Prayerful

A Sceptic's Guide To Atheism 

Atheism is Dead

'The question of God … has returned to the contemporary conversation.'
- Roy Abraham Varghese

God is back, and this time it's personal. Recent years have seen a rising tide of public debate about the existence of what Richard Dawkins calls 'a supernatural creator that is "appropriate for us to worship"'. God, as 'he' is otherwise known, has permeated the media - from the internet to print, from television and film to radio and pod-casts, as well as the bestseller shelves of book stores. As David Robertson comments, 'Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion [has] been joined in the bestseller lists by Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, A.C. Grayling's Against all Gods and a host of other books [e.g. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell] extolling the virtues of atheism and the dangers and follies of religion.'

Perhaps more surprising than the fact that we have started thinking publically about God again is the ironic fact that this conversation was started by atheists. As Madeleine Bunting observes,

It's an extraordinary publishing phenomenon - atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal . . . The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books . . . Surely not since Victorian times has there been such a passionate, sustained debate about religious belief.

The motivation of those who have put God in the spotlight isn't only intellectual (or financial), it is also intensely political: 'After more than six years of a Republican administration that has been identified more closely with Christian conservatives than any other in American history, there was bound to be a backlash . . .Add to that the unpopularity of the current administration's policy in Iraq and you have a combustible mix of political and cultural hostility . . .' God's existence is of course the central issueat stake in every debate about theism; but the current 'sizzle' surrounding this 'stake' is the proclamation that faith isn't merely intellectually mistaken, but morally wrong to boot. Hence, Christopher Hitchens writes, 'I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.'

Wired Magazine dubbed the rising tide of popular antitheism 'The New Atheism' in a November 2006 cover story written by agnostic contributing editor Gary Wolf. He wrote that 'The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; its evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.' The New Atheism combines a naturalistic worldview with a moral imperative to eradicate religion (or at least theistic religion); a rhetorical 'call to arms' fuelled by the intellectual and moral failings of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. Indeed, one of the primary arguments advanced by the New Atheist movement is that faith is either directly or indirectly the cause of such suffering that it should be spurned by all right-thinking people.

The New Atheism is thus as much of a political riposte to monotheistic religion (especially the American 'Christian Right', on the one hand, and 'Jihadist' Islam on the other) as it is an intellectual riposte to the God hypothesis. As agnostic John Humphrys observes:

The twenty-first century came of age on 11 September 2001. Nineteen Muslims, with the name of their God on their lips, murdered three thousand Americans . . . Whatever else they may have achieved, the zealots have given militant atheists yet more ammunition. Isn't this what religion does, they say, create endless conflict in the name of God? So the atheists are on the march armed with logic and even more righteous indignation at the horror of religion and determined, at the very least, to weaken its grip on the national debate.

Thus vocal antitheists have launched a political-cum-intellectual movement that has precipitated not only a raft of replies from believers, but which has simultaneously ignited a heated debate among atheists about the tactical merits of telling the faithful that they are all brainwashed idiots who pose a threat to public safety. And just as the New Atheism has provided theists with an expanded 'route to market', so it has stirred up renewed expressions of more tentative forms of non-theism, as exemplified by the publication of Humphrys' In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist (2007) and David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (2008). 

As secular philosopher John Gray observes: 'there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism . . . For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is
not all one-way.'

Three Responses
Jeremy Stangroom complains that 'It's obvious that God doesn't exist and that religion is bunk. But irritatingly this is not the view of some ninety percent of the world's population.' The typical
response to the God hypothesis is 'theism' (an ancient Greek term meaning 'god-ism'). For the monotheist (one-god-ist) 'God' means: 'a supreme personal being - distinct from the world and
creator of the world.' There are two atypical responses to the God hypothesis: atheism and agnosticism.

Atheism
Atheism is the denial that the proposition 'God exists' is true. Like many whose 'atheism is motivated at least in part by their naturalism', philosopher Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosopher's Magazine, calls upon naturalism ('a belief that there is only the natural world and not any supernatural one') to provide an alternative 'positive world view' to that of theism.

