The new new atheism
Atheism is just another theology. That's not a problem
Theists like to say “atheism is just a new religion.” The ‘new atheists’ have spent several decades trying to defeat the facticity of this claim, often to little effect. The number of people who are going to be persuaded by meta-arguments about whether science produces true knowledge may not be literally zero, but it’s pretty close.
As a result, the main effect of atheism vs. theism debates over the past few decades has been a bunch of question-begging arguments that pretty much go nowhere. For example, atheists love to insist that the existence of God is inherently unprovable, as if that means anything. Of course no one is going to be able to offer empirical proof for the existence of God. That’s one of the principle features of ‘god’ in the first place.1 Which makes me wonder about the wide-eyed breathlessness with which this point gets made—as if theological scholars over thousands of years had never bothered to consider this very basic issue. On the other side, theists often insist that ‘there is no morality without God.’ This is true, but only if by ‘God’ we mean that fundamentally super-empirical idea that gives us a means for organizing and relating to an otherwise chaotic universe. Which of course is not what they typically mean.
The ‘reasonable centrist’ approach to this sort of argument is to reject both the dogmatists on either side, and offer a kind of mild toleration for all perspectives. Which mostly means ‘theism without insisting on its universality’ and ‘agnosticism with no demands for agreement.’ As a practical political matter, this kind of secularism works pretty well. Letting people be is almost always better than trying to argue them into submission about supposedly fundamental truths.2
However, as a philosophical matter, I think the sensible middle is actually not that helpful. The theists are right that soft liberalism and dogmatic atheism are equally squishy when it comes to establishing reasons for believing anything at all. And the atheists are right that soft liberalism and dogmatic theism are equally tautological in their exhortations of meaning.
Which means that reasonable secularism—for all that it works as a practical political doctrine—remains profoundly unsatisfying.
I have long thought that the better approach for secularists and atheists was to join hands and collectively respond to the accusation that secularism/atheism/liberalism are just a new religion with a simple “and why is that a criticism?”
What theology is, and isn’t, trying to achieve
At the heart of theology is a question: how is possible for us to make judgments when all empirical existence suggests that we are simply subjective beings? Judgment implies a position from which two issues might be considered. If existence is only material—and is found through the realm of experience—then there can be no vantage point capable of issuing authoritative judgments among the various perspectives. There are only individual perspectives.
In order to make a normative statement with objective validity, you need to be able to identify the perspective that exists outside of perspectives. The one perspective which isn’t a subjective opinion but is valid fact. Theology is the field of human thought trying to grapple with this idea. It often manifests through the literal invocation of godly beings of various forms, but it doesn’t have to work that way.3
One distinguishing feature of ‘modernity’ was a growing certainty among European elites that value-generation could be separated from God. This was in some sense a move forced by history. The religious wars of the Reformation meant that a general acceptance of one particular interpretation of God was not going to function as the universally accepted standard of validation. But it was also an intellectual movement. A matter of epistemology. How, exactly, can you declare that something has been established? This was a metaphysical question, not just a practical one. Even something as simple and clearly ‘provable’ as the statement X caused Y depends on a prior determination of what counts as an agent capable of making that judgment. That’s why you get Descartes and his cogito, ergo sum. It’s why you get Kant trying to find a way to establish a priori concepts able to stand where God once did. It’s why you get Hegel thinking about geist. It’s why you get Hume’s skeptical take on the fact/value distinction.
An important contribution of atheists is to emphasize that all theologies are also political. They serve individual interests, and derive their legitimacy from them. One perspective on God wins not because it’s more correct, but because it is capable of declaring itself victorious. Indeed, the question of more or less ‘correct’ is a totally meaningless one when it comes to meta-theology. The whole premise of theological thinking is that it deals with questions that can’t simply be reduced to empirical study. Because the atheists regard theology as ‘false,’ they regard this as an enormous crime: an illusion meant to obscure the operations of power.
This is what leads some of the more prominent atheists (Christopher Hitchens was notoriously annoying about this) to describe religion as causing horrific violence. This sort of claim is true, but only in a sense that makes it effectively meaningless. Of course religion is the basis for horrific violence. Religion is a concept, a way of recognizing the fundamental tension built into a being capable of thinking of itself as being: how is it that there is an ‘I’ and that there are also ‘not-Is’? When you decide that someone deserves to have war waged on them, you are establishing a religious community (those on your side – a particular concept of ‘I’) and therefore justifying the destruction of those on the other side.
