"God Is Dead" and I Don't Feel So Good Myself: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism

God Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself

Theological Engagements with the New Atheism

Edited by

andrew david

christopher j. keller

& jon stanley

CASCADE Books • Eugene, Oregon

GOD IS DEAD AND I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD MYSELF

Theological Engagements with the New Atheism

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Cover image by Paul Roorda, Crown of Thorns and Capeline Bandage, blood, crushed stone, rust, gold leaf, beeswax, and vintage book pages on paper. Used by permission.

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-531-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

God is dead and I don’t feel so good myself : theological engagements with the new atheism / edited by Andrew David, Christopher J. Keller, and Jon Stanley

       xxii + 186 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

       isbn 13: 978-1-60608-531-8

1. Christianity and atheism. 2. Faith and reason—Christianity. I. Title. II. Series.

       bt1212.g5 2010

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Preface

At a family reunion when I (Christopher) was a young boy, my mother got to talking with my estranged cousin who had left the faith. The son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher and once the golden child of his West Virginia religious community—he even achieved a brief professional career as a Christian recording artist—my cousin’s conservative Christian faith had spiraled downward into disillusionment. He stopped attending his church, ceased reading his Bible, abandoned his daily prayer time, and committed the cardinal evangelical sin—he allowed his marriage to collapse. Repulsed by the Christian fundamentalism of his upbringing, for all intents and purposes my cousin renounced the faith.

It is this kind of narrative that today’s New Atheists relish, indeed idealize: they see a recovery from god delusions, an enlightening exchange of the warm, fuzzy fairy tales of faith for the cold, hard facts of science. And it is a story that the New Atheism’s Christian critics would decry, interpreting it as recklessly throwing the Christian baby out with the fundamentalist bathwater. But neither reaction is sensitive to the particularity of my cousin’s story, nor to the theological, political, and psychological currents at play in the lives of fellow prodigals. No stories are canned—in this case, twenty years later we find that the prodigal cousin is a practicing Anglican, something neither side of the New Atheism debate would have predicted—and the truth shows itself in color rather than the black-and-white binaries of the New Atheists and their theist critics.

The New Atheism debate’s explosion onto the central cultural scene presents us with a surprisingly fortuitous moment for polychromatic Christian reflection. But the fact that a virtual cottage industry has sprung up around the New Atheism debate, flooding the airwaves, op-eds, blogs, and bookshelves, made us pause and ask ourselves if we really needed another book on the New Atheism. Was there any unturned stone that if turned might make a positive contribution to a debate over which so much ink (and blood!) has already been spilled?

As we sifted through the vitriolic, reductive material coming from both sides of the debate, we concluded that it was time for an other kind of book, a different sort of Christian engagement with New Atheism—one that entered the debate otherwise, conscientiously objecting to the rules of engagement established by the generals of the culture wars, who have strategically rallied their foot soldiers through ad hominem, straw-man arguments and familiar talking points in ever louder and more bellicose voices. Here, we have worked hard to ignore the generals and to give you exactly this kind of book.

First, many Christian responses to popular atheism have been pedestrian, patronizing, dismissive, and violent, mirroring the New Atheists’ hostility toward the Christian faith and religious culture at large. Conversely, we have sought to embody simultaneously a generous spirit, a substantive analysis, and a more incisive critique of the New Atheists (and, at times, their critics) than the market has typically produced.

Second, because most Christian responses to the New Atheism hail from conservative evangelical camps, we have assembled a bouquet of leading Christian philosophers, theologians, and writers from various confessional backgrounds. So although this book pulls no punches and makes no apology for the fact that it is a robustly Christian engagement with the New Atheism, the contributors vary widely in their accounts of the resurgence of this pop atheism and their assessments of what might be of value to Christians in the New Atheists’ criticisms of Christian faith and religious culture.

Third, we take both the New Atheists and the debate between the New Atheists and their critics as our subject matter. The essays draw the New Atheism into dialogue with other atheisms, past and present, suggesting that some of these other atheisms might have one up on the New Atheism in terms of their social and intellectual benefit. And the essays also point out the ways in which both the New Atheists and their more conservative Christian critics often make strange bedfellows and at times even partners in crime by sharing certain problematic fundamental assumptions.

