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

by Watson, Peter

  No less than Woolf or Joyce, Lawrence took risks with his writing—in style, in subject matter. But, like them, his aim was a larger, warmer life, living well among others close to him. Intimacy and accurate details are the key ingredients.

  * * *

  I. Italics added.

  14

  The Impossibility of Metaphysics, a Reverence for Metapsychology

  T

  oward the end of 1932, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer and his new wife, Renée, arrived in Vienna. He was there to work under Moritz Schlick, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a group of radical philosopher-scientists, news of whose achievements was beginning to seep into the British and American consciousness.

  The Vienna that Ayer found was not so different, in many respects, from the city it had been before the Great War. It was busy and crowded, with two million inhabitants, still a wonderful architectural showcase, still home to a vibrant café culture where, for the price of a cup of coffee, “one could spend a morning in an elegant salon reading newspapers in three or four languages.”1 It was still famous for its music, its cheap dance halls and its anti-Semitism. Freud was still practicing there.

  The Vienna Circle was elaborating a tradition begun by such figures as Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and espoused a philosophy known to themselves as Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, “the world scientifically conceived.” Its main members were Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann, Austrian and Jewish, together with Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap from Germany, and occasional members included Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper. Only two Anglo-Saxons were ever admitted, Ayer and the American Willard Van Orman Quine, who was in Vienna at the same time as his British colleague. Several of the group had trained as scientists or as mathematicians before turning to philosophy, and such training clearly shaped their views.

  The Circle had been launched in 1929 when Carnap and Neurath published Wissenshaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle): its main planks were empiricism and its commitment to logical analysis, and its distinguishing both of these from the belief—common since Kant’s day, particularly among Hegelians—that there are certain metaphysical facts about the world (such as “the Absolute”) that we can know independently of experience.

  The Circle saw itself as having two tasks. Negatively, as Ben Rogers put it in his biography of Ayer, its purpose was to “warn people off” metaphysics, and particularly to counter the German fascination with Romanticism and idealism. At the same time, its more positive aim was to clarify the logic of science and commonsense observation. For Schlick, Neurath, Carnap and the others, science—to encompass commonsense observation as well—is the only source of real knowledge; everything is built up from sense experience and so any proposition which does not relate back to sense experience cannot lay claim to being knowledge. In Carnap’s words: “All knowledge stems from one source of knowledge: experience—the unmediated content of experience such as red, hard, toothache and joy.” This can be traced back to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and its claim that an utterance is meaningful if, and only if, it expresses a proposition whose truth or falsehood can be verified by empirical observation or solely by reference to the meaning of the terms it contains. If a statement could not be tested empirically, then according to the Circle it was meaningless. (Karl Popper would subsequently replace the notion of verifiability with that of falsification.)

  WHAT CAN AND CANNOT BE SAID

  This had grave, even apocalyptic, consequences for metaphysics. “The Vienna Circle no longer attacked propositions about the soul, God, the Absolute, the after-life, historical destiny, national spirit, or transcendent values, as being false or unduly speculative. Instead it maintained that insofar as they were unverifiable, they were literally meaningless.”2 Anything that could not be tested was out of court. The Circle’s aim—as had been Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus—was to purify language, to make clear what can and cannot be said.

  In a letter to friends in Britain at the time, Ayer wrote that the ultimate term of abuse among the members of the Circle was “metaphysical.” Wittgenstein was treated, if not like a god (as that would have been metaphysical), “as a second Pythagoras.”3 All his life Ayer retained the view that there is no “unknowable realm of hidden objects” or entities—such an idea was simply nonsensical, as it was to the members of the Circle. He started his famous book Language, Truth and Logic, which popularized the ideas of the Circle in the English-speaking world, in the summer of 1933, with the specific aim of “demonstrating the impossibility of metaphysics.”

  He began by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense.4 Nothing concerning the properties, or even the existence, of anything super-empirical can legitimately be inferred. The impossibility of a transcendent metaphysic is a matter of logic. It was at the time impossible to verify, practically, that there were mountains on the far side of the moon, but it was verifiable in principle. On the other hand, “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress,” and is not verifiable even in principle. We cannot conceive of an observation that would verify this.5 Most statements can never be more than highly probable—“arsenic is poisonous” or “all men are mortal” cannot be established with certainty in an infinite number of cases. By the same token, statements about the past can never be more than highly probable.

