My ChristianWeek faith and science column: Are we living in the twilight of atheism?

This summer I was reading Oxford historian Alister McGrath’s lucid Twilight of Atheism (2004), which tackles modern atheism’s rise as well as its fall. Twilight was written before the current anti-God crusade but - nicely fulfilling McGrath’s thesis - the crusade exudes an unmistakable air of desperation, remarked by many observers. Indeed, atheist science historian Michael Ruse broke ranks and endorsed McGrath’s more recent book [with his wife Joanne], The Dawkins Delusion. He announced that zoologist Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion - one of the crusade’s trusted weapons - "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist."

McGrath’s historical analysis sheds some light. He identifies three thinkers as founders of modern materialist atheism: Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx (1818-83), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939. Why these founders? Feuerbach was the first to treat God simply as a construction of the human imagination, essentially replacing theology with religious studies. In other words, when we ask why people believe in God, we do not entertain the idea that God has revealed himself in some way. God does not actually exist, and therefore the causes of belief are sought in society or nature.

Marx took the further step of prescribing a specific cause - unjust social conditions. He reasoned that belief would naturally wither away under communism. When it didn't, communists were forced to conclude that believers were merely perverse, so persecution was inevitable. Then Freud took things a step further still. He asserted that belief in God arises from unconscious illusions. Believers are not even voluntarily wicked, they are merely mentally ill.

Formerly an atheist and now a Christian, McGrath considers atheism’s most creative period to be the 18th century. In those days, many thinkers yearned for atheism - harnessed to science - to liberate them from oppression by established religion. Indeed, he notes, the main reason atheism did not capture the heart of English-speaking North America was not that our society was in the grip of a zealous religious right but that we did not establish a government-mandated church.

I myself would put it like this: Religious freedom inoculates people against atheism as a mass movement because it privatizes grievances with religion. One might add that the United States today is - all at once - the world’s science leader, a conspicuously religious nation, and strongly secularist. Go figure.

Atheism flourished in the salons of 19th century Europe, where intellectuals morphed into a secular priesthood.. Then it ran aground in the late 20th century. Why? Not lack of confidence; until fairly recently, atheists were sure they were going to win. Not lack of resources; both atheist doctrines and attacks on spiritual traditions have poured forth from novels and newspapers for a half century. And not lack of reach, either. Muslim friends tell me that their key difficulty in getting conservative Muslims to stop listening to violent radicals is that so often third world modernization schemes are permeated with atheism. So then why didn't the atheists win?

McGrath offers some interesting ideas. First, atheism did not start out as materialist. Indeed, atheist poets such as Shelley and Keats hated materialist reductionism and affirmed transcendent ideas. Such ideas can form the basis of a moral system, as they did for Plato and Aristotle. But as atheism gradually became synonymous with materialism, grounding a moral system became increasingly difficult. Morality comes to be regarded as simply an evolved behavior that is not grounded in any greater truth. Not surprisingly, atheist regimes in the twentieth century murdered on a historically unprecedented scale. Then, as modernism gave way to post-modernism, atheism lost any right it ever had to be humanity’s Big Story - because there is no longer any Big Story. Much of Europe is now in a recovery phase dubbed “post-atheism.”

In other words, McGrath says, atheism wasn’t so much disproven as shown to be cruel and unworkable at best, irrelevant and unproductive at worst. Its rise and fall provides lessons for thoughtful churches. Convincing ourselves and others is not the goal; we need to commend ourselves and our Lord to people who do not otherwise accept any obligation to believe our message (Colossians 4:5-6). The story of atheism also provides a warning for prophets, religious or otherwise. Fifty years ago, who would have thought that post-atheism would better describe European society than post-theism? Trustworthy prophets should have a better track record.

(Note: I blogged on this before), but this is the more formal look at McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism book that I promised to post.)

Other posts: Dawkins on the need to curb religious liberty.

At the end of this post are links to other reviews of McGrath’s book.

More on the twilight of atheism ...

