I've just finished this review, which should appear in a national newspaper soon (with apologies to Mark Kaplan).
Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, Rider £14.99
Edward Gibbon is supposed to have said of a visit to Chartres: ‘I paused only to dart a look at the stately pile of superstition and passed on.’ Alister McGrath doesn’t cite this remark in his new book, but it would certainly be grist to his mill. McGrath, a professor of Historical Theology at Oxford, thinks atheism is an ‘impoverished and emotionally deficient’ creed and endorses the view of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that secularism and atheism leave us ‘linguistically bereaved’ by setting limits to what can be said.
According to McGrath, two things are implied in this charge: first, that atheism ‘disenchants’ the world and seeks to eliminate the capacity for reverence and awe that sustains the ‘imaginative lives’ of human beings; second, that the bleakness of this outlook has serious moral implications too. (McGrath adds a further historical argument here, borrowed from Max Weber and Charles Taylor, to the effect that the roots of descralization and secularization in the modern world in fact lie in Protestant iconoclasm, though this isn’t central to his claim that atheism is intellectually barren.)
Now, it’s not clear that either of these lines of argument establishes McGrath’s contention that the ‘intellectual case’ for atheism has ‘stalled’. There is no prima facie reason, for instance, why atheists and secularists cannot find certain things, art works or landscapes say, to be sources of awe and wonder – such things can be valued for themselves, and not just because they are blessed or holy. Similarly, it is a fallacy, albeit a very common one, to suppose, as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov does, that if God is dead, then everything is permitted. Denying that God exists does not entail denying that moral goodness exists. For one thing, it must be possible to say what goodness is independently of God if the notion that God is good is to be at all compelling – otherwise, goodness would just be whatever God happened to be.
There is a deeper problem with McGrath’s position, however, and it has to do with what he thinks atheism is exactly. He takes it for granted that atheism is strictly anti-religious, and therefore essentially negative. If McGrath is right, it would be impossible to make a positive case for atheism – one that doesn’t harp on the baleful effects of religious belief. Atheism does come in militantly anti-religious strains, of course, and McGrath is correct to say that these are often rebarbative and grimly dogmatic – just look at Gibbon! But that’s not the whole story: it’s possible to regard religion as false without disdaining all its works. And the belief that religion is false flows from a set of further, positive beliefs about the world and what it contains – specifically, that there is only physical stuff and that it’s from this kind of stuff that things like imagination, art and moral value spring.
McGrath would reply that science, which tells us that there is only physical stuff, itself takes the existence of a number of things on trust – quarks or protons for example. Admittedly, no-one’s ever seen a quark, but believing they exist coheres with other beliefs about the physical world in a way that believing in God does not. And calling such beliefs matters of ‘faith’ serves only to render the latter term meaningless.