fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Unexamined Dogmas Of Contemporary Atheists

In a Slate (!) review of a new book about atheism by Nick Spencer, Michael Robbins lays into the historical ignorance of contemporary atheists, who, he says, not only misunderstand religion, but also misunderstand atheism. Excerpt: Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing […]

In a Slate (!) review of a new book about atheism by Nick Spencer, Michael Robbins lays into the historical ignorance of contemporary atheists, who, he says, not only misunderstand religion, but also misunderstand atheism. Excerpt:

Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority of the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of theÜbermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary has lost the contexts from which its significance derived, and no amount of Dawkins-style hand-waving about altruistic genes will make the problem go away. (Indeed, the ridiculous belief that our genes determine everything about human behavior and culture is a symptom of this very problem.)

The point is not that a coherent morality requires theism, but that the moral language taken for granted by liberal modernity is a fragmented ruin: It rejects metaphysics but exists only because of prior metaphysical commitments. A coherent atheism would understand this, because it would be aware of its own history. Instead, trendy atheism of the Dawkins variety has learned as little from its forebears as from Thomas Aquinas, preferring to advance a bland version of secular humanism. Spencer quotes John Gray, a not-New atheist: “Humanism is not an alternative to religious belief, but rather a degenerate and unwitting version of it.” How refreshing would be a popular atheism that did not shy from this insight and its consequences.

Damon Linker trod the same path last year, in a controversial column decrying the lack of “honest atheists.”

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now