Following up on my earlier Twilight of Atheism post: Before I take Alister McGrath’s book on the twilight of atheism back to the library, I should draw attention to a couple of points he makes. For example, he asks,

What if the great revolt against God of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is not a matter of reason, but of taste? What if the appeal of atheism is culturally conditioned and historically located- in other words, its attractiveness is the outcome of a specific set of historical circumstances that have now ended, giving way to a quite different situation? (p. 174)

Indeed, I think something like that has indeed happened. Three broad causes can be identified: One is the growth of religious freedom in the Western world. Religious freedom inoculates people against atheism as a mass movement because it privatizes grievances with one’s religion.

The United States, for example, is - all at once - the world’s science leader, a conspicuously religious nation with few atheists, and strongly secularist in its laws. I don’t think the confluence of these characteristics is accidental. Quite the reverse.

Second, today’s Western societies impose few constraints on people’s behavior, least of all on account of religious pressure. So again, atheism is deprived of a key source of recruits.

Third, in the twentieth century, atheism was genuinely tried out. It formed part of the basic structure of the Communist system of government, for example. As McGrath puts it,

As the history of the twentieth century makes clear, atheists can be just as nasty, prejudiced, stupid, and backward as their religious counterparts. In retrospect, this was only to be expected. After all, atheists are human beings, like everyone else, and their refusal to believe in God or any other spiritual force makes them no better and no worse than anyone else. Yet many expected that atheism would morally elevate its followers. It was much easier to believe this in the nineteenth century, when atheism held the moral high ground, never having been exposed to the corrupting influences of power and government. When atheists kept a discreetly low profile, nobody could be bothered to look into their beliefs and lifestyles. But when they launched high-profile social and political campaigns advocating an atheist agenda, people started asking awkward questions. And they began getting disturbing answers. (p. 236-37)

Um, yes. I’m going to buy this book for sure.

Is this the twilight of atheism? - Oxford historian says yes

I’ve just read a most interesting 2004 book by Oxford historian Alister McGrath, arguing that we are currently looking at the twilight of atheism.

That’s certainly my impression, judging from the remarkably ill-advised antics of the recent anti-God campaign. One thing the campaign made quite clear is that atheistic materialism is not some neutral middle ground on which we can happily do science experiments together. On the contrary, your local atheist now wants you to know that he is militant, and that could be trouble for you if you are a theist or non-materialist of some kind.

Well, trouble for somebody, anyway. Euripides said long ago: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

McGrath’s thesis is that atheism’s most brilliant period was the eighteenth century. It flourished in the nineteenth century, and started to collapse after the fall of communism revealed how awful it all was. One problem seems to have been that the substitution of materialist for non-materialist atheism made the grounding of values difficult - as Nietzsche realized.

Some interesting observations from Twilight of Atheism (2004).

Everywhere there are signs that atheism is losing its appeal. ... The term “postatheist” is now widely used to designate the collapse of atheism as a worldview in Eastern Europe and the resurgence of religious belief thought many of those areas that had once been considered officially atheist. Yet it is now clear postatheism is not limited to the East; it is becoming a recognizable presence within Wesern culture. Atheism, once seen as Western culture’s hot date with the future, is now seen as an embarrassing link with a largely discredited past. (p. 174)

Come to think of it, I keep running into people here in Canada who tell me that, (like McGrath himself), they were once atheists. They sure aren't now.

One symptom of decline, he points out, is the general disconnectedness of atheist messages from reality:

Works of atheist propaganda seemed to relive long-forgotten battles; they paid disturbingly little attention to the more worrying aspects of he twentieth century, not least the highly ambivalent legacy of institutionalized atheism itself. (p. 178)

Essentially, where at one time atheism felt exciting and liberating, it now feels by turns dull and threatening - like a sullen and bad-tempered neighbour. You wish he would move, but you can't decently wish him on anyone else.

For reviews of all shades, go here, here, and here.

I will be writing about Twilight for print pubs, and will post my reviews when free to do so.