New Atheism: In the Wake of the Cold War and Postmodernism

Is it really possible to explain New Atheism as a response to Christian and Islamic fundamentalism over the last decade or so? This seems to be the standard explanation out there, but I think it only tells a part of the story. While New Atheism certainly wouldn’t make sense without reference to religious fundamentalism, there are many good reasons to think that it has also been fed by a crisis within liberal, progressive and secular thought itself.

I will here suggest three reasons for thinking this; there are undoubtedly more. Firstly, New Atheists dedicate a significant portion of their energy to attacking not just religion, but also certain ‘liberals’ – i.e. people whose progressive values they share, but who have adopted a position of cultural relativism which makes them reluctant to condemn the actions of people who hold different values. In more abstract terms, New Atheism is a firm rejection of postmodernism, that form of thought seen by some as defining what it meant to be left wing. The scientific method, and the possibility of ascertaining objective Truth, is not simply offered as a riposte to the religious, but also to left-wing cultural relativists.

Secondly, New Atheism can be seen as merely one facet of a much wider cultural trend in which the virtues of science and rationalism have been valorised. This can be seen, for example, in what I’ll refer to here as the ‘bad science’ movement, whose figureheads are Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh; both of whom work to expose the false or exaggerated claims made by practitioners of alternative medicine, pharmaceutical companies, psychics and the media. This group and New Atheism come together in the annual variety show Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People.

Thirdly, there is a more clearly political facet of this cultural shift which also overlaps with New Atheism. Three books from recent years will serve as examples: Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004), Nick Cohen’s What’s Left (2007) and Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) are all written from the perspective of left wing authors who reject cultural relativism and postmodernism in general. The attitude can also be seen in the Euston Manifesto, written by a group of academics, journalists and bloggers in 2006 and announcing a new political alignment of ‘progressives and democrats.’ While these authors and the signatories of the Euston Manifesto identify themselves as a new political alignment, they in fact look back in time, beyond the recent ‘new left’ of identity politics, and even further back beyond the ‘old left’ of class politics, and attempt to re-establish a connection with the progressive liberalism of the eighteenth century enlightenment.

To summarise: New Atheism cannot be seen simply as a direct response to religious fundamentalism and is, rather, part of a broader shift within secular Western thought itself. It should be seen as only one manifestation of an attempt on behalf of progressives to regroup and redefine themselves in the wake of the Cold War and postmodernism.

Is religion the cause of human conflict?

Religion, claims Sam Harris, backed up by weapons of mass destruction, will destroy human civilization unless it is erased.

This stark, frightening claim is made repeatedly in the opening chapter of The End of Faith. If humanity ‘eradicates itself through war’ it will be because of religion (p.12). Unless we get rid of ideas like ‘God and ‘Allah', ‘they will unmake our world’ (p.14). Mixing weapons of mass destruction with religion is ‘a recipe for the fall of civilization’ (p.26). If people believe their holy texts, then ‘we need only count the days to Armageddon’ (p.35). If we have not ‘killed ourselves ten times over’ in two hundred years’ time, it will only be because religion has been extinguished.

Harris argues that it is wrong to absolve religion of its responsibility and instead to point the finger of blame at other factors. For both liberals and conservatives, he argues, when a suicide bomber blows himself up, ‘the role that faith played is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic or entirely personal […] Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated’ (p. 13).

But is it really possible to isolate religion from all other factors and identify it as the cause of all conflict? Harris appears to be confident that it is, but he unwittingly provides evidence which seems to suggest that reality is far more complex.

Take, for example, his position on Muslim suicide bombers. He claims Muslim terrorists are driven to violence by their Islamic beliefs and their hatred of the secular West, along with the inferior religions of Christianity and Judaism. Their hatred is derived directly from their belief that Koran is the perfect word of Allah, and not from any economic disadvantage. He writes, ‘There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God. As Samuel Huntington and others have observed, religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated’ (p. 32).

Harris’s ‘evidence’ here turns out to indicate that religion cannot be isolated from other factors, even with suicide bombers. If religious fundamentalism is predominantly a movement of the educated and middle class, then this indicates that social and economic factors play a part in religious fundamentalism in the developing world (just not necessarily that they are correlated with economic disadvantage). We could add to this the fact that suicide bombers are overwhelmingly male and in their late teens and early twenties – indicating gender and age factors as well.

