Atheism: Whence and Whither?

Review Article Atheism: Whence and Whither? Nathan G. Alexander School of History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom [email protected] (Published in History of European Ideas (online 14 July 2016).) STEPHEN LEDREW, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. x + 262 pp. £18.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-19-022517 NICK SPENCER, Atheists: The Origin of the Species. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xxi + 298 pp. £16.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-14729-029-62 MITCHELL STEPHENS, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. viii + 328 pp. $30.00 USD (hardback), ISBN: 978-1137002600 Interest in the history of atheism has ballooned in the past few years. This follows from global reports noting the upsurge of individuals claiming no religion and the increased prominence of atheist intellectuals like Richard Dawkins. A century ago, atheists and other nonbelievers wrote sweeping surveys of the history of atheism as a way to demonstrate the progressive march of their views. Samuel Porter Putnam, 400 Years of Freethought (New York, 1894); J.M. Robertson, A History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern, to the Period of the French Revolution, 4th ed. (London, 1936 [1899]). In the intervening years, a handful of academics approached the subject, examining for example the origins of atheism in early modern Europe, the emergence of popular atheism in the nineteenth century, or histories of atheism beginning in antiquity and continuing until the present. See for example Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650-1729: The Orthodox Sources of Unbelief (Princeton, 1990); Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992); Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement: 1791-1866 (Manchester, 1974); Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866-1915 (Manchester, 1980); James Thrower, A Short History of Western Atheism (London, 1971), republished as Western Atheism: A Short History (Amherst, New York, 2000). Now more than ever academics are turning their attention to the study of atheism and its history. For works in the twenty-first century see Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (New York, 2003); Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York, 2004); Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism (London and New York, 2010); Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (New York, 2014); Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London, 2016). Here I consider three recent interventions into the history of atheism. Atheists: The Origin of the Species by Nick Spencer and Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World by Mitchell Stephens both trace the history of atheism over several centuries and mirror each other in many ways, though the authors take opposite positions with regard to atheism itself, something which informs their analysis. Spencer’s work considers the emergence of atheism as the result of political and social factors, while Stephens’s argues that this history can be seen as the steady triumph of a more rational worldview in tandem with modern political concepts like democracy and humans rights. While these two works offer valuable surveys of the history of atheism, neither can be considered definitive. Stephen LeDrew’s The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement meanwhile interprets contemporary Anglophone atheism in the light of its historical roots, particularly in Victorian Britain. This work however attempts to force a presentist framework onto the past that does not survive historical analysis. I Nick Spencer, the research director of the Christian think tank Theos, sees the history of atheism as dependent upon social and political factors. Rejecting atheism’s ‘creation myth’ – that atheism emerged in tandem with science and reason – Atheists: The Origin of the Species instead argues that ‘modern atheism was primarily a political and social cause, its development in Europe having rather more to do with the (ab)use of theologically legitimized political authority than it does with later developments in science or philosophy’ (xiv-xv). While such an approach has valuable explanatory power, it falls short when confronted with some of the contingent factors that might have led to atheism’s growth. Atheists rightly points out the profound political implications that came from making atheistic claims, which often served to undercut traditional authorities. The criticism of Biblical authority in the early modern period, by figures as diverse as Hobbes and Spinoza, were also political statements: true authority, they argued, should rest in the sovereign authority of the state, not the religious class. But these men vehemently denied the charge of atheism. It was not until the eighteenth century when people began to profess and articulate a coherent atheism. This was in France, ‘where the garrotte tying together royal absolutism and ecclesiastical authority was drawn tighter than anywhere else in Europe’ (92) and there was ‘no tradition of a moderate, demonstrably Christian enlightenment’ (93) that might redirect atheistic sentiments. This repressive context emboldened professed atheists like Baron d’Holbach to be more uncompromising in their attacks against religion and the state, and to imagine radical, new political systems. These