Books: By Claire Berlinski Claire Berlinski on The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath and Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World by Chantal Delsol and translated by Robin Dick
Alister McGrath.
The Twilight of Atheism. Doubleday. 320 pages. $23.95
Chantal Delsol.
Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. Translated by Robin Dick. ISI Books. 325 pages. $25.00 A theism,
as theologian Alister McGrath
understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God
exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and
political history and may be mapped to particular historic events
— the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by
two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This
movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has
produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve
political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its
compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint. The
political and cultural institutions associated with it having come
now to be objects of general revulsion, so too may atheism itself
be observed in its twilight; thus the title of McGrath’s
book, an allusion and rebuke to Twilight
of the Idols, Nietzsche’s
“grand declaration of war” on religious faith.
McGrath locates the sources of the movement in
the challenge posed by Revolutionary France to the Catholic Church
and the rotten Bourbon monarchy, institutions viewed by many of
that era as inseparable. Before the late eighteenth century there
were almost no atheists in Europe. While the Revolution itself was
swiftly followed by the restoration of Catholicism, the minds of
alienated European intellectuals continued to roil: “Seeds
were planted, mental horizons were expanded, and hopes for change
ignited.” Thereafter, the giants of atheism emerged —
Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. This was not because the existence of
God was specifically disproved in the late eighteenth century; nor
did any scientific or philosophic innovation of the era suggest
anything like a comprehensive answer to the questions posed by
religious inquiry. The rise of atheism, McGrath concludes, was
above all a response to political events.
When atheism failed to deliver on its stellar
promises of political liberation — indeed, helping to produce
a blood-drenched century to rival any period of Church atrocity
— it was natural, McGrath says, for those who had embraced it
as a deliverance from barbarism to revise their views. Moreover,
its association with such profoundly unattractive personalities as
Madalyn Murray O’Hair did as much to undermine its message as
theism’s association with its assorted cast of hypocrites,
inquisitors, and profiteers. McGrath sees in O’Hair’s
career particular symbolism: “A movement that began with a
sense of outrage at the injustices of the world seems to have ended
up either by parodying itself or by appropriating the excesses
— moral and intellectual — of its opponents.”
Beyond observing that religious people tend to
be happy, McGrath is not particularly interested in making a case
for theism. He is satisfied that no one has yet made an impressive
empirical or philosophical case against it. In his portraits of
atheism’s luminaries, McGrath notes that all assumed atheism
as a premise and constructed their systems of belief as
explanations for the enduring and puzzling persistence of faith.
Even Darwinism, he finds, is philosophically compatible with
theism, for a naturalistic account of evolution is no disproof of
supernaturalism.
Mcgrath,
now a professor of historical
theology at Oxford University, is himself a lapsed atheist. As an
adolescent in Northern Ireland, he saw in atheism the obvious
answer to the region’s sectarian conflict. “If
atheism,” he writes, had represented itself simply as commending the merits of a godless worldview, I would not have been attracted to it — and neither would many others. Its lure lay in its proposal to change the world rather than to create a little club of the godless in the midst of the religious world.
As a young man attracted to the easy fix, he
believed science would explain every aspect of human experience.
Cracks appeared in this juvenile faith during his final year of
high school when, studying for the first time the history and
philosophy of science, he found the subjects “rather more
complicated and rather less straightforward than I realized.”
No doubt. Increasingly disturbed by the “empty and
uncomprehending” slogans of the anti-religious and their
irrelevant preoccupation with a long-extinguished social order, he
at the same time found himself, like C.S. Lewis, sensing “the
steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not
to meet.”
McGrath nonetheless retains some affection for
atheism, or at least for its original moral aspirations. In an echo
of Voltaire, who argued that atheism is determined not by the
intrinsic power of its ideas but by its social context —
particularly by the corruption of Christian institutions —
McGrath holds that it is above all a reaction to the burning of
witches, the torturing of heretics, the venality of clerics and the
wars of religion. “Reform those institutions,” he
concludes, “and the plausibility of atheism is dramatically
reduced.” It is no surprise to him, then, that atheism never
achieved the popularity in the United States that it did in Europe:
In America, the historic separation of church and state obviated
the possibility of embracing it as a form of political rebellion.
