“Religion” in the Writings of the New Atheists
TINA BEATTIE
This essay explores the representation of religion by thinkers associated with a movement sometimes referred to as “the new atheism.” This is an antireligious ideology that emerged primarily in Britain and America during the late 1990s, as a response to the growing visibility and sometimes violent extremism of Islamism and fundamentalist Christianity.
Not all forms of atheism define themselves over against religious ideas. There is, for example, a fruitful engagement between postmodern theologians and the work of philosophical nontheists such as Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom are concerned with ways in which the idea of God and religious meanings function in their linguistic, psychological, and political contexts.1 However, unlike their continental and postmodern counterparts, the new atheists are not concerned with questions about the complexity of language and the ambiguity of philosophical and theological claims to knowledge. Rather, in language that sometimes echoes that of their nineteenth-century scientific predecessors, they assert the irrefutable triumph of scientific rationalism over religion and the ethical superiority of atheism over faith in God, and many of them seek the elimination of all religious influences from public institutions and civil society, including schools and universities.
Yet like all movements that define themselves primarily in oppositional terms, the new atheists risk mirroring that which they claim to reject, for in their polemical absolutism they are sometimes indistinguishable from their more extreme religious counterparts. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate the shortcomings in their conceptualization of religion, and to illustrate how often they betray their own stated criteria of rationality and empirical evidence as the only reliable basis for knowledge. I conclude by appealing for a more nuanced appreciation of the complexity of religious traditions and a greater awareness of the extent to which all our accounts of meaning and truth constitute mythical and metaphorical interpretations of reality that allow us to position ourselves meaningfully within the world. This invites a more thoughtful and open-ended dialogue between atheists and religious believers, a willingness to acknowledge that our diverse cultural and linguistic contexts defy any single, definitive claim to truth or knowledge, and an acceptance that this openness can and often does go hand in hand with a personal religious commitment that embodies its values within the material practices of everyday life, which can give a reasoned account of itself if called upon to do so, and which is open to modification or change when presented with persuasive and well-reasoned challenges to the positions it holds.2
“THE NEW ATHEISM”
In 2006, the popular science writer Richard Dawkins published a polemical attack on religion, The God Delusion,3 which went to the top of the best-seller lists in Britain and America. Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,4 published in 2007, was also an immediate best seller, and books offering similar although more nuanced arguments by Sam Harris and Daniel C. Dennett have attracted a wide readership.5 The philosopher A. C. Grayling is an advocate of the new atheism, as is the novelist Ian McEwan and the journalist and political commentator Polly Toynbee—one of the few women associated with the movement.
There are two main points to Dawkins’s antireligious campaign. First, he argues that modern science, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, provides a sufficiently compelling explanation of human origins to make it irrational to believe in God. Second, he holds religion responsible for corrupting human values and ethics throughout history, and for causing most of the violence in the world.
Although he had been pitting Darwinism against religion for some time (a conflict that is more apparent to Darwin’s recent disciples than it was to Darwin himself),6 Dawkins embraced a more militant form of atheism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America. This inspired others to join in what they saw as a clash between the rational scientific values of liberal modernity and the dangerous and violent influences of religion in all its forms. In a newspaper article in 2002, the novelist Martin Amis wrote, “Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”7 Amis’s description of all religion as irrational, unreal, and immoral sums up claims that are made in one form or another by all the new atheists.
DEFINING “RELIGION”
At the heart of Amis’s description of religion is a circular argument that one finds in most of the new atheist writings. The claim that religious belief is “without reason and without dignity, and … is near-universally dreadful,” results in a tendency to dismiss any evidence of reasonable and ethical religious faith as not really religious at all, and to identify all irrational, unethical, and violent belief systems as de facto religions. Let me give some examples of this.
Sam Harris describes communism as “little more than a political religion.”8 Referring to Stalin and Mao, he argues that “Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational.”9 In other words, the working definition of religion seems to be whatever is “cultic and irrational,” so whatever is cultic and irrational must be a quasi-religion. Conversely, because all rational and ethical beliefs must be atheist, reasonable and ethical people are really atheists at heart, even if they believe themselves to be religious.