eighteenth-century atheists’ religious radicalism went hand-in-hand with their political radicalism. In contrast, many deists in eighteenth-century Britain, a country that gave greater leeway to unorthodox views than France, did not become atheists like their French cousins. ‘In different circumstances’, Spencer writes, ‘any number of those loosely accused of atheism […] might have become atheists […]. Yet, they did not and the reason they did not is that the Christian establishment was too flexible and accommodating, intellectually and politically, to give them reason to’ (86). While hardly a bastion of open thought, Britain was nonetheless more tolerant than most of its European counterparts. The case of David Hume provides one example. Hume, though a fierce sceptic toward religion, never became an outright atheist since he ‘lived too comfortably in mid-eighteenth-century Britain to feel the need to bring about a new system’ (123). Similar situations were to be found in Germany, where ‘atheism was impeded by pious mathematicians, natural theology and political moderation’ (91), and the United States, where the constitution prohibiting a linkage between church and state prevented religion ‘from using coercion or becoming associated with the coercive measures’ (132) as in Europe. The trend of British moderation blunting the growth of atheism continues throughout Atheists. Spencer is however careful not ‘to draw the differences too strongly’ (160) between France and Britain and noted some examples of British atheism prior to the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the British overreaction to that revolution meant a crackdown on dissent, which helped to spur the atheist movement in the nineteenth century. Indeed, many of those in Britain jailed for blasphemy would come out even more radical than before. The working-class secularist movement reached its height in the 1880s, as its leader Charles Bradlaugh fought to take his seat in parliament despite his irreligion, but the masses never turned to atheism ‘largely because the nation was willing to accommodate heartfelt atheism, like Bradlaugh’s, within its structures’ (194). The movement declined in the twentieth century with no clear foe to attack and a redirection of the membership to socialism. The twentieth century, for Spencer, ‘was an age in which atheism came out and came of age, and it wasn’t pretty’ (xx). This was in Russia, where, much like eighteenth-century France, church and monarchy were closely linked. Russia too developed a form of radical atheism in the nineteenth century, which came to fruition in Lenin’s (and his successors’) attempts to extirpate religion in the twentieth century. Spencer’s dialectical argument continues with the present day as well. In places like China or Russia, the numbers of religious adherents have increased, the religious right in the United States continues to enjoy substantial power, and Islamist terrorism is more than ever a global problem. This return of religion, after twentieth-century commentators predicted its demise, paradoxically led to the renewal of atheism. Spencer notes that the number of professed atheists in the western world is at its peak today, a trend that, as in the other cases, resulted from ‘aggressively politicized religion – always atheism’s best recruiting sergeant’ (253). Spencer’s goal is to explain how atheism flourishes due to non-rational factors and thus to challenge the premise of an inevitable rise of a supposedly rational atheism against irrational religion. The lesson seems to be that states need to strike a balance between being just permissive enough of some forms of heterodoxy, but not so much as to encourage outright atheism, while at the same time being careful not to crackdown on heretics too strongly, lest they will be pushed to even more radical positions. While there is something to be said for this dialectical approach, such a formulation seems too malleable to explain why atheism flourishes in one time and place and not another. After all, what counts as tolerance and moderation in one era might be suffocating restriction in another. Twenty-first-century atheists’ anger at, for example, attempts to push creationism in science classes would appear trivial to those in eighteenth-century France who faced lengthy jail sentences or worse for writing or even reading atheist tracts. Furthermore, such a societal level explanation blurs the distinction between context determining religious and political views and context influencing them. There is no doubt that context influences individuals’ views, but such a framework cannot do all the explanatory work Spencer wants it to. Why, for example, did Voltaire remain a deist while close contemporaries like Jean Meslier or d’Holbach became atheists, even though they all felt the same animus toward clerical and political collusion? On Spencer’s view, the climate in France should have pushed Voltaire all the way to atheism. Yet the vast majority of people in eighteenth-century France were not atheists, meaning that one must be cautious about extrapolating a general pattern from only a handful of individuals. This is not to say the connection Spencer presents is untrue, only that it cannot be the entire story. II Mitchell Stephens’s Imagine There’s No Heaven begins earlier than Spencer’s (in the ancient world), but ultimately covers much the same ground. Their outlook on atheism is, however, completely different. Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, offers a progressive and triumphalist narrative of the development of atheism, though one that ‘certainly does not follow a straight line’ (119). In this narrative, religion, an erroneous view of the world arising out of humans’ imperfectly evolved brains, is gradually eroded in favour of a naturalistic explanation of the world. Aside from vanquishing religion, these atheists and other religious sceptics ‘contributed […] to what may be humankind’s greatest accomplishments: the advancement of knowledge and the expansion of human rights’ (2). On the whole, Stephens makes a convincing case, yet his argument runs the risk of making historical atheists seem completely modern. In contrast to Atheists, Imagine There’s No Heaven contends that atheism is not merely contingent upon social or political factors, or tied up with modernity, but something that can be found in all (or most) times and places. One example of this is the Charvaka, an ancient sect of Indian materialists who rejected not just gods, but also the soul, the afterlife, and concepts like karma and nirvana. To Stephens, they ‘are not the only answer to the argument that atheism is a phenomenon limited to the West’ or ‘that atheism is a product of modernity, the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution’, but they ‘may be the best answer to these arguments’ (7). Other examples of anti-clericalism or scepticism towards religious doctrines, if not a coherent theory of atheism, can also be found in pre-modern or non-Western societies. For Stephens, the story of atheism parallels the story of the rise of liberty and democracy, and, like Spencer, he gives eighteenth-century France a prominent place in the story. The atheistic works of Jean Meslier, Denis Diderot, and d’Holbach denounced tyranny and called for liberty and equality. These men ‘laid out a vision of a more equitable world that would eventually – after many setbacks and much bloodshed – be shared by most of the world’ (139). The American and French revolutions represented the logical conclusion of ideas originally divined by atheists, namely, ‘representative democracy’, ‘tolerance’, ‘human equality’, and ‘human rights’ (152). Such ideas, Stephens contends, ‘would not have been possible without the growing conviction that men and women – not gods – are responsible for this world’ (162). The problem with such a view, however, is that contemporary observers saw the French Revolution and its radicalism as a disaster never to be repeated, and therefore the real challenge for historians is to uncover how these radical views eventually gained acceptance. The French Revolution presents not a smooth transition from the eighteenth century to the present, but a major break, and any attempt to link Enlightenment ideas with those of our time needs to deal with this hurdle. For a summary of this argument, see Richard Whatmore, What Is Intellectual History? (Cambridge, 2016), 93–5. Furthermore, attempts to locate present-day concepts like human rights among eighteenth-century thinkers are anachronistic and only obscure past viewpoints. Recent scholarship suggests for example that our present conception of human rights emerged in the 1970s and that in the eighteenth century rights referred to things guaranteed to citizens in the context of a bounded state, not things that all humans possessed. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2010). One difference from Spencer’s Atheists is the inclusion of the abolition of slavery in the United States in Imagine There’s No Heaven. One chapter is devoted to atheists’ role in this movement in the nineteenth century, in particular the career of Ernestine Rose, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to the United States, who advocated abolition, atheism, and women’s rights. This connection between atheism and criticism of religion-backed patriarchal systems, something else that Spencer neglects, can likewise be seen in the leading suffragettes in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, or the twentieth-century French feminist author, Simone de Beauvoir. While Spencer is right to point out that atheism emerged partly as a reaction to religious and political abuses, he does not fully discuss, as Stephens does, atheists’ advocacy of new and radical political ideals. Aside from political radicalism, science and learning also went hand-in-hand with religious scepticism. In defiance of the scholarly consensus that there is no inevitable conflict between science and religion, See for example David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, ‘Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science’, Church History 55, no. 3 (September 1986): 338–54. Stephens argues that science regularly runs up against ‘ancient holy books – most of which do end up proclaiming something or other on “how” the earth works or “heaven goes”’ (86). The collision between science and, if not religion, the holy texts themselves, inevitably resulted in the triumph of science. Stephens admits that those at the forefront of the scientific revolution were largely Christians, yet in that time it became clear that ‘science explains better’ (95) than religion. More broadly, there was a link between atheism and investigation into the world. Could, for example, ‘the Encyclopédie have been undertaken […] by individuals who believed all important wisdom had already been inscribed in some ancient holy book?’ (128) While Christians and deists contributed to the Encyclopédie, it was telling, to Stephens, that the leader of the project (Diderot) was an atheist. Moving to the nineteenth century, Stephens argues that the great works of the era by Mill and Darwin ‘[p]robably […] had to be written by nonbelievers’ (187). Darwin’s bold investigations into evolution or Mill’s defence of continual scepticism towards all received truth could not, in Stephens’s view, have been performed by religious individuals. Stephens rejects the charge that atheism is responsible for the Terror in Revolutionary France or the communist states of the twentieth century. While these cases cannot be completely divorced from atheism, Stephens contends they were in fact more like their religious counterparts than atheists: ‘like Hébert and other members of the cult of the guillotine in 1793, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were in a sense religious’ (221). Their faith in the righteousness of their own interpretation of history, culminating in the inevitability of utopia, was held with an absolute certainty that was more characteristic of the religious than the sceptical tradition of atheism. While to Nick Spencer the twentieth century saw the culmination of atheism in the communist states, these are actually an aberration for Stephens. Rather, the twentieth century saw ‘a continuation and intensification’ of the story of the previous three centuries: ‘the spread of learning, particularly training in science, to more places and more levels of society, with a concomitant increase in life expectancy and living standards’ (212). Stephens is aware that his narrative of progress will repel many academics who are often justifiably allergic to Whig history. As he writes, ‘Religion’s defenders – along with those postmodern critics of the narrative of religious decline – rebel against any notion of inevitability here (in religion’s decline), but isn’t what is happening becoming clear?’ (269) The critical difference between the two authors is whether atheism has a logic of its own (like Stephens says), or if atheism, along with other intellectual positions, is merely an outgrowth of one’s socio-political environment (like Spencer says). In other words, is there something objectively true about atheism (which would mean that the history of atheism is a teleological one in which the truth is gradually discovered) or is the ‘truth’ relative (which would mean that what counts as the truth in any given era is historically contingent)? Neither of the works grapples with this theoretical debate in any sustained way, but ultimately a reader’s answer to the question will determine which book’s argument they prefer. III Stephen LeDrew’s The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement charts a different path. Rather than tracing up the history of atheism from centuries past, he aims to interpret contemporary atheism through the light of its history. LeDrew, a sociologist at Uppsala University, deals mainly with contemporary issues, but a large part of his argument is that there is an ‘essential tension’ (4) at the heart of contemporary atheism between scientific and humanistic atheism, a division that he believes dates to the nineteenth century. Such an approach however is ultimately wrong-headed and serves to obscure nineteenth-century debates. Scientific atheism, to LeDrew, had its roots in the work of Charles Darwin and his followers. ‘These Darwinists’, he writes, ‘cultivated a “scientific atheism” that views religion primarily as the antithesis of science and an obstacle to social and scientific progress (progress of the former type being contingent upon the latter in this view)’ (14). Humanistic atheism meanwhile ‘considered religion primarily a social phenomenon rather than an attempt at explaining nature.’ (14) The representatives of scientific atheism in the nineteenth century include Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, T.H. Huxley, E.B. Tylor, and of course Darwin, while the chief examples for humanistic atheism are Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. This division between scientific and humanistic atheism is an imposition on the past that none of the figures discussed would have recognized. Indeed, all of the figures in the scientific atheist tradition would have rejected the label of atheist; Darwin especially recoiled from aggressive proselytizing of nonbelief. James Moore, ‘Freethought, Secularism, Agnosticism: The Case of Charles Darwin’, in Religion in Victorian Britain: Volume 1 Traditions, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester and New York, 1988), 274–319. Furthermore, it would seem a glaring point that the first group were British (save Comte) while the second group were German, a potentially important difference that LeDrew does not explore. Indeed, the differences between the two groups are not as stark as it would appear, something LeDrew even acknowledges, particularly in the cases of Nietzsche and Freud who ‘at moments sound very much like rationalists in their critiques of the dogma of faith’ (33). Aside from Nietzsche and Freud, Marx – and even more so his collaborator Friedrich Engels – had positive things to say about Darwin. While it is a myth that Marx wished to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin, Marx wrote approvingly of Darwin’s theories. He sent Darwin a copy