Harris also tries to make a direct link between Islamic terrorism and the contents of the Koran. The Koran mandates violence, he claims, citing this line ‘Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.’ Of course there are many similarly appalling sections in the Bible, and yet he acknowledges that Christianity is currently less of a concern than Islam, saying that 'at this point in history, it represents a unique danger to all of us' (p.28, emphasis added). No doubt Harris recognises that people have not adhered to religious texts in a uniform way througout history, but his simplistic understanding of religion as being derived from scriptural literalism cannot be squared with the admission that people have re-interpreted and effectively re-edited their holy texts in very different ways in different historical periods.

Rather than Harris demonstrating that suicide bombing is a direct result of Islamic beliefs, he in fact raises the question, why, in this historical moment, are some Muslims currently acting on the basis of particular violent edicts in their holy text? And, by extension, why has suicide bombing become a method of attack only in relatively recent times? We might also ask, why are Islamic fundamentalists adhering to violent edicts in their texts while Christian fundamentalists in America are not stoning homosexuals to death as the Old Testament requires? If religion is defined so narrowly as literal belief in a text, we cannot answer these questions - we have to ask historical, cultural, social, economic, and other extra-religious questions.

But even if we accept that religious moderates do not adhere literally to a text, the claim that fundaentalists do seems equally problematic. What seems to me rather weak (though I am no expert on the Koran) is the evidence Harris offers for a connection between Islam and suicide attacks. The quote Harris offers to prove this connection goes: ‘Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God.’ This appears to be a call to go to battle, knowing that there is a possibility that you may die – not a call to actively pursue your own death. In the seventh century when Mohammad was supposedly writing this, he presumably didn’t have the technology to create bombs. What method of suicide would have been available that would also have killed many others? It seems far more likely that connection between this passage in the Koran and suicide bombings was made by contemporary Islamic fundamentalists – an interpretative leap is required to understand it as a command for suicide attacks, not a literal reading.

What I am trying to show here is that you do not have to query your atheist credentials to be critical of what the New Atheists claim. Harris comes across not as any expert on religion, but like an over-confident intellectual teenager - he is intelligent, writes good prose, and is able to construct what seems like a logical argument. He just doesn't seem to know very much about how religion works.

Prelude to an Essay on Sam Harris's 'The End of Faith'

Sam Harris is a very frightened man. So would you be, if you realised how perilously we are teetering on the edge of world destruction. And there is no mistaking how we arrived at this historical juncture. With weapons of mass destruction increasingly finding their way into the hands of people who hold irrational beliefs about God, morality and the afterlife, Harris points the finger of blame for the impending apocalypse squarely at religion.

The End of Faith (first published August 2004) was the first of the books around which the term ‘New Atheism’ crystallised. It is very much bears the imprint of its time, begun, according to Harris, on 12^th September 2001 and developed during the height of the Bush era. Liberalism in America was being attacked by Islamic fundamentalism from without and by Christian fundamentalism from within. This raised a major question for political progressives who previously may have championed the equal validity of all cultures: how is it possible to be tolerant towards people who reject the very notion of our tolerance? Harris’s book signalled a possible new direction – a determination to stand up for the values of liberalism on its own terms, and to go on the attack against those alternative cultures which may have been afforded more respect in the postmodern era.

There was clearly a need to speak out about some of the more dangerous manifestations of religious belief, and this book performed a timely and important service in encouraging secularists, atheists and humanists to be openly critical of the excesses of religious irrationalism, be it Christian, Muslim or whatever. As an atheist who has very little sympathy for baseless religious beliefs, I read the book expecting to have my own attitudes confirmed. And yet there were many aspects of the book which I felt were just not right. None of my objections have anything to do with my non-belief in gods; the aspects of the book I had problems with were his depiction of the impacts of religion, and whether it was really possible to make a clear distinction between ‘irrational’ religious beliefs (more moderate ones, at least) and the beliefs of atheists – his claims were all over-simplified, over-generalised, and logically flawed. It was this initial reaction which has encouraged me to examine more closely the nature of religion, beliefs, values and how we make life meaningful.

