Alistair McGrath declares Enlightenment over

robindch

The good Alistair McGrath, memetic sparring partner of Richard Dawkins, has declared the Enlightenment over and a new age of Religion "which works for many people" upon us:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1847654,00.html
THIS weekend the World Congress of the International Academy of Humanism takes place in upstate New York. Its theme? “Toward a New Enlightenment”.

To judge from the publicity, the conference organisers have no doubt of the urgency of their theme. Religion is regaining the ascendancy. We are facing a new dark age. Only a return to the Enlightenment can save us. We need to create a road map for a New Enlightenment throughout the world.

Speakers such as Richard Dawkins, Britain’s best-known atheist, will address issues such as the “God Delusion” — one of the many barriers that need to be swept away if humanity is to finally come of age.

It is a fascinating glimpse of the crisis of confidence which is gripping atheism. Belief in God was meant to have died out years ago. When I was an atheist, back in the late 1960s, everything seemed so simple. A bright new dawn lay just around the corner. Religion would be relegated to the past, a grim and dusty relic of a bygone age. God was just a cosy illusion for losers, best left to very inadequate and sad people. It was just a matter of waiting for nature to take its course.

I was in good company in believing this sort of thing. It was the smug, foolish and fashionable wisdom of the age. Like flared jeans, it was accepted enthusiastically, if just a little uncritically.

Everyone knows it has not worked out like that. In The Twilight of Atheism, I try to find out what went wrong for atheism in the past 40 years. There’s lots to find. Hopelessly overstated arguments that once seemed so persuasive — such as “science disproves God” — have lost their credibility. Anyway, our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?” And the simple fact is that religious belief works for many, many people, giving direction, purpose and stability to their lives — witness the massive sales and impact of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. Atheism, already having failed to land the knockout punch by proving that God does not exist, has not even begun to engage with this deeper question; instead it mumbles weary platitudes about mythical “God-viruses” or mass “Goddelusions”.

It may once have been bold, brave and brilliant to argue that religion was an infantile delusion or a pernicious superstition. Now, atheism seems arrogant and uncomprehending; incapable of even the most basic act of intellectual empathy that tries to grasp why intelligent, articulate people might choose to believe something which we disagree with — and which might even be right.

The real issue, however, has to do with atheism being trapped in a time warp. Atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative — a totalising view of things, locked into the world view of the Enlightenment.

So what happens when this same Enlightenment is charged by its postmodern critics with having fostered oppression and violence, and having colluded with totalitarianism? When a new interest in spirituality surges through Western culture? When the cultural pressures that once made atheism seem attractive are displaced by others that make it seem intolerant, unimaginative and disconnected from spiritual realities?

The obvious answer would be for atheism to undertake a reformation — to examine itself in the light of its failings, and direct towards itself the negative criticism it has until now automatically fired off at anything religious.

The Enlightenment is over, the world has changed, and atheism must change as well. But that is not the answer they are looking for in upstate New York. Instead, they want the Enlightenment all over again.

I’m not an atheist any more. As a Christian, however, I still retain a deep respect for the serious, reflective, intensely moral atheism I find in writers like Ernst Bloch. Religion needs to be criticised, both internally and externally, to remain true to its roots and its heart. Yet its critics need to be credible.

Atheism has, quite simply, lost much of its moral and intellectual cutting edge in recent decades. And unless it sorts itself out, it is not going to regain it.

Comments?

Excelsior

He (along with his Anglican fellow NT Wright) is where it is at at the moment in theology. I think he is right about the twilight of atheism.

(Excelsior trying to be brief)

OfflerCrocGod

robindch wrote:

Comments?

Doesn't support any of his statements. I suppose since it's to do with religion it doesn't require any. I don't remember what law stated that Atheism (that vast secret organization) was meant to disprove god. I must have missed that meeting; why wasn't I sent a memo? Anyway the whole disprove god thing is simply a logical fallacy.

Asiaprod

Excelsior wrote:

He (along with his Anglican fellow NT Wright) is where it is at at the moment in theology.

I have read some of his work (NT Wright), very impressive. Also in general I like what the Anglicans have to say.

(Excelsior trying to be brief)

And you are doing a wonderful job of it:)
What do you do fill to all that free time you are now left with:rolleyes:

Excelsior

I was thinking about this article last night as I was falling asleep and a couple of paragraphs really struck me. If you asked most people who was the most influential (for better or worse) Northern Irish Christian of the last 100 years most people would say he-who-shall-be-named-through-gritted-teeth Paisley. But in reality it is CS Lewis and then this chap.

