Critiquing the 'New New Atheism'

Writing in this past Sunday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz constructs an interesting critique of the recent atheist publishing boom. Referring to the views espoused by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris as 'the New New Atheism', Berkowitz has this to say:

Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.

Essentially, Mr. Berkowitz seems to think that the caustic, mean-spirited, uncompromising nature of the atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al is unprecedented in western intellectual history, and he strongly implies that past generations had better sense than to be so dismissive of religious ideas.

This is patently false. Mordant, no-holds-barred criticism of religion is far from being a new development. Friederich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ambrose Bierce, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley - all of these thinkers and more have expressed atheistic arguments in even more uncompromising and mean-spirited terms than the 'new new atheists' who Mr Berkowitz pretends to be unique.

Consider Nietzsche, who wrote that "prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own", and that "in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." (I have no idea where Mr Berkowitz gets the lunatic notion that Nietzsche thought the death of god to be a "catastrophe"; Nietzsche despised religion and thought the death of god to be a prerequisite for the rebirth of the human spirit. But I digress.)

Or consider Robert Ingersoll, who is little remembered today but who toured the US in the mid-nineteenth century giving lectures on atheism. He was one of the most popular speakers of his day, drawing record crowds in a country which had only recently gone through a second great awakening. He once said that "religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."

These thinkers of the past made no such efforts to "disguise or mute their disbelief"; indeed, they proclaimed their hatred of religion "loudly and proudly from the rooftops" every bit as stridently as the new atheists. But I think Mr Berkowitz errs in saying that any atheists, new or old, possess a "hatred of God". You can't hate a being in whom you don't believe. All of these thinkers hate the idea of god - the notion itself that there exists a supernatural being in whom one is supposed to have faith. That's a big difference from hating the being itself - which makes it sound like atheists simply resent god, instead of thinking the belief in him irrational.

All this being said, Mr Berkowitz does make a couple of good points. First of all, he points out that nitpicking at religions - finding sundry contradictory or false statements in the Bible, for instance, or interpreting religious stories like the binding of Isaac in a strictly modern framework - is to miss the point of the religious experience. Although I personally think that these criticisms are not without merit, since so many people do interpret their religions in the same "slavishly literal sense" that Mr Berkowitz says atheistic critics should avoid, I see his point: it's not the big picture.

Berkowitz also makes a sound point in arguing that it is beyond the scope of the new atheists to prove that there is no god. No one will ever be able to prove that beyond doubt, just as no one will ever be able to prove that there is a god.

But I'm not so sure that that is what Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris are saying. I think that their argument is not so much that "we are certain that there is no god", but rather that "we are certain that there exists no good reason to believe in a god". As I have not read all of the books in question, I will not say for sure; but I suspect Mr Berkowitz may be conflating these two approaches to atheism.

The final thrust of Berkowitz's criticism seems to be this:

Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

With this I disagree. If anything, the new new atheism confirms America's commitment to freedom, because it is emblematic of the free exchange of ideas that make freedom worthwhile. The mere fact that these criticisms are harsh does not mean that they are undemocratic, and the mere fact that these thinkers consider religions to be false does not mean that they think people should be prevented from practicing them.

And although the new new atheists may indeed blur the distinctions between different forms of faith, that is no flaw, because the focus of their criticism is what all religions share. They are attacking what religions have in common, from militant Islam to Mormonism to Orthodox Judaism: faith. It is faith - believing things without reason - which draws the fires of their abuse.

Mr Berkowitz concludes his piece by suggesting that "the variety of religions" deserve "a fair hearing." Have they not had a fair hearing for the past several thousand years? If there is indeed "nothing new under the sun" in the criticism of religion, certainly religion can offer nothing new in its own defence.