Two New Books Against the “New Atheism”

Last updated on: April 16, 2009 at 11:23 am by Henry Karlson

Two New Books Against the “New Atheism” 2009-04-16T11:23:28-05:00 Henry Karlson

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There has been a significant amount of “God Talk” done in the popular level, with considerable effort made by various sources to highlight pop-atheism as a rigorous and proper response to theism. Two authors who are currently the favorites of cultural atheism are Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Philosophically, pop-atheism tends to be as shallow, if not more-so, than similar forms of apologetics done by Christians. Just as apologists have often become an embarrassment to the intellectual Christian, so the pop-atheists are becoming more and more an embarrassment to their intellectual counterpart. The dishonesty in their approach has caused many of their peers to criticize them.

It should be of great interest to Vox Nova’s readers that two new texts have come out which show a philosophically minded atheist taking on an aspect (or more) of pop-atheism, deconstructing the arguments, demonstrating the political ideologies behind them, and showing the danger associated with this new popularized atheism. The first is by Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate[1], while the second is a debate between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank entitled, The Monstrosity of Christ.[2]

Eagleton’s book directly confronts the new atheism, and especially the political ideology found within it. For someone like Hitchens, the criticism of Christianity goes hand in hand with their criticism of Islam. It’s rather interesting and telling that many of his readers will separate the two and you will find Christians applauding his rants against Islam. Not so with Eagleton. Of course, he has his own political interests, and one can understand it easily in this very telling statement:

It is striking how avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam. Indeed, most of them hardly mention the word ‘capitalism’ at all, however they may protest from time to time against this or that excess of it. One has not noticed all that many of them are speaking out against, say, the appalling American-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. It is a familiar fact (though not apparently, at all familiar to the U.S. media) that, thirty years to the day before the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an odious puppet autocrat who went on to massacre far more people than died in the World Trade Center. The United States also supported for many years a regime in Indonesia that probably exterminated more people than Saddam Hussein did. Those who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes as a protest against Islamic atrocities should perhaps keep these facts steadily in mind (100-101).

But it’s not just the political interests, it’s also the philosophical interests which creates a laziness within the thinking of popular atheism which gets considerable criticism by Eagleton. It’s a fundamentalism plain and simple.

God is not Great is also a fine illustration of how atheistic fundamentalists are in some ways the inverted mirror image of Christian ones. And not just in their intemperate zeal and tedious obsessiveness. Hitchens argues earnestly that the Book of Genesis doesn’t mention marsupials; that the Old Testament Jews surely couldn’t have wandered for forty years in the desert; that the capture of the huge bedstead of the giant Og, king of Bashan, might never have occurred at all, and so on. This is rather like someone vehemently trying to convince you, with fastidious attention to architectural and zoological detail, that King Kong could not possible have scaled the Empire State Building because it would have collapsed under his weight (53-4).

Hitchens, Eagleton properly notes, just doesn’t know how to read the Biblical literature and so goes about it as a fundamentalist.

Obviously, as an atheist, while Eagleton criticizes “Ditchkins,” (a combination of Dawkins and Hitchens) in a way which a Christian can approve, his own atheism means he does have harsh words for theism as well. The book is not merely a criticism of the new-Atheism. But it is a criticism which finds positive values in the Christian and theistic tradition which popular atheism can never do. Ditchkins belongs to the old, liberal atheistic humanism which has not yet seen the tragedy of humanity:

The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. […] Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There will be no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals did not continue to stand in its way (168-9).

Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ is a different kind of text. In it, there is a debate about the very nature of Christianity, and who is its better interpreter, Žižek’s Hegelian materialism or Milbank’s paradoxical theology. Žižek, an atheist, counters popular-atheism by realizing the importance and influence of Christianity and its incarnational materialism in the development of serious, philosophical atheism. In other books, he has shown why he thinks a materialism which leads to atheism and the “death of God” is the perverse core of Christianity. It is from this perspective that he comes to Christianity and why he believes one can and should learn more from Christianity and its intellectual tradition than from its popular critics; indeed, he tries to use Christian thought (in a Hegelian sense) as one of his major sources for his intellectual concerns. In ths present book, he opens up his understanding of Christianity (and is theological debates, such as the filioque) to confront one of the major players in modern Christian theology, John Milbank. It’s because he is capable of working within the Christian tradition to bring about his arguments, he brings into the debate the kind of philosophical rigor needed to truly address Christian theology. And within this context, he is able to confront the popular atheism and its political foundations similar to Eagleton:

Within this complex picture, relations between the couple materialism/idealism and the political struggle are often ‘overdetermined’ – for example, the recent popularity of scientific materialist direct attacks on religion (the big bestseller ‘troika’ of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet) is certainly sustained by the ideological need to present the liberal West as the bastion of Reason against the crazy Muslim and other irrational fundamentalists. (94).

The introduction of the book by Creston Davis really epitomizes why this work, as a whole, serves as a great antidote to the popularized debates about God. It confronts the debate beyond the rationalistic modernism (based upon the ideologies of the Enlightenment) found in popular, “rational” debates about God, such as the one between Dawkins and McGrath:

In short, although this Dawkins/McGrath debate looks genuine, and is certainly successful in terms of selling a great many books, it nevertheless is only a limited and not very intellectually significant debate. It is more an exercise in ideological (mis)interpretation of the same premises than a real debate, because it fails to risk forgoing the very existence of what both sides presuppose. For is it not the case that modernity’s mode of reason – for all its worth— cannot bring reason under its own critique? Is not the Achilles heel of reason precisely the fact that it cannot be deployed against itself? This is because if you fold reason back against itself, it panics. In this respect, like a person without a face, reason cannot tolerate the representation of its own mirror image. So in the end, the atheist’s and the secular theist’s views of reason and how it functions remain more or less identical, and far from organizing a theology of resistance that overthrows the established order, this false debate only ever manage to perpetuate and reproduce it. (10).

With Žižek and Milbank, we get something new. It is a debate over the Enlightenment and what is to come next, now that postmodernism has overthrown modernism and its absolutizing of human reason. The next step in philosophy and debates over God can be found here. Both books are worth getting. Both books will make the theist and the atheist think. Both books serve as great introductions for any real God-talk in the 21st century. But if you were going to choose one, I suggest The Monstrosity of Christ, because it offers a more comprehensive discussion, as it should when it has two different authors writing for it.

Footnotes

[1]Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[2]Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

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