The Manley Arts: God and the New Atheists.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:58:12 GMT

Manley, Will (author).
FEATURE. First published October 1, 2009 (Booklist).

I’ve always been amused by the story of the author P. D. Ouspensky, sitting in the sands before the Sphinx in the year 1910. He has come before the Sphinx because he considers “this strange great face” to be the “most remarkable of the world’s works of art.” At first glance, he is struck by how simple, modern, and understandable the face looks. What is disorienting for him, however, is the way the face peers off into the distance. Ouspensky feels invisible in front of the Sphinx because he realizes that the great face is focused on eternity. With a sense of terror, he realizes that he does not exist for the Sphinx. Because Ouspensky lives in the fleeting, transitory present moment, he despairs of existing at all. In his smallness, he is overwhelmed by the reality of eternity.

This little crisis of the soul seems a bit archaic to us today. Who among us grapples with the big, scary questions of existence? The profound theological issues that, for many centuries, preoccupied great thinkers as well as normal, everyday people are rarely even thought about today. When is the last time someone asked you about your eternal soul? It’s just not the lingua franca of the modern age. We seem to be hurtling headlong into a postreligion culture, at least among mainstream Christians. All the statistical surveys confirm it. Church membership and church attendance are down catastrophically. At a funeral I attended a few years ago, a young man in his early twenties asked me who the dude was who was hanging on the plus sign at the front of the church.

There are many theories about why masses of people have turned their backs on organized religion. They’ve been turned off by the scandals of the clergy; they’re too busy with the here and now to even give eternity a second thought; they’re appalled by the violence that they see arising out of religious extremism; or they simply don’t know anything about religion because prayer and Bible reading have been prohibited in public schools, and what they do know comes from best-selling novels that tell them the Gospels are part of a sinister conspiracy.

All of this may be true, but I think the decline of organized religion owes more to the world we live in than anything else. Historically, people have clung to religion for answers to the unanswerable questions of life and death. In today’s high-tech knowledge economy, science seems to have an answer for every question, and technology seems to have a fix for every problem. A couple of years ago, I participated in a focus group about the future at a local university. The cluster of college students in the group seemed to think that in time the biomedical industry would render death obsolete. Who needs God in a deathless world?

But there is something else at work in our world. A host of proselytizing authors best known as the “new atheists” have launched an aggressive literary crusade against God. These apostles of the new church of evangelical atheism are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007), John Allen Paulos (Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, 2008), Victor J. Stenger (God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, 2007), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004). It is important to note that these books are not dry academic tomes intended to contribute to lofty philosophical debates. No, the intent here is to shepherd the mainstream reader out of the darkness of blind faith and into the promised land of sunny rationality, where reason and logic will usher in a well-ordered paradise on earth.

This truly is a new form of atheism. Think of the old atheists: Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness), Albert Camus (The Plague), George Orwell (1984), Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and Her Children), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night), and Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy). These authors wrote masterpieces of darkness, despair, despondency, and depression. To them, there was nothing uplifting or inspiring about a godless universe. The world they lived in was inherently hopeless. Life was a biological accident full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Think back to Hemingway’s greatest short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” The main character expresses his angst in the form of an answerless prayer: “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

The old atheists wrote to express their angst about an unredeemable world; the new atheists write to extol the promise of a world based entirely on reason, logic, and science. They urge us to unload the religious superstitions of the past so that we can proceed uninhibited with the task of creating a just and peaceful society. So much do the new atheists believe in the power of the intellect that they have taken to nicknaming themselves “the brights.”

I have read all their books with great interest because I, too, would like to be considered “bright,” and I must admit that I am thoroughly convinced by their arguments. They have convinced me that life has meaning and that we should strive to do the right (and bright) thing for the common good.

I wonder, however, where these notions came from if not from God.

Will Manley has been writing The Manley Arts since 1991.

Booklist Online - The Manley Arts

The Manley Arts: God and the New Atheists.