It is a thesis that is plausible as far as it
goes, but incomplete: Before the French Revolution the inevitable
popular response to the institutional corruption of the Church
— observed with dismay for nearly a millennium — was heresy, not atheism. What
changed? It was the Renaissance, born of faith and Greco-Roman
values, that gave rise to humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and
the idea of the limitless perfectibility of man. These put an end
to the piety that had engendered them — the great irony of
the Enlightenment. It is important to note, as McGrath does, that
nothing about the Scientific Revolution inherently
entailed the demise of religious belief.
Atheism did not emerge logically from any particular scientific
discovery. But clearly the rise of modern science facilitated the
demise of Christianity by replacing religion as a framework for
interpreting human experience; and clearly atheism gained strength
through its loose association with the triumphs of science. How
precisely did this happen? A more complete account of the emergence
of materialism as a doctrine would not have gone amiss here.
If his chronicle of atheism’s rise seems
insufficient, so does McGrath’s account of its decline. The
movement, he claims, reached its zenith at the middle of the
twentieth century, when nearly a third of the world was under the
control of tyrannies that held the eradication of religious faith
as key to their utopian political programs. In the West,
atheism’s ascendancy was symbolized for McGrath in the famous
1966 cover
of Time magazine
that asked, “Is God Dead?” But the failure of communist
regimes worldwide gave rise to a widespread recognition that
atheism had liberated no one. McGrath observes with satisfaction
the subsequent reflorescence of Christianity throughout the former
communist nations and the effacement of Marxism in favor of
liberation theology throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He
is struck as well by the emergence of the Pentecostal and
Charismatic movements, which he compares admiringly to the
“dull, joyless and unattractive” asceticism of early
Protestantism, particularly the Calvinist rejection of
ornamentation and imagery. He sees in these events a decisive trend:
He predicts the coming century will be characterized by surging
religious devotion.
Here one wishes McGrath had made his case with
greater precision and care. He offers scant sociological data and
few statistics about rates of religious belief over this period. He
rarely specifies the indicators he uses for his assertions: How many Westerners, for
example, declared themselves to be atheists in 1966, when that issue of Time magazine was
published? Is there any reason to believe that the reemergence of religious
belief in Eastern Europe has a correlate in Western Europe? McGrath
does not note — but should — that church attendance in
Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden is
now below 10
percent, a dramatic decline from the 1960s. Rates of baptism have similarly plummeted.
Christian belief in Western Europe has in fact dropped sharply
since the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to opinion surveys.
The first draft of the new European Union Constitution did not
include a single mention of Christianity. When asked by pollsters
to name an inspirational figure, British respondents placed Christ
well below Britney Spears. The only religion on the ascendant in
Western Europe is Islam, and this for historic and demographic
reasons only tangentially related to the collapse of communism.
There is not much evidence of widespread
religious revivalism in the United States either. Columnists for
the New York Times may insist that America has become a nation of
pulpit-bashing religious primitives — for Maureen Dowd, this
is a self-evident proposition on the order of “snow is
cold” — but the proportion of the American population
identifying itself as Christian has actually shrunk by more than 10 percent since the
fall of the Berlin Wall. According to one recent comprehensive
study of religious identification in America,
American religion has been widely perceived as leaning toward the more literal, fundamental, and spiritual. . . . In sharp contrast to that widely held perception, the present survey has detected a wide and possibly growing swath of secularism among Americans . . . the pattern emerging from the present study is completely consistent with similar secularizing trends in other Western, democratic societies.1
It might be argued that in the global context
of religious revivalism the beliefs of Westerners are of limited
import. Yet McGrath’s analysis derives almost entirely from
his observations about European political and cultural history, so
the persistence of atheism in the West — or, at least, the
West’s persistent indifference to religion — is
problematic for his thesis. He conjectures that post-modernism will
provide a nurturing climate for theists, inasmuch as atheism is
rigidly intolerant of opposing ideas whereas post-modernism
stresses tolerance of all ideas. This suggests that McGrath has not
encountered many post-modernists in the flesh. If he is still
prepared to make this case after a weekend spent sharing the Good
News at the annual Modern Language Association Convention, I am
prepared to listen.