In the ‘review’ that follows, I want to critically examine the claims that Harris makes – not the claims about whether or not God exists, or whether Jesus really was born of a virgin – but his claims about what religious belief means and its impacts in the real world. I’ll be looking at three aspects in turn: his understanding of religion itself, his attitude towards religious and cultural tolerance, and then Harris’s own belief system which he outlines toward the end of the book – and asking how it is possible to distinguish this from 'religion'.

Problems With Sam Harris's The End of Faith

I have started a careful re-reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith and will be writing a longer critique as soon as I have time; for now I just wanted to give one example of the many problems with his work.

And I will just emphasise again that my problem with what he says has nothing to do with his atheism - it is with his 'analysis' of the effects of religious belief.

In his opening chapter, he claims that religious belief results in tribalism and human conflict, and therefore cannot be sustained at a point in history when humans have developed weapons of mass destruction. Others blame violent acts such as suicide bombings on other factors such as politics, economics or personal circumstances, but Harris claims that religion can be isolated and identified as the principal cause of their actions.

He later offers some evidence for this claim - but it is contradictory. We cannot blame acts of violence on economic definciency, he writes, because most suicide bombers tend to be from middle class backgrounds. He writes 'There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God. As Samuel Huntington and others have observed, religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated' (p. 32).

If it was true that religion can be isolated from other factors as the cause of human conflict, why, as he acknowledges, is there a correlation between Islamic fundamentalism and middle class men of a particular age group? This observation alone brings in several other criteria - class, gender and age - into the mix as well. There are undoubtedly others. Harris's book contains many clear but unacknowledged contradictions such as this which undermine his central arguments.

This is just one that I have picked up on - and I will address some of the other problems with his book as I go along.

We Atheists Should be More Critical of New Atheism

I generally find it quite difficult to explain my stance on New Atheism to both atheists and believers. In an argument with a believer about whether God exists or not, my arguments are pretty much the same as Dawkins and the rest of his gang - no evidence and so on. However, if I try to point out to fellow atheists that there are problems with pretty much everything else that the New Atheists claim - that religion is the sole cause of human conflict, that religion is defined by adherence to a particular text, that it is impossible to practice science while having religious faith - I immediately sense hostility, as if they suspect that I am some sort of religious apologist.

I really want to separate the question of whether or not God exists from the more complex question of how people use religion, or any system of values and beliefs, in their day-to-day lives. To point out the many logical errors of the New Atheists' historical and philosophical claims about the the effects of religion does not weaken my stance on the question of whether God exists or not; I just don't think that that question in itself is particularly important. So this is an initial attempt to outline a couple of reasons why atheists should take adopt a more critical stance on New Atheism.

Note - I would be interested in hearing different perspectives on this from Americans and Brits. It strikes me that the style of the New Atheists' arguments is perhaps more forgivable in an American context where anti-evolutionism is a more pressing public problem than in  Britain.

New Atheism is Boring

The British Humanist Association recently hosted an event in London with Richard Dawkins in conversation with PZ Myers. It started promisingly with some interesting speculations from the perspective of biology about how life on other planets might have evolved differently to on Earth. After about fifteen minutes, however, it took a right-angled turn to issues of atheism and religion. This in itself was fine, but what they were saying was so boringly familiar that I quickly lost interest.

As a rationalist and an atheist, I know that immaculate conception isn't biologically possible. I know that creationists are deluded. I know that there is no more evidence for God than there is for Thor. But this is stuff that an intelligent eight-year old can tell you. Indeed, my eight-year old niece has declared herself an atheist having worked each of these things out for herself, but she hasn't made millions by writing a book about it. Dawkins, however, has been churning out these same basic ideas at least since The God Delusion came out.

In a sense, he's a bit like Oasis - one release with some simple and derivative, but basically enjoyable ideas, and then a subsequent repetition of the formula for years afterwards, with no artistic development and increasingly tedious results. And yet there is a hardcore fanbase who will not hear a word said against him. I have attended a few similarly themed events in recent weeks, and they seem to me to function not so much as a forum to debate ideas, but as a social occasion at which humanists and atheists sit around and congratulate each other about how rational they are and laugh at how stupid religion is. This is a perfectly valid position to take, but the endless repetition of the same basic ideas is becoming increasingly tedious to me.

