Book
God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. John F. Haught. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2008.
Reviewer
Christian Early, Associate Professor, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA
Since the second half of the twentieth century, the debate between atheists and religious believers has been carried on, most often, at academic conferences. That has just very recently changed. The New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) have with their books, radio interviews, and presentations at colleges and universities successfully brought the debate back into the awareness of the general public.
What is new about the New Atheists is not the claim that there are natural explanations for religion – these are as old as the Sophists – but the claim that applying a cost-benefit analysis to religion demonstrates it is bad for humankind. Religion preaches love, but practices manipulative and violent hatred, and consequently we should rid ourselves of it altogether. Moreover, because it provides a space for faith, it is a breeding ground for anti-intellectual fanaticism.
Instead of religion, the New Atheists offer a thoroughgoing Darwinism in which we learn to fold in and make normative ways of being that are conducive to human survival and flourishing. Darwinism explains the rise of religion by suggesting that our belief in God or gods is a residual hangover from the adaptive ability to imagine unseen enemies. It has now become urgent, so they would argue, to pull up the weeds of our imagination.
There are, then, two issues to consider: Does evolution explain religion? And, Is religion bad for us? In God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, John Haught responds to both of these issues.
Haught responds to the first issue by arguing that theological and scientific explanations are not in principle opposed to each other unless one is an explanatory monist. This is the most important intellectual move to make, and it is central to any successful response to the New Atheists.
Explanatory monism is the view that there is at bottom only one account that can be given to explain a state of affairs and therefore all other accounts are in competition with it. Haught argues instead that multiple layers of understanding and explanation can exist. In fact, almost everything in life admits of a plurality of layers of explanation in which various accounts do not necessarily compete with one another.
Haught’s example is the page of a book you are reading. Why does it exist? One explanation is a printing press has stamped ink onto a piece of paper, but another explanation is that the author had something to say in writing. These explanations are non-competitive and in fact both are true. By extension, “you do not have to choose between evolution and divine inspiration to account for religion any more than you have to choose between the printing press and the author’s intention when explaining the page you are reading” (85).
The author’s response to the second issue, however, is slightly weaker.
He argues that God is a God of infinite power and vulnerable love, who makes all things new and who can be approached only by way of faith, trust, and hope. This faith by which we approach God is neither simple nor anti-intellectual, as anyone who is familiar with a life of faith and reads theology knows; we are painfully aware of the misuse of the name of God. So the New Atheists are quite simply entirely mistaken in their view that God is monstrous and that followers of God are or become monstrous too.
In Haught’s judgment, the New Atheists are little more than fundamentalist puritans, and to engage them in discourse does not deepen faith, because their views are simplistic and their criticisms misfire. But this is where Haught could have a more generous reading of the New Atheists; yet I suspect he cannot allow such generosity because he would have to become a pacifist in order to do so.
That is, he would have to do more than confess painful awareness of misuse of the name of God. He would have to say “No!” not to misuse but to false conceptions of God and ways of following God. He would stand to gain if he did so, because it would allow him to turn the tables on the New Atheists more effectively – by saying that their critique is right but hasn’t gone far enough.
What we need, Haught could say, is a consequentialist analysis of not only religion but scientific naturalism also. After all, we wouldn’t want to take scientific naturalism on faith, would we?