Fourth, we have chosen to engage the New Atheism not only in analytical prose, but also in creative writing and visual imagery. Indeed, poems serve as bookends to the project, intended to jumpstart the conversation and provide an alternative means of reflection. If the New Atheism debate needs anything, it is an opening up rather than a closing down, and this collection of essays, interviews, memoir, poetry, and art is responsive to this in both form and content.

Any project we take up at The Other Journal—whether it’s through our online quarterly, our annual film festival, or our book publications—is a product of double-vision, looking at the key issues of our day in light of the vast resources of the Christian tradition and looking at our Christian tradition in light of the key issues of our day. We believe, then, that the rise of the New Atheism provides Christians with an excellent opportunity to reflect upon and discern what is baby and what is bathwater in contemporary Christian thought, witness, and practice. It is an occasion to listen to the critiques of faith and then, as in the case of Chris’s cousin, to reassess and recommit to what is at the heart of our faith, to check our idolatries at the door and scour our faith commitments with the relentless skepticism that today’s popular atheists possess. This book goes out with the prayer that it might draw, compel, and even seduce believers unto a more mature faith, authentic spirituality, charitable witness, and peaceable practice.

Andrew David

Christopher J. Keller

Jon Stanley

Acknowledgments

The Other Journal is proud to partner with such creative and compelling people. Our online quarterly (http://www.theotherjournal.com), annual film festival (Film, Faith, and Justice), and book publications are all made possible by funding from Mars Hill Graduate School (MHGS) in Seattle, Washington. MHGS trains people in the study of text, soul, and culture and teaches its students to openly imagine a holistic gospel that has power to transform and save.

We would like to thank D. Stephen Long for writing a foreword that wonderfully frames the discussion we are hosting in this offering and that makes a substantive contribution to the discussion in its own right. We would also like to thank Paul Roorda for enthusiastically volunteering images from his stellar art exhibition, The Skeptic’s Gospel and Other Remedies for Truth.

We are extremely grateful for the hard work of all our brilliant contributors and for their unique and incisive contributions to this project. You have each done us and all the other readers of this book a great service.

Finally, we would like to thank the good people at Cascade Books of Wipf & Stock Publishers for their interest in The Other Journal and this project. We respect your unique eye for material, your preference for meaningful content over the whims of the market, and your commitment to publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability.

Andrew David

Christopher J. Keller

Jon Stanley

Foreword:

Atheism’s Resurgence and Christian Responses

D. Stephen Long

After the journal Mladina published caricatures of Muhammad, stirring irrational violent protests from some Muslims,¹ Slavoj Žižek published an editorial in the International Herald Tribune entitled Atheism Is a Legacy Worth Fighting For.² His editorial questioned the wisdom of Dostoyevsky’s putative statement, If God is dead, everything is permitted. Far from the atheists being the source of moral atrocities, Žižek rightly noted, historically those who profess faith in God had been the ones who violated the bare minimum expectations of human decency—God gave permission for abandoning any modicum of morality altogether. The Western legacy of atheism, he then suggested, would provide a better foundation for basic goodness than had God. For this reason Žižek fights for atheism.

Readers of Žižek could be excused for being confused. Five years earlier, he published a book whose subtitle asked, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?³ wherein he gave positive answers to this question. This seeming contradiction might confirm Charles Mathewes’s counsel later in this anthology that one should only read Žižek after consuming high doses of caffeine. Nonetheless, as Mathewes notes, Žižek is an atheist Christians should read carefully, for he often speaks the truth when few others will. For instance, in his editorial he refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other’s beliefs. He recognizes that this only patronizes people of faith, refusing to treat them as rational persons who are seeking truth. Thus, he also refuses to adopt the relativist stance of multiple ‘regimes of truth’ disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. Instead, he treats religion rationally, submitting it to a common pursuit of truth, and he concludes with this suggestion, What, however, about submitting Islam—together with all other religions—to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This is atheism worth engaging.

