In a routine expedition to HalfPrice Books I picked up John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism. His basic line is that modern atheism is just Christianity without the God. Thus, he begins,
Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human events could be finally chaotic, and no story could be told that satisfied the need for meaning.
So "atheists have looked for surrogates of the God they have cast aside." Instead of "belief in divine providence" they believe in the "progress of humanity." Thus most modern atheisms are really a re-imagining of the Christian narrative with different names on the beliefs.
But first Gray wants to instruct us about the uniqueness of Christianity.
The notion that religions are creeds -- lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject -- emerged only with Christianity.
In most religions -- and that was originally true of Judaism -- what mattered was not belief but "observance," the observance of sacred rituals. Many religions have creator-gods, but the "divine mind" is not experienced universally as good, nor as intimately engaged with the world, nor that humans have a "soul" or a "self," nor a death involving a judgement by a Supreme Being.
So when Marxists and their brethren want to force march us towards a better world, they are just repurposing Christianity, but without God and with Marx instead of Christ.
The New Atheism of the 19th Century. Chaps like Comte believed that "magic, metaphysics and theology belong in the infancy of the species." But now we adults "accept science as the only authority in knowledge and ethics." But science, to Gray, is just a tool for the human animal to deal with the world. Suppose religion really is an "illusion." Who is to say that the creation of illusions not is an important part of survival? And there is the embarrassing fact that atheism tends to ally itself with pseudo-science. Comte thought that bumps on the head were significant; Dawkins believes in "memes."
Secular Humanism. In Christianity, humanity is a "species in need of redemption" with an apocalyptic myth that Jesus would return and found the kingdom of God. But the Reformation replaced the apocalypse with a "conviction that evil could be slowly diminished in history." Thus, with God removed, we get to the idea of modern meliorism, of gradual improvement. Then there was Gnosticism that believed that "salvation was achieved by acquiring a special kind of knowledge."
The modern myth of progress came into being as a fusion of Christian faith with Gnostic thinking.
But, of course, science has nothing to say about improvement in history.
Faith in Science. Following Darwin's theory of evolution, a lot of thinkers harnessed evolution to "theories of innate racial inequality" and eugenics to improve the race. "Herbert Spencer used evolutionary ideas to vindicate untrammeled capitalism... Beatrice Webb... suggested that Stalin's Russia embodied the next stage of social evolution." Francis Fukuyama "had no doubt that an evolutionary process was at work, leading to the advance of "democratic capitalism" throughout most of the world."
Modern Political Religions. Gnosticism "is the belief that humans can be delivered from a dark world by the saving light of knowledge." Plato and Socrates may have believed that goodness and truth were one, but not that they could be realized in history. But Christianity plus Gnosticism combined to form the "explosive force" of political religions in the modern west.
[Forget] the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites... Jacobinism and Bolshevism were secularizing forces; but both were channels for the millennarian myths of apocalyptic Christianity... [W]hen the Nazis tried to create a "science of man" based in physiology, they continued an Enlightenment project. Liberalism emerged in the seventeenth century as the application of a universal morality inherited from monotheism.
We do not live in a secular age, for "secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion."
God-haters. Think Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky, and William Empson. Says Gray about de Sade:
Hating the Christian God, he also hated Nature, cursing it even as he obeyed what he believed were its laws... For Sade's libertines... nothing but a world-destroying act could sate their passions... the satisfaction that comes from doing evil.
For writer Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky is "the greatest artist in human misery." He "was chronically unhappy and spread unhappiness around him.
And said William Empson of the Christian God: "the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man."
Atheism Without Progress. This is the kind of atheist that John Gray prefers. He starts with George Santayana, born in Madrid in 1863 who became a Harvard professor and then quit in 1912 when he received a small legacy. He ended his life in a nunnery. For Santayana, religion is natural to humans. He wrote:
Why should we be angry with dreams, with myth, with allegory, with madness? We must not kill the mind, as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it... Values presuppose living beings having a direction of development... so that good and evil may exist in reference to them.
Says Gray: "Without valuing organisms there are no values."
Next, Gray considers Joseph Conrad, who spent years working in sailing ships in the late 19th century. He was an atheist and rejected the idea of progress. Says Gray:
The seaman's struggle with the ocean is a cipher for the human situation in a godless universe.... None of the visions of improvement conjured by modern thinkers could stand up against his "deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world."
The Atheism of Silence. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer just stepped away from monotheism without regret. But his life was a contradiction.
Himself extremely wilful, Schopenhauer was convinced that all human troubles came from the will... Anyone who grasped this truth would turn away from life and mortify their appetites, he believed.
But did he follow that advice? Not a bit of it. With financial independence he did exactly as he pleased, "playing the flute and attending the opera." He never married, but "pursued erotic pleasure." He "denounced the world as illusion" but lived a life of "disciplined intellectual labour... was careful with money." He believed that human life is "purposeless striving" and "the world was in need of redemption." So what!
John Gray concludes his disquisition on atheism with the following thought.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means... But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.
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