Howard A. Doughty
In May’s edition of Critical Links, Seanna Watson wrote an evocative reflection on the death of philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-2024). Along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), he was dramatized as among “the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.” Their sudden celebrity merits examination.
Why then? Why them? What now?
The Ages of Myth and Faith
Whatever ancestral speculations gave rise to what we now call religion, anthropological inquiry traces our supernatural projections, reflections, rites, and rituals into distant prehistory. So deeply and pervasively has religion been woven into our cultural fabric that some consider it endemic to our species, an almost genetic necessity.
Spirits and god(s) coevolved with our growing self-consciousness and conceptual capacity to translate experiential awareness into existential questions of mortality, competing versions of morality, and special claims to authority that congealed into proto-religions. Call them the loss of innocence, the first bites from the “tree of knowledge,” the ability to feel guilt or shame, or the affection for golden calves. Our predecessors’ formative belief systems also begat oppositional dissenters and nonconformists, freethinkers and skeptics, iconoclasts and schismatics, idolaters and heathens, and miscellaneous unbelievers who brought differential levels of antagonism and intensity to disputes over whatever mythology temporarily prevailed.
Of practical importance, at least since the Neolithic Era, shamans and sorcerers, initially with demonstrable skills in herbiculture and weather forecasting, also provided ideological cover for the stronger and more cunning appropriators of labour, land, and animals. Giving god-infused legitimacy to brute power, they helped create precursors to civilization’s ruling political, economic, and warrior classes — eventually leading to the rigid class/caste formations and the eventual development of the state.
The Conceit of Human Enlightenment
Fast-forwarding from the stone, bronze, and iron ages to what’s called the European Enlightenment (roughly 1685-1815), we now had the knowledge to carry out the Biblical injunction to exercise “dominion” over nature. We made the Faustian bargain to triumph over our environment. And although reluctant to invoke full-throated atheism, we allowed mild versions of secular humanism to permit freedom “of” and, occasionally, freedom “from” religion. We built an inventory of advances, including the promotion of rationalism, empiricism, science, and technology that prompted a fulsome spread of reason over magic, education over ignorance, health over disease, prosperity over poverty, liberty over subservience, equality over hierarchy, equity over privilege, capitalism over collectivism, progress over stagnation, materialism over idealism, and eventually democracy over authoritarianism.
How has it worked out? Daniel Dennett was optimistic. In 2013, he said that “the world is becoming ever more peaceful, ever less violent… I think we’re making progress. We may have some horrible backsliding — there could be a terrible terrorist catastrophe that could set us way back, we could blow up the planet — but if we don’t do that, I think the signs are good.” That “if” bore a terrible burden.
Modernity: A Mixed Verdict
The twentieth-century record of world wars, totalitarianism, pandemics, depressions (both economic and psychological), genocides, dystopian technochauvinisms (real and imagined), and imminent (or ongoing) global ecological catastrophism, isn’t Panglossian. Pessimism from Spengler’s early intellectual foundation for Nazism to Adorno’s indictment of the Enlightenment’s path to Auschwitz tell one tale. Optimism from Ronald Reagan’s mantra that “at General Electric, progress is our most important” to neuroscientist Steven Pinker’s slide shows in service to the “Whig” interpretation of history tell another.
Both overstate their cases, but it’s hard to dismiss Max Weber’s 1904 prediction that we were on the cusp of “tremendous development” within a technocratic iron cage destined to bring either “entirely new prophets [or a] great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved’.” With Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as contemporary socio-economic icons, you’re free to pick your poison.
What is clear is that modernity has delivered severe blows to traditional theologies and human self-images as special creations of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god. The great late-nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche could madly proclaim that “God is dead!” and many people felt free to believe him. There was, however, no coup de grâce. As previously unthinkable twentieth-century disasters increased, the scene was set for an early twenty-first-century resurgence of religious fervour and a violent reversal of the pendulum.
Islamic jihadists, Christian fundamentalists, and Jewish apocalyptics now protest against Nietzsche’s premature obituary in unison (though certainly not in harmony), along with legions of Hindu and even occasional Buddhist nationalists. “God is dead”? “No,” they say, “he’s not!”
Marx was wrong. In 1843, he prematurely announced that “the criticism of religion has been essentially completed”. Almost two centuries later, we remain largely in the cultural adolescence of our species. As the ecological, economic, educational, ethical, epidemiological, epistemological, and authoritarian political polycrisis is undermining buoyant human self-confidence, revanchist religions are melding with toxic tribalisms to create lethal pockets of fanaticism sometimes elevated to dominant ideologies. In 2013, Dennett predicted that religion is “going to change more in the next twenty years than it changed in the twentieth century.” That may be so, but from Gaza to Galveston and Moscow to Mumbai, the comfortable, confident arc of history seems not to be bending predictably away from theism.
