by Matthew Sitman
Last week the Dish featured an interview with Peter Watson, author of The Age of Atheists, an intellectual history of European and American thought since Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is dead.” Emma Green accuses Watson of “intellectual snobbery” for believing that because “intellectual history trends toward non-belief, human history must, too.” Why she objects:
For one thing, it suggests that believers are inherently less thoughtful than non-believers. Watson tells stories of famous thinkers and artists who have struggled to reconcile themselves to a godless world. And these are helpful, in that they offer insight into how dynamic, creative people have tried to live. But that doesn’t mean the average believer’s search for meaning and understanding is any less rigorous or valuable—it just ends with a different conclusion: that God exists. Watson implies that full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism, and that’s just not true.
We know it’s not true because the vast majority of the world believes in God or some sort higher power. Worldwide, religious belief and observance vary widely by region. It’s tough to get a fully accurate global picture of faith in God or a “higher power,” but the metric of religiosity serves as a helpful proxy. Only 16 percent of the world’s population was not affiliated with a particular faith as of 2010, although many of these people believe in God or a spiritual deity, according to the Pew Research Center.
Green goes on to cite a litany of statistics, broken down by region and country, showing just how many people still believe in God, even in Europe. I find this a puzzling and unpersuasive retort.
To begin with, the distinction between “intellectual history” and “human history” is a strange one – isn’t the former part of the latter, and might it not portend the shape of things to come? Even more, large numbers of people across the globe still having a “religious affiliation” doesn’t mean such social facts will be durable, or indicate how strong such affiliations are, or predict how the ongoing churn of the modern world will impact areas outside the United States and Europe. That 30 percent of the religiously unaffiliated in France believe in God, a number Green trots out, seems irrelevant to me; one can imagine a survey respondent shrugging and saying, “Sure, I believe in God,” with that belief being of no practical import to that person. The Pew study she cites specifically notes that such numbers only deal with the self-identification of those surveyed, and “does not attempt to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how religious they are.”
Most of all, in her own summary of his book, Green describes Watson as implying that “full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism.” That means he’s making an argument that an array of forces in contemporary life – from modern science to capitalism to the overturning of traditional ideas about sex and morality – mitigate against religious belief, or at least make it more tenuous and difficult. In other words, there are reasons, intellectual and cultural, that make Watson predict an atheistic future. I’m not convinced Watson is right, but responding with rather weak survey data does nothing to address these deeper issues. That’s why John Gray’s review of The Age of Atheists (along with Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God) is so on point, getting at the true intellectual and moral alternatives at stake. Here’s why he praises Watson and Eagleton as the rare exceptions who take Nietzsche as the “central reference point” in their books:
There can be little doubt that Nietzsche is the most important figure in modern atheism, but you would never know it from reading the current crop of unbelievers, who rarely cite his arguments or even mention him. Today’s atheists cultivate a broad ignorance of the history of the ideas they fervently preach, and there are many reasons why they might prefer that the 19th-century German thinker be consigned to the memory hole. With few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals. Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together. Illustrating this fact, Nietzsche can only be an embarrassment for atheists today. Worse, they can’t help dimly suspecting they embody precisely the kind of pious freethinker that Nietzsche despised and mocked: loud in their mawkish reverence for humanity, and stridently censorious of any criticism of liberal hopes.
I want more discussions prompted by this line of thought, more atheists who have absorbed the full import of what rejecting Christianity really might entail, especially the faith’s deep, if not uncomplicated, impact on the West’s moral and political heritage. To the extent Watson’s book, along with Eagleton’s, contribute to this happening, I rather enthusiastically welcome them.
The Dish 