The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  POROUS VERSUS BUFFERED SELVES

  Taylor pursues this argument further than any of the others. He says that humanism has failed, that the “pursuit of happiness,” a current concern, is a much thinner idea or ideal than “fulfillment” or “flourishing” or transcendence; that it uses a “less subtle language,” giving rise to less subtle experiences; that it is lacking in “spiritual insight,” spontaneity or immediacy, is devoid of “harmony” and “balance,” and is ultimately unhealthy.

  The modern individual, he says, is a “buffered” self rather than a “porous” self. A porous self is open to all the feelings and experiences of the world “out there,” while the modern buffered self is denied these experiences because our scientific education teaches us only concepts, our experiences are intellectual, emotional, sexual and so on, rather than “whole.” Modern individuals have been denied a “master narrative” in which they may find their place, and without which their “sense of loss can perhaps never be stilled.” Without these factors, he goes on, there is no scope for any human life to achieve a “sense of greatness” out of which a “higher” view of fulfillment arises. The sense that there is “something more” presses in on us, and, therefore, we can never be “comfortable” with unbelief.

  Phew. Skeptics may raise their eyebrows at these claims but there is no doubt that they chime with what many people feel or think. And the likes of Taylor find support for their arguments in the statistical fact that, after the high point of secularization in the 1960s and 1970s, at the beginning of the twenty-first century more and more people are turning—or returning—to religion. Richard Kearney has even given it a name, Anatheism.6 We shall return to the (ambiguous) meaning of these statistics presently, but it is certainly true that in 2014 the battle between religious thinkers and atheists is as fierce (and indeed as bitter) as it has been for many a year.

  For their part, the militant atheists, as they have been described, largely occupy a Darwinian position. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, to name only the best known, follow Charles Darwin in seeing human beings as an entirely naturally occurring biological species, which has slowly evolved from “lower” animals, in a universe that has likewise evolved over the past 13.5 billion years from a “singularity,” or “Big Bang,” itself a naturally occurring process (albeit where the laws of nature break down) that we shall understand someday. This process has no need of any supernatural entity.

  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 o
f 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—complicated 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, o
r 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.

  TRANSCENDENCE VERSUS POVERTY

  A number of things follow from this analysis. In the first place, we can say that the original secularization theory was right all along but many societies did not follow (or failed to follow) the same industrialization/urbanization path as did the West. Second, and conceivably more important, we can now see that religion is best understood “as a sociological rather than a theological phenomenon.”15 Far from “transcendence” being the fundamental ingredient or experience related to belief, as Peter Berger and others claim, poverty and existential insecurity are the most important explanatory factors. Given all this, and combined with the UNDP findings—that the gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen, and “existential insecurity in some fifty or more countries is likewise growing”—then the “success” of religion is actually a by-product of the failure of some countries to successfully modernize and reduce the insecurities of their people. On this reading, the expansion of religion is nothing for us, as a world community trying to help each other, to be proud of—triumphalism concerning the religious revival is therefore, on this account, misplaced.

  A final point is more subtle. When we actually look at the “flavor” of the religions that are flourishing now, when we look at their theological, intellectual and emotional characteristics, what do we find? We find, first, that it is the established churches—those with the most elaborately worked out theologies, theologies as often as not about transcendence—that are losing adherents, to be replaced by evangelicals, Pentecostals, “health-and-wealth” charismatics and fundamentalists of one kind or another. In 1900, 80 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and the United States; today, 60 percent of them live in the developing world.16