Julian Baggini reviews Nick Spencer’s book Atheists: The Origin of the Species, calling the author “the kind of intelligent, thoughtful, sympathetic critic that atheists need, if only to remind them that belief in God does not necessarily require a loss of all reason.” He goes on to write that although “there is plenty here for infidels to argue with, there is much more that is undeniably true and important to know, if you want to understand the complex histories of both present-day religion and atheism”:
What is … debatable is the contention that “the history of atheism is best seen as a series of disagreements about authority” rather than one primarily about the existence of God. “To deny God was not simply to deny God,” writes Spencer. “It was to deny the emperor or the king who ruled you, the social structures that ordered your life, the ethical ties that regulated it, the hopes it inspired and the judgment that reassured it.”
This is certainly true. But it does not follow that the tussle between religion and atheism is political rather than philosophical.
Baggini feels that it’s “a false choice to say that the battles must ‘really’ be either political or metaphysical: the messy reality is that they are jumble of both.” Where Spencer is on firmer ground:
[H]e is right to say that there is something odd about the kind of secular humanism that says all we need to do, to quote the famous bus campaign slogan, is accept “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Believing that human beings are special is natural if you believe God created us apart from other animals, not if you believe we are higher primates whose brains evolved to help us survive and reproduce. This should certainly call into question naive atheist faith in the power of secular reason, even if Spencer goes too far when he suggests it ends up undermining its very basis, “sawing through the branch on which the atheist sat”.
The Dish 