What’s new about ‘new atheism’?

HE Baber says (via Ophelia):

Most people I know are atheists. But they're atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God and because they recognise that theological claims are controversial. Unlike the New Atheists they don't think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting.

Ophelia thinks that this is obviously false, and she’s right. But there is something new afoot.

So, what is ‘new atheism’? The phrase, apparently coined in 2006, seems mostly to be used pejoratively by critics, often accompanied by the words ‘strident’, ‘shrill’, ‘aggressive’, ‘intolerant’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘dogmatic’.

But what the term seems to refer to is people (there’s no coherent ‘new atheist’ movement) who believe, and are not afraid to say out loud, most if not all of the following: there is no god; belief in god is irrational; irrational faith is not good for the individual; religion is not good for society; religion is not good for government. Obviously, none of these positions is remotely new. But what’s new is the prominence of a few people taking these positions publicly and robustly (most notably Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – see this article and this video). What’s also new, crucially, is the context in which they do so.

As far as I can make out, ‘new atheism’ is a fairly small cultural phenomenon, existing primarily in parts of the media and academia, which is largely a response to the changed dynamic between Christianity and Islam in Western countries over the last decade or two. The UK story, very roughly, runs as follows:

From around the Rushdie fatwa, Islam in the UK has been increasingly willing to assert itself as a social and political force. Muslims in the country had been and remain mostly of south Asian origin, facing prejudice and often great poverty. Until the late 1980s, though, talk had been more of ‘Asians’ than of ‘Muslims’. This was to change, and of course the religious aspect of their identities became more prominent and more politicised after 9/11.

The political mainstream - mostly Christian and post-Christian in culture if not religion – has mostly responded by seeking accommodation with non-extremists. Islamic organisations were nurtured and listened to eagerly, religious ‘community leaders’ sought out and put on official task forces, and visible efforts made to promote Islam as part of a ‘multi-faith’ society.

Many Christian leaders and commentators, though, didn’t like the way this was going. It seemed to them that their (majority) religion was being ignored, taken for granted and even demoted, and so they made the effort to speak out on political and cultural matters from a more self-confidently Christian perspective. No doubt they had always said such things, but they took advantage of a new climate in which religion – in the form of Islam – had become much more of a talking point, and of a press that was keen for another twist in the story of the decade.

Some of these ‘new Christians’ (as it’s equally absurd to call them) were openly critical of Islam; others were conciliatory, focusing on the need for people of faith to come together.

All of which left people of no faith out in the cold.

The rise of political Islam in the UK – sometimes in the slipstream of extremists abroad, sometimes in opposition to them – presented Western critics of religion with something new. There had been little mileage in taking on Christianity, which had usually seemed an inoffensive, unremarkable default setting: near-omnipresent yet barely visible.

But Islam, brought to public attention through the worst atrocities of its vilest adherents, created scope and appetite for discussing the flaws of religion afresh. For most Brits, it was an alien religion: people wanted to know more, they were inclined to greater suspicion, and it had no stock of cultural goodwill to draw upon.

Then the Christian reassertion came, and the government felt bound by even-handedness to listen to all ‘faith groups’ alike. Religious influence over public policy – most notably in education – grew, and a political fightback became more pressing. Atheists, secularists and humanists spoke out, saying that religion shouldn’t get special treatment in politics, that most ‘religious hatred’ is inspired by rival religions against each other, that people with ‘faith’ aren’t thereby more virtuous or insightful than those without, and indeed that this whole god idea is deeply suspect.

The reaction to that, of course, was righteous indignation at these strident, shrill, aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, dogmatic atheists for daring to disagree without pulling their punches.

There wasn’t a ‘new atheism’. There was a new need for atheism, and for the humanist values and secular politics that often go with it.

Atheists mustn’t be so critical, the obsessive bastards

Ophelia nails Giles Fraser very well, and I recommend reading her post in full, but I’m going to chip in as well anyway.

Fraser says:

Contributors to Thought for the Day mustn't attack the beliefs of others. It's a basic BBC rule. This is not a place where Christians can fire pot shots at Hindus or Muslims have a go at Judaism. Which is why it's just not appropriate for atheists. Not that they haven't important things to say. The problem is that atheism is defined by what it's against, that it is not theism. And to introduce such a sense of "againstness" would fundamentally alter TftD's character.

