by Akim Reinhardt
The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often called, to be a mixed bag. It was long overdue, and many good (if obvious) points were made. However, there was also a fair bit of navel-gazing and even stupidity. And among some of the celebrity leaders, I believe, there was also a profound misunderstanding of religion, how it functions, and even its basic purposes.Below I identify what I see as two basic recurring problems in modern atheism. I then offer two approaches that I believe atheists should consider for understanding and relating to the religious.
Problem 1: Arrogance. Don’t be so sure of yourself. Even if you’re not laboring under a “God delusion,” you should still have the humility to recognize that you know next to nothing, and what few answers you might proffer aren’t anything anyone wants to hear. If humanism is to offer any benefits, it must begin with an acknowledgment of humanity’s vast ignorance and inability to learn much.
This sentiment will likely send some admirers of science into paroxysms. Surely, they protest, we’ve learned so much over the last century or two.
Surely. We used to know 0.00000000001% of what we might learn, and now we know. And now we know 0.000000000011%
We’ve achieved so much, they will protest. And I am certainly happy that I get to live in a world with painkillers and antibiotics. But let’s not make too much of our achievements. Slamming atoms together doesn’t make us brilliant. It just means we’ve found new clubs to whack with.
Even the greatest of human innovations, complex language, is as much a tangle of obfuscation as it is a path to truth. Indeed, It’s a medium for inventing the kinds of make believe that many atheists are so hostile towards. Perhaps one of the first things humans did with their new words was invent gods.
Why? Because the meaninglessness of our labor, the loss of our loved ones, and the ever narrowing borders of our own mortality are too much to bear. So we are compelled to make up meaning, or to embrace the make believe meanings that others have already made up. Believers find that through apparitional divinity. But many atheists, similarly burdened, invent other meanings. They reject gods but perceive humanity as a pantheon of godlike super achievers working their way towards the heavens. They reject supernatural yarns of creation and heavenly afterlife, then embrace tall tales of space arks that will deliver us to the stars, or computerized consciousness offering us an eternity of 1s and 0s, or fountains of youth in pill form. All of it, whether godly or scifi, is just another version of an afterlife that will never exist.
The truth is much simpler and rather humbling. You are here. It will not last long. You and everyone you’ve ever loved will die, and soon be forgotten. And for what? The answer is unknowable, and probably non-existent.
Be modest. Even armed with language and science, we are nonetheless unable to discern any real meaning to our lives, and that is too much to bear. And just because you’ve been backstage to someone else’s puppet show doesn’t make you smarter than them. Spend time examining your own strings, and perhaps you will learn humility.
We are the same matter and energy as lizards and insects, as rocks and lakes. We will never attain eternity. And although we may one day escape this planet in a more permanent way than a quick trip to the moon, that will mark us not as divine, but as merely invasive.
Problem 2: Myopia. It is irrational to define belief in the supernatural as irrational. Belief in the supernatural is entirely natural. Of course people cling to religions that offer life meaning and ease the fear of death. Who wouldn’t want that? And what, besides religions, offers it?
The vast, vast majority of humans who’ve ever lived were/are not intellectually compromised because they’ve sought or accepted supernatural explanations for the big unexplainable questions about life’s meaning, origins, and ending. It simply means that they, like all of us, are helpless amid the void.
Too many atheists think that, in realizing there are no gods, they have uncovered a great truth. They have not. God was the truth. Pointing to the non-existence of gods is not a truth in much the same way that there is no great truth in pointing out that Aesop’s talking animals are fictional. Revealing a lie is not in and of itself a great truth. And anyway, those talking animals occasionally had a good moral to teach.
Religions offer an answer. You reject their answer. What is your answer?
You have none.
Some atheists’ insistence on thinking themselves smarter than believers blinds those atheists to their own ignorance. As atheists, we must open our eyes to the vast ignorance that enshrouds us. And to the great anxiety and sadness that ignorance imbues within us. Just because their answers don’t work for you does not mean your answers work for them.
And anyway, there are no answers; to be truly honest is to admit that. Or perhaps we have a smattering of micro-answers that get us through our days and keep us functional. So stop pretending we know something they don’t when the best we can hope to achieve is to merely is a fuller awareness of our unknowing.
With these problems in mind, I consider two approaches.