McGrath wrote:

our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?” ... Atheism, already having failed to land the knockout punch by proving that God does not exist, has not even begun to engage with this deeper question; instead it mumbles weary platitudes about mythical “God-viruses” or mass “Goddelusions”.

My day to day work has me in constant contact with universtity students, both Christian and non Christian, talking about faith and meaning and other such soft fuzzy nonsenses. Very few people categorise themselves as atheists. I disagree with the idea that Ireland has become a post-modern society but there are aspects of life that are very much of late-modernity, such as the approach to questions of meaning. McGrath is right on the button here when he critiques the dis-satisfaction that my peers have with atheism. It offers, they feel, nothing.

Now I, schooled by my CS Lewis books, might want to convince them that it is a question of truth and not utility but McGrath has made a concise 13 paragraph response to the state of play with regards to the "which works for me" zeitgeist. He lays out his arguments in more detail in the book.

McGrath wrote:

Now, atheism seems arrogant and uncomprehending; incapable of even the most basic act of intellectual empathy that tries to grasp why intelligent, articulate people might choose to believe something which we disagree with — and which might even be right.

Trying to be the Christian apologist on this forum, I am often struck by how many of the hardened atheists I discuss with seem to ask this question. Maybe that is because I come across as verbose and puffed up instead of intelligent and articulate but the absolute absolutism of atheism seems to me to be a lonely place, where interaction with other points of view is very difficult. One of the things that turns people off atheism is this recognition that accepting it really does mean adopting a meta-narrative completely in the primacy over all others. One of the great contributions McGrath has made in the Science of God is to mark out the beginnings of a boundary line where Christianity can engage with the rationalistic materialists without automatically assuming a position of dominance and foreclosure.

And Peter, get more of Tom Wright's work. The guy is remarkable. His 6 volume set (3 completed) Christian Origins and the Doctrine of God (1- New Testament and the People of God, 2- Jesus and the Victory of God, 3- Resurrection of the Son of God) is reshaping how serious thought on what started Christianity. It is dense but if you feel like engaging with Premiership level theology, its a good start.

OfflerCrocGod

Excelsior wrote:

It offers, they feel, nothing.

That's right it doesn't. It's not meant to. The truth doesn't have to be warm and fuzzy - actually it's often harsh and unpleasant but usually the society that can face up to it will do better.

robindch

Well, I must say that the more that I read of Alistair McGrath, the more and more insufferably smug he appears to become. This text is rather easier to comment upon than the memetic text, as it's much shorter, even though it contains many, if not most, of the same shallow (intentional?) misconceptions about atheism, christianity and religion in general.

Splitting it up by sentence is not the best way to comment on a text, but I think it might be useful in this context, as almost every one is erroneous in some way. To wit:

> the “God Delusion” — one of the many barriers that need to be swept away if humanity is to finally come of age.

Unusually accurate for McGrath -- one point to him!

> Belief in God was meant to have died out years ago.

Said who? I'm certainly not aware of anybody foolish enough to predict the immediate and sudden death of something which has been around since the beginning of recorded history, and presumably a long while before that. However, setting up a straw-man argument is useful, as it permits McGrath to demolish it (fwiw, he does precisely the same thing, time and time again, in the memetic text).

> God was just a cosy illusion for losers, best left to very inadequate and sad people.

"cosy illusion" is a good start, but I don't recall many people referring to believers as "inadequate" and "sad"; actually, a quick look would indicate that a belief in god (or more properly, life after death) can cause happiness, particularly around times of death. Again, McGrath's disingenuousness about his idealogical opponents does not advance his case and a bit of intellectual honesty here would go a long way.

> It was just a matter of waiting for nature to take its course.

Religion must be fought with knowledge, education and thought, since, in my experience, it's usually (though not always) the lack of each of these which cause religion to take hold of people's minds.

> I was in good company in believing this sort of thing.

Ah, McGrath cast himself heroically as the sinner who repented! Nice.

> It was the smug, foolish and fashionable wisdom of the age.

Where?

> Like flared jeans, it was accepted enthusiastically, if just a little uncritically.

Ooooo -- atheism is like flared jeans -- that (almost) hurt! Though I'm a bit surprised to see that a religious believer could object to things being believed uncritically. Pots and kettles spring to mind...

> Hopelessly overstated arguments that once seemed so persuasive — such as “science disproves God” — have lost their credibility.

Huh? Who's claimed that science has disproved (the existence of) god? As far as I'm aware, not even Dawkins has claimed this. Yet more straw-men arguments...