The claim that “atheism is defined by what it's against” is true as it stands, but when he goes on to add that “atheism is parasitic upon religious belief, united only by what it is against”, we can see that he’s tiptoeing into rather different territory. It’s correct that none of us atheists would talk much about our atheism – or even think of ourselves as atheists – if there weren’t so many theists around.

But the fact that I don’t believe in goblins plays no part in my self-conception, it doesn’t inform anything I say or do. This is because nobody else believes in goblins. If lots of people did, then I would find myself in discussion taking an agoblinist position is response to the goblinism that so befuddled society.

My conscious public agoblinist stance would indeed be parasitic upon the conscious public goblinism that I found myself facing.

Likewise with theism. Were it confined to a few schizophrenics or children, I’d barely give it a moment’s thought. But no: I believe a great many people to be mistaken on this point, so it’s hardly surprising for me to pipe up on the subject.

Now, while atheism as a belief (not a belief system, it’s just ‘there are no gods’) is defined by what it’s against, atheists as people have a whole panoply of moral, social, cultural and political beliefs – with much greater scope for variation than among a group of theists who all adhere to the same creed (theistic religion is far more than a mere belief in a god). Most of an atheist’s beliefs will not reference the idea of god at all, so perfectly non-negative points of view can be offered.

Indeed, there’s nothing in the atheist rulebook (I could end this sentence there, of course) to say that we must dislike religion. Just as a Christian may applaud other faiths for various reasons, so may we.

Fraser recalls an occasion when “Richard Dawkins was offered a slot to experiment with a secular TftD” – with a predictably anti-religious result that proves nothing about what atheists have to say about moral issues.

To discuss moral issues without reference to the supernatural is not only possible but easy, with scope for a spectacular variety of thought. It’s like practising medicine without the use of leeches: you might use antibiotics or radiotherapy or bandages or scalpels or homeopathy or chanting. You’ll get a range of results, but mostly the doctors won’t stand around talking about how useless leeches are until the patient bleeds to death.

An atheist Thought for the Day would, I think, have much the same blend of wisdom, banality, woolliness and and worthiness as most of the religious ones do - but different flavours of each.

Trying to be as happy as Mary Kenny

The Atheist Bus Campaign, kicked off by Ariane Sherine, has been raising money to put ads on the sides of buses saying: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”


I think that’s a cracking idea. It probably won’t create all that many converts, but it should start a few conversations and raise a few smiles and/or eyebrows. It may well also offend some of those religious types who seem to take grim pleasure in being offended (it’s almost like self-oriented schadenfreude), but that’s their call.

But Mary Kenny, while not disapproving of the exercise of free speech by atheists, finds the “stop worrying and enjoy your life” slogan a bit incongruous:

Far from relaxing and enjoying life, most atheists I have encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing and nihilistic message that there is no purpose to life so where's the point of anything?

To which I can only recommend that Mary tries to meet a wider range of atheists.

I might have responded that most religious people I have encountered are fearful, blinkered blighters with a depressing and dehumanising outlook that we cannot create purpose in our own and in each other’s lives and that there’s only any point to anything if a being who has no detectable contact with humanity says so – but that’s just not true. Most religious people I know are every bit as lovely and fun as most atheists I know (there are exceptions in both groups).

Whatever Mary gets up to this weekend, and whomever she spends it with, I hope she has an enjoyable and worry-free time. Likewise to all of you.

Heaven is other people

Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney, reassures us that he does think atheists can be moral. Phew. But:

My worry about the way many atheists describe the process of moral decision-making is that it seems to boil down to a sense of moral instinct, informed by a few formulas of general benevolence…
This seems so naïve, underestimating the extent to which human beings are able to deceive themselves into believing they are doing the right thing, when they are simply doing what they want or what makes them happy.
Christian moral decision-making begins with a strong sense that we often try to fool ourselves, and thus we need some external check. Going to church, regular prayer, reading from scripture, specific times to meet and challenge each other’s moral instincts: all these are forms of external practice which offer checks against the dominance of my own internal moral intuitions.

Sigh…

On the moral fallibility of the Bible and the mixed motives Christians can have in appealing to it, Alonzo Fyfe makes a good response to Fraser. As for my own two penn’orth:

Everyone, of whatever religious views, has experience of moral deliberation. Sometimes we do this with others, sometimes on our own. But even when alone, we still can and do think about the views of others and how these might inform our own thinking. And we are still informed by the moral influences in our lives, be they familial, societal, literary, theological or whatever.