Like Harris, Dawkins refuses to accept that the savagery unleashed by atheist political ideologies in the twentieth century can in any way be attributed to atheism. He claims that “Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.”10 Even this concession is contradicted elsewhere, when he professes, “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca—or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”11 Dawkins appears somewhat ignorant of twentieth-century history, when communist regimes destroyed vast numbers of religious buildings and shrines.12 But while atheism is denied any motivating role when people do evil, religion is also denied any motivating role when people do good. Consider the following examples.
Dawkins gives an account of a television discussion with the obstetrician Robert Winston—described by Dawkins as “a respected pillar of British Jewry.”13 Winston told Dawkins that “he didn’t really believe in anything supernatural,” which leads Dawkins to conclude that Winston is confused when he calls himself Jewish:
When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as “religion” the pantheistic reverence which most of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein.14
According to Dawkins’s definition, any belief system that goes by the name of religion must make supernatural claims, for that’s what religion is. Pantheism is therefore not a religion (even though many scholars would include it in that category), but Judaism is, and therefore Judaism must include belief in the supernatural. Because Winston does not believe in the supernatural, he is not really Jewish.
A more informed understanding of Judaism might force Dawkins to acknowledge that Judaism may not qualify as a religion according to his criteria, or that it is his definition of religion that is “confused and confusing.” The position he attributes to Winston is not an aberration from traditional Judaism but a description that would be acceptable perhaps to the majority of observant Jews. Judaism does not entail a belief in the supernatural in the way that Dawkins implies. It is a way of life rooted in the overlapping narratives of many different communities and cultures that share a common story about their place within God’s creation, and this finds expression in the communal observances, rituals, and ethics of Jewish life. This way of life provides the discipline, structure, and goodness that, according to Dawkins, Winston mistakenly identifies with being Jewish.
If we turn to Hitchens (1949–2011), we discover a similar resistance to any suggestion that, sometimes, religions inspire goodness and altruism in their followers. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for his role in the attempted assassination of Hitler, and he is regarded by many as one of the greatest Christians of the twentieth century. He drew his inspiration and courage from a radical commitment to the Jesus Christ of the Bible beyond any religious, social, or moral status quo, but Hitchens attributes his willingness to die in resisting the Nazis to “an admirable but nebulous humanism.”15 Hitchens denies that there could be any Christian motivation for Nazi resisters such as Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller because “the chance that they did so on orders from any priesthood is statistically almost negligible.”16 Again, we see an insidious logic at work. According to Hitchens’s definition, Christians act only on orders from priests; therefore Bonhoeffer and Niemoller were not acting because of their Christian beliefs.
Martin Luther King, another great twentieth-century Christian thinker and martyr, is given similar treatment. Hitchens points out that King quoted the Bible in “metaphors and allegories,”17 rather than literally acting out its violent rhetoric, and he claims that “In no real as opposed to nominal sense … was he a Christian.”18 In other words, “real” Christians are violent biblical fundamentalists, and if good people claim to be Christians then they are either self-deluding or dishonest.
