Atheism

A couple of weeks ago, Julian Baggini wrote a commentary titled The New Atheist Movement is destructive. An atheist himself, he blasts the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist movement (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) for doing more harm than good in their attacks on religion. A paragraph that is exemplary of his position:

A second feature of atheism is that it is committed to the appropriate use of reason and evidence. In order to occupy this intellectual high ground, it is important to recognise the limits of reason, and also to acknowledge that atheists have no monopoly on it. The new atheism, however, tends to claim reason as a decisive combatant on its side only. With its talk of “spells” and “delusions”, it gives the impression that only through stupidity or crass disregard for reason could anyone be anything other than an atheist. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,” says Dawkins, once again implying that reason and evidence are strangers to religion. This is arrogant, and attributes to reason a power it does not have.

Baggini also puts forth the claim that atheism is a world view, going on to describe it as a form of naturalism.

This world view is essentially a very general form of naturalism, in which there are not two kinds of stuff, the natural and the supernatural, but one. The forces that govern this substance are also natural ones and there is no ultimate purpose or agency behind them. Human life is biological, and thus does not survive beyond biological death.

Apparently, this is a view he espoused in a book. I’ve never read the book so I cannot comment on it, unlike Baginni in his criticism of the Four Horsemen’s books that he hasn’t read. But I did start a post at the time I read this article, criticising the idea that atheism is a world view. My position is that atheism is one thing and one thing only – a lack of belief in any god or gods. It is nothing more than that. There is no dogma, no atheist bible, and there is certainly no world view proscribed by atheism. Atheists could very well believe in supernatural entities, such as spirits. Nothing prevents an atheist from believing that all life is recycled in the form of reincarnation. One’s view of the world may be directly influenced by a lack of belief in god (atheism), but there’s nothing that dictates what that view should be.

It took me a while to coalesce my thoughts in that post and I didn’t have the time to finish it, so I saved it as a draft intending to come back to it later. Unfortunately, I forgot all about it. I may resurrect the main theme in a separate post at some point. The reason I bring it up now, though, is because of a wonderful reply to Baggini’s commentary by George Williamson. I intentionally ignored Baggini’s criticism of the New Atheist movement itself, focusing only on his belief that atheism is some sort of world view. That’s a misguided claim made by the religious in their arguments against atheism, and I think it’s silly to see an atheist do the same. Williamson doesn’t bother with such trivialities, though, and goes straight to the heart of the matter. He eloquently assails Baggini on the foundations of his argument and tears it apart.

After going through several of Baggini’s points, Williamson succintly summarizes Baggini’s complaint thusly:

…it seems to me that his complaint in sum is this: tactless and harsh comments in the media by new atheists have soured the otherwise benign, friendly atmosphere in which believers and non-believers usually meet.

That basically is the gist of it. Williamson expands on that summary with this eminently quotable paragraph:

So, although religious believers have persecuted and murdered atheists, and anyone else who disagreed with them; while religion has happily promoted genocide, slavery, the oppression of women and other races, sexual repression and the use of force to ensure conformity (this being only what the Bible flat-out recommends); and while religious authorities have fought tooth and nail the liberalization of our ethics and politics, to say nothing of steadfastly opposing progress in scientific knowledge and technical ability, what is really counter-productive is that atheists have the temerity to think their tendency to base belief in reason means they might have something to say about the truth of matters, and are downright arrogant in expecting those who disagree with their conclusions to do so on reasoned grounds.

This is precisely what is wrong with atheists like Baggini, those who think that their fellow atheists should sit back, be polite, and let things be. The problem with this approach is that things won’t just be. When you give religion free reign, you are allowing the growth of a cancer in society that not only retards progress, but ultimately erases decades, centuries, of scientific and social advances. It is being demonstrated all over the United States right now, where you can find state boards of education attempting to force religiously inspired, non-scientific beliefs into the science classroom. You can see it in the US government, as PZ Myers points out in a recent post regarding the Bush administration’s suppression of Plan B birth control, where he notes that even Obama has weekly consultations with a “clergy council”.

No, we cannot just let things be. Again, there’s no atheistic doctrine that dictates that we godless need to stand up and actively oppose religion. But I think it’s a true assessment that atheists do not survive long in religiously governed societies. We may never see a true Christian theocracy in the West, but it’s not far-fetched to believe that overzealous leaders can wreak havoc on secularism with religiously-motivated laws and edicts. The Bush administration is example of that. It is most certainly in the interest of all atheists, and all those who value the freedom we enjoy in a secular society, to stand up and oppose anything that threatens to erode those freedoms. Sometimes, that means standing up and calling a spade a spade.