Einstein is a hard case for both sides. He took pains to distance himself from both sides in the debate, and yet, he seemed not to exactly be agnostic. And, of course, Einstein was sympathetic to Communism as well, and not in its romantic Che or Ho guises, either, but during its pure, raw Stalinist epoch. Not a simple man…
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Agree with the rough consensus above, but a word on behalf of the atheists.
Proselytizing for conversion is one thing. If there is no God there’s no particular reason for people to try to convince others he does not exist. Let others believe what they will.
On the other hand, though, consider the matter from a political perspective. The very fact that running for office demands a profession of one or another acceptable faith is some sort of signal about the dominance of the religious meme in America. It took centuries for religions to get to the very counterintuitive notion that they should be tolerant of others’ beliefs–I mean why be tolerant if you think we are right and they are wrong? Tolerance emerged as a pragmatic, but totally muddy, answer to the question of belief in a complex world. But it is one thing to be asked to be tolerant of other’s beliefs–quite another to asked to be tolerant of non-belief. America has done a better job accepting other faiths than the lack of one. Not for nothing that atheists and agnostics feel the need to “come out”. The pesky, obnoxious phase we are going through with atheists maybe just means we are in a Stonewall or Black Power phase.
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Yeah, and Stonewall and Black Power worked out so well for Gays, Blacks, and America…
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