  There is a difference between being false and being nonsensical, and we are often confused by language. For example, the statements “unicorns are fictitious” and “dogs are faithful” look similar, but fictitious objects like unicorns do not have some special form of existence, “so as to be real in some non-empirical sense.” Just because something can be the subject of a sentence does not mean that it exists.

  Ayer argued that fundamental ethical concepts are unanalyzable because “there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgments in which they occur.” The reason is that they are pseudo-concepts. In saying “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” I am saying nothing more than “You stole that money.” No further statement is added other than moral disapproval. “It is as if I had said ‘You stole that money’ in a particular tone of voice. . . . Sentences which make moral judgments are pure expressions of feeling and do not come under the category of truth or falsehood.”6

  Moreover, “there cannot be such a thing as ethical science, if by ethical science one means the elaboration of a ‘true’ system of morals.” One of the chief causes of moral behavior, he says, is fear, both conscious and unconscious, of God’s displeasure, or fear of the enmity of society.7 “This is why [morals] present themselves as ‘categorical’ commands. They are partly determined in turn by the society’s condition of its own happiness. This is why altruism is preferred everywhere to egotism.”

  Regarding the possibility of religious knowledge, Ayer says: “If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstrably certain, then these premises must be certain. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot judge the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. . . . It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.

  “What is not so generally recognized is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Christianity, is even probable. Yet this is also easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. . . . But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed that certain regularities in nature constitute sufficient evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence ‘God exists’ entails no more than that certain types of phenomena occur in
certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended. He would say that in talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being. . . . In that case ‘god’ is a metaphysical term. And if ‘god’ is a metaphysical term, it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that God exists is to make a metaphysical utterance that cannot be either true or false. . . . This affects atheists and agnostics too. The atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical.”

  Thus the assertions of the theist cannot be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As the theist says nothing about the world, he cannot be justly accused of saying anything false. “It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition,” says Ayer, “that we are entitled to disagree with him.”

  He goes on: “Regarding the attributes of God . . . We may have a word which is used as if it names this ‘person’ but unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything at all. And this is the case with regard to the word ‘god,’ in the usage in which it is intended to refer to a transcendent object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster an illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. It is only when we inquire what God’s attributes are that we discover that ‘God’ in this usage, is not a genuine name. The same is true of soul and afterlife.8 . . . We are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends human understanding. But to say this is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. We are told that God is an object of faith and not an object of reason. This may be nothing more than an admission that the existence of God must be taken on trust, since it cannot be proved. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something that cannot be described, then he must admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. . . . The argument from religious experience is fallacious. The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge, any more than our having moral experiences implies that there is any such thing as moral knowledge. The theist, like the moralist, may believe that his experiences are cognitive experiences but unless he can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure he is deceiving himself.”9

  The logical positivists—as the followers of the Vienna Circle in the Anglo-Saxon world came to be called—all seemed to think, as Freud appears to have thought (see p. 278), that simply by making their arguments available they would be accepted and eventually prevail. They saw no need to put anything “in the place” of God. The major change that they sought to bring about was for philosophy to become a “smaller” activity. Ayer argued that philosophy was nothing more than logical analysis, and in that case, he insisted, no sense could be made of a God who was held to have created the universe, on the grounds that no sense could be made of an entity existing outside space and time; and that “in being made to transcend time, it loses all possibility of being, even in principle, accessible to our experience.”

  Ayer became more and more convinced that philosophy was incapable of offering an authoritative answer to the question “How should I live?” Put another way, he was saying that we can have knowledge of empirical truths and of the truisms of math and logic, “but not of values”—our morality is ultimately up to us. “The purpose of man’s existence is constituted by the ends to which he, consciously or unconsciously, devotes himself. . . . In the last resort, each individual has the responsibility of choice; and it is a responsibility that is not to be escaped.”10

  THE CRUELTIES OF CONSOLATION

  It is one of the sharper ironies of modern intellectual history that at exactly the time the logical positivists were focusing on “the impossibility of metaphysics,” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were introducing their own accounts as to how and why psychology “explained” God. Each of them claimed he was an empiricist, that his theories were based on close observations of experience. Nonetheless, several critics have described what they produced as “metapsychologies.” Each constructed a very radical synthesis, each very different from the other, coming to diametrically opposed conclusions.