of the original German version of Capital and signed off as a ‘sincere admirer’ of the English scientist; Darwin replied courteously, but appears never to have read the work. Terence Ball, ‘Marx and Darwin: A Reconsideration’, Political Theory 7, no. 4 (November 1979): 469–83. All of this points to how much this ‘essential tension’ is contrived. Elsewhere, The Evolution of Atheism attempts to shoehorn the well-known debate in the middle of the nineteenth century between the founder of British secularism, George Holyoake, and the atheist firebrand, Charles Bradlaugh, into this humanistic versus scientific atheism framework, with Holyoake representing the former and Bradlaugh the latter (98). LeDrew is right to point out that their debate has modern parallels – should, for example, the atheist movement attempt to build alliances with moderate religious people (Holyoake said yes, while Bradlaugh said no) – but the scientific versus humanistic binary obscures rather than illuminates our understanding of their conflict. Rather than attempting to impose an artificial binary on the past, a more fruitful approach would be to try to understand what figures in the past thought they were doing and how they saw their work in relation to others’ contributions. Scientific and humanistic atheism are likewise divided politically and there is little question that LeDrew prefers the humanistic version which contends ‘the social order must be questioned and transformed, a position that sets humanistic atheism apart from the more conservative laissez-faire liberalism of scientific atheism’ (35). The theories of Darwin were intertwined with ‘liberalism and capitalism’ and also supported ‘the idea of Western Europe as the world’s most advanced (or highly-evolved) society. […] To this extent, it became as much an instrument of conservative political ideology as it was an instrument of liberalism’ (23). It is not clear what LeDrew means by conservative or liberal here and one of the recurring problems is that, as with atheism, LeDrew treats these political ideologies as timeless, rather than ones whose meanings are rooted in their context. The primary target of The Evolution of Atheism is the New Atheists, a group of outspoken atheist intellectuals in the twenty-first century. It is not clear that these individuals would recognize themselves in LeDrew’s characterizations, which simplify and sometimes distort their actual views. To take one example, he quotes the American thinker Sam Harris on the issue of profiling at airports: ‘We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it’. About this seemingly damning statement, LeDrew comments, ‘it is unclear what Harris feels a Muslim could conceivably look like, unless he simply means people who are not white’ (185). But the very next sentence in Harris’s article reads, ‘And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me [a white man] entirely outside the bull’s-eye’ and he references the white American al Qaeda member Adam Gadahn as one reason for this. Sam Harris, ‘In Defense of Profiling’, Sam Harris Blog, 28 April 2012, <http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/in-defense-of-profiling> [accessed 14 April 2016]. Whatever one thinks of Harris’s views, it is hard to agree that LeDrew has accurately or fairly described them. While this is the most egregious case, numerous other examples of this are present throughout the work. Ultimately, the history of atheism is at once less divided and more diverse than LeDrew suggests. The division between humanistic and scientific atheism is artificial, but there were a variety of ways of being an unbeliever in the nineteenth century, including the agnosticism of Huxley, the positivism of Comte and his followers, the secularism of Holyoake, the atheism of Bradlaugh, and the ethical culture of Felix Adler. Furthermore, these categories were fluid and individuals often moved freely between these worldviews. These positions, aside from their theological nuances, were also bound up with class divisions, political commitments, and ethical approaches. While LeDrew uses Darwin’s metaphor of the ‘radiating bush’ to describe how atheism is becoming more diverse today, the richness of the historical record is lost by LeDrew’s imposition of a contrived binary onto the past. IV The works discussed here highlight the need for greater scholarly attention to the history of atheism. While both Atheists and Imagine There’s No Heaven are valuable books, they are marred by, on the one hand, an over-reliance on societal explanations for the emergence of atheism, while, on the other, a narrative that blurs contextual differences between the past and the present as a way to show the inherent modern-ness of atheism. Read together, however, the two provide a useful introduction to those first approaching the subject, but apart they are too triumphalist or too pessimistic to be wholly satisfying. The Evolution of Atheism meanwhile explores many interesting avenues, particularly contemporary Anglophone atheists’ political links with their Victorian predecessors, though the work is flawed by its attempt to understand history not on its own terms but on the present’s. An intellectual history approach would be one way to address some of these problems in the future. Such an approach, with its focus on historical context, authorial intent, and language, would help to put this emerging and important field on a stronger foundation.