Is all such atheism worthy of engagement? And how should Christians in particular respond to its resurgence?

No one should be surprised by its resurgence. A-theism is a parasitical consequence of the return of religion, a return which continues to surprise persons who seem confused as to how to respond to it. The reality of faith perplexes people at the political level as well as in everyday life, as illustrated in Becky Crook’s delightful story, "Mystery and Mayhem: Reading Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita while Dating an Atheist in Seattle. That reasonable people still have faith—and actually practice it—strikes some as odd. Many of these skeptics were convinced by the narratives spun by the great masters of suspicion, narratives insisting that the gains of the Enlightenment would surely be irreversible by the twenty-first century and that these gains would result in reasonable people eschewing belief. So how do we account for the return of religion (outside of universities and mainline seminaries, it never really disappeared in the first place)? Is this a pathology to be remedied, as some of the more popular atheists diagnose, whose remedies take on increasing bellicosity in inverse proportion to the strength of their arguments? Or are religious people to be considered rational and therefore engaged in the form of argument Žižek proffers? A true atheist, he states, has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy." Truth demands something more than patronizing respect for religion or the intellectually lobotomized affirmation of religious pluralism and relativism. We Christians certainly have something to learn from atheists, but some more than others; after all, not all atheists are created equal. What follows are diverse responses to atheism’s resurgence, responses that will assist readers to discern what is to be learned and what is to be avoided.

Let me suggest some types within which the various responses may or may not fit. This is not intended to prejudice the reader before she picks up the book, but to provoke an argument among the diverse contributors and those who might find their responses convincing.

1. Modern Atheism Is Unworthy of a Response

One response would be to dismiss modern atheism (or certain versions of it) altogether. Take for instance Peter Candler’s opening analysis of the atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Michael Onfray. Candler writes, Suffice it to say that if this gang of atheists represents the highest form of atheism these days, and if every atheism is always parasitic upon some form of theism, then the critiques of religion offered in these books imply that the state of theology in public discourse is pretty dismal (83–84). Candler offers less a response to the so-called New Atheism and more a critique of contemporary theology. He does not explain why Dawkins so badly understands the ontological argument or misunderstands Wittgenstein; such a response would be too easy. A more worthy response, he suggests, is to question ourselves; the weaknesses of the arguments for the resurgent atheism are less to be taken seriously than to provoke theological self-criticism. Why have our accounts of who God is not produced a more interesting reaction? If we are to have an atheist the caliber of Nietzsche rather than Dawkins, we will have to do better with our reasons for faith. Of course, that these resurgent atheists have sought to avoid parasitism by changing their names from a-theists to brighties only demonstrates that the same kitsch we find in so much contemporary Christian worship and music now has its correlate in the New Atheism.

2. Variations on Dostoyevsky

Žižek challenges Dostoyevsky’s assertion that God’s death brings down the walls of restraint against immorality. But another version of Dostoyevsky’s assertion might go like this: If God is dead, everything is atomized. It is not so much that everything is permitted, but that everything is flattened, everything is placed on the same immanent plane and reduced to its barest elements. In a witty albeit sobering play on the atomization in modern politics and science, Andy Barnes observes the reality of slums in the Philippines and suggests that if there is no God, no second life, and no redemption, then there is no hope for these slums, because too much has been lost already. Everything is rising entropy, decomposition, and atomization, and there’s no way to glorify that here (101). He challenges atheist materialists by asking, can you look upon the atomized reality of decomposition and say, Yes? Implicit in his challenge is another theme that runs through many of these essays: materialism without God becomes nothing but atomized decomposition. Or to put it less delicately, is the true end of man nothing but shit? Have we lost our sense of smell?

3. Atheism as Apophaticism

To a certain extent, Robert Inchausti and Merold Westphal welcome the resurgent atheism, for the ‘god’ denied in this atheism is not the God we Christians affirm. Drawing upon Thomas Merton’s apology to unbelievers, Inchausti finds believers responsible for the unbelief of our neighbors. By setting forth an unflattering presentation of God and exhibiting actions that run contrary to the very God they affirm, believers are the ones responsible for the construction of a ‘god’ whose deconstruction by atheists actually does theology a service.

