Brandon Ambrosino interviews Nick Spencer, author of Atheists: The Origin of the Species, about how unbelief in the divine has changed from Nietzsche to Dawkins:
BA: Modern atheists seem of a very different variety than their forebears. For instance, Richard Dawkins, whom you critique, is very different than, say, Nietzsche. How did we get from one to the other?
NS: You’re right: Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins don’t have a great deal in common. I guess I’d say, we didn’t get from one to another, because there are different strands of atheisms. I talk about atheisms (plural) in the book. At one point, the statement “There is no God” is acceptable as it is in an academic seminar. But if you wanted to deny the existence of God in public — in the late 19th-century Europe, for example — you’d have to say, “There is no god and therefore … ” There’d have to be some implications of your nonbelief. Atheists over the years have differed according to what those implications are. And the result is that atheists, I argue, differ in their “doctrines,” if you like, of the nonexistence of God and its implications for human affairs.
Now Nietzsche had one particular, very abrasive, and, I think, painfully honest approach to that question which has spawned in the 20th-century certain nihilistic forms of atheism that are more usually associated with continental philosophy. Dawkins does it right within that tradition, and therefore, is a move on from Nietzsche. He occupies a very different atheistic position (arguably several atheistic traditions) and that’s why there is clear blue water between Nietzsche’s and his. But it wasn’t as if the former ever led to the latter. They were all, if you like, different branches of the same tree.
Recent Dish on Nietzsche here and here.
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