Challenging the New Atheism

Pragmatic Confrontations in the Philosophy of Religion

Aaron Pratt Shepherd

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000175301
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filosofía
• Categoría: Filosofía de la religión

This book presents a pragmatic response to arguments against religion made by the New Atheism movement. The author argues that analytic and empirical philosophies of religion—the mainstream approaches in contemporary philosophy of religion—are methodologically unequipped to address the "Threefold Challenge" made by popular New Atheist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.

The book has three primary motivations. First, it provides an interpretation of the New Atheist movement that treats their claims as philosophical arguments and not just rhetorical exercises or demagoguery. Second, it assesses and responds to these claims by elaborating four distinct contemporary philosophical perspectives— analytic philosophy, empirical philosophy, continental philosophy, and pragmatism—as well as contextualizing these perspectives in the history of the philosophy of religion. Finally, the book offers a metaphilosophical critique, returning again and again to the question of method. In the end, the author settles upon a modified version of pragmatism that he concludes is best suited for articulating the terms and stakes of the God Debate.

Challenging the New Atheism will be of interest to scholars and students of American philosophy and philosophy of religion.

1 The New Atheism

A Threefold Challenge

A decade and a half has passed since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a 400-page polemic against the Abrahamic religions and in defense of scientific rationalism and evolutionary theory. In two months after its release in October 2006, The God Delusion rose to number four on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list; millions of copies were sold in the succeeding years.¹

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist still completing his doctorate at UCLA at the time, had published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason two years prior. Harris had anticipated many of Dawkins’ arguments, arguing that the consequences of religious fundamentalism were dire enough to warrant an end to religion in the Western world altogether. Both Harris and Dawkins primarily sought to address religious moderates and those “on the fence” about matters of faith. “It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs,” Harris wrote in End of Faith. Dawkins states in his preface to The God Delusion that “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”²

This aspect of their projects caught the attention of columnist Gary Wolf, who dubbed these writers “The New Atheists.” Wolf wrote in Wired magazine shortly after the publication of The God Delusion that “the New Atheists…condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.”³ Wolf’s hyperbolic declaration of war on religion may or may not have been warranted at the time, but his comments do seem somewhat prophetic in light of the subsequent popularity of the intellectual movement that wholeheartedly adopted Wolf’s moniker.

In the years following the publication of The God Delusion, choruses of commentators sounded off both in support and condemnation of the New Atheists. Daniel Dennett, whose book Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon had come out earlier in 2006, was an early ally of Dawkins and Harris, and lent intellectual credibility to their views by virtue of his academic pedigree (Harvard BA, Oxford PhD) and position (professor of Philosophy at Tufts University). Journalist Christopher Hitchens joined the fray with god Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything in 2007, which received a popular reception that was God Delusion-esque. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett, the self-proclaimed “Four Horsemen” heralding the end of Western religion,⁴ were joined by Victor Stenger in 2007, whose book God: The Failed Hypothesis received substantially less popular acclaim, but was described by Hitchens as “a huge addition to the arsenal of argument” for the New Atheism.⁵

Stenger’s most important contribution, however, came two years later in his systematic treatment of the movement, entitled The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. In that book, Stenger endeavored to “review and expand upon the principles of New Atheism,”⁶ as well as respond to the first round of opposition literature that had been produced by theologians Alister McGrath, Keith Ward, Thomas Crean, Scott Hahn, and John Haught, as well as scientists Francis Collins and Jerry Coyne.⁷ As more counter-literature was produced by the likes of fellow physicist John C. Lennox,⁸ Stenger continued to fire back in public lectures and publications, including The Fallacy of Fine Tuning and God and the Folly of Faith.⁹ Alongside Stenger and the rest of the self-identified “New Atheists,” a small cottage industry of publications sprang up as the rising tide of the New Atheist writers’ appeal lifted more anti-religious and secular humanist boats. If nothing else, the New Atheism succeeded in animating a conversation about how religion is treated in the 21st century as well as opening a space for secular humanists to articulate a positive vision of a religion-less society.