Christians have access to the Bible to help them make moral decisions. But so do atheists: just as you don’t need to believe that there really was a ‘good Samaritan’ to appreciate the parable, so you don’t have to believe that Jesus was anything other than human to wonder (if he strikes you as a good moral example) ‘What would Jesus do?’ Atheists also have recourse to the opinions and examples of any number of political leaders, moral philosophers, fictional heroes and ordinary people. And so, although they downplay these in contrast to their scripture, do Christians.

We all have as many checks as we want against self-serving self-deception; and we all have to decide for ourselves how much use we want to make of those checks.

I’m regularly surprised by how flimsy are the claims of the religious to be not necessarily morally better than atheists but morally better resourced.

Fraser says:

Many of the atheists I get into discussion with seem content to perform an internal self-audit of their moral dispositions. … Perhaps that is what comes of having a moral vision shaped by little more than what one is against?

I can’t speak about his atheist acquaintances, but I can say that mine would think it bizarre to base a moral vision on disbelief in gods, ghosts, unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters and the rest. All this disbelief does is to remove one kind of distraction from your moral thinking.

The only atheists I’m aware of who treat the absence of god as suggesting the absence of all external checks are those who used to be religious but became disenchanted and lost faith – and with it, they lost much else as well. If you build your morality on a fairytale, you take the risk that it could crumble if, one day, your theism does.

Post-theistic solipsism is a terrible mistake. Humanity may be alone in the universe, but individual humans are not; we don’t need god in his heaven to guide us on right and wrong when we have so much that we can learn from each other.

Atheism has all the answers

So, this Q&A’s been doing the rounds a fair bit this week. My turn:

Q1. How would you define 'atheism'?
Believing that there are no such things as gods. But I’m not going to excommunicate people who define it as a mere lack of belief in god(s) – I think they’re more accurate etymologically, but we still need a word that means positive disbelief. Sometimes ‘antitheism’ is suggested, but that sounds too hostile – it’d have to cover people who like the idea of a god but think it’s untrue, and who have a broadly positive attitude to religion. Pesky words.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
Not at all. I had some hymns, visiting vicars and stuff like that at primary school, but nothing systematic – in fact my old headmaster used to give us morning assembly readings from Aesop’s Fables! – and nothing religious from my family. I believed in God for a while in much the same way I believed in the Tooth Fairy, even though my evidence base for the latter was much stronger.

Q3. How would you describe 'Intelligent Design', using only one word?
Desperate.

Q4. What scientific endeavour really excites you?
Neuropsychology. Infinitely richer and more fascinating than the notion of a ‘soul’.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the 'atheist community', what would it be and why?
The idea that there is, or should be, such a thing.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said 'I'm joining the clergy', what would be your first response?
“What do you mean? I don’t have any children!” More hypothetically, I’d be concerned to talk it over with them, and if they were sure it was what they’d really wanted, I’d hope they’d do really well.

Q7. What's your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?
I call it the oncological argument, and it runs along the lines of: “My loved one got cancer and went into hospital; I prayed for them to get better and they did – thank the Lord!” But it comes in a lot of varieties, based on selectively interpreted personal experience. Unlike the ontological argument, which treats thinking of god as proof that he exists, this one treats refusing to think of any other explanation as proof that there isn’t any. I usually refute it by rolling my eyes ort, if really necessary, slapping my forehead.

Q8. What's your most 'controversial' (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?
Dunno really. Not sure what those “general attitudes” would be. Has someone done a reliable survey of us?

Q9. Of the 'Four Horsemen' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?
I’ve never really read any Harris, and while I agree with Dawkins and Hitchens a lot, they often annoy me. Dawkins tries to do philosophy when it’s really not his field, and Hitchens at times often seems to have been overcome by his own – admittedly brilliant – rhetoric. Dennett is the most interesting, largely for his philosophy of mind work.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?
I’m tempted to go with Ophelia and think of the person whose theism is causing the most suffering – she says King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – but I think an atheist convert in such a position would be either sidelined or forced to play along. So maybe my hypothetical child. But I think there are far more important things to convince people of than atheism.