Westphal takes a similar line, wisely reminding us that something more than proofs or disproofs for the existence of God are at the heart of the matter for contemporary atheists. Few of us, he suggests, came to faith through such proofs. After all, who knew the ontological proof for the existence of God or Aquinas’s five ways before he or she was already a convinced Christian? And how many atheists were not already well on their way to losing faith before reading Hitchens or Dawkins? We were already long down the road toward faith or disbelief before these arguments could sway us one way or another. Westphal rejects that what is at stake in the current debates are convincing arguments for theism. If we can admit that few of us came to faith because of such commanding reasons, then might it not also be the case that what drives atheists is also something other than rational arguments alone? If Westphal is correct, then the appropriate response to atheism is not better arguments, but a patient humility borne from penitential disciplines. He urges Christians, with some important qualifications, to adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion as a Lenten discipline.

Westphal finds an ally here in Charles Taylor who, like Candler, finds much of modern atheism intellectually shoddy. Taylor argues that one reason for this is the assumption that there really are some knockdown arguments against belief in God (126). He then places this peculiar version of modern atheism in its historical context, in the rise of a scientism that claims it can explain everything: And of course, this is something you can only believe if you have a scientistic, reductionist conception and explanation of everything in the world, including human beings. If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God are just closed (126). (Incidentally, I recommend reading Taylor while watching John Cleese’s The Scientist at Work podcast on the discovery of the God gene. Cleese says, The discovery of this God gene is a big step forward in our quest to show that every bit of human behavior can be explained mechanically because we have now also located the gene that makes some people believe that every piece of human behavior can be explained mechanically, and it is here right next to the gene that makes you go to Nicholas Cage movies.⁴) Thus, a proper response to resurgent atheism will not be found in stronger theistic arguments, but in a broader conception of rationality itself, one that will recognize that the rigid boundaries erected between faith and reason are much more porous than scientism, as well as much of modern epistemology, could recognize. Such scientism did not discover some rigid boundary between faith and reason; it erected it. Ronald A. Kuipers seeks to explain such a position to an acquaintance as a way to advance the conversation: For example, I could take the time to explain to her that, not only am I religious, but I have been trained in an intellectual tradition that rejects the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of religious neutrality, that is, of anyone not being religious in some sense (146).

Jon Stanley offers another version of this position, although he is less concerned with the arguments for and against God’s existence, and more interested in analyzing faith as always containing an element of doubt. He reminds us that whenever we confess our belief, we at the same time pray for assistance with our unbelief: I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief! (Mark 9:24 NIV). This is authentic faith, for it acknowledges the element of a-theism present in our confession. Stanley helps us understand why we often suspect that those who confess most loudly are simultaneously trying to silence that other voice, which whispers, I do not exist. For Stanley, that voice may not come only from the devil, not least because the philosophical category of existence may be an improper predicate for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In fact, the god in which we doubt may be a specific example of faith because most of the gods we construct are idols—take for instance Thor, the god who we often affirm in our recitations of the United States’ pledge of allegiance, or Dionysius, the god of liberal affirmation. To learn to doubt these gods’ existence is itself a species of faith. Stanley wants Christians to be mistaken for atheists much as the early Christians were when they denied the gods of the Roman Empire. Stanley will find an ally here in Westphal, who confesses that he had probably never prayed to a God who wasn’t an idol (77). Westphal’s affirmation of Luther and Stanley’s affirmation of Derrida bear a striking resemblance. Both assume that much of Christian tradition produced a metaphysical idol that needs deconstruction.

4. Outnarration of Modern Atheism

John Milbank also emphasizes the importance of the apophatic tradition and the inevitable relation between faith and reason. Yet his response to atheism takes a slightly different angle than that of Inchausti, Westphal, Taylor, Kuipers, and Stanley. Milbank’s intent is less to dismiss or welcome modern atheism and more to recognize its cultural and/or metaphysical presuppositions and then outnarrate them. He does not provide much of that narrative here, but he points to his and others’ work that has tried to do so. Resurgent atheism has a cultural history, and as he puts it,