"One should be the sort of atheist who is not an atheist I suppose."

Seven Types of Atheism REVIEW

One often hears people referring to “Christians” as though that term described a singular point of view. In reality, we know that there are many kinds and many denominations of Christianity. There are Lutherans, Pentecostals, Quakers, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and Anglicans to name a few. In a similar way, the word “atheist” is used as a means of describing all people who do not believe in God but, as John Gray points out, the terms is too general. There are many kinds of atheists. This book asserts that there are at least seven. The author tries to take the views of several scores of atheists who happened to write about their atheism to distill these seven categories. He is well read. This cannot be denied. That said, his categories are not easily deciphered and certainly cannot be easily remembered. He is clear that he is a fan of two of the seven types of atheist and not a fan of five of them. “I have no interest in converting anyone to or from any of these types of atheisms” he writes, “But my own preferences will be clear. Repelled by the first five varieties, I am drawn to the last two.”

So, let’s try and summarize the denominations of atheism that John Gray could not see himself belonging to. The first (covered in the first chapter) is the sort of atheism that says that religion is the product of a few conniving power-seekers who exploited the ignorance of the masses to concoct narrative explanations for the physical universe in ways that granted them power. This atheism is an assertion that the God or gods that religions concoct amounts to no more than a scientific hypothesis that science has now proven untrue. i.e. since scientists have never taken an X-ray and seen a demon, there is no God. This sort of atheism argues that science can answer any and all questions that matter without reference to God and thus God does not exist. It assumes that science will eventually uncover some world view that will make all other world views appear foolish to anyone who considers them.

“There is no reason for supposing that the progress of science will reach a point where only one world view is left standing” Gray counters. This sort of blind attack on all religion for failing to turn up under a microscope is something that the author cannot adhere to. “Religion may involve the creation of illusions,” he writes,

“But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that the need for illusion goes with being human.”

Gray dismisses these atheists in the following words:

“The organized atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment.”

As you will see, Gray prefers the sort of atheism that sees religion and belief in God pragmatically and even indulgently. So long as it serves a beneficial purpose, it ought not be attacked and it may even be in an atheists best interest to support it.  

A second form of atheism that the author disdains is the sort of atheism that seeks to retain all the benefits of the religious world view while dismissing its foundation (“castrating the gelding and bidding it be fruitful” as C.S. Lewis put it). Gray notes that many atheists are trying to practice a philosophical sleight of hand magic trick when they pretend that conclusions based on faith in revealed religion can be maintained even though the ground of the conclusion is dismissed. For example, theism argues that God can make the world a better place and even, in time, a perfect place. An atheist can dismiss the existence of God and then, without so much as an explanation, maintain that the world can be made a better place and even a perfect place by simply replacing the part that God played in that narrative with humans.

But this is a leap of faith with no evidence, says the author. This is a case of thinking with one’s hopes. The atheist is doing exactly what the theist was doing – specifically, believing in something with no evidence. “The idea that civilizations improve throughout history has never been a falsifiable hypothesis,” the book insists in chapter two. “If it had been, it would have been abandoned long ago.” Evidence suggests that humans are not able to achieve anything close to perfect societies and it suggests that even brief episodes of “better than average” are always followed with regressions of an equivalent nature.

“No thread of progress in civilization is woven into the fabric of history. The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics, philosophy or the arts. Knowledge increases at an accelerated rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been. Gains in civilization occur from time to time, but they are lost after a few generations. . . . The evidence that the human animal learns from his mistakes and follies is at best mixed. On this point, empiricism and liberalism are at odds.”

Gray has a problem with people calling themselves atheists while they maintain the entire superstructure that only a belief in God allows. “Nowadays there are millions of liberal humanist who have never had a religion of the ordinary kind,” he writes, “Few of them have asked themselves – as Mill did - whether their faith in human improvement can be supported by reason.”

“... they think they have no religion.”

“Partisans of revolution, reform and counterrevolution think they have left religion behind,” Gray writes in a later chapter, “when all they have done is renew it in shapes they fail to recognize.”

“The belief that we live in a secular age is itself an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian church has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. ... Since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era.”

In a similar way, Gray decries the sort of atheism that only works if people do not stop thinking like theists. He uses John Stewart Mill as an example. Mill dismisses God as having no relevance to life on this planet and then devises a moral theory that requires them all to acts as though they were devout Christians of the most committed variety. “Mill never questioned the Christian idea that morality is an overriding imperative,” Gray says, but then “he failed to explain why anyone should want to be moral.”

Morality, he says, is a relic of monotheism. At least altruism is anyway. Gray makes his argument with references to Ayn Rand and the Roman Epicurean, Lucretius. The sentiment captured in Lucretius’ poem is, Gray argues, more consistent with honest atheism. It cultivates a serene indifference to the mass of humankind:

A joy it is, when the strong winds of storm
Stir up the waters of a mighty sea,
to watch from the shore the troubles of another.
No pleasure this in any man’s distress,
But joy to see the ills from which you are spared,
and joy to see great armies locked in conflict
Across the plains, yourself free from the danger.