Is there anyone I know left to tag with this? I guess Anticant, David and Scribbles would be good value for money. Not that I’m offering any. But no pressure – as I say, there are more important things in life.

Nature, humanity and atheistic awe

Also from Standpoint magazine, and also on the subject of why religion is so very good regardless of whether it’s true, is Alain de Botton:

We are the only society in history to have nothing transcendent at our centre, nothing which is greater than ourselves. In so far as we feel awe, we do so in relation to supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its denizens the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be inconsequent next to the spectacle of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of our veneration than our brilliant and morally troubling fellow human beings.

I don’t agree.

First, no technology can hold a candle to an ocean, to thunderstorms, to the Horsehead nebula, to a randomly encountered iceberg shaped like a castle. Casting off the fiction of a creator leaves my awe at these things untouched. In fact, if there’s an all-powerful god, then the existence of these things becomes that much less impressive: omnipotence can do far more than what actually exists (‘couldn’t you have made it bigger, or with more colours, or just a bit more like an actual horse?’)

And in the cases of the nebula and the iceberg, part of what’s astonishing is precisely that the resemblances are natural and unintended.

Second, how can “our brilliant and morally troubling fellow human beings” not be a tremendous source of awe? Maybe de Botton has let his familiarity breed too much, but I find other people almost constantly impressive: for doing things I never could, for thinking thoughts I never would, for their ceaseless ability to surprise, for their strengths and idiosyncracies great and small.

One of the achievements of religion is that we – or rather, some of us – have been tricked into thinking that the world we live in is less remarkable than it really is, by making it face comparisons with myth and fantasy.

(Norm also takes issue with de Botton.)

Nice quote

Via Martin Rowson:

Saying atheism is a religion is like saying that bald is a hair colour.

Faithy-ism

I should really know better than to bother fisking Theo Hobson, but, well, he’s at it again:

Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does.

You mean, that there are no gods when actually there are? Nope:

It claims to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is.

Um. I’ll come back to this.

And atheism is muddled because it cannot decide on what grounds it ultimately objects to religion. Does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged falsity? Or does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged harmfulness? Both, the atheists will doubtless reply: religion is false and therefore it is harmful.

You might think that a challenge that has a “doubtless” reply isn’t so much of a muddle. Oh well.

But this is to make an assumption about the relationship between rationality and moral progress that does not stand up.

It seems to me more an assumption about the relationship between falsity and harmfulness. And often it’s an explicit argument rather than an assumption.

Atheism is the belief that the demise of religion, and the rise of "rationality", will make the world a better place.

Does anyone mind if I just say “oh no it isn’t” here, so we can keep things moving along? Thanks.

Atheism therefore entails an account of history - a story of liberation from a harmful error called "religion".

If ‘the world would be better if there were less X’ entails ‘world history has involved (or henceforth will involve) a reduction in the amount of X’, then I’m very much mistaken about the nature of logic and/or history.

Some will quibble with the above definition. Atheism is just the rejection of God, of any supernatural power, they will say, it entails no necessary belief in historical progress. This is disingenuous. The militant atheists have a moral mission: to improve the world by working towards the eradication of religion.

Ah. So there’s something called ‘militant atheism’, which from the qualifier one might guess is something different from atheism per se. You know, if only there were some sort of word that meant disbelief in gods, then we could use it in articles and discussions without people wondering what the bloody hell we were on about.

What is this thing that the atheists hate so much? What is religion? Believe it or not, I don't know the answer. … If the atheist deigns to define religion at all, he is likely to do so briskly and conventionally, as belief in and worship of some species of supernatural power. It's a terribly inadequate definition.

Well, I don’t know if I can speak for atheists; I’m just someone who thinks there aren’t any supernatural beings. And what I hate is terrorism, malaria, jam jars that you can’t open, the excess of ad breaks on TV these days and waffly obscurantist third-rate sophistry.

In my terribly inadequate opinion, a religion is something that involves some sort of belief in the supernatural. Religion may also involve meetings, institutions, set texts, communal culture, architecture, arias, contemplation, charity and violence, but then you can have all of those things without religion. And I don’t really hate those things (except violence).

In reality, "religion" is far wider than a belief in a supernatural power. This is only one aspect of what we mean by "religion".

