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

by Watson, Peter

  Some of these innovations are controversial, some are fantastical (part of their point being to gain our attention) and some are contradictory. They bring us up to date.

  THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL HEALTH

  Richard Dawkins is probably the most controversial figure in the current debate between science and religion. In Unweaving the Rainbow, he sought to show that a scientific approach to creation can be just as “awesome” and fulfilling as religious belief. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he set himself two more objectives. First, to explain in the only way possible—as the result of thousands and thousands of incremental evolutionary advances—the great biological complexity we see around us. And second, to argue that, if complexity can arise only in this way, there is no need of a complex God in the first place—in fact, it is a contradiction in terms. He insists that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”5

  He returned to the attack in 2006 with The God Delusion. Here he repeated some of his arguments against God—for example, that God would have to be complex to create the evolutionary mechanism, so why would he need to create evolution to manufacture complexity all over again? He looked at the several projects that have subjected prayer to experimental verification—and found them severely wanting. He looked at the roots of morality and examined a number of religious stances, which he found suspect. For instance, he believed that hardly anyone any longer “looked forward” (if they ever did) to the afterlife. So religion for him was a sham.

  Dawkins didn’t have much to say about how we should live without religion—he took it for granted that his own lifestyle as perceived via his writings was evidence enough—but in typically combative fashion he described several instances of individuals “escaping” (his word) from their faith, to show that it could and can be done, and he published as an appendix a list of “friendly addresses,” mainly of humanist associations around the world, where people escaping from their church could find refuge and intellectual support.6

  In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University and a colleague of Dawkins, argued that it was now time for religion “as a global phenomenon” to be subject to multidisciplinary research, “because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about.”7 Until now, he said, there has been a tacit agreement that scientists will leave religion alone, but with fundamentalist terrorism so widespread “we are paying a terrible price for our ignorance.”8 He pointed out that two or three religions come into existence every day and that their typical lifespan is less than a decade, with even the great monotheisms not being that long-lived by the standard of other human institutions—writing, say, which has been around for five thousand years, or agriculture, ten thousand, or language, hundreds of thousands of years.9 By examining humans’ need for intensity, for ritual, for attributing agency to anything that puzzles them, for finding patterns almost everywhere, for some people to assume the role of steward and others to cede it, he showed how folk religions evolved seamlessly into organized religions.

  It is “belief in belief” that really matters, Dennett asserted; many people don’t actually believe many of the tenets of their religion (a belief in hell, say, or in the golden calf), but they do believe in the concept of God. Belief in belief is an elusive matter, but it has played an important role in the development, in the twentieth century in particular, of the concept of God as “apophatic”—meaning that God is “ineffable, unknowable, something beyond all human ken.”10 He was particularly dismissive of this concept (made popular by Karl Barth in the 1920s).

  He concluded by asking if people are right in thinking that the best way to live a good life is through religion; the world is “sick and tired,” he said, of the demonstrations of devotion by one fundamentalist terrorist or another.11 The political agendas of fundamentalists and fanatics often exploit the organizational infrastructure of the religions they profess to belong to and their traditions of unquestioning loyalty. Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorism are Islam’s responsibility.

  In writing his book, he said, he had come across one widespread opinion, albeit expressed in a variety of ways: in essence, this was that “man” has a “deep need” for spirituality. “What fascinates me about this delightfully versatile craving for ‘spirituality’ is that people think they know what they are talking about, even though—or perhaps because—nobody bothers to explain what they mean.”

  Dennett had three things to say about how we should live. The secret to spirituality had nothing to do with the soul, or anything supernatural—it was this: let your self go. “If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the great scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person [italics in original].”12

  It was a matter of urgency, he thought, that people understand and accept evolutionary theory. “I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No. . . . We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! . . . In our view there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. . . . I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion.”13

  As indicative of another way forward, Dennett recommended the work of the British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who has pioneered, he said, the consideration of the ethical issues involved in deciding how to decide “when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible.” Humphrey advocates teaching them about all the world’s religions, “in a matter-of-fact, historically and biologically informed way,” just as we teach them about geography, history and mathematics. “Let’s get more education about religion in our schools, not less.” We should teach rituals and customs and the positive and negative aspects of religious history—the role of the churches in the civil rights movement and the Inquisition. No religion should be favored, and none ignored. And as we learn more about the psychological and biological basis of religion, this should be included too. “The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century.”