McGrath’s case is a limited one. The
arguments for and against the existence of God are for him
unresolvable and, the reader senses, ultimately uninteresting. The
object of his historic inquiry is not atheism per se but one
particular and influential strand of it: a conjunction of so-called
hard atheism — the explicit denial of the existence of God,
as opposed to mere lack of belief — with a series of beliefs
that exceed any ontological claims about God to encompass moral and
political arguments for the eradication of theism. Only this species of
atheism, thus defined, is by his reckoning cast in twilight.
As a limited case it is somewhat successful
— who can dispute that atheist regimes failed to cover
themselves in glory, or that strident atheists are a particularly
unattractive bunch? Richard Dawkins, for example, who is
atheism’s most visible contemporary champion, is hardly a
figure to inspire affection: The Professor for the Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University has denounced his
critics as ignorant, stupid, insane, and wicked, adding recently
that this “sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily
mistaken for arrogance.”
But McGrath defines atheism so narrowly that
the most interesting questions are unaddressed and unresolved, and
his ebullient conclusions are unsupported by the arguments. It is
not clear, for example, that the discrediting of one strain of
atheism necessarily entails a similar grim fate for secularism,
humanism, or agnosticism; nor that it will produce a revival of Christian faith,
which McGrath strongly implies. If it is true that a wide renewal
of faith is at hand, as he believes, it is nevertheless not clear
precisely how this devolves from general revulsion at the excesses
of atheist regimes. One might equally expect the reaction to be a
condemnation of zeal and faith in all its forms, theist or atheist,
in preference for the weak solutions of moral relativism — or
the spread of general outright despair.
These,
in fact, are precisely what we are seeing, according to
Chantal Delsol, a professor of philosophy at the University of
Marne-la-Vallée in Paris. (This institutional affiliation is
noteworthy: It is striking that public figures in France with
innovative and unorthodox ideas are no longer apt to be associated
with the Grandes Ecoles or the traditional French educational
elite; Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, recently elected chief of
France’s ruling party, is not a graduate of the Ecole
Nationale d’Administration, the traditional feeder school for
the French administrative and political elite.) In her subtle,
highly intelligent meditation on the moral state of modern European
man, Delsol considers his profound disillusionment: European man
has in recent memory suffered two great losses, first his Christian
faith and then its replacement — a vision of human
perfectibility absent supernatural guidance. Failed experiments in
utopianism, particularly in its communist and fascist expressions,
have left him, like Icarus, singed at the wing-tips and fallen,
paralyzed by self-doubt.
Utopian ideologies were, as she says,
“systems of reference structured like cathedrals,” and
her use of this rich simile is no accident. Europe has spent the
past several centuries, not just this one, in a series of struggles
to find a replacement for its lost Christian faith. Until recently,
for example, nationalism was a substitute for religious belief; in
France, the idea of France itself and its civilizing mission lent
meaning to the lives of Frenchmen, just as the mystical Aryan ideal
stood in for religious belief in Germany. The nation-state, the
arts, music, science, fascism, communism, even rationality itself
— all of these were substitutes for Christianity, and all failed. “We have
watched all the cathedrals fall into ruin,” Delsol laments,
“one after another.” But where McGrath sees in this the
inevitability of religious revival, Delsol discerns no such thing.
She finds her contemporaries’ fear of ideological certainty
fully reasonable: Rigid orthodoxy, after all, did give rise to both the
Inquisition and the Holocaust. So a return to the past is
impossible, and no one has the faintest idea what the future might
hold.
Man continues, nonetheless, to long for utopia
and for the absolute — this is a design feature, to
paraphrase Delsol, not a bug — and for a means to interpret
his existence. But he no longer possesses a coherent ideological
vehicle by which to express this longing. Here she sees the source
of the profound risk-aversion of the modern European: “In
general,” she writes, “our contemporary cannot imagine
for what cause he would sacrifice his life because he does not know
what his life means.” Though Delsol does not explicitly say
as much, this is as good an explanation as we are apt to find for
Europe’s recent approach to international affairs: How
better, for example, to explain the willingness of the Spanish
people instantly and obediently to capitulate to the demands of the
terrorists who last year slaughtered some 200 of their countrymen?
Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol asserts,
modern man enshrouds himself in technological and physical comfort,
leading a life that is at once free of risk and mediocre, mouthing
vapid, unexamined clichés. These she calls “the
clandestine ideology of our time” — clandestine because
no overt adherence to ideology is now socially permissible. Yet the
banishment of the economy of ideology, she astutely remarks, has
encouraged a black market to flourish in its place: “This
underground moral code is saturated with sentimentality yet
arbitrarily intolerant.” The code is a close cousin to the
political correctness of the Americans, and it is the unspoken
foundation of the modern European welfare state — a society
predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement:
Anything contemporary man needs or envies, anything that seems desirable to him without reflection, becomes the object of a demanded right. Human rights are invoked as a reason for refusing to show identification, for becoming indignant against the deportation of delinquent foreigners, for forcing the state to take illegal aliens under its wing, for justifying squatting by homeless people, for questioning the active hunt for terrorists. It is not only desire or whim that leads to rights claims, but instinctive sentimentality and superficial indignation as well.
Another principle of this code is the
estimation of tolerance above all other virtues. Once defined by
the absence of state prohibitions against certain ideas and
behaviors, tolerance has come to be conflated with legitimization
— as the state itself now actively encourages those ideas and
behaviors through legal and material aid. Delsol finds this
pernicious, and rightly so. One need only look at the Netherlands
to see exactly where this orthodoxy leads: When an artist created a
street mural with the words “Thou shalt not kill” in
response to the murder — by a Muslim radical — of
filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, Dutch police immediately destroyed it in
the name of tolerance. Deputy Prime minister Gerrit Zalm was widely
criticized for declaring the Netherlands to be at war with Islamic
extremism. “We fall,” said Green-left leader Femke
Halsema, “too easily into an ‘us and them’
antithesis with the word war.” No more perfect example of
Delsol’s thesis can be imagined. “Dominated by
emotion,” she observes,
our era overflows with treacly sentiment. It is almost as if the feelings that were once associated with a certain type of piety have contaminated the whole population. . . . Seeking the good while remaining indifferent to the truth gives rise to a morality of sentimentality.
My only quibble: This is not just a morality of
sentimentality; it is a morality of eager, collective suicide.
Delsol’s is certainly not the first
baleful assessment of our ambient culture of moral relativism
— perhaps quasi-relativism is more apt because, as she
rightly notes, its practitioners unquestionably accept moral
absolutes (“one must be tolerant”) while insisting that
they indignantly reject them. But her criticism is particularly
lucid, and her analysis of the reasons for the rise of this
ideology — and the kind of culture to which it in turn gives
rise — unusually canny.
Alister
mcgrath contends that a new
“cultural sensitivity” has “led to religious
beliefs being treated with new respect.” Yet on the pages of
our major news organs we find the faithful described in the most disrespectful terms. Here
is novelist Jane Smiley, in Slate, depicting them as “unteachably
ignorant,” advising us to “[l]isten to what the red
state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the
sermons they flock to. They know who they are — they are full
of original sin and they have a taste for violence.” Brian
Reade of the Mirror calls the faithful “self-righteous,
gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’,
abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’,
foreigner-despisin’, non-passport ownin’
red-necks.” Maureen Dowd, predictable as sunrise, sees
“a vengeful mob — revved up by rectitude —
running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans
and infidels.” And Nicolas Kristof echoes his New York Times colleague with his nod to
“wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking,
beer-guzzling, Bible-toting” Americans. If Delsol’s
thesis needs further confirmation, consider this: These critics are
exercised about the intolerance of the religious.
No, not much newfound respect for religion on
display here — just a good deal of what Delsol calls the
“ideology of the apostate.” Mainstream moral thinking
remains, above all, structured around the rejection of religious
morality. “The drama of the present age,” she observes,
“does not lie so much in the return of certain figures of
existence as it does in the fact that these figures were —
and in many cases still are — despised.” Evidence for
Delsol’s somber assessment of Western man, with his limited,
repulsive view of truth and transcendence, is everywhere, belying
McGrath’s sunny appraisal of man’s renewed spiritual
sensitivity.
1 Egon Mayer, Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey (Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2001). |
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