> Anyway, our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?” And the simple fact is that religious belief works for many, many people, giving direction, purpose and stability to their lives

Oi -- you can't do that -- two different meanings of "work"! And, leaving this sneaky semantic slippage aside, togther with the emphatic meaninglessness of the whole sentence, who has ever claimed that "our culture’s criterion of acceptability" is this? I really wish he'd make some statement based upon a fact that we can all agree upon, rather than generalizing well past the point at which what he's saying actually has any tangible meaning.

In the second usage of the word "work" he means "makes one feel happy", but so does prozac. Does this mean that he's in favour of this too? And communism provided direction, purpose and stability -- is he a closet commie? Or is he just in favour of anything which provides all of these pleasant-sounding attributes, and could therefore be a buddhist?

> Atheism, [...] has not even begun to engage with this deeper question; instead it mumbles weary platitudes about mythical “God-viruses” or mass “Goddelusions”.

Memeticists disagree with McGrath about his conclusions concerning memes -- they are not inventions, but observed facts with plenty of examples. A simple google search will throw up many excellent pages immediately and [url]Http://www.christianitymeme.org[/url] is a good start.

Atheism has "engaged with deeper question"s on many occasions, it's just that McGrath doesn't like the answers and ignores them.

> It may once have been bold, brave and brilliant to argue that religion was an infantile delusion or a pernicious superstition. Now, atheism seems arrogant and uncomprehending; incapable of even the most basic act of intellectual empathy that tries to grasp why intelligent, articulate people might choose to believe something which we disagree with — and which might even be right.

Awww. McGrath was once "bold, brave and brilliant", but now has discovered the truth and is able to engage with "deeper questions" which "might even be right", and his opponents are "arrogant and uncomprehending". This is a dialog of the deaf with McGrath cast as street-preacher.

BTW, atheism is not a philosophy, or a generational creed, it's just a rejection of religion and its endless claims to eternal truth based upon a selective interpretation of what's written in a set of very old books. He's clearly too used to thinking about the world in the closed terms of religious belief, and applies the same mind-tools to everything. The world doesn't work that way, as JC's current efforts to argue that black is white elsewhere confidently show.

> The real issue, however, has to do with atheism being trapped in a time warp. Atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative — a totalising view of things, locked into the world view of the Enlightenment.

Blah, blah, blah. Can somebody explain what these two sentences mean?

> So what happens when this same Enlightenment is charged by its postmodern critics with having fostered oppression and violence, and having colluded with totalitarianism?

"Colluded" -- <splutter>! Atheism was, on rare occasions in the last century, been declared by certain governments to be a societal good, in the correct expectation that people who were susceptible to religious belief would instead lap up the nearest fully-compatible totalitarian meme.

Armies have *never* marched anywhere claiming atheism as their creed -- "With 'no-god' on our side, who can be against us?" doesn't cut it as a slogan.

Far more blame-worthy is religion's bloody rampages down through the centuries which have left millions dead -- to quote from elsewhere, "Ideologies have consequences. They need to be held accountable when they encourage violence against the enemy." Atheism does no such thing. Religion does.

At this stage, I've written far more than I should have and I still haven't got to the end of McGrath's endless parade of straw-men, verbal incongruities, sloppiness and outright misdirection. I could go on, but I think that the point has been adequately made that this article says far more about McGrath than it does about its topic.

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

He (along with his Anglican fellow NT Wright) is where it is at at the moment in theology. I think he is right about the twilight of atheism.

I might agree that the need for atheism may soon be extinct, and so atheism itself.

This does not mean that I agree that religion will make an enduring comeback in the West. And while I concede that it might, it could not do so because of intellectual progress of any kind. People may seek to find meaning in an abstract conception of the universe, and may choose to call it, or include in it, "god", but there are no logical reasons whatsoever why people would choose to describe this "god" through the vocabulary of any existing religion, or anything that could sensibly be described as a religion.

Excelsior

While I respect your faith belief in the non-claims of existing religions, it is important to remember Sapien that you are not sharing a reasoned insight but your faith. I came to my belief in Christianity through thought and reason and I remain a Christian through continued thought and reason.

I can understand where you are coming from Robin. You have a very bad habit of expressing things in a way that changes my opinion. Through your eyes, McGrath's article is smug and unsupported. The smugness isn't justified, the claims he makes are supported in the long and lovely book he has written on the topic.

Excelsior

McGrath wrote:

The real issue, however, has to do with atheism being trapped in a time warp. Atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative — a totalising view of things, locked into the world view of the Enlightenment.

robindch wrote:

Blah, blah, blah. Can somebody explain what these two sentences mean?