Religion is the means by which that destruction is enabled, but it’s simplistic and silly to say in a declarative sense that religion caused the conflict. Instead, religion is the terrain on which a particular type of violence—they type made possible by the existence of beings who believe themselves to have a Will (as opposed to pure instinct)—takes place.
If all theology is political, however, then all politics is also theological. And more broadly, this means that philosophy itself always depends on some sort of foundational premise—one which takes place outside of the empirical realm but which is itself the means by which material facts can be translated into meaningful concepts.
This is neither good nor bad, in itself. It just is. The problem isn’t with theology as such; it’s the narrowly constructed terrain of acceptable concepts of value-production that we’ve allowed within theology.
Theology and suffering
Because theology isn’t just a way of describing what you will fight and kill (and maybe even more importantly, what you will die) for. It’s also a way of assigning meaning to the prosaic features of material life. Most specifically, to the experience of pain.
John Lennon basically nailed it when he said “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
The thing about pain is that when it’s experienced in its unmediated form, it has no particular meaning. Pain in that sense is inevitable, eternal. It could not be other than it is. The question ‘why do I feel pain’ doesn’t go anywhere. You feel it because it’s there. It could theoretically be quantified (“I experienced three pain-units when I hit my finger with the hammer”), or put into biological context (“pain is a signal of danger or harm”) but it can’t really be giving meaning.
We can distinguish pain (the experience of nerves) from suffering (the experience of a self). Suffering is pain that which we are capable of understanding could have been different. It’s a theological matter, not one subject to empirical answers.
The thing that makes it theological is the way it provokes a question: how is it that I am made to suffer, rather than simply feel pain? One answer is simply “because God wills it.” Perhaps the suffering is righteous because I have sinned. Perhaps it’s a feature of original sin; I suffer because Adam and Eve ate the apple in Eden. Perhaps my suffering is a test, like Job. Regardless of the specific answer, the point is that God provides a measuring stick for adjudicating pain, and therefore rendering it meaningful.
A secular version of this process is one which declares that suffering happens because it exists within a just political order. Maybe one person suffers because they are experiencing just punishment for a crime. Or alternatively, maybe we choose to describe suffering as the pain that ought to have been prevented. Again, the particular meaning of suffering might be radically different in different secular contexts, but the broader point is to translate simple material pain into something more ineffable and to thereby justify it.
And the reason we do all of this is the classic existential reason: the desire to assign meaning to our pain.
Which is why atheists should give up on trying to refute the accusation that atheism (or liberalism, or secularism, or whatever) is just another form of theology. Instead, they should try to explain why reason (or science, or liberalism, or whatever) offers better, more satisfying, more life-affirming answers to the existential problem of suffering. They should accept that they are trying to articulate a concept of justice that is capable of replacing the work that has historically been done by God. And they should have the courage of their convictions and make the case.
If atheists want to convince anyone, they need to learn the exact same lessons they have been trying to teach: fundamentalism is a dead-end. Enlightenment is a process of openness to difference, of wonder, of flourishing. And it can only occur in those liminal spaces where sacred and profane intersect. Where we encounter beauty, and wonder, and joy.
Really, sacred things are everywhere, if you’re looking for them. I find it myself when I’m dancing with my kids. Holding my partner close while we watch a sunset. Hearing a beautiful song. Reading an enthralling story. Tasting a perfect bite of food. Lighting candles and breaking open a loaf of challah. It doesn’t minimize the concept of sacrality to apply it to these things. It also isn’t helpful to treat these as purely utilitarian pleasures. There’s something special about these sort of joys, and it’s appropriate to recognize that.
People need sacred things, not because they’re true, but precisely because they exceed the scope of ‘true’ entirely. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that sacrality is the means by which we decide what will allow us to make truth claims. We can’t simply abandon that potentiality. At least, we can’t abandon it and have much hope of persuading others that our vision of the universe is satisfying or worthy of affirmation. They will rightly wonder where our faith is, and will regard our claim for its nonexistence as either a lie, or (even worse) as an failure of self-knowledge.
See my post from a few months back on the conflicts between faith and proof:
One of John Rawls’ most important—and most straightforward—arguments for political liberalism is that it provides a framework for simply bypassing the expectation of ‘winning’ these unwinnable arguments.
Obviously, in non-monotheistic traditions it doesn’t work in the same way we expect it to function in the Abrahamic faiths. And for some significant subsets of the world population, faith has never meant the assertion of universal truth.