Agreed. And the supernatural aspect is that which is distinctive to religion; it’s what religion “essentially is”. And the belief that I’d like to but apparently can’t call atheism is distinctive for its rejection of a supernatural creator. Beyond this basic disagreement, there is indeed an “infinite variety” to the types of outlook held by religious believers – and the outlooks held by atheists.

The… relationship between religion, morality and politics is infinitely various and complex. The critic of religious abuses must be specific, particular. He must focus on particular practices, particular institutions, and explain why they have a detrimental effect on society. But the militant atheist cannot humbly limit himself to the realm of the particular; he necessarily lapses into sloppy generalisation. For he has to insist that religion in general is harmful, all of it, always.

Specificity is good for clarity. And everyone will agree that religions at times deserve specific criticisms. But acknowledging this doesn’t preclude the possibility of a general argument that the social effects of religion may be likely to be bad overall (no, not “all of it, always”).

I consider the atheist's desire to generalise about religion to be a case of intellectual cowardice. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.

You might say the same about the desire to generalise about atheism. Is this guy being paid to satirise himself?

OK, fisking over. Undeserved substantive response follows.

There’s a Steven Weinberg quote that Richard Dawkins is fond of:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

There’s some truth in this, but there are two things wrong with it. First, religion can indeed make good people do evil things – but certainly not in all cases. In many cases it can make evil people (and we should really say ‘nasty’ rather than ‘evil’, which is a bit all-or-nothing) do good things. In fact, religious belief systems, once acquired, have general motivational power: they can make people do all sorts of things they weren’t previously inclined to.

The second point is that this isn’t just true of religion. Any belief system can have motivational power, for good or for ill or for whatever. Secular political ideologies, if held with uncritical zealotry, and pursued with disregard to the consequences, can be monstrous and catastrophic. If held with a scepticism about means and a willingness to question ends, they can motivate great good.

So, what characteristics of a belief system could lead it to tending towards intolerant, fanatical, unthinking closed-mindedness, thus producing bad results? Here are a few suggestions:

• Being based around an authority (in the form of either a leader or a text); it may perhaps be acceptable to question the authority, but these questions are not permitted to lead to rejection.
• Favouring believers over unbelievers, saying that the latter are less deserving of good treatment in this world and/or that the former will be rewarded and the latter punished in a subsequent world.
• Relying on doctrines that resist empirical disproof.
• Encouraging or demanding assent without clearly reasoned supportive arguments.

Of course there are other risk factors (ethnic tribalism, sanctioning of violence), but the above, I think, are likely to be more common in supernaturally based belief systems – particularly more organised and institutional ones.

The problem of good

If you fancy a (long-ish) witty and inventive read, Stephen Law reports on a debate between theologians on the planet Eth:

BOOBLEFRIP: What a bizarre suggestion. It’s obvious our creator is very clearly evil! Take a look around you! Witness the horrendous suffering he inflicts upon us. The floods. The ethquakes. Cancer. The vile, rotting stench of God’s creation is overwhelming!
GIZIMOTH: Yes, our creator may do some evil. But it’s not clear he’s all-evil, is it? It’s certainly not obvious that his wickedness is infinite, that his malice and cruelty know no bounds. You’re deliberately ignoring a famous argument against the existence of God – the problem of good.

From the characters’ names, I suspect that Stephen is a Douglas Adams fan. He also has a brain the size of a planet (which one, I’m not sure…) But seriously: if you only read one extraterrestrial dialogue satirising the theistic responses to the problem of evil this week, make it this one!

Hellishly difficult

Norm Geras picks a theological bone with the Pope.

His Holiness (that’s the Pope, not Norm) has warned us that Hell really exists, “and is eternal for those who shut their hearts to [Jesus’] love”.

The previous Pope had said that Hell was “the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God” – and while the two of them appear to disagree (in their infallibility) on whether it’s literally a place, they do seem to concur that rejecting god’s love is a freely chosen sin.

As such, it might seem to make sense to punish atheists for being such cold-hearted wanton rejectionists. Consider an analogy: suppose that my brother and I had fallen out many years ago over something that seemed very important at the time, but recently he’s been contacting me to tell me he still loves me and wants to make up. I spitefully turn him away in my defiant pride.

I’d say that doesn’t reflect too well on me. So maybe my failure to accept and return god’s love is equally reprehensible?

