The Window Into The New Atheist Mind

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 2:12 pm by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

The Window Into The New Atheist Mind 2014-12-23T14:12:46+01:00 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

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A recurrent theme in the whole simmering “New Atheist” controversy is the question of the impact of the moral worldview on civilizational flourishing; in other words, the historical question of whether Christianity (or “religion” in general) has been “good” for the world, and the speculative question of whether an irreligious world will be more, or less, morally enlightened.

By a strange unwritten convention it seems that almost all these discussions always sidestep what seems to me an obvious and topical point of contention, which is the question of abortion.

Almost all New Atheists support abortion “rights”; this post is prompted by this attempt to crowdsource a set of Atheist “10 Commandments.” Commandment 4 supports abortion, because of course. (It’s really worth reading the list, to contemplate its sheer platitude and vacuousness.)

On the other hand, it is well known that the pro-life movement is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) made up of religious Christians.

It’s worth pausing for a second to realize how strange this is. After all, the pro-life position has nothing inherently “religious” about it. Many religions make allowances for abortion (indeed, infanticide).

Conversely, the idea that every single human being has intrinsic dignity which it behooves other human beings to respect is, or so we are insistently told, one that need not be grounded in any particular metaphysical worldview–just ask the very good people at a movement like Secular Pro-Life. Indeed, it is the basis of the Enlightenment worldview which is the closest thing we have in a post-Christian world of a common ethical grammar, and whose mantle the New Atheists so insistently claim.

So a priori it would be quite reasonable to suppose that the question of abortion would not be split neatly into “religious” lines. And yet in practice we find roughly the opposite; this is a puzzle.

After all, at first blush anyway, it would seem that a dogmatic materialism in metaphysics does not necessarily entail any particular moral worldview by itself, so that you would expect a much greater variety of perspectives on the issue within the New Atheist world, and yet you find the opposite. (It might be noteworthy here that the late Christopher Hitchens not infrequently expressed moral qualms and ambivalence about abortion in his writings–until he threw in his lot with the New Atheists, and thence his position became much more doctrinaire.)

Now, there is a very easy way for the New Atheists to support abortion: simply go #FullNietzsche. Nietzsche, apostle of the Death of God, would have no problem with abortion, since he believed that the weak are contemptible and deserve to die. As a trained classicist, Nietzsche understood full well that the idea that all human beings have infinite intrinsic worth, and that the weak and the poor have a special moral claim on us, is a Christian invention, and that if Christianity must go, then so must that idea. The disaster of Christianity, Nietzsche believed, was that it had replaced the noble ancient ethic of “good vs. bad” with the moral categories of “good vs. evil.” And Nietzsche knew very well that the ancient pagan society he so admired was in great part held together by the venerable institution of infanticide and infant exposure, and that among the many reasons the pagans had to despise Christianity was precisely their reckless insistence on rescuing, and raising, exposed infants, instead of letting nature take its course and eat the weak. And though Nietzsche had deep contempt for Sunday-morning Christians, the class of people he despised the most were people whom he called “those who worship the shadow of the Buddha”, by which he meant not easy-believing Christians, but easy-believing atheists, who believed that after the “death of God” the ethic of compassion introduced into the world by the New Testament could or should endure (indeed, would flourish more!).

But most of our New Atheists, at least ostensibly, at least most of the time, are worshippers of the shadow of the Buddha. However vague and ungrounded, they claim a broadly humanistic ethic of compassion, what can only be called a “New Testament-lite” ethic; they proclaim the intrinsic dignity of the human being; indeed, very often, it is in the name of that dignity that they direct their attacks upon religion.

(And they do sometimes hit the mark! It is quite true that “religion,” especially so broadly defined, has been the occasion of much moral terrorism, and violence, and obscurantism, and all the rest. After all, this is what Christians not only expect but proclaim since one of the great articles of the faith is precisely our own sinfulness from which we need to be saved.)

But this is why the question of abortion is so illuminating, because it is where the rubber meets the road. When the time comes, no longer for vague pieties and bromides, but for actual choices with actual consequences, where do the chips fall? Are Christians just pietistic, fideistic hypocrites who believe merely for the sake of wish-fulfillment and the sweet release of opium, or are they more likely to take a costly stand for moral truth? Conversely, is it possible for the atheist worldview to produce, in practice, a consistent humanism?

What is the answer to the insistent Christian query of whether a humanistic worldview can be sustained without a metaphysical ground, without even (say) the philosophical “Nature’s God” of the American Founding?

And what we find, in practice, is pretty much exactly what a Christian would expect. That is to say, we find countless Christians–oh yes, very imperfectly–honorably defending the intrinsic dignity of every human being. And we find that atheists are humanists right up to the point when it stops being convenient to be humanists, and then they believe in the strong eating the weak.

In other words, we find, surprise surprise, what we always find, historically, in the wake of ascendent, evangelistic atheism: astonishing barbarism and relentless mass murder.

When my parents were my age, a child with Down Syndrome was not at all an uncommon sight, on the streets, in cafés, with their families. Now, this sight has become all-but impossible. There is only one place where a Down Syndrome child looks not out of place, but ordinary: at church on a Sunday morning. There, you will see them, and more importantly, you will see them being ordinary. Just regular human beings, just children of God, like all of us.

And the quiet moral heroism of these countless parents, who receive and pass on the baton of Christian care for the least of these, and even moreso, the quiet beauty of Down Syndrome children–who, as anyone who has known them will attest, are fountains of joy–is ultimately the only rebuke we need to the claim of the New Atheism to be anything but the priesthood and heralds of a monstrous barbarism.

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