Equating atheism with naturalism secures Baggini a big bunch of denials, all grounded in the denial that there is anything more to reality than the physical. As Baggini explains: 'The atheist's rejection of belief in God is usually accompanied by a broader rejection of any supernatural or transcendental reality. For example, an atheist does not usually believe in the existence of immortal souls, life after death . . . or supernatural powers.' Indeed, the atheist's rejection of theism is often produced by the presupposition that naturalism is true. As Corliss Lamont says: 'naturalistic metaphysics . . . considers all forms of the supernatural as myth [because it] regards Nature as the totality of being . . .'

In recent decades, naturalism has come under an unprecedented barrage of high-calibre intellectual fire on multiple fronts. As John G. West reports: 'A growing number of scientists and other scholars . . . say that recent developments in biology, chemistry, physics and related sciences undermine the . . . materialist worldview . . .' Sociologist Steve Fuller admits that: 'naturalism remains a controversial position within academic philosophy. In fact, it is probably still a minority position.'

According to many commentators, atheists in society at large are a shrinking minority. Paul M. Zulehner, a distinguished sociologist of religion, says that European atheists are: 'an infinitesimally small group [such that there] are not enough of them to be used for sociological research.' A worldwide poll taken in 1991 put the global figure for atheists at just 4.4% of the population. By 2006 it was estimated that only 2% of the world population were atheists. As Phil Zuckerman acknowledges: 'the nations with some of the highest degrees of organic atheism (such as Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia) have been experiencing a steady increase of atheism over the past century, an increase which shows no indication of abating . . . On the other hand, worldwide atheism overall may be in decline.'

Agnosticism
The more popular atypical response to the God hypothesis is agnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, meaning 'knowledge', and the alpha 'a,' which negates its subject). As a general term, agnosticism
expresses: 'any conscious attitude of doubt, denial, or disbelief, towards some, or even all, of man's powers of knowing or objects of knowledge.' Applied to religion, agnosticism is: 'The position that neither affirms belief in God (theism) nor denies the existence of God (atheism) but instead suspends judgement.'

Strictly speaking, an agnostic claims that we cannot know whether God exists ('hard' agnosticism); but the term is often used to mean someone who says that we (or they) simply do not know if God exists ('soft' agnosticism). The soft agnostic may claim that no one has been able to resolve the question of God's reality one way or the other, and that therefore 'suspension of judgement is the only reasonable stance' (corporate soft agnosticism); or merely that they have been unable to resolve the question
of God's reality, and are currently suspending judgement (individual soft agnosticism). While theists believe that the proposition 'God exists' is true, and atheists believe that this proposition is not true, agnostics believe that 'God exists' is a proposition with a truth-value that either they or we do not know (perhaps because we cannot know).

General agnosticism 'reduces to the self-destructing assertion that: "one knows enough about reality in order to affirm that nothing can be known about reality."' In any form of limited agnosticism 'the door remains open for some knowledge of reality', and this is of course compatible with 'finite knowledge of
an infinite God.'As agnostic-turned-theist Francis Collins warns, 'To be well defended, agnosticism should be arrived at only after a full consideration of all the evidence for and against the existence of God. It is a rare agnostic who has made the effort to do so.'

Many agnostics are practical atheists. As atheist George H. Smith writes, 'One either accepts the proposition "god exists" as true, or one does not . . . The self-proclaimed agnostic must still designate whether he does or does not believe in a god . . . Agnosticism is not the escape clause that it is commonly thought to be.' We all live either as if God exists, or as if God doesn't exist, and agnostics usually live as if he doesn't. As agnostic Somerset Maugham acknowledged: 'the practical outcome of agnosticism is that you act as though God did not exist.'

Philosopher Stephen D. Schwarz comments that the supposedly neutral position of agnosticism:
is certainly a position, but is it really neutral? What does this position entail for one's life? Does it not entail the same thing as atheism: that one does not live before God, that one does not reckon with God, that one does not pray to God, does not thank him? Whether one does not reckon with God because one says, 'God is not,' or because one says, 'I don't know that he is,' makes no practical difference . . .


Peter S. Williams (MA, MPhil) is a philosopher and apologist with several books to his name and an author and speaker with Damaris Trust.

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