Atheism sells. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett’s success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief; they want it eradicated.
This wave of new atheism is deeply political — and against some of its targets even a churchgoer might cheer them on. What they all share is a loathing of increasing religiosity in United States politics, which has contributed to a disastrous presidency and undermined scientific understanding.
Dennett excoriates the madness of a faith that looks forward to the end of the world and the messiah’s return. What Dawkins hates is that most Americans still haven’t accepted evolution and support the teaching of intelligent design; according to one poll, 50% of US voters believe the story of Noah. He argues that ”there is nothing to choose between the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent … The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America.”
Harris similarly compares Muslims and the American Christian right: ”Non-believers like myself stand beside you dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well … by the suffering you create in service of your religious myths and by your attachment to an imaginary God.”
This is popular stuff — a plague on both your houses, after a war on terror in which both sides have used their gods to justify appalling brutality. But it tips over into something more sinister in Harris’s latest book. He suggests Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are ”utterly deranged by their religious faith”.
Harris goes further, concluding that ”some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”. This sounds like the medieval Inquisition. As one New York commentator put it, we’re familiar with religious intolerance, now we have to recognise irreligious intolerance.
The danger is that hostility to religion in all its forms deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged in the science/faith debate. The durability and near-universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking.
Scientists have argued that faith was a by-product of our development of the imagination, or a way of strengthening social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step that is no longer needed — the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human well-being? If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?
The new atheists aren’t interested in this debate; theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding.
But even on the political front, one must question whether their aggression isn’t counterproductive. Biologist Robert Winston voiced increasing concern among scientists when he argued that Dawkins’s insulting and patronising approach did science a disservice. Meanwhile, American critics argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting back the cause of secularism, rather than advancing it.
Dawkins is an unashamed proselytiser who says his book is aimed at religious readers who he hopes will be atheists by the time they finish reading it. Yet The God Delusion is a work of provocation, not persuasion — it may have sold heavily, but has it won any souls?
I suspect the new atheists are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and less sympathy for why people increasingly use religious identity in political contexts, they miss the elephant in the room.
These increasingly hysterical books may be morale boosters for a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised — the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition — but they will do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand. —