“Watching calmly as others drowned in misery,” chapter two of the book concludes,

“The Epicureans were content in the tranquil retreat of their secluded gardens. Humanity could do what it pleased. It was no concern of theirs.”

The third form of atheism that the author cannot ascribe to is the sort of atheism that asserts that jettisoning a belief in God will somehow magically make all humans better. I suspect one might quote John Lennon here: “Imagine there’s no heaven.” Somehow, the belief in God is what has made human beings go to war with each other and the absence of the belief will lead, as sure as water leads to wet, to world peace. To the contrary says Gray, many of the world’s great atheists were loaded up like Jethro Clampitt’s car with racist, war-nurturing ideas. “Modern racist ideology is it in enlightenment project,” he writes citing numerous examples of racist atheists from Voltaire to Trotsky. “Though the 21st-century missionaries for enlightenment values resist the fact,” we read in chapter three, “modern racism emerged from the work of enlightenment philosophers. Voltaire was a pivotal figure in this process.”

One could easily cite Vermont’s own Ethan Allen here (though Gray does not think to mention him). In Ethan Allen’s notorious publication Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, Allen has a chapter articulating his convictions about the inferiority of people of African descent.

In short, this sort of atheism is the sort that would suggest that if a person does not believe in God, they are insured against the possibility of ever holding any other noxious idea so long as they cling to their atheism. Gray wonders if maybe being an atheist increases the odds of holding noxious ideas.

Another form of atheism that the author would have his readers discard is the sort of atheism that literally hates the being that they say does not exist. He calls the chapter, “God Haters.”

So long as a belief in God is a essential component of a healthy life, it is a mistake to try to eradicate that belief he suggests. And for Gray, belief in God is a not so much an opiate as it is air to human well-being. For Gray, “man has done nothing but invent God so as to live without killing himself; in this lies the whole of world history up till now.”  

In the final two chapters of this book, the author attempts to introduce us to those philosophers of atheism that he admires. Chapter Six is entitled “Atheism Without Progress” and Chapter Seven is entitled “The Atheism of Silence.” These chapters introduce us to thinkers like George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Baruch Spinoza. The argument is difficult to follow but I think the gist of it is that there is a certain wisdom to denying the existence of God without living like you have and without working against the idea of God being believed. In discussing the atheism of Joseph Conrad, Gray writes:

“Conrad asks if illusion might not be more humanly worthwhile than a heightened self-awareness that denudes life of meaning. Any prospect of a worthwhile life without illusions might itself be an illusion.”

Spinoza, it seems, satisfied his intellect by denying the existence of a personal God but continued to maintain the existence of pantheistic divinity in all material things. In other words, he maintained a cause for meaning while discarding the God of the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Quakers along with the gods of the Hindus and the Kami of the Shintos.

Gray approves of the atheism of an Arthur Schopenhauer who he says

“led a double existence, carefully cultivating his pleasures while endlessly preaching the futility of desire. For anyone who believes that philosophers must live by their teachings – as Santayana did, for example, this may look like hypocrisy.”

In other words, the sort of atheism that one should consider for their own life, is the sort that would keep a wall of separation between what they thought and what they lived. One should be the sort of atheist who is not an atheist I suppose.

Professor Gray is, I admit, more widely read than I and I doubt I could win an argument about anything with him if the subject were philosophy. He knows his stuff. I often like to finish these book reviews by affirming to myself that I have represented the views of the authors I read fairly. I struggled a bit to keep up with Professor Gray because of my own lack of expertise in the field he writes about. I hope he will forgive if I have misrepresented his views.

Thanks to my friend and colleague, David, for gifting me this book.

 Question for Comment: Do you have any beliefs that do not serve you well and yet you cannot discard them?

Comments

[David]

Hi Phil,

I thought that you wrote a very good, thought-provoking review. Like so many writers, I try to take what John Gray has to offer with some skepticism, yet those first five chapters did such a good job of surveying the religious or fundamentalist character in those forms of atheism covered that it was perhaps a bit of catnip for me. More shortly, my enthusiasm clearly tinted my critical eye.

Yet I thought his consideration of Conrad and Santayana was the most rewarding. I always thought there was a wee bit of cowardice in stoicism (your providing Lucretius's poem helps to reinforce this) , but Conrad's consideration of the place of education in the context of human value was I thought very perceptive. It made me ask: has education ever improved human character, or has it just reinforced or oriented tendencies that were already there? Must awareness always precede action? I'm not explaining things very well, and on that note, I think that you can give yourself more credit. Your own perspective is well-informed, and your review deepened my appreciation of the book, because it drove me to rethink some of my own receptivity to secular takedowns of some atheists who think there may be something new "...under the sun" as Ecclesiastes related over three thousand years ago.

Regarding your question for comment, I can understand that I emotionally embrace beliefs that do not serve me (or others) well, yet why I consciously choose to buttress them with "intellectual" or "reasonable" arguments is the real kicker. As David Hume once wrote "the heart has more reasons than reason can ever understand."

Thanks for the review of John Grey's book.

David