David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

With the rise of what the Wall Street Journal has called “militant atheism,” both the terms of debate and the climate of opinion have changed. The sunny agnosticism characteristic of men who believed that with respect to God, it could go either way, is no longer in fashion. It is regarded as rather dim.

Some of this represents nothing more than the reappearance of that perennial literary character, the village atheist, someone prepared tediously to dispute the finer points of Second Corinthians in time taken from spring planting. A little philosophy, as Francis Bacon observed, “inclineth man’s mind to atheism.” A very little philosophy is often all that is needed. In a recent BBC program entitled A Brief History of Unbelief, the host, Jonathan Miller, and his guest, the philosopher Colin McGinn, engaged in a veritable orgy of competitive skepticism, so much so that in the end, the viewer was left wondering whether either man believed sincerely in the existence of the other. Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is in this tradition, and if his book is devoid of any intellectual substance whatsoever, it is, at least, brisk, engaging, and short. To anyone having read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, these will appear as very considerable virtues.

If rural atheism is familiar, it is also irrelevant. Religious men and women, having long accommodated the village idiot, have long accommodated the village atheist. The order of battle is now different. It has been the scientists —Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Taner Edis, Emile Zuckerkandl, Peter Atkins, Steven Weinberg ( vasta môle superbus )—who have undertaken a wide-ranging attack on religious belief and sentiment. Although efforts among atheists to promote fellowship by calling one another bright have not, it must be said, proven a great success, in all other respects, their order is thriving. Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, is in this respect outstanding. He is not only an intellectually fulfilled atheist, he is determined that others should be as full as he. A great many scientists are satisfied that at last someone has said out loud what so many of them have said among themselves: Scientific and religious belief are in conflict. They cannot both be right. Let us get rid of the one that is wrong. Where before he was tolerated, Dawkins is now admired. Should he announce that shortly he will conduct a personal invasion of Hell in order to roust various American evangelicals, ticket sales at the National Academy of Sciences would at once start vibrating.

These views are important because they invoke for their authority the power and the glory of the Western scientific tradition. The title of Victor Stenger’s recent book is God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Stenger is a professor of physics. He may have written the book, but it is science, we are to understand, that has provided the requisite demonstration. Like a nineteenth-century spirit medium, Stenger has simply taken dictation. The physicist Taner Edis has also seen the light, and so published a book. Entitled The Ghost in the Universe, it is not a celebration of the Host. Both men exhibit the salient characteristic of physicists endeavoring to draw general lessons about the cosmos from mathematical physics: They are willing to believe in anything.

Because atheism is said to follow from various scientific doctrines, literary atheists, while they are eager to speak their minds, must often express themselves in other men’s voices. Christopher Hitchens is an example. With forthcoming modesty, he has affirmed his willingness to defer to the world’s “smart scientists” on any matter more exigent than finger-counting. Were smart scientists to report that a strain of yeast supported the invasion of Iraq, Hitchens would, no doubt, conceive an increased respect for yeast. He is presently persuaded that “religion poisons everything.” His book is entitled God Is Not Great, and within its pages, he has managed to convey his contempt for religious thought by propositions exhibiting a positively oriental degree of evasiveness. “We do not rely solely upon science and reason,” he writes, “because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.” If Hitchens is not prepared to “rely solely upon science and reason,” why, one might ask, should anyone else? And if science and reason are “necessary rather than sufficient factors,” then who is to say that factors both necessary and sufficient might not convey a man to the very edge of faith? It is by means of these questions, I imagine, that one day the lion shall lie down with the lamb, circumstances that with justifiable pride Hitchens may affirm that he has anticipated.

Does any of this represent anything more than yet another foolish intellectual fad, a successor to academic Marxism, feminism, or various doctrines of multicultural tranquillity? Not in the world in which religious beliefs overflow into action. For Islamic radicals, “the sword is more telling than the book,” as the Arab poet Abu Tammam wrote with menacing authority some eight hundred years ago. The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction—a lurid but natural reaction—to the violence of the Islamic world.

But the efflorescence of atheism involves more than atheism itself. Of course it does. Atheism is the schwerpunkt, as German military theorists used to say with satisfaction, the place where force is concentrated and applied; and what lies behind is a doctrinal system, a way of looking at the world, and so an ideology. It is an ideology with no truly distinct center and the fuzziest of boundaries. For purposes of propaganda it hardly matters. Science as an institution is unified by the lowest common denominator of belief, and that is the conviction that science is a very good thing.

Curiously enough, for all that science may be a very good thing, members of the scientific community are often dismayed to discover, like policemen, that they are not better loved. Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain, politically immature, and arrogant. This last is considered a special injustice. “Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain,” the biologist Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is “a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology.” Yet despite the outstanding humility of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen suspicions. Scientists are hardly helped when one of their champions immerses himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm. Thus Richard Dawkins recounts the story of his professor of zoology at Oxford, a man who had “for years… passionately believed that the Golgi apparatus was not real.” On hearing during a lecture by a visiting American that his views were in error, “he strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand, and said—with passion—‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’” The story, Dawkins avows, still has the power “to bring a lump to my throat.”

It could not have been a very considerable lump. No similar story has ever been recounted about Richard Dawkins. Quite the contrary. He is as responsive to criticism as a black hole in space. “It is absolutely safe to say,” he has remarked, “that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.”

The tone is characteristic. Peter Atkins is a professor of physical chemistry at Oxford University, and he, too, is ardent in his atheism. In the course of an essay denouncing not only theology but poetry and philosophy as well, he observes favorably of himself that scientists “are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality, and intellectually honest.” It goes without saying, Atkins adds, that “there is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence.” Science is, after all, “the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance.”