  In fact, Dennett’s call for more research into religion overlooks the fact that this is already under way, most notably as recorded in David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral (2002), which looks at a variety of religions—those of the Nuer, Dagara and Mbuti, of John Calvin’s Geneva and of the Christian Koreans in Texas. He concludes that religions are adaptive units that form in order to access resources (often, material resources) that can be obtained only through coordinated group action. Catechisms and the concept of forgiveness can also be regarded as evolved phenomena, he claims.14

  NEW RULES TO LIVE BY: TRUST, TRADE AND A TRAGIC VISION

  Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), mounted a coruscating attack on all religions, stating that both the Bible and the Koran contain “mountains” of life-destroying gibberish; that the “land” most terrorists are fighting over is not to be found in this world; and asking why God would make Shakespeare a better writer than himself. Science, he said, is gradually encompassing life’s d
eepest questions and we are beginning to understand why humans flourish. We are beginning to understand, for instance, the role of the hormone oxytocin in the brain and its link with human well-being.

  Thanks to such discoveries we will eventually be able to say, objectively, that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, because once we put religion in its place, “[w]ell-being captures all that we can intelligibly value.”15 Harris argued from the failures of the kibbutzim in Israel that some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography; that it is societies whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others that are the most successful. We are changing morally, and improving, he emphasized—for instance, we are less prepared than we used to be to accept collateral damage in conflict situations. One of his prime conclusions was that “there may be nothing more important than human cooperation.”

  This was the conclusion, also, of Matt Ridley, a British polymath who combines being a scientist with a number of other roles, including chairman of a bank. In his book The Origins of Virtue (1996), he argued that “moral sentiments are problem-solving devices to make highly social creatures [us] effective at using social relations to ensure their genes’ long-term survival.” Moral life, he concluded, is based on the fact that “selfish genes make us social, trustworthy and cooperative.” There was morality before the church, trade before the state, exchange before money, social contracts before Hobbes, welfare before the rights of man, culture before Babylon, self-interest before Adam Smith, and greed before capitalism. The main element in cooperation, he said, is trust, “a vital form of social capital.” Where authority replaces reciprocity, the sense of community fades. For trust to grow, we must reduce the power of the state and devolve our lives into parishes, computer networks, clubs and teams, self-help groups and small businesses—“everything small and local.”

  In The Rational Optimist (2010), Ridley argues that, in contrast to what many people think, in the last thousand years life expectancy has increased dramatically, indicators show a decrease in violence, and average income has increased exponentially. Humans are the only living beings, he points out, to have been able to continuously increase their quality of life. No other species with a prominent brain, such as dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses and parakeets, have achieved this, so it cannot be simply a matter of brain size. His answer is trade. It is trade between unrelated parties that has increased our collective intelligence, to the benefit of all.16 More open trade should be the faith of the future.

  Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, very largely agrees. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), he explores what he thinks are humanity’s greatest fears so far as human nature is concerned—the fear of inequality, the fear of imperfectibility, the fear of determinism and the fear of nihilism. Against this, religions have traditionally provided “comfort, community and moral guidance” to countless people, and according to some biologists the sophisticated deism toward which many religions are evolving “can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of mind and nature.”

