When atheists lack the courage of their convictions

Seven Types of Atheism. By John Gray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 176 pages; $25. Allen Lane; £17.99.

EVER SINCE the Enlightenment, Christianity has been exposed to rigorous examination that has contributed to the decline of organised faith. Though Christian teaching is at the heart of the Western academic tradition, atheism has long been the new gospel for many intellectuals. Some authors have tried to subject it to the same scrutiny that religion has received. But, as polytheistic Romans found in the fourth century, challenging rampant orthodoxies can be tough.

Alister McGrath’s “The Twilight of Atheism” and Nick Spencer’s “Atheists: The Origin of the Species” are excellent critiques; but both writers are Christians, so they have been relatively easy for unbelievers to dismiss. It has taken a prophet seated firmly in an atheist pew to publicise the creed’s contradictions more widely. That prophet is John Gray, a retired professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics. In several books published over 15 years, Mr Gray has reasserted his belief that there is no God, while also attacking the liberal humanism that has emerged in God’s stead—which, he thinks, is as flaky as the religion it has replaced.

At the centre of his argument, in books such as “Straw Dogs” and “The Silence of Animals”, is the assertion that humans are no different from other creatures. Christianity’s “cardinal error” is to say that they are. Yet dispensing with the teachings of monotheism leaves no coherent concept of humanity, nor of human dignity. Mr Gray uses this observation as a launch-pad to criticise “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, and to point out that most modern atheists do not follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion. They may have rejected monotheist beliefs, but they have not shaken off a monotheistic way of thinking, and “regurgitate some secular version of Christian morality”. Mr Gray has a much bleaker view of atheism’s implications: “A truly naturalistic view of the world leaves no room for secular hope.”

In “Seven Types of Atheism” Mr Gray neatly recapitulates his arguments, combining them with a whistle-stop tour of modern unbelief from the Marquis de Sade through to Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph Conrad. He gives Christianity its due, conceding that not all enlightenment began at the Enlightenment and pointing out the imperfections of that era’s heroes—the racism of Hume, Kant and Voltaire, for instance. Many of the saints of modern liberalism were not as secular as they might seem, he suggests. John Locke’s liberalism is indebted to Christianity at every point; John Stuart Mill’s insistence that morals did not depend on religion “invoked an idea of morality that was borrowed from Christianity”. The new orthodoxy Mill founded was deeply rooted in Christianity, Mr Gray says: “the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.”

He is as exasperated with knee-jerk unbelief as he is with unthinking devotion, and has no time for several of the types of atheism he enumerates. All of them look to replace God with some form of secular humanism, science or politics. Their high priests tend to be just as blinkered as the ecclesiastics they abjure, Mr Gray complains: “While atheists may call themselves freethinkers, for many today atheism is a closed system of thought.” He decries a rising intolerance in academia, where free expression is jeopardised by “a frenzy of righteousness” that recalls the iconoclasm of Christianity when it came to power in Rome. “If monotheism gave birth to liberal values,” he says of today’s illiberal liberalism, “a militant secular version of the faith may usher in their end.”

Instead, he is drawn to the more bracing denominations of the new church, such as those espoused by Spinoza and Schopenhauer, “atheisms that are happy to live with a godless world or an unnameable God”. These varieties reject the idea of a creator and dispense with all pieties regarding human nature. They have truly emerged from the shadow of Christianity: “Not looking for cosmic meaning, they were content with the world as they found it.”

Mr Gray’s provocative, frank approach has three main drawbacks. The first is that the God he says does not exist cannot be recognised as the Christian God. He suggests that it was the apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo who invented Christianity, turning a local Jewish movement into a universal one that Jesus never intended, and turning Jesus himself from a prophet into “God on earth”. Naturally this disregards the Bible’s account of Christ’s teaching about his identity and purpose. But it also contradicts recent scholarship that sees Paul less as a Roman who created a new faith than as a Jew who thought he was witnessing the long-expected fulfilment of Judaism. It is ironic that, having spent his career denouncing outmoded orthodoxies, Mr Gray rests his critique of Christianity on outdated perceptions.

The forsaken

The second weakness lies in his view that progress is an illusion: “you will find it hard”, he contends, “to detect any continuing strand of improvement” in human society. You don’t have to be Pangloss (or Steven Pinker) to demur; a glance at the history of medicine is ample evidence to the contrary. But the biggest problem is the void to which his skilful demolitions lead. What ought to be the basis for Western civilisation after the decline of religious faith? Mr Gray never proposes nihilism, hedonism or suicide, and seems (like Mr Dawkins) to believe that peace, prosperity, honesty and common decency are good things.

He ended “Straw Dogs” by asking, “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” This might sound profound over port at high table, but may be less persuasive to people mired in abject poverty. It is not a premise on which to build a society. His new book is similarly lacking in constructive proposals.

Yet its reflections on the future are insightful. Looking beyond the squabbles over science and God, Mr Gray sees the challenges implicit in abandoning the metaphysical and moral order that Christianity once provided. Like Nietzsche, he says the West cannot ditch the faith and expect to retain congenial Christian ethics. It will be difficult, he predicts, for modern liberalism to ground a universal moral law on non-theistic foundations.

Relieved as they are by the weakening of the church’s oppressive aspects, many secularists have missed the flipside of Christianity’s decline. In the absence of a single moral code mandated by God, says Mr Gray, people must accept a spectrum of moralities, palatable or otherwise: “Anyone who wants their morality secured by something beyond the fickle human world had better join an old-fashioned religion.”