The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (2 page)

BOOK: The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God
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In the latest rounds of this debate, Dawkins and Harris have used Darwinian science to explain the moral landscape in which we live, and Hitchens has described such institutions as the library, or “lunch with a friend,” as episodes in a modern life just as fulfilling as prayer or church- or synagogue- or mosque-going.

The average reader—especially the average
young
reader—could be forgiven for thinking that this is all there is to the debate: either we embrace religion, or we embrace Darwinism and its implications. Steve Stewart-Williams has taken this reasoning to its logical conclusion when he says, in
Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life
(2010), that there
is
no God, that the universe is entirely natural and in that sense accidental, so that there can be no purpose to life, and no ultimate meaning other than that which we work out for ourselves as individuals.

But though it is the Darwinists who, among atheists, are making the most noise at the moment (and with good reason, given the amount of biological research that has accumulated in the past decades), theirs is not the only game in town. The fact is that, since the advance of religious doubt gathered pace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular since Nietzsche announced “the death of God” in 1882 (adding,
moreover, that it was we humans who had killed him), many people have addressed themselves to the difficult question of how we are to live without a supernatural entity on whom we can rely.

Philosophers, poets, playwrights, painters, psychologists, to name only those whose professions begin with the same letter of the alphabet, have all sought to think through just how we might live, individually and communally, when we have only our own selves to fall back on. Many—one thinks of Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett—have expressed their horror at what they see as the bleak world that is left once the idea of God leaves it. Perhaps because horror claims all the best tunes, these Jeremiahs have caught the popular imagination, but
The Age of Atheists
will concentrate instead on the other—in some ways braver—souls who, instead of waiting and wallowing in the cold, dark wastelands of a Godless world, have devoted their creative energies to devising ways to live on with self-reliance, invention, hope, wit and
enthusiasm
. Who, in Wordsworth’s words, “grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.”

This aspiration, how to live without God, how to find meaning in a secular world, is—once you put your mind to it—a grand theme that has been touched on by a number of the more daring modernist writers, artists and scientists but has never before been gathered together, so far as I know, into a master narrative. When that is done, it provides a rich and colorful story, as I hope to show, a set of original yet overlapping ideas which I am sure many readers will find thrilling, provocative, yet commonsensical and even consoling.

Some consolation is especially called for because the debate over faith, over what is missing in people’s lives, has degenerated in recent years into a bizarre mix of the absurd and the deadly.

ARE WE IN A SPIRITUAL RECESSION? OR, ARE WE AS FURIOUSLY RELIGIOUS AS WE EVER WERE?

Twice in recent years, religious figures predicted that the world would end—on May 21, 2011, and December 21, 2012. Nothing of the kind happened either time, but none of the figures concerned felt a need to
acknowledge that their predictions were . . . well, plain wrong. Pakistan has experienced numerous assassinations of individuals seen—by fellow members of the public—to be contravening its relatively new Islamic blasphemy laws. Tunisia has seen two prominent secular politicians assassinated. Sexual and child abuse cases by Muslims in Britain and Holland, or by Catholic priests in a whole raft of countries worldwide, have become virtually part of the furniture of our lives; the abuse of young white girls, by Muslim men, in Britain has been described as a “tidal wave of offending.”
7

These events, coming in the wake of other, even more spectacular, atrocities (the devastation of 9/11, the bombings in Bali, Madrid and London, all committed by Muslims), may not have been quite as bloody in terms of the numbers killed. But they do mark an
extension
of religiously motivated criminal behavior into ever widening areas of human intolerance—and therein lies what is arguably the most important intellectual, political—even existential—paradox facing us in the young twenty-first century.

An atheist observing this set of absurd and deadly behaviors could be forgiven for grimacing in chastened satisfaction. After centuries of religious strife, after more than two hundred years of deconstruction of the factual historical basis of the Bible, after a plethora of new gods has emerged in the most unlikely, mundane and prosaic of ways and places—the Duke of Edinburgh is worshipped as a god on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, a Lee Enfield motorcycle is revered as a deity in parts of India, there is now a website, godchecker.com, listing more than three thousand “supreme” beings—humans everywhere seem to have learned next to nothing. They are still locked into ancient enmities, still espouse outdated and disproved doctrines, still fall for shabby con tricks, allowing themselves to be manipulated by religious showmen and charlatans.

And yet, and yet . . . The blunt (and to many the perplexing) truth appears to be that, despite the manifest horrors and absurdities of many aspects of religion, despite the contradictions, ambiguities and obvious untruths embodied by all major and minor faiths, it is—according to a number of distinguished authorities—atheism that appears to be in retreat today.

One of the first to point this out was the sociologist Peter Berger. His
view might be seen as poignant because it had some of the characteristics of a conversion. Berger, an Austrian émigré who became professor of sociology and theology at Boston University, was in the 1950s and 1960s a keen advocate of “secularization theory.” This theory, which was at its strongest in the mid–twentieth century and could be traced back to the Enlightenment, held that modernization “necessarily” leads to the decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals. On this analysis, secularization was and is a good thing, in that it does away with religious phenomena that are “backward,” “superstitious” and “reactionary.”