If Hitchens were to acknowledge that Christianity was the inspiration and motivation for the lives of Bonhoeffer, Niemoller, and King, he would have to conclude either that Christianity is not a religion at all or that religion is a more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than he once thought. He does neither. Instead, he clings to his conviction that religious people are by definition mad, bad, and dangerous by dismissing abundant evidence that many are in fact sane, good, and altruistic. What has become of the insistence on rationality and empirical evidence as the basis for belief? These attempts to categorize religion begin to sound a little like Humpty Dumpty speaking to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass: “ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ”19
CONTEXTUALIZING “RELIGION”
These confusions arise because the new atheists fail to acknowledge what a complicated, contested, and multivalent term “religion” is. They appear to have little awareness of recent developments in the field of religious studies, drawing most of their definitions and explanations from writers such as William James (1842–1910) and James Frazer (1854–1941). As is now well acknowledged, the modern concept of “religion” emerged during the nineteenth century, primarily as a way of categorizing and ranking the beliefs, values, and practices of non-Western cultures encountered during Britain’s imperial conquests.20 Perceptions of “religion” were filtered through a Eurocentric lens which assumed that the white, educated Western man with his Christian history and his objectifying and rationalizing mind was at the top of the evolutionary ladder, and women as well as all other cultures, races, and religions were inferior to him. His task was to educate and improve them as far as possible—which included ridding them of their religious superstitions and beliefs—and to assert his superiority by ruling them with a benign but authoritative paternalism.
An example of this is the pioneering English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who writes of the need “to obtain a means of measurement” in ethnological research in order to find “something like a definite line along which to reckon progress and retrogression in civilisation.” This involves grading civilization according to the achievements of educated Europeans and Americans: “The educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life.”21
For Tylor, the ultimate purpose of ethnography is not simply to study the “primitive” religions of these societies, but to eliminate all traces of them from modern culture in the name of science and progress. He writes: “It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old cultures which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.… Active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer’s science.”22
It is difficult not to see similar cultural prejudices at work among some of the new atheist writings, particularly in their treatment of Islam. Sam Harris represents Islam as an enemy of America because it is a worldview that is opposed to modern ideas of progress and reason. He writes that “many Muslims [are] standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century.… Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments.”23
According to Harris, this necessarily entails a violent conflict in which Americans must accept war, torture, and the killing of the innocent as a necessary price they must pay to defend their values: “We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”24 Harris goes further than some of his coatheists, but at least he makes clear that violence and killing are not the exclusive prerogative of religions. They are also part of the apparatus of the modern state.
Dawkins regards the burqa worn by some Muslim women as a particular symbol of darkness, ignorance, and superstition. Under the subtitle “The Mother of All Burkas,” he describes the burqa as “a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cowed female submission.”25 He goes on to use this as a metaphor for scientific inquiry:
The one-inch window of visible light is derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head. What science does for us is to widen the window. It opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.26
The idea that the scientific investigation of nature is comparable to stripping a woman of her clothes is not original. It has been a privileged metaphor ever since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the language of stripping and penetrating the female body was sometimes used to describe the scientific quest.27
METAPHORS, MYTHS, AND SYMBOLS
Scientists like Dawkins, no less than their religious counterparts, need metaphors, symbols, and analogies to think with.28 If modern scholarship problematizes the concept of religion, it also calls into question the methods by which science gathers its evidence and establishes its claims, by demonstrating the extent to which all forms of knowledge and normative judgments are filtered through unacknowledged cultural, gendered, and ideological assumptions. To accept this is not to discredit our different ways of knowing, but to call for a more fluid and dynamic approach to what counts as knowledge. Academic disciplines and sciences help us to organize our studies and to focus our research, but when they seek to limit the horizons of knowing and to invalidate all but the most rational and empirical claims to truth and meaning, they diminish the imaginative wisdom and creativity of our species.
It is a delusion to believe that science offers an objective, value-free position from which to evaluate all claims to truth and meaning. The philosopher Mary Midgley argues that evolution has become a powerful quasi-religious myth by which atheists such as Dawkins confer meaning on the world. She refers to the “cosmic mythology”29 associated with the theory of evolution, arguing that it is “not just an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins.”30 Like any myth of meaning, scientific rationalism shapes our view of the world, but it also has the capacity to seduce its followers with its utopian promises and hubristic claims.