  Furthermore, with increasing knowledge our moral circle has in fact been expanding. Instead of religions focusing on their own kind, greater biological understanding has led to the entities worthy of moral consideration being “poked outward” from the family and the village toward the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race and, most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), toward all of humanity. Nor will it stop there, as some seek to include within their orbit certain animals, zygotes, fetuses and the brain-dead. The latest cognitive science has agreed upon a list of “core intuitions,” he reports, on which we base our understanding, such as an intuitive physics, intuitive engineering and psychology, spatial and number sense, sense of probability and intuitive economics. We once had an intuitive sense of the soul, which it is no longer possible to reconcile with biology, and that means we now need to reconfigure our moral understanding, which is better understood as a system of trade-offs according to circumstances. This is, in effect, a return to situation ethics, first encountered in chapter 19.

  Pinker himself tends toward a “tragic” intuition of life, rather than a “Utopian” one, which contains these elements at least: the primacy of family ties; the limited scope of sharing and reciprocity which leads to “social loafing”; the universality of dominance, violence and ethnocentrism; the partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness and antisocial tendencies; the prevalence of defense mechanisms; biases in the moral sense toward preference of kin and friends; and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness and beauty. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), Pinker identifies six periods in which violence decreased significantly, proving, he argues, that we are getting more moral.17

  Though Pinker has been widely criticized, as was Ridley, for his Panglossian tendencies, and though Pinker thinks that the advent of a strong state has a lot to do with the decline in violence, he also believes that another major factor has been commerce, “a game which everyone can win.” “As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.”

  For Harris, Ridley and Pinker, then, moral progress has been and is being made—it has nothing to do with religion and never has. Trade is perhaps not usually pitched against religious values as much as science has been; but the effect is much the same. Trade is a horizontal activity, carried out between people on the same level, and by definition it is a this-worldly activity. Like most other human activities, it has evolved.

  George Levine’s aim is different, but not unrelated. In Darwin Loves You (2006), he aims to introduce us to a “kinder, gentler” Darwin, a man who was a romantic at heart, a nature lover, a man who helps us understand the world as a more—not less—enchanted place. Through Darwin, he says, we get a deep sense of the power of nature, which he equates to a religious feeling, going so far as to say that evolutionary theory is a form of nature worship—and a “more effective” one because it embodies a different relation to nature, one of which humans are a part rather than being somehow separate from it and receiving it as a gift from God, as Christianity has it.

  He sees Darwin’s attention to minutiae as a moral act, and a model, because “this is where non-theistic enchantment begins.” He argues that Darwin’s inspection of the “lower” animals was important for understanding hierarchy and the human place in nature.18 Darwin’s contribution was as both participant and observer—again, an excellent model. “Darwin offers us no mysteries, no transcendence, but an earth that is room enough. We have been misled by 2,500 years of monotheism into expecting some larger meaning, meaning that is not material. That is too bad.”

  Each of these biologists writes combative prose, born of a conviction that evolution is, as Dennett puts it, “the most important idea, ever.” Indeed, they have been accused, as we shall see presently, of being the new dogmatists. But that hardly applies to the doyen of evolutionary biologists, the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson, who has been by far the most inventive and positive evolutionist of modern times and also the most stylish writer.

  Raised as a Southern Baptist in Alabama (where he read the Bible from cover to cover, twice), he lost his faith suddenly on being introduced as a young man to evolution. (“It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive.”) It also seemed to him that the biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all—they had made no provision for evolution. “Could it be,” he asked himself, “that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken?” It was al
l too much, and he was a Baptist no more.

  Even so, he had no immediate desire to purge himself totally of his religious feelings. “I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end.”19

  Viewed in one way, Wilson is as uncompromising as his biologist colleagues, but he also has the distinction of coining three words that were to prove influential, and which address our subject. These were “sociobiology,” “biophilia” and “consilience.”

  In Sociobiology (1975), he proposed that the biological principles which we now know govern animal life could be profitably applied to human societies. But if these premises were correct, he insisted, then humans were presented with two great spiritual dilemmas. “The first is that no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. [Everything,] even the capacities to select particular aesthetic judgments and religious beliefs[,] must have arisen by the same mechanistic approaches [that is, according to biological principles]. . . . The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature. . . . Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized? Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.”