Why God Won't Go Away

Engaging With The New Atheism

Alister McGrath

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281063871
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065769
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

The recent rise of the New Atheism has aroused great general interest, thrown up questions of fundamental importance, and started a fascinating conversation. Why God Won't Go Away invites us to join in. The volume opens with a survey of the main ideas of the New Atheism, as expressed in the works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. We then examine the core views of the movement closely, making due reference to its 'virtual community' of websites and blogs. Subjects explored include: whether religion is delusional and evil, the belief that human beings are fundamentally good, whether we should have faith only in what can be proved through reason and science, the idea that the best hope for humanity is a 'New Enlightenment' The result is a lively and highly thought-provoking volume that poses a number of interesting questions. Why is religion experiencing a resurgence in the twenty-first century, when we are meant to have grown out of such a primitive fixation? Has the New Atheism's fascination with rationality led to a fatal underestimation of the longing of the human heart to adore? And if, as Christopher Hitchens writes in exasperation, religion is 'ineradicable', doesn't this tiresome fact suggest that dismissing belief in God as irrational and unscientific might just be a waste of time?

Part 1

WHAT IS THE NEW ATHEISM?

1

The New Atheism: how it all started

The term New Atheism was invented in 2006. Gary Wolf was writing an article for Wired, a British magazine aimed at ‘smart, intellectually curious people who need, and want, to know what’s next’. He was looking around for a snappy slogan to refer to a group of three men who’d attracted media attention through bestselling popular books advocating atheism: Sam Harris with The End of Faith (2004), Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennett with Breaking the Spell (2006). The authors were already linked through a number of groups, most notably John Brockman’s ‘Edge’ network,¹ which describes its purpose as ‘To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.’ Wolf hit on the phrase ‘the New Atheism’ to designate the approach of Dawkins, Harris and Dennett – an enthusiastic advocation of atheism and a scathing criticism of both religious belief and cultural respect for religion.²

In 2007 the movement gained a new hero when Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great became the latest atheist bestseller. The phrase ‘the Four Horsemen’ began to be used to refer to these writers, who rapidly assumed celebrity status and are now collectively identified as the intellectual and cultural spearhead of the New Atheism.³

But who are they? Where are they coming from? What are their agendas? Before engaging with the core ideas of the New Atheism in detail, it makes sense to find out more about its four main protagonists and the approaches they develop in their books. We’ll begin by considering Sam Harris (born 1967), whose The End of Faith is widely regarded as laying the groundwork for the rather more significant later volumes by Dawkins and Hitchens.

Sam Harris

In The End of Faith (2004), the hitherto unknown American author mounted a powerful rhetorical attack on religion, seeing it as the primary cause of the catastrophe of 9/11. The book bristles with anger. How could such an outrage take place in a rational nation like the USA? What does the persistence of religion tell us about the state of the human mind there? What can be done to purge the nation of the dangerous delusion that there is a God?

While conceding that militant Islam must be acknowledged as the immediate cause of 9/11, Harris is nonetheless scathing of Islam as a whole: ‘It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been “hijacked” by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims.’ But Christianity and Judaism, he believes, also deserve blame for this disaster because the problem lies with religion as such, rather than any specific form of religion. Fanatical Islam is simply a particularly extreme example of the irrationality and dysfunctionality of religious faith. The world would be a better place if no one believed in God at all.

Note that Harris’ primary concern in The End of Faith is not to defend atheism but rather to portray religion as dangerous and deluded. Ideas that should be regarded as symptoms of mental illness – such as praying – are tolerated in Western culture simply because we’ve got used to them. Religious moderates blind society to the danger of religious extremists. The problem is not extremism or fanaticism as such but religion, which engenders such attitudes in the first place.

I read this book with mixed feelings back in 2005. I completely agree with Harris when he declares that religion can be a problem. It’s one of the reasons I myself was an atheist when I was younger. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the 1960s I was painfully aware of the tensions between Protestants and Catholics, and it seemed obvious that if there were no religion there would be no religious violence. Getting rid of religion was the key to human progress and social cohesion. In fact as I read Harris I felt rather nostalgic for the certainties of my youth: religion was for losers, idiots and terrorists. Of course this is a hopelessly simplistic view that cannot be sustained in the light of subsequent scholarly research. But it was how I perceived things then.

