Science and atheism don't make the grade

Source: Quillette

Gallup polling has found that the percentage of Americans who are not attached to a church, synagogue or mosque – though they may still have religious belief – has dropped below 50 per cent for the first time. (See details here.)

This figure is not surprising given the rapid decline in general loss of association (affiliation) with any religious belief system at all – though, once again, this does not reflect a lack of belief in God or the spiritual realm of life.

One thing that stands out from this information is that the society we live in envelopes us in an atmosphere that produces a mindset that we are barely aware of. It’s the old story of the fish saying goodbye to family in the sea at the start of a journey to find the ocean. The mindset that younger Americans in particular are reflecting is that which Europeans have absorbed in different forms since the 1600s throughout the Age of Reason and its associated materialism, as well as from the upheaval in forming nation states which had to accommodate a diversity of religious beliefs. Secularism in Europe produced not impartiality surrounding forms of religion but an aggressive anti-religion stance fomented by the intelligentsia and other branches of the elite. This is what we are seeing increasingly in the United States.

I want to pick on some of the issues arising by referring to an article under the title “America’s New Religions” that widely-read journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote for New York Magazine in 2018 – “The truth doesn’t age!” Sullivan is an English-born Catholic, and he has spent his professional life in the United States.  I will let you read his views on the new cults that have developed in the political sphere, to focus first on what religion really is and how even atheists are expressing religious belief. He writes:

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer. (There’s a reason, I suspect, that many brilliant atheists, like my friends Bob Wright and Sam Harris are so influenced by Buddhism and practice Vipassana meditation and mindfulness. Buddhism’s genius is that it is a religion without God.)

In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism, released in October [2018] in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.

Science is not the answer to religion, which involves the human search for meaning, where our need to understand forces us to rise above the information that research provides:

Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning. Art can provide an escape from the deadliness of our daily doing, but, again, appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life.

Ditto history. My late friend, Christopher Hitchens, with a certain glee, gave me a copy of his book, God Is Not Great, a fabulous grab bag of religious insanity and evil over time, which I enjoyed immensely and agreed with almost entirely. But the fact that religion has been so often abused for nefarious purposes — from burning people at the stake to enabling child rape to crashing airplanes into towers — does not resolve the question of whether the meaning of that religion is true. It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice. Fanaticism is not synonymous with faith; it is merely faith at its worst. That’s what I told Hitch: great book, made no difference to my understanding of my own faith or anyone else’s. Sorry, old bean, but try again.

What about capitalism or “progress” as the ground of our being?

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning. In this respect, Steven Pinker [the writer of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, 2018] is one of the most religious writers I’ve ever admired. His faith in reason is as complete as any fundamentalist’s belief in God.

Progress in meeting our material needs or in understanding how to better organise society is all well and good…

But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:

“I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”

At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover.

Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.”

I suspect that most thinking beings end up with this notion of intense love as a form of salvation and solace as a kind of instinct. Those whose minds have been opened by psychedelics affirm this truth even further. I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It said “Loving kindness is my religion.” But the salient question is: why?

Society is bereft of so much that the human ecology needs in order to live life abundantly:

Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill, that they do, in fact, have “an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.”

But, says Sullivan, “the banality of the god of progress” soon becomes apparent because whatever the fruit of belief in progress might be, “… [it] never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper”. Sadly, however, as the bastions of Christianity are overrun, liberal democracy loses its defences, prompting the lost sheep to direct their deep yearning for satisfaction to politics instead.

Therefore, two years on from the publication of his article, Sullivan’s insights into the inadequacy of "progress", and the implausibility of atheism, give rise to the hope that the West, in particular, will soon feel humble enough to appreciate afresh how Christianity is the source of God-given truths, so giving a rock-like foundation to meaning in life for us all.

[] Go to my Substack newsletter, Peace and Mind, and subscribe. It's free!