This is where the meat in McGrath's argument is to be found. I tire of the endless debates about the prevailing wind in our culture but whether you diagnose western democracy as in the peak of modernity, in the late great days of modernity on the cusp of that which is next or slap bang in the middle of a new historical era called post-modernity, it is certain that the way the world views the world is shifting.

Derrida and Focault and way back at the start Nietszche have had their way and any explanatory system is viewed with suspicion. Troublingly, their thesis is an explanatory system. Contrary to what Robindch has to say, atheism is an all inclusive explanation for how the world is. Unlike say, Christianity ( ) it can't engage with other systems accepting good and accepting correction where it finds it. Atheism establishes itself in total conflict with all the different ranges of other beliefs. More and more people view the world in such a way as to discard automatically any such blatant power-games (where power-games is used in the terms of the po-mos who view any truth system as a power-grab, not that atheists are atheists to get power).

Also, would Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin not each have embraced an explicit atheism? It seems to be shading to keenly to detach atheism from such systems simply because they primarily embraced Marx's meta-narrative.

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

While I respect your faith belief in the non-claims of existing religions, it is important to remember Sapien that you are not sharing a reasoned insight but your faith.

I may be a bit dim today, but I have no idea what that means. In what do I have faith?

Excelsior wrote:

I came to my belief in Christianity through thought and reason and I remain a Christian through continued thought and reason.

I think we may have touched on this before, back on that Gnosticism thread - in your contention that the response by the peoples of the Middle East to early Christianity was, in short, miraculous. Or is there something more, aside from the prettiness you see in its theology, to recommend Christianity over any other faith? Have you given equal thought to the provenances of other religions?

For there to be a resurgence of religion it would be necessary not merely that people maintain there faith, but that many more come to it adventitiously from a state of atheism, agnosticism or apathy. Why would they? And why Christianity?

Sapien

And how is atheism an explanatory system? What does the word "atheism" connote beyond a rejection of the idea of the existence of a god or gods? If it does connote more than that, tell us what word we can use that does not.

Excelsior

It is a system of belief defined by the boundaries laid out in the sentence:

>>a rejection of the idea of the existence of a god or gods

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

It is a system of belief defined by the boundaries laid out in the sentence:

>>a rejection of the idea of the existence of a god or gods

:mad:

What have you done with Excelsior?

Is vegetarianism an all inclusive explanatory system?

robindch

> > The real issue, however, has to do with atheism being
> > trapped in a time warp. Atheism is a superb example of
> > a modern metanarrative — a totalising view of things,
> > locked into the world view of the Enlightenment.
>
> This is where the meat in McGrath's argument is to be found.

On the contrary -- I don't see any meat here at all.

McGrath's principal mistake is to think that atheism is a religion, or worldview, or comprehensive explanation for anything. It's not; it's simply a position on the existence of something, and that's as far as it goes. It is not a meta-narrative, it is not a totalizing view of anything and it is not "locked into the world view of the Enlightenment" (however one might manage that). It is no more a world-view than is the denial of the existence of hobbits, or the easter bunny. And while atheism may derive as a consequence of evidence-based approach to the world, it is not dependent on it.

> Contrary to what Robindch has to say, atheism is an all
> inclusive explanation for how the world is.

Again, I have to disagree with you here. You seem to think that the mental model of a 'christian worldview' (which invokes a god at every turn) also applies to an athiest worldview -- it does not.

The assertion of the non-existence of something cannot -- think about it! -- be an explanation for anything.

> Unlike say, Christianity it can't engage with other systems
> accepting good and accepting correction where it finds it.

Again, wrong. Leaving aside the leading question of whether or not christianity is any good at "accepting correction" itself, atheism is the simple assertion that "god does not exist" and that's all there is to it. Nothing more, nothing less. There's simply nothing there to "engage with".

> Atheism establishes itself in total conflict with all
> the different ranges of other beliefs.

Simply because all these other beliefs assert the existence -- without a shred of evidence -- of some kind of deity (or deities), each one endowed with more amazing attributes and abilities than the last one, each deity with a more all-encompassing omnipotence, a more all-engaging omniscience, a more infinite sense of justice, etc, etc.

> Also, would Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin not each have embraced
> an explicit atheism?

I've already explained above that there's a good reason why state atheisms have arisen within various societies (go find it!).

And it's also interesting to note that each of these three men adopted explicitly religious modes of expression of their personality cults, as also did Hitler 70 years ago and the adminsitration in the DPRK [where I was in August ] still does.