Handout
- Seven Types of Atheism
- By John Gray
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- 176 pages
Since the publication in 2006 of Richard Dawkins’s anti-faith polemic The God Delusion, the atheist movement has transformed itself from a marginalized cult into a respectable intellectual movement in the anglophile world. Holding together this motley crew of scientists, moral philosophers, evolutionary psychologists and journalists is complete faith in a Darwinian-materialist interpretation of the world, in both a physical and cultural sense.
An example of this blind faith in science, reason and progress can be gleaned from Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which points to incremental advancements in global civilization over the last century, especially as famines have decreased, global poverty has been cut drastically, life expectancy has risen sharply and violence, overall, has declined. Pinker puts all of these advancements down to science and knowledge.
But there has been a revolt in the wider intellectual culture against the notion that evolutionary theory can explain all the complexities of life as a single universal truth. Certain thinkers are placing emphasis, again, on the positive aspects of religion, such as the power it has to make meaning from mythology and give human beings a roadmap for morality. The English philosopher John Gray – himself a moderate atheist – is one such thinker who rejects an all-encompassing view of science. Moreover, Gray points out how many atheists, ironically, use the core principals of Christian ideology to find meaning in language and ideas.
Gray lays into “new atheism” fairly early on in this concise yet philosophically enlightening book. “Dawkins and his disciples have embellished Darwinism with [a] cod science,” the author states caustically. The neuroscientist and moral philosopher Sam Harris, meanwhile, “cultivates a willed ignorance on the history of ideas,” Gray adds.
Gray’s contempt for the fundamentalist outlook of Dawkins and his God-hating science buddies fits into the central argument this book is framed around: If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the notion that they are opposites. Or, as Gray puts it more directly: “Contemporary atheism is simply monotheism by other means.”
But to understand this idea with the depth it deserves, you really must explore the history of Christianity itself. The turning point, Gray posits, was 20 years after the death of Christ, when St. Paul transformed what was then a Jewish cult into a global religion. Crucially, this was the beginning of Western modernity, and would imprison the Western mind with the idea that a universal history of the world exists.
Gray neatly surmises the core message of Christian teaching: Suffer now for the promise of salvation tomorrow, when the world will be born anew. It’s an idea that has infected numerous atheistic ideologies ever since, notably in the 20th century. There’s Leninism, Maoism, Fascism and, of course, unregulated free-market capitalism.
As the book’s title suggests, Gray walks the reader through seven different types of atheistic thought, gleaning ideas from Western history, philosophy and culture. Ever the skeptic, though, Gray is not trying to convert the reader to atheism – he usually puts the boot to any form of atheism he discusses. Everyone, from Plato to Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Trotsky, Hitler, Lenin and Rand, gets a dressing-down from the English philosopher for what he sees as their myopic view of history and philosophy.
Gray’s writing is concise, convincing at times, self-assured, subjective, paradoxical, highly opinionated and almost always seeking a public scrap with his intellectual opponents. If you are in any way interested in the history of the West, and European culture more broadly, it’s hard not to like Gray’s writing.
Still, there are downsides. Gray too quickly reaches for extreme epochs of history – the gas chambers and gulags being his favorite examples – to prove how deplorable the human species is. Seven Types of Atheism is a bleak affair.
Believing in neither science nor God, Gray believes in nothing. And it appears as if the philosopher has tragically read himself into existential-misanthropic-doom. The book’s despairing analysis on the sheer pointlessness of human self-reflection is especially empty, in both presentation and content.
”If there is no order at the bottom of thing, an examined life may hardly be worth living,” Gray depressingly concludes.