And yet, judging from various declared atheists I follow on Twitter, there are many other people who, rather than seriously examining the issues and problems around religion, are happy to just repeat aphorisms over and over again - such as 'The Holy Bible. Turning the sin of intellectual indolence into a virtue for nearly 2000 years.' Things like this are fine in themselves, but it doesn't get any more sophisticated than this, and it indicates to me that many atheists have an over-simplified idea of how people select from and draw on religious traditions in their own lives. In the 'atheist community', if such a thing exists, there appears to be no attempt to examine the issue in any more detail - there just seems to be an unthinking circulation of the same basic ideas.

What the New Atheists Get Wrong

Aside from the fact that New Atheism has become dull, I think it is important to also point out the things which the New Atheists are just plain wrong about. I am embarking on a project to re-read the central works of the 'New Atheist' canon (The End of Faith, The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell) and I'll be posting some detailed pieces outlining my take on each of them over the coming weeks. For now, I would just point out a few common and problematic claims. Firstly, they all (possibly excluding Daniel Dennett) claim that religion can be isolated as the sole, or at least, the most significant, factor in causing human conflict. I'd be interested to find out if any credible historian or political scientist supports this view.

They also claim that to be religious is to draw on the contents of a particular holy book. But this would involve ignoring the fact that people can also draw on particular theological traditions and alternative interpretations rather than directly from the source text, and some have a concept of religion that means nothing more complicated than being good to other people. This is no different to what most humanists would believe, whether there is a god out there or not.

They also claim that religion is inherently incompatible with science. This of course makes sense with someone who thinks that there really is evidence for Intelligent Design, but what about someone for whom God is not a scientific entity whose existence could ever be verified, but just exists somewhere, a comforting presence who does not lay down moral dogma or play an active part in the world?

In summary, I want to emphasise that pointing out that New Atheism is crude and intellectually lazy is not the same as arguing that perhaps creationists have a point. Also, it is not to deny the existence of major problems where science is attacked or prejudice grows out of religious beliefs. But it should be the duty of any rational person to subject the claims of Dawkins et al to the same scrutiny as anything else - and not just their claims about whether God exists or not.

New Atheism Blog - Intro: Working Out What the Hell I'm Doing

Welcome to the latest of my many attempts to start blogging regularly!

This blog is mainly intended to be an outlet for ideas related to what will hopefully end up as a PhD project, though I will undoubtedly stray into other territory, be it personal, political or pointless. Feel free to post comments and I'll do my best to respond! Just an intro for now to help people (including myself) work out what I'm talking about.

I'm interested in taking a critical look at the public debate about atheism and the role of religion in contemporary society - not adopting a simplistic stance on whether religion is 'good' or 'bad', but, rather, to trace the roots of this debate and ask why it has become such an urgent issue in our culture. It is often seen as a straightforward response to Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, but I think there is a more complex and interesting story to tell about where it originates from - and it has its roots in a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself.

A point to make early on about my stance on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others associated with 'New Atheism' - I am an atheist myself, and I have no time for for the crazier 'scientific' arguments supporting the existence of God. While I share this position with the New Atheists, I also understand that many people who believe in God don't base their belief on 'scientific' claims anyway, and not all religious people hold irrational moral positions based on dogma. I feel that there is much to be regretted about 'New Atheism', which has had an unnecessarily divisive impact on public debate and has created a crude and over-simplified picture of the role that religion plays in many people's lives.

I also think that there has been a failure on the part of the New Atheists and their supporters to reflect on the foundations of their own intellectual positions. For me, New Atheism is not only responding to an attack on secular liberal democracies by religious fundamentalism, but also to a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself. The flawed attempts by Harris and Dawkins in particular to claim a 'scientific' basis for their values reflect this, and I think that their focus on attacking religion distracts liberals from examining problems within their own ideologies.

That probably doesn't clarify very much but it will hopefully start to make sense as I slowly work out what the hell I'm talking about. Feel free to argue - I'm open to revising my ideas, though I won't necessarily admit that I was ever wrong about anything.

Follow me on Twitter @Steverini.