Maybe. But to the very best of my knowledge, I don’t have a brother. So if he wants us to have a good relationship, he’s going to have to make the effort to convince me that he exists first. Ditto god.

And another thing: if Hell really is an actual eternal inferno, then surely it must get through a lot of fuel to keep the fires going. How big a carbon footprint – sorry, hoofprint – would the whole operation have? And if we’re concerned about climate change, should we all convert to keep down the number of lost souls that they need to burn, or would it be more practical to bring Hell into an emissions trading scheme?

I know George Bush is in the pocket of the oil companies, but surely Satan wouldn’t be so evil as to ignore the Kyoto Protocol? Now, how many Ryanair flights does it take to offset the amount of brimstone used up in torturing a sinner…?

Getting high

You know how conversations about religion tend to get a bit tense and bad-tempered? And you know how online debates tend to get a bit personal and sneering? Well, both of these pitfalls are being delightfully avoided (mostly) on this thread over at Alex’s blog, ‘In Search of High Places’.

A few of us are kicking around different ways to understand the meaning of life if there is or isn’t a god (following an earlier discussion here). So if that’s your cup of tea, you might fancy dropping by. At time of writing Alex has managed to get me onto philosophy of mind, which I did a lot on as a student and could potentially ramble on about for ages, doubtless costing me my job. He and I disagree on an awful lot but we manage to keep things good-natured, as we’re both secure in the knowledge that the other guy is wrong…

Here and there

If anyone other than Matt, Alex and me was following this discussion of god, atheism, morality etc, then you might like to know it’s now passed on to a better place chez Alex.

Living the good life without god

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has written a delicious post about the small pleasures in life:

“I love standing in the shower after all the cleaning is done, just rocking back and forth while the warm water massages my neck and shoulders. … I love the sound of a new can of tennis balls being opened: PH-SSSHHHT. … I love the smell of vanilla. I love the feeling of doing something right, no matter how inconsequential, such as guessing the exact right time it will take to warm a yam in the microwave. … I like being tired at the same time I have access to a comfortable chair and plenty of time to sit in it. … I like a pen that has good balance, opens easily, and leaves a clean line with no skipping, blotching or fussiness. … I like rubbing my head after I give myself a haircut. It feels good on my hand and my head at the same time.”

Great stuff. What interests me, though (with a hefty hat tip to Matt Murrell) is the puzzlement of a Christian commenter called Alex at how someone with an atheistic outlook (i.e. Scott’s) can find meaning in life at all. Alex says:

“This still leaves me with this question for the Atheists: How do you work around talking about meaning and beauty and purpose? How do you with honesty to your world view strive to do good things, treat people as you’d like to be treated, or try to make a difference in this joint? Please keep in mind that most every Atheist I have met has been generally very thoughtful, kind and concerned about living life ‘right’. Basically they are better than the world view they claim to hold. But I can’t understand why. …
“If we are from nothing, for nothing, to nothing, then nothing matters. The job you have, the hobbies you enjoy, the family you have, the way you treat people. It doesn’t matter at all. Sure, you can say that it does matter because you want to leave a good mark on the world etc... But what does THAT mean? Good? What’s that? It’s nothing! It’s an illusion. Your children will die. Your children’s children will die and they will all forget you. You don’t matter. You mean nothing. You count for nothing. You are an accident. An amazing accident beyond all odds. …
“…it seems to me that all the beauty, joy, love and happiness that we experience here is but a reflection of the one who put us here. Without God all the wonderful things we experience in this life really have no worth of value. Long after our species has passed from the scene and our planet ceases to exist, what will it matter weather or not we enjoyed the quality craftsmanship of a pen?”

This isn’t an uncommon view. And it merits a constructive response.

I’m an atheist: I think this life is all that there is and that we mortals are alone in the universe. We humans are intelligent and self-aware, which immediately gives us an advantage over the ants, the frogs, the sparrows and the daytime TV addicts: we can form our own purposes and make our own justifications. This counts for something – but why doesn’t it automatically lead to a self-centred nihilism?

I’ll try to explain. Justification or purpose, for a being like us, can come from two types of source: internal or external to them. Now, I quite accept that if all someone’s sense of purpose were focused internally, then they’d be utterly selfish and amoral. There’d be no scope for justifying anything they did other than ‘I want’. As a matter of logic, purely internal justification doesn’t take us anywhere beyond an individual’s own desires. Hold that thought.