The Three Challenges of the New Atheism

In what follows, I will articulate what I see as the problem constellation introduced in the New Atheism’s challenges to the place and significance of religion in contemporary America. To read professional commentary (particularly professional academic commentary), the New Atheist movement was all thunder and no lightning, a blustering collection of angry, Islamophobic, occasionally eloquent writers and speakers trotting out not-so-new arguments against the existence of God while vociferously evangelizing scientific materialism and a dogmatic Darwinism. Most commentators (even sympathetic ones) argued that it was less what the New Atheists had to say that characterized the movement than the way they said it: bluntly, publicly, and agonistically.¹⁰

David B. Hart’s 2010 article “Believe It or Not” was particularly dismissive; he described the New Atheism a “passing fad” that will “inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County.”¹¹ Hart argued that the New Atheists are guilty of making scarecrows out of religious ideas. Most of all, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens in particular were doing a disservice to the noble traditions of skepticism and atheism that have helped advance Western civilization over the past three centuries with their vigorous-yet- often-fallacious arguments. Similarly, Teemu Taira argued in 2016 that the New Atheism was less motivated by the desire to “get it right” about religion than it was by identity politics, “in which atheists demand recognition as atheists.” The New Atheists, on this account, aimed to win religious people and “nones” (those who claim no religious affiliation) to their cause.¹²

For both Hart and Taira, the actual substance of the New Atheism’s claims lack credibility as critiques of religion. However, this dismissive focus upon tone and tactics, rather than the actual content of the New Atheism as an intellectual movement, has led many to overlook the philosophical significance of the New Atheists’ challenges. Because of this oversight, those who have tilted with the New Atheists in the so-called God Debate of the past decade have largely failed to unseat the “Four Horsemen” as cultural imprimaturs. In fact, this debate has done little to assuage the fears of religious folk that the age of religion is coming to an end.

What, then, is the substance of the New Atheism that is worth considering? In this chapter, I offer an interpretation of the New Atheism’s core ideas, formulated as three challenges to religious belief and practice: the “truth challenge,” the “consequences challenge,” and “the meaning challenge.” The last of these, I hold, is the most important and unique aspect of the New Atheism for philosophers of religion. While none of these three challenges may be “new” per se, they can and have been interpreted as live, substantive threats by those worried about the erosion of religious belief and practice in the early 21st century.

This sense of crisis among some theists is evident in the direct responses to the work of the New Atheists. I intend to show, however, that this counter-literature is methodologically hamstrung, particularly in its response to the meaning challenge, by some of the presumptions governing contemporary theological discourse, and the way in which the terms of the God Debate were set by the New Atheists. Furthermore, as I will argue in the next chapter, the presumptions constraining theological thinking are also often at work in the dominant modes of contemporary philosophy of religion as well. The mutual reinforcement of assumptions about the nature of religious categories, truth, and morality in mainstream philosophical and theological thinking contributes to a situation in which the most fundamental challenge of the New Atheism—the meaning challenge—cannot be adequately addressed.

If we take the New Atheist’s challenges as genuine problems (and indeed, an existential threat) to religion as it is currently understood and systematically articulated by philosophers—as I believe we should—it will be necessary to expand our philosophical horizons and explore both the history and the wider contemporary landscape of philosophy of religion in order to come to a clearer understanding of the meaning challenge and how it may be addressed. This is not a mere thought experiment either; at stake is the very meaning of religion and the philosophical project of articulating the permanent place of religion in experience itself. If there is no philosophy up to the task, the prophetic critiques of the New Atheists may yet be realized in an end to religion as we know it.

What’s “New” about the New Atheism?

Not Much. A strong case can be made that there is very little that is “new” about the New Atheism; even the phrase “New Atheism” is not all that new.¹³ The title “New Atheism” may be helpful only insofar as it points out that atheism is not a single, monolithic ideology, but rather an intellectual position that has stood in for different things in different historical moments. In Michael Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism, he argues that ‘atheism’ names a situation in which dominant theistic paradigms in Western thinking are called into question. Atheism is not necessarily a “problem” for thinking, but rather indicates “a situation, an atmosphere, a confused history” in which “assertions can be identical in expression and positively contradictory in sense.”¹⁴ According to Buckley, in such cases, the first step toward clarifying the disagreement is the recognition of mutually shared concepts. “Atheism is essentially parasitic…The assertions of the theist provide the state of the question for the atheist, whether that question bears upon the words, the meaning, or the religious subject.”¹⁵ The meaning of atheism is thus dependent upon the theological and religious ideas, which it opposes at any given historical moment. Adopting an overtly Hegelian tone, Buckley concludes that “Atheism is essentially a transition, a movement from the affirmation of the divine into its negation, perhaps a negation awaiting its own negation.”¹⁶

Gavin Hyman, in his A Short History of Atheism, echoes Buckley in linking the kind of atheism recognized today to the Enlightenment and the dawn of the modern period of Western thought. Prior to the Enlightenment, the denial of theological paradigms was always internal, denoted by “heresy.” “The real revolutionary turn,” Hyman writes, “was the one that allowed for the taking of an external viewpoint, casting judgement on the theological tradition as a whole from a position outside it.”¹⁷ This external position—the “secular”—is unique to the modern period, Hyman claims. Prior to this, the closest approximation was the “profane,” understood as the absence of the holy and the opposite of the sacred. The profane, however, is still a space within the...