The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Gadamer insisted that art in the modern age has been “definitively shorn” of its traditional relationship to Greco-Christian religion and mythology and is wholly thrown back on the resources of the word, becoming a self-sufficient auto-telic activity. Poetry since Hegel, Gadamer thought, has become more inward precisely because it has severed its connection with religion and is now “more modest”; though that has, paradoxically, resulted in a poetry that is more radical in its “purchase” on the world. “Poetry is a making oneself at home in the world, of showing how we share the world.” Poetry is a “finality without purpose,” since it shares with speculative discourse—philosophy—an existence at the limits of verification. The religious element in life, in our minds, has found a new home in the “inward dimension of poetic speech.”12

  Many of these observations coincide more or less with those made in chapter 23, on poetry. And that is Gadamer’s point, that poetry is a form of philosophy, especially where it relates to the horizon of language (and therefore meaning); and that, as Sartre said, the dimension of lyricism is something over and above philosophy. In order to live well, we must be able to sing.

  MEANING AS OPPRESSIVE ILLUSION

  Music—or at least harmony—is one of life’s chief assets, according to the British philosopher A. C. Grayling and as expounded in his book The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the Twenty-First Century (2007). Grayling is a brisk thinker and a brisk writer. Here, he sees no need to go back to basics—some basics are self-evident—“The case for the humanist outlook is overwhelming.” He goes straight to the point, as he sees it. The average human lifespan is fewer than one thousand months long (it sounds shorter when laid out as numerals), so we need to make the most of it. Good lives must be lived in the appropriate social and political setting. To live well and enjoy a good life, we don’t need religion: we must have an ideal and work toward it.

  He proposes that there are seven “notes,” in a musical sense, that can produce a harmonious existence. These seven notes are meaning, intimacy, endeavor, truth, freedom, beauty and fulfillment. Fulfillment, he says, means integrating the other six into one’s own chosen project. To these he adds the arguments that we should all have a lifelong commitment to education—one never stops learning—and that, regarding the question of meaning, unity of purpose is what counts, for “unity of purpose is often exactly what is missing” when people are unfulfilled.

  Also, we must be aware of the successes of science, for “eventually we will all use a biological, or even a physical language” (much as David Deutsch and Frank Tipler have said—see chapter 25). And he thinks we cannot live a good life without an involvement of some sort in politics, because nothing can take the place of the individual—liberty, equality and community all depend on each other. And the “sovereign virtue” of the political community should be a concern equal to the concern we feel for our own well-being, because this safeguards the well-being of others. To achieve this we must look forward to a global ethics, the idea of a good world, as the ultimate ideal and the backbone of meaning.13

  Terry Eagleton, another British philosopher, is equally brisk—brusque, even. A hundred-page book on the subject, The Meaning of Life (2007), is no mean feat, the more so as he dedicates it to his son, “who found the whole project embarrassing.” He leaps straight in: What is the cause you would be prepared to die for? He observes that during the twentieth century, perhaps because life was so cheap, spirituality became “rock hard or soggy”—unshakable fundamentalisms on the one hand, gurus and spiritual masseurs, the “chiropractors of piped contentment,” on the other.

  The fact that there may be many meanings to life, he thinks, is perhaps the most precious meaning of all: “The din of conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have.” He doesn’t think that God is the answer—“he tends to thicken things rather than make them self-evident.” And Eagleton asks whether the whole question isn’t overblown. “Many people have led superlative lives without apparently knowing the meaning of life.” Desire is eternal, while fulfillment is sporadic, so that intensity counts in a fulfilled life. Meaning, he thinks, is an oppressive illusion. “To live without the need for such a guarantee is to be free. . . . To keep faith with what is most animal about us is to live authentically” (