But what about externally focused justifications? Religious believers would look outside themselves to god as a source of meaning and purpose. I can’t do that. But, even though I think humanity is alone, that of course doesn’t mean that each individual human is alone – we’re obviously not, there’s a planetful of us.

So I find my inspiration, my sense of moral purpose, in other people – my family, my friends, people I meet online or pass in the street, people halfway around the world I hear about on the news… That solves the immediate problem, if I can draw personal meaning from others. But then what makes them matter? Where do they get their purposes? You could trace lines from one person to another to another, but you’ll either go round and round in circles or eventually meet a dead end. The notion of a better world for my great-grandchildren is fine, but only goes so far. It’s not just that each human is finite – the whole species is as well. How there be an external justification for us collectively?

Let me reply with a different question. Say that our purpose derives from god. Where, then, does his derive from? (I guess this question is a little analogous to that other atheist staple: ‘If the universe must have been made by god because it couldn’t possibly just exist uncaused, then how did god come to be?’)

It won’t work here to say that he’s all-powerful, so he can provide his own ultimate purpose in a way that we can’t. Because we’ve already established, as a matter of logic, that purely internal justification doesn’t take us anywhere beyond an individual’s own desires – even for a god. Omnipotence may be able to create a physical universe and intelligent life, but it can’t break the rules of logic: it can’t draw a triangular circle, it can’t make a man who is taller than himself, and it can’t conjure non-subjective internal justification.

And it won’t work to say that god is morally perfect (one of his defining features), and that’s why he can act as the final source of purpose. Because if so, if we’re defining god in terms of morality rather than the other way round, then the morality we’re appealing to is something more basic, transcending even him in the same way that logic does. A moral principle isn’t the sort of thing that could be deliberately created.

Now, I don’t really know how to approach the notion of such an absolute, objective, foundational morality – but whatever we might think about that, if god doesn’t create right and wrong, then those ideas are something that an atheist can lay an equally legitimate claim to.

So the theist and the atheist are really in the same boat here. Whatever purpose we look for outside ourselves, we can only criss-cross through a network of beings with their own personal interests and attachments to others (whether or not this network includes god, the principle is identical). Whatever morality we aspire to, others – even divine others – can only advise and inspire us, not act as its creator.

This means that the choice isn’t between selfish, meaningless atheism and moral, purposeful religion. Rather it is, god or no god, between individual selfishness and reciprocal decency. I’m not going to try to argue against anyone inclined towards the first option; my aim is to suggest that this choice is the one we all face, and that the existence of god doesn’t affect the logic of this.

It’s true that believers in god very often do feel that they have a more secure moral basis than atheists, and (even though I’m arguing against this) I think I see why this feeling does have, for them, a kind of legitimate justification. This is rooted in the idea that god is omniscient. As such, then whatever ultimate, objective morality there may be, he understands it all and can therefore give the best possible advice – which can provide certainty. On the other hand, if we’re awkward about the idea of a metaphysically absolute morality, then our ideas about right and wrong will have to be forged through shared wisdom. And in this case, if we have a supremely wise being to guide us, that’s a reason for strong confidence too.

So perhaps these considerations make my case a bit less counter-intuitive for people coming from a different religious viewpoint. Indeed, in my experience, people who believe in god (whom I generally find to be no better or worse than atheists) do think that he knows what’s best and that his commandments are genuinely good moral guidance; they don’t at all take the sort of ‘might-is-right’ view that any arbitrary whim of a decree is worth obeying just because it comes from on high. (Some extremists seem to corrupt themselves by worshipping power alone, but I have nothing to say to them.)

Now, from my perspective, my existence is a spectacular fluke; so is the whole human race’s existence. Well, so be it. Here I am and here you are. I can either scowl and turn in on myself or smile and use you as the only kind of moral compass there could be – you and the billions of others. We have purpose not because we have ‘Made in heaven’ or ‘Property of god’ stamped on our backsides, but because it’s in our nature to make purpose: we have it because we can. There’s as much meaning in life as we make for ourselves and for each other (and the existence of god would only add one more other to the network). To demand more than this of an atheistic or humanistic worldview – but not of a religious one – is like one mechanic criticising another for failing to build a perpetual motion machine.