Species of the Beast
Arrayed against religion in all its forms are three broad categories of critics: agnostics, atheists, and antitheists. None affirm the existence of “God”; but, they differ markedly in their denials.
Merriam-Webster defines agnosticism as the view that any ultimate reality (such as a deity) is unknown and probably unknowable; one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god. Agnostics come in several types. Most have genuinely thought about the existence and nature of god and the cosmos. They have concluded that such questions are unanswerable. They just don’t know because they can’t know. Some are satisfied that a good, ethical, and contented life is possible without recourse to a divinity. God, then, is surplus to requirements as an equipment for living.
Oxford defines atheism as a philosophical or religious position characterized by disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods. Thus, atheists go further than agnostics. They may use the tools of the analytic philosopher or the strict empiricist for whom statements are only meaningful if they refer to logical necessities or observable facts. So, since god is neither a logical necessity nor operationally definable, god is a meaningless concept.
Atheists are compassionate. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed “non-overlapping magisteria” wherein scientists attend to the material world while normative theorists and theologians deal with matters of morals and metaphysical meaning with each sticking scrupulously to their own turf. Others, like the far-famed critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas, have sought to construct bridges among proponents of the secular and the sacred worlds.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary defines antitheism as a philosophical or religious position characterized by disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods. Antitheists, thus, are more aggressive than the former two. Rather than proclaiming belief to be benign nonsense with psychologically therapeutic potential, antitheists detect deep moral harm in religion for those who believe and for those whom the believers shun, denounce, and often torture and kill. Antitheists consider it a moral duty to oppose religion and theism.
Enter the Horsemen
Turn-of-the-third-millennium antitheists were branded the “new” atheists. The four famous flag-bearers presented their respective views efficiently in conversation here. Their individual approaches are fascinating.
Dawkins is a confirmed atheist and has no qualms about dismissing religion. It is, he argues, “bigger than what gives you comfort… it’s bigger than morality… It’s something that is huge and is something terrific and it’s false.” At the same time, he acknowledges: “I’ve been a cultural Christian all along… I think that if, for example, in Africa, there are missionaries, Christian missionaries, and Muslim missionaries fighting for people’s loyalty, then I’m on Team Christianity where that’s concerned.”
Dennett may have been the most affable of the group. He urged “a certain intellectual etiquette: not treating one’s academic opponents with contempt, trying to understand their point of view, and not relying on caricature or rhetoric to win an argument.” He also revealed “a sense of philosophy as a form of combat, with teams, winners and losers.”
Dennett affirmed a thoroughgoing naturalism, a “working hypothesis” that everything — including consciousness and morality — can ultimately be explained without reference to the supernatural. He had an engaging manner well-suited to explaining complexities to the intelligent, attentive, but lay public. He demonstrated joy in living and learning. He was warmly “down-to-earth,” though not beyond “bluster” when jousting with scientists of comparable stature.
Sam Harris — the youngest and the one most often called “a racist, an Islamophobe, and a prime example of white entitlement” — first came to public attention on television’s controversial comedy show, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” in a debate with Hollywood actor Ben Affleck. Harris says he “found his voice” as the two were leaving the stage and he told his interlocutor: “You know that if we decided to burn a Bible on live television tonight it would be controversial, but it wouldn’t ruin our lives. If we decided to burn a Qur’an on the show tonight, the rest of our lives would be spent dealing with the aftermath, and you know that and you’re lying about it.”
Christopher Hitchens was once a post-Trotskyist/Spartacist, later a self-described “conservative Marxist,” and finally a former Marxist whose “secular faith [had] been shaken and discarded, not without pain, [and] a literary pugilist,” whose persona Scott Sherman described as having “combined the wit of Oscar Wilde, the steely intelligence of Susan Sontag, the hard-bitten anti-imperialism of Gore Vidal, the bitchy humor of Truman Capote, and the swagger of Norman Mailer.” His tragedy [was] that he became what he had despised—as Hazlitt put it, “a living and ignominious satire upon himself.”
So, to answer my original questions. Why then? September 11, 2001. Why them? They were the right people at the right time in the right place. What now? October 7, 2023, defines the moment as a test of whether secularism’s competitor is religion in general or some religions in particular. If, as Oscar Wilde pronounced, “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” then perhaps inconsistency is the first exit of the hypocrite.
Coda
Baruch Spinoza (aka Bento de Espinoza or Benedictus de Spinoza, 1632-1677) was labelled both a pantheist and an atheist. For my purposes, he exemplifies the modesty that befits the most creative/destructive, peace-seeking/warlike species on our planet. In his terminal year, he wrote:
“I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary, and have fixed causes, by means of which we endeavour to understand their nature, and the mind has just as much pleasure in viewing them aright, as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.”