That was then. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, however, the picture appears very different, at least to some people. As mentioned above, Peter Berger was one of the first to draw attention to the change which brought about, on his part, a famous recantation. In 1996, he accepted that modernity had, “for fully understandable reasons,” undermined all the traditional certainties, but he insisted that uncertainty “is a condition that many people find very hard to bear.” Therefore, he pointed out, “any movement (not only a religious one) that promises to provide or to renew certainty has a ready market.”
8
And, looking about him, he concluded that the world today “is as furiously religious as it ever was . . . is
anything but
the secularized world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently),” that whatever religious color people have, they are all agreed upon “the shallowness of a culture that tries to get along without any transcendent point of reference.”
9

Berger is not alone. There is no question that the spirits of religious authors are on the rise. In 2006, John Millbank, professor of religion at the University of Nottingham, sought to explain how theology can lead us “beyond secular reason.” In
The Language of God
(2006), Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, described his own journey from atheism to “committed Christianity.” In
God’s Universe
(2006), Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus of astronomy at Harvard, explained how he is “personally persuaded that a superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos.” And in
Evolution and Christian Faith
, published the same year, Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, recounted her struggles to fit the individual into the evolutionary picture—compli
cated in her case by the fact that she is transgender and so has views at odds with some conventional Darwinian thinking about sexual identity.

In 2007, Antony Flew, professor of philosophy at various universities in Britain and Canada, explained in
There Is a God
how “the world’s most notorious atheist [himself] changed his mind.” Also in 2007, Gordon Graham examined whether art, for all its advantages, can ever “re-enchant” the world the way religion did, concluding that it couldn’t. In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander suffered bacterial meningitis and went into a deep coma for a week. Recovering, he wrote a best-selling memoir,
Proof of Heaven: A Neurologist’s Journey to the Afterlife
, in which he described heaven as full of butterflies, flowers, and blissful souls and angels.
10

RELIGION AS SOCIOLOGY, NOT THEOLOGY

There is another perplexing side to this—namely, that in the past decade some new and sophisticated arguments have been made for understanding religion as a natural phenomenon. Some of these arguments, moreover, have arisen as a result of new scientific findings that have changed the nature of the debate. What are we to make of this state of affairs, in which atheism has the better case, where its evidence involves new elements, which introduces new arguments, but where religion, so its adherents claim, has the numbers, despite its manifest horrors and absurdities?

The most convincing argument I have encountered—certainly the one with the most substantial and systematic evidence to support it—is that offered by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide
(2004). Their book draws on a massive base of empirical evidence generated by the four waves of the World Values Survey, carried out from 1981 to 2001, which has conducted representative and sophisticated national surveys in almost eighty societies, covering all of the world’s major faiths. Norris and Inglehart also used Gallup International Polls, the International Social Survey Program and Eurobarometer surveys. While, they say, “it is obvious that religion has not disappeared from the world, nor does it seem likely to do so,” they insist that the concept of secularization “captures an important part of what is [still] going on.”

Their study identifies a core sociological factor, something they term “existential security,” which they say rests on two simple axioms and which “prove[s] extremely powerful in accounting for most of the variations in religious practices found across the world.”
11

The first basic building block in their theory is the assumption that rich and poor nations around the globe differ sharply in their levels of sustainable human development and socioeconomic inequality and thus in the basic living conditions of human security and vulnerability to risks. The idea of human security has emerged in recent years, they say, as an important objective of international development. At its simplest, the core idea of security rejects military strength to ensure territorial integrity and replaces it with freedom from various risks and dangers, ranging from environmental degradation to natural and man-made disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and droughts, and to epidemics, violations of human rights, humanitarian crises and poverty.

The past thirty years have seen dramatic improvements in some parts of the developing world. Nevertheless, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reports that worldwide progress has been erratic during the last decade, with some reversals: fifty-four countries (twenty of them in Africa) are poorer now than in 1990; in thirty-four countries, life expectancy has fallen; in twenty-one, the Human Development Index declined. In Africa, trends in HIV/AIDS and hunger are worsening. The gap between living conditions in rich and poor societies is growing.
12

Analysis of data from societies around the world has revealed that the extent to which people emphasize religion and engage in religious behavior could, indeed, be predicted with considerable accuracy from a society’s level of economic and other development. Multivariate analysis (a mathematical technique) has demonstrated that a few basic developmental indicators, such as per capita GNP, rates of HIV/AIDS, access to improved water sources and the number of doctors per hundred thousand people, predict “with remarkable precision” how frequently the people of a given society worship or pray. The most crucial explanatory variables are those that differentiate between vulnerable societies and societies in which survival is so secure that people take it for granted during their formative years.
13

In particular, Norris and Inglehart hypothesize that, all things being equal, the experience of growing up in less secure societies will heighten the importance of religious values, while, conversely, experience of more secure societies will lessen it. The main reason, they say, is that “the need for religious reassurance becomes less pressing under conditions of greater security.” It follows that people living in advanced industrial societies will often grow increasingly indifferent to traditional religious leaders and institutions and become less willing to engage in spiritual activities. “People raised under conditions of relative security can tolerate more ambiguity and have less need for the absolute and rigidly predictable rules that religious sanctions provide.”

It seems plain that improving conditions of existential security erode the importance of religious values but—and here is the rub—at the same time reduce the rates of population growth in postindustrial societies. So rich societies are becoming more secular in their values but
shrinking
in population. In contrast, poorer nations remain deeply religious in their values and will also have much higher fertility rates, producing ever larger populations (and therefore tending to remain poor).
14
A core aim of virtually all traditional religions is to maintain the strength of the family, “to encourage people to have children, to encourage women to stay home and raise the children, and to forbid abortion, divorce, or anything that interferes with high rates of reproduction.” It should be no surprise, then, that these two interlinked trends mean that rich nations are becoming more secular, but the world as a whole is becoming more religious.

BOOK: The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God
10.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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