Religious narratives are our responses to vast questions that science will never be able to answer. Why is there something rather than nothing? How do we explain consciousness, which enables us to observe the world of which we are a part? In the words of the popular science writer and agnostic cosmologist Paul Davies,
The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works. Scientists themselves normally take it for granted that we live in a rational, ordered cosmos subject to precise laws that can be uncovered by human reasoning. Yet why this should be so remains a tantalizing mystery. Why should human beings have the ability to discover and understand the principles on which the universe runs?31
As a linguistic, meaning-making species, our defining essence is our capacity to discern order in the world, and to use language to create imaginative stories of possibility and meaning through that process of discernment. This is the means by which we weave our lives into an intelligible and meaningful cosmos, beyond the increasingly sterile debates between scientific atheists and Christian theologians who are often just as constrained by a narrow form of modern Western rationalism as those they are arguing against.32
In an interview with the playwright David Hare,33 Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, describing his sense of tedium with regard to such debates, quotes St. Ambrose: “It does not suit God to save his people by arguments.” Williams suggests that, “while I think it’s necessary to go on rather wearily putting down markers saying, ‘No, that’s not what Christian theology says’ and, ‘No, that argument doesn’t make sense,’ that’s the background noise. What changes people is the extraordinary sense that things come together.” This making sense is not, he says, “a great theoretical system.” It is rather that “you can see the connections somehow and—I tend to reach for musical analogies here—you can hear the harmonics. You may not have everything tied up in every detail, but there’s enough of that harmonic available to think, ‘OK, I can risk aligning myself with this.’ ”
This creative reading of the world, in which we attune ourselves to attend to the harmonics of the cosmos, is the basis of all great religions and all honest scientific research. The challenge we face today is to seek to better understand the kind of species we are in our capacity for dazzling genius and apocalyptic destructiveness, to ask how effectively our living stories about the world allow us to express the truthfulness of our condition, and to endeavor to reach out across differences of culture, creed, gender, and race, to create more fertile myths than those that are offered either by scientific rationalism or by religious extremism.
NOTES
1. Cf. John D. Caputo, “Atheism, A/theology, and the Postmodern Condition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 267–82; Graham Ward, The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). I refer to these thinkers as nontheists rather than atheists, because the word “atheist” implies a claim to knowledge based on belief (that there is no God), and the thinkers mentioned here are more subtle in their critique of traditional theism.
2. For a more detailed and extensive critique, see Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007). There is a growing body of literature written by supporters and critics of the New Atheists. For a very small selection of critical responses, see Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006); John Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel: A Seraphic Response to “The God Delusion” (London: Profile, 2007); Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (New York: Free Press, 2008); Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: Why Faith Is the Foundation of Civilisation (London: Continuum, 2010); Alister E. McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (London: SPCK, 2007); Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008).
3. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006). Dawkins also made a two-part documentary for Channel 4 television, with the title The Root of All Evil?, which was broadcast in January 2006, but renamed as The God Delusion when it was rebroadcast in 2010.
4. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). The first British edition had a less provocative title: God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).
5. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London: Allen Lane, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006).
6. Cf. Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Adrian J. Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
7. Martin Amis, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” Guardian, June 1, 2002, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jun/01/philosophy.society.
8. Harris, The End of Faith, 79.
9. Ibid.
10. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 278.
11. Ibid., 283.
12. For more on this, see Tina Beattie, “Science, Religion and War,” in The New Atheists (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007).
13. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 19.
14. Ibid.
15. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 7.
16. Ibid., 241.
17. Ibid., 175.
18. Ibid., 176.
19. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London: Penguin, 2003), 186.
20. Cf. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
21. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (London: John Murray, 1920), 1:26.
22. Ibid., 2:453.
23. Harris, The End of Faith, 145.
24. Ibid., 53.
25. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 362.
26. Ibid.
27. See Beattie, The New Atheists, 65–67.
28. See Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (London: Clarendon Press, 1987).
29. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London: Routledge, 2002), 34. See also Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2001); Mary Midgley, Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2003).
30. Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, 1.
31. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (London: Penguin, 2006), 20.
32. See Beattie, The New Atheists, 9–11.
33. David Hare, “Rowan Williams: God’s Boxer,” Guardian, July 8, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/08/rowan-williams-interview-david-hare.