The End of Faith has won plaudits from enthusiastic atheists, who often express delight that Harris has broken one of the fundamental taboos of American culture: the need to be respectful about religion. It needed to be ridiculed, and Harris slammed it. Yet even a casual reading of the book raises some very awkward questions. Let us look more closely, for example, at his perplexing statement that ‘we are at war with Islam’. Can this superficial critique really be sustained by the evidence? Is it not overgeneralizing to present the more fanatical elements of Islam as representative of the movement as a whole in order to justify such a war?

If the first chapter of Harris’ book makes clear that he dislikes certain forms of religion intensely, sadly what follows it reveal that he doesn’t really know very much about them. And by the end of the book you have to wonder if the plausibility of his argument depends largely on his readers sharing his abhorrence and lack of understanding.

To his supporters Harris is a straight talker who tells us the truth. To his critics, his analysis of the question of religious violence is based on an alarmist rhetoric; excessive reliance on anecdote; an appeal to popular prejudice and predisposition rather than evidence-based analysis; and above all, a failure to engage with the massive scholarly research literature on religion. He presents a highly simplistic narrative that depicts religion as the cause of the world’s ills. (The weakest part of the book is a particularly unpersuasive section that invites us to believe that religion lies behind the USA’s problem with drugs.) Yet his analysis is so biased and inattentive to the evidence that many are left wondering if there’s a fatal disconnection here between rhetoric and reality.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, is one mainline scholar who’s worried about Harris’ simplistic approach to what’s clearly a complex issue. If religion causes problems, it’s important to understand properly why this is so – otherwise the solutions offered will be worthless and possibly even counterproductive. In a seminar sponsored by the Edge network, Atran launched a frontal assault on the methodology of the New Atheism. By ignoring the scholarly literature on religion, Atran declared, Harris and others were offering responses to religion that were ‘often scientifically baseless, psychologically uninformed, politically naive, and counterproductive’.⁴

Let us agree that there are indeed some real problems about religion in the modern world, and that we all need to work out what to do about them. That is why so many leading Christians talk to atheists: listening to informed criticism can help us get a sense of perspective and possibly even identify ways ahead. But I am not sure Harris really helps much here. His remedy is little more than a pastiche of prejudice and passion that aims to incite through its rhetoric as much as to persuade through its arguments. It is as if he already knows the answers and sees no point in reflecting critically on the issues. Happily for us, if inconveniently for Harris, there are more informed approaches that enable us to reflect critically yet intelligently about religion in the modern world.

A good example is Mark Juergensmeyer’s important work, Terror in the Mind of God (2000),⁵ which sets out the case for believing that religion, while rarely being itself a direct cause of war and violence, can provide a potent and persuasive moral justification for violence as a form of resistance to perceived injustices and inequalities. Juergensmeyer argues that recent religious extremism reflects the failure of both secularism and modern nation states (especially the USA) to challenge and confront deprivation and injustice. It is a rather more complex analysis than Harris’, and raises some awkward questions about the impact of US foreign policy on encouraging religious radicalization in the Islamic world. But it does seem to be based on much better evidence and to make more sense of what’s happening around us.

Or again, we might consider the detailed evidence-based arguments in William Cavanaugh’s recent study, The Myth of Religious Violence (2009).⁶ Cavanaugh’s book provides a sustained critique of contemporary thinkers – such as Harris – who argue that religion generates its own distinctive pathological kind of violence, which is to be distinguished from legitimate secular violence.⁷ Cavanaugh argues that this is neither scholarly persuasive nor socially liberal. Harris’ agenda, he concludes, is to use the false category of ‘religious violence’ to ‘marginalize discourses and practices labelled “religious”’.⁸

Harris’ apparent belief that liberal society uses violence to enforce only noble values and aspirations seems more than a little naive. Many have drawn the troubling conclusion that violence does not solve anything at all, but simply creates a cycle of violence that perpetuates and amplifies the problem.

The really disturbing parts of Harris’ book concern his own views, not his criticisms of religion. In one section, after rightly noting that beliefs shape behaviour, he argues that ‘some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.’⁹ Killing such people, he tells us, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Authors information
• Dedication
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Content
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• Further reading