My attitude is that because this is the only life I get, it’s all the more important to live it well: to do right by myself and to do right by the people I come across. Saying that there’s nothing at the end is true enough, but for me the point of life is not the destination: it’s the journey. I can enjoy the beautiful scenery and the fascinating company, and help other people along when I can, and ask for directions now and again. The going may sometimes be tough, and many of us may not travel as far as we’d like, or in the direction we’d expected, but at least we can travel as best we can.

The journey is finite, but the limited quantity doesn’t mean a lack of quality. If you doubt this, if you feel that you need eternal life – go to hell. See if that enriches your existence. Me, I’d take oblivion.

And this finitude ties up with Scott’s small pleasures. They are fleeting, but I don’t think that invalidates them. I, too, love the smell of vanilla. But if I had to smell it all the time, I’d feel sick. A momentary sniff, though – that’s real. It counts. Even if I’ve utterly forgotten it the next day, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great when it happened. Or a small act of helpfulness to someone with Alzheimer’s: even if they won’t remember it, it matters while it lasts; it’s a piece of goodness there wouldn’t otherwise have been.

One might say that such things as these don’t matter, because they don’t stand the test of time. But time is a constant series of tests. There doesn’t need to be an official point where the score is totted up and rewards or punishments dished out.

Happiness and goodness and purpose come in finite chunks. In a million years, it may well not matter whether I enjoyed some vanilla today, or helped out someone who was in trouble. But conversely, it doesn’t matter now that in a million years these things won’t matter. We’re chained to our own time. This means that we can’t inherit the distant future, but it also means that the distant future can’t disinherit us of our present.

Being human has its downsides, but it’s something. And something like this is enough.

How wrong can you be?

Norm Geras (reacting to Stephen Unwin’s response to Joan Bakewell’s review of Richard Dawkins’s book on god – keep up at the back), says:

“Unwin writes that to be an atheist is to proclaim a form of certainty. It can involve that, but it needn’t. You can be an atheist on the grounds that you’ve not yet seen (or felt) a compelling reason, piece of evidence or anything of any other sort to persuade you of the existence of a divine being. That is still an open and fallibilist form of belief. It’s not the same as certainty of the non-existence of God; it’s just an attitude of economy - not to accept the existence of entities for which you can find no persuasive arguments or persuasive anything.”

There are two different distinctions that aren’t quite kept apart here (at least, not explicitly): beliefs held with unshakeable certainty versus those held in an open, fallibilist way; and absence of belief in god’s existence versus presence of belief in god’s non-existence.

Unshakeable certainty is usually best avoided if you want to stand a decent chance of being right. Getting yourself into a mindset whereby you will disregard any logical or empirical considerations to the contrary means that the correctness of your belief depends entirely on luck – on whether you happened to stumble across and embrace a dogma whose contents are factually accurate.

Now it is, as Norm says, perfectly respectable to withhold belief in something on the grounds that you’ve found no compelling reason to so believe. Occam’s razor will keep your face clear of all sorts of unsightly, straggly, uncontrollable hairs. And it is of course far harder to give evidence of absence than to establish absence of evidence.

But it’s also perfectly reasonable to be firmly and positively (but not dogmatically and unshakeably) convinced in the non-existence of something. That’s my own attitude to god: not only is there no good argument for god’s existence, but also there are strong grounds (the problem of evil) for affirming that there is no such being. Now, I might conceivably be wrong; there are certainly finer minds than mine, and if somebody thinks of a compelling response to the problem, then that would force me to think again.

One thing to note is that the problem of evil isn’t science; it’s philosophy. It still relies on rigorous logical thought, and even depends on observable data – but the observations are pretty basic, and as far as I know there’s no scientific way of measuring right and wrong, good and bad. But because the rigorous logical thought is essential, this isn’t ‘just another faith position’, as some theists like to say about atheism. The problem of evil has been discussed in different forms over centuries, by people with a vast range of opinions. Some of them have argued well and some badly. But the conclusion that it proposes remains open to debate.

My strong confidence in atheism is a result of the contestable process of analysing philosophical arguments for and against. But my belief is not unshakeable. In fact, its inherent shakeability is what gives me the strong confidence in the method that led me to it. The method is made less fallible because its fallibility is assumed. Reason beats faith because, in this way, it can guard against being captured by unlucky guesses.