Approach 1: Acknowledging Human Complexity. People are complex. What makes someone themself is an impenetrably complicated equation of biology, life experiences, and life choices, all of it ongoing, and everyone’s persona a dynamic, abstract entity that is forever changing in ways big and small. Given that, reductively bashing believers as dolts and dupes is no better than believers casting atheists as amoral villains; it’s a retreat to simplistic generalizations.
If people were simple, psychology and psychiatry wouldn’t be scientific fields. And if people’s collective actions were so simple to untangle, we wouldn’t have sociology, anthropology, and every other field in the Liberal Arts.
We may be limited, and even downright stupid, but that doesn’t make us simple.
When atheists fail to recognize believers’ complexity, or at least that believers are at least as complex as atheists, and instead reduce believers them to cartoonish tropes, they accomplish little more than making themselves feel smart. Even as they’re being stupid.
To stereotype groups of people as predictable simpletons is to dehumanize them. Yet, ironically in this case, perhaps nothing is more human than believing in supernatural forces. An honest atheist must admit this; belief in the supernatural is one of the few things that pervades the entirety of human sociocultural history. Few things are as universal to the human experience as “religion,” in whatever form it takes. It is on a short list of human inventions that have, as far as we can tell, manifested within every single human society that has ever existed, along with tools, language, family relations, and perhaps a few others. Being marked as a human cultural invention doesn’t make religions simple; it makes it abstract. Like language itself. Such abstractions are complex: in their structure, in their universality, and in their seemingly endless variety.
Individual believers may be simpletons, as too may be individual atheists. But even the dullards among us (and I’m not ruling myself out) are complex, regardless of what they believe or don’t believe. Only a dunderhead would fail to see that.
Approach 2: Genuine Dialog. As the world increasingly becomes engulfed in a battle between imperfect democratic institutions on one side and right wing populist authoritarianism on the other, it is increasingly difficult, and even dangerous, to put too much faith in dialog. Right wing authoritarianism legitimizes itself by demanding equal respect while it degrades norms; and well meaning external forces in the media legtimize authoritarianism by misguidedly playing along with misplaced notions of equal respect. The result of such a “both sides” approach to the legitimate and to that which seeks to overthrow the legitimate, is creeping fascism. Pretending that two very unequal philosophies deserve equal coverage, respect, and voice enables the authoritarian capture of democratic institutions.
Furthermore, right wing authoritarians around the world are in league with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists, as they have been since the birth of fascism a century ago. Thus, one must be very careful in the present moment when calling for genuine dialog between atheists and religious monotheists.
Yet while taking note of this very real and present threat, we must not generalize. It is a cliché to note that some of the finest people I’ve ever met believe in God, and some of the worst are atheists. But it’s a cliché in part because it’s a truism for any honest person who has had a well rounded social existence and interacted substantially with a range of people. And given the relative numbers, it’s actually much easier to stereotype atheists than the religious. So be judicious, but engage with people who possess a genuine spirit of engagement and dialog, and avoid false dialogs with fundamentalist ideologues.
Why? Because teaching and learning from each other is as important as critiquing each other. Indeed, the latter without the former is often little more than name-calling and stereotyping. Solid critique requires dialog. And dialog is not to be confused with debate. Believers are unlikely to convert you, and you’re unlikely to turn them into an atheist. No matter. Genuine dialog can lead to better understandings, something atheists often claim to value. Genuine dialog can also lead to improved relations, something no atheist should underestimate the importance of given believers constitute nearly all of humanity.
Indeed, some atheists are quick to point towards the long histories of religious intolerance and persecution of nonbelievers. Fair enough. There’s no justifying that persecution. But let’s not back ourselves nto corners in the name of stubbornness and resentment.
Furthermore, don’t doubt what horrors humans are capable of in the name of atheism. True, people have had far fewer opportunities to be monstrous in the name of godlessness than believers have had in the name of gods, but give it time. People are quite capable of being shitty regardless of what they do or don’t believe. And if nothing else, the atheistic regimes of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge should be enough to warn us off secularism as a surefire path to decency.
Looking Forward: I am a historian, and as anyone who seriously studies the past can assure you, the future is unknown. Science estimates the sun will run out of fuel in 7–8 billion years. Life on Earth will end long before that. But until then, some bits of Heaven and Hell can be of our own making.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com