  Freud was raised in a thoroughly secular household, as a “Godless Jew” in the historian Peter Gay’s words, in Vienna in the last half of the nineteenth century when the city, as we have seen, was one of the jewels of Europe in terms of its sophisticated secular culture: theatre, opera, architecture, science, sports, cuisine, leisure—a world, in Frederic Morton’s account, of “nervous splendor.” This may well have helped determine Freud’s approach: that once the psychological basis of religion had been explained, and its “errors” exploded, people would turn away, having no further need of religious psychological support. For Freud, as for the Vienna Circle, there was no “need” for an alternative to religion. It was a shortcoming, a false path in human history, and it was time to move on.

  Freud’s first critiques of religion were, as we saw earlier, his 1907 paper “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” and Totem and Taboo (1914). There, he had noted that several times in the past—in pre-exile Israel, for example, or classical Greece—gods had died or been killed off without too much fuss being made and without too many untoward effects being felt. In this sense, the death of God was nothing new. But now, as the logical positivists were circling their wagons, he produced three more books on religion, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. That number is a measure of the importance he attached to attacking/explaining/explaining away belief in God.

  The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, was an all-out assault, a polemic of just ninety-eight pages in which Freud, then already seventy-one, dismissed outright the truth claims of religion and foresaw its continued demise. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was becoming established internationally—the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute was formed in 1924, the same year that the Institute of Psychoanalysis opened in London, while a Paris outfit was opened two years later. More personally, Freud had detected a benign growth in his mouth in 1923, a leukoplakia associated with smoking. But this would develop into a cancer, about which his doctor failed to inform him at first, worried that he might commit suicide. From the late 1920s, Freud was in almost constant pain.

  In The Future of an Illusion, he began by considering the cultural and psychological significance of religion. He said that the principal task of culture, “its real raison d’être,” was to defend mankind against nature. God, or the gods of the ancients, had the same threefold task: “they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile one to the cruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, and they must make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed on man.”11 This is where Freud’s idea of the soul comes in. Since it is obvious that man succumbs to fate, is often overwhelmed by nature, and invariably dies, only an element detached from the body—the soul—is capable of being perfected, and offers the chance of a new kind of existence after death. The soul is a psychological entity, not a theological one.

  But Freud also claimed that “society knows very well the uncertain basis of the claims it makes for its religious doctrines.” And here he begins his polemic: he was essentially arguing that there is something intellectually dishonest about the claims that religions make in modern society. He insists, for instance, that all the arguments for the authenticity of religious doctrines “originate in the past” and that we should look to the present to see whether evidence is available. None of the “spiritualists,” as he calls them, referring implicitly to the contemporary doctrines of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner
and others, have “succeeded in disproving the fact that the appearances and utterances of their spirits are merely the productions of their own mental activity”—in fact, he disparages them as “foolish” and “desperately insignificant.”

  He is equally dismissive of arguments that claim truths must be “inwardly felt,” that “one does not need to comprehend them.” This, he says starkly, is an attempt to “evade” the problem. And the philosophy of “as if” was an absurd evasion. Some people (he is referring here predominantly to the ideas of Hans Vaihinger) go so far as to say that, even if it could be proved that religion “was not in the possession of the truth,” we should believe “as if” it were, in the interests of “the preservation of everybody” and because countless people find consolation in the doctrines of religion. Freud contemptuously turns away from this, saying it is a purposeless cruelty; “with the confession of absurdity, or illogicality, there is no more to be said.”12

  This leads him to consider the psychical origins of religious ideas, and to this statement: “These, which profess to be dogmas, are not the residue of experience or the final result of reflection; they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.” Which in turn leads him to his famous distinction between errors and illusions. Aristotle’s belief that vermin are evolved out of dung was an error, Columbus’s belief that he had discovered a new sea route to India was an illusion, the difference being this: “It is characteristic of an illusion that it is derived from men’s wishes.” Illusions are not necessarily errors, he says. “A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible; some such cases have occurred.” Freud is very caustic about religious illusions: some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with the knowledge we have built up, he says, that they border on delusions.13 And then this: “Where questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.” In particular, the meaning of the word “God” has been stretched into “vague abstractions.”