Hey atheists, Ur doing it wrong.
There was a young man I attended college with who I hated for no other reason than that he always agreed with me. He was for me that breed of antagonist with whom each of us is familiar, a comrade in whichever cause or interest we passionately pursue, and his only sins were stupidity, ignorance, and a complete inability to rationally articulate why exactly it was that he felt the way he did. He was a vocal liberal, and he championed many positions I hold dear, but his advocacy always seemed a disservice to the cause. He was good intentioned and well meaning, but an idiot nonetheless, and I despised the possibility that anyone might confuse this moron as being representative of the Left at large.
I also hated him because I was smarter than him, but he was louder and got more attention. But that’s beside the point.
After reading Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, I get the distinct sense that Terry Eagleton harbors the same feelings towards Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and rightfully so. He’s spent a lifetime reading his Hegel and studying the Grundrisse and developing a vested theoretical interest in the dialectical consequences of atheism (in addition, of course, to deeply engaging with a wide body of literature), so to encounter a couple of timely screeds like The God Delusion andGod is Not Great has got to be infuriating. And just like me and my undergraduate nemesis, that fury has probably grown to a fever pitch once “Ditchkins”, as Eagleton dismissively conflates the two, accrued so much attention and popular acclaim. It’s one thing when half-wits toil in the same obscurity we do; it’s another thing entirely when they get a megaphone just for being dumb.
Now don’t get me wrong: these two guys aren’t idiots. Dawkins is an accomplished scientist who has made no small number of valuable contributions to his field. And Hitchens, a man who’s never met a political headwind too weak to make him change his tune, has made quite a career for himself as a well paid pontificator. But once they stray from their respective niches the two of them demonstrate a level of maturity and intellectual development indistinguishable from a thirteen-year-old who reads The Stranger and now thinks he can hold court on the finer points of existentialism.
See, atheists are making atheism look bad, and it’s been long overdue that someone throw down the gauntlet. And while deconstructing Ditchkins is like going after low-hanging fruit in the first place, Eagleton, proven polemicist that he is, delivers a virtuoso performance. Plus, just as the only American who could go to China without being red-baited by Richard Nixon was Richard Nixon, the only person who can make the argument that Ditchkins is doing it wrong without being accused of religious irrationalism is another card-carrying atheist.
Eagleton’s is the first crucial step in rescuing atheism from the atheists, to reclaim the public perception of atheism from the likes of Dawkins and Hitchins and those who might represent it as merely the opposite, antithetical fringe to the fundamentalist religious Right. Because to be an atheist does not mean to define oneself in defiant contradistinction to those of faith; in its theoretical case it is necessitated in order to mediate the power relationships among men (“The criticism of religion,” Marx teaches us, “leads to the doctrine according to which man is, for man, the supreme being; therefore it reaches the categorical imperative of overthrowing all relationships in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.”). This leaves the door wide open to the possibility that perhaps—just perhaps—there’s a little common ground to be shared among those of faith and those of non-belief (the latter being a phrase which, in this context, is almost too non-sensical to be employed in good faith [oh, I pun!]).
But not for Ditchkins, of course: so far as they’re concerned matters of religion are best represented by those radical outliers who kill OB/GYNs in the name of God. Such a stance makes it all that much easier to disregard the whole affair as all a bunch of nonsense standing in the way of the forward march of Science (an added bonus, of course, is realizing one has discovered a fount of endless intellectual superiority). If nothing else this stinks of unsportsmanlike conduct: I don’t resent the entire scientific community for Dawkins’ arrogance, nor did theorists resent all of science because of one asinine stunt by Alan Sokal, nor—I’m confident—would Plato have held it against Galileo for debunking the Timaeus.
The greater outrage than the segregation of these disciplines, though, is this notion that theology has absolutely nothing to offer outside of a lousy alternative to the scientific explanation for the origins of the universe (which in the vast majority of cases it doesn’t attempt to proffer anyhow). With this single sleight of hand the Ditchkins atheist does away with three significant groups of thinkers. We learn that we can fairly disregard a.) those in theology or religious studies departments whose work traverses a variety of fields (suck it, Cornel West), b.) those outside of religious studies who address topics of a theological focus (like the ongoing and rich critical engagement of Paul), and c.) the entire history of thinkers who have been influenced by or engaged in any serious way with matters of faith (Kierkegaard suffered from a serious mental deficiency). Because Dawkins and Hitchens have found it so easy in their contemporary historical and material conditions to discount the question of faith as all a lot of gibberish, those responsible for the portion of mankind’s written record that precedes our present circumstances must have been intellectually lacking for not having come to similar conclusions (second added bonus: we’ve just saved ourselves a hell of a lot of reading).
This brand of atheism is symptomatic of the many contradictions inevitable in that swaggering flavor of Western Enlightenment liberalism so prevalent in this moment of late modernity. In an homage to Eagleton’s “Ditchkins” neologism, these atheists can rightly be referred to as metheists: ardent believers in the supremacy of an enlightened and liberally emancipated self, each his own independent counsel, each his own judge and jury. Theirs is an unfinished dialectic, a battle against God to become God, a crusade to liberate matters of aesthetics, judgment, and truth from the inconvenient shackles of time, deliberation, and historically collective thoughtfulness. A supreme Reason, once fully liberated from the nattering nabobs of nuance, allows for every individual to exercise his own categorical imperative to call bullshit, without having done any of the research that might justify such a claim. Seriously: find me more than a handful of atheists who have genuinely tarried with Aquinas or Anselm or Augustine before feeling completely at ease making wholesale denials of the purpose or even the possibility of faith, and I’ll eat my words.
The reason I’m so confident in such a gamble is that it’s apparent these metheists haven’t read their Aquinas or much other thoughtful theology, because the straw man they’re attacking didn’t originate from the pen of St. Thomas or his ilk. I’m reminded of where Nietzsche said that “great moments in the struggle of single individuals make up a chain, that in them a range of mountains of humanity are joined over thousands of years.” If one limits their gaze to the great thinkers of faith, to what Nietzsche would call the monuments of this discipline, he’ll find no resemblance at all to the nonsense being pedaled by a minor and unrepresentative strain of American evangelical fanaticism, no such assertions that Jesus triumphantly rode a tyrannosaurus rex into Jerusalem.
This pairs with Eagleton’s statement that these people choose to buy their “rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by triumphantly dismissing out of hand a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves too ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place.” For so many thinkers, science and faith were intended never to be mutually exclusive, but complementary. For Ptolemy,
Aristotle divides theoretical philosophy very fittingly into three primary categories, physics, mathematics, and theology. For everything that exists is composed of matter, form and motion; none of these three can be observed in its substratum by itself, without the others: they can only be imagined. Now the first cause of the first motion of the universe, if one considers it simply, can be thought of as an invisible and motionless deity; the division of theoretical philosophy concerned with investigating this can be called ‘theology’, since this kind of activity, somewhere up in the highest reaches of the universe, can only be imagined, and is completely separated from perceptible reality.
We now know, of course, that Ptolemy’s struggles with deciphering the eccentricities of Venus are entirely due to the fact that Aristotle suckered him with that Prime Mover bullshit.
Yet even for Francis Bacon, the man who started the chain of events that ends in the disastrous abortion that is the Ditchkinsian method, faith and science work in parallel, with the former addressing questions of meaning so as to advise the cold, heartless hand of the latter on matters of ethics. Or as Eagleton brilliantly states, “the doctrine that the world was made out of nothing is meant to alert us to the mind-blowing contingency of the cosmos—the fact that like a modernist work of art it might just as well never have happened, and like most thoughtful men and women is perpetually overshadowed by the possibility of its own nonexistence.” The brand of liberal bravado on display with Dawkins and Hitchens is a crusade against anything bearing even the slightest whiff of myth, a crusade which will not end until the reign of Reason is recognized to extend across all matters of natural phenomena.
And “crusade” is a fine word to use here, because the temperament of Dawkins and friends is one that suggests they’re in a heated battle against Christ, as if scientism has assembled at the battlefield to answer the challenge of religion once and for all. What’s so easily missed amidst all this blind zealotry is the fact that this extreme case of scientific arrogance is in fact the edge case of the Enlightenment. The Dawkins style of science isn’t a tool being nobly employed in a war against oppressive religious dogma; rather, this siege mentality is baked right into the method. Enlightenment liberalism has always been fundamentally patriarchal, a question of power and man’s ability to harness nature so as to exploit nature (or other human beings, as the case may be—which goes a long way towards explaining the symmetry between the Enlightenment’s exploitation of nature and capitalism’s exploitation of man, in addition to Ditchkins’ collective political indifference to that other symmetry between the forward progress of unbridled Reason and the upward trend in the horror of those atrocities committed in the name of Western Reason). Myth, therefore, the notion of the unanswerable, of what Ptolemy said could “only be imagined”, must become the gravest enemy.
This petulant insistence on the leveraging of science towards the demythification of all human cognition is, of course, wholly ignorant of its own upbringing. When presented with the fact that Isaac Newton was able not only to balance faith and science but to produce revolutionary results along the way, the hard-headed metheist answers that there must be some correlation between Newton’s faith and the ultimate failure of his system at very large or very small magnitudes. The irony is apparently lost here that those who were chiefly responsible for exposing the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics—from Bohr to Heisenberg to Schrödinger—were actually quite distant from the methodical and scientifically rigorous environment of the laboratory proper. They were rather theorists, or “supreme imaginative artists” as Eagleton describes them, scientists who “when it comes to the universe are aware that the elegant and beautiful are more likely to be true than the ugly and misshapen.” Plus, as Eagleton mentions, “‘reasonable’ is not quite the word that leaps spontaneously to mind when we are told that the same nuclear particle can pass through two different apertures at the same time.”
It is also terribly inconsistent, all this chest-thumping surrounding the exclusive superiority of the scientific method and the provability of the laboratory. Ignore for a moment the fact that this evangelical faith in provability as the only valid metric of ontological legitimacy is far too hubristic to be even remotely conscious of its Humean and Cartesian ancestry; worse, it’s guilty of exactly that which it demonizes. As we learn from Horkheimer and Adorno, “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown… Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.” The will to science that Dawkins demonstrates isn’t so much a will to know as a will to know in a historically unique sense of the term, to know without facing the risk of the lesson that history has taught us, that today’s knowledge may yet become tomorrow’s debunked theory. So the atheistic scientism of the day comes factory equipped with the notion that not only does science have unique dominion over questions of truth, but that the truth we seek will change as soon as our instruments are more precise, as soon as our calculations are more exact.
This all smacks of Kantian cosmopolitanism, which—ironically—smacks of Christian eschatology. But where the eschaton is at least an end, the “progress” of Dawkins’ science knows no such boundary, and perhaps that’s what so disturbing about all of this. If the traumatic kernel of the Enlightenment manifests itself in a drive to crush myth wherever it might rear its unscientific head, what’s to stop the next Dawkins from waging this war on new fronts?
Eagleton, a man whose rhetoric is no stranger to metaphor, suggests that Dawkins resembles “someone who thinks a novel is a botched piece of sociology”, and given this, “Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber?” My ultimate fear is that this is no metaphor, and that the work of men like Dawkins will lead us down a road where religion has long since been dispatched with, and the new hotness will be a cultural hostility towards art, or poetry, or literature, or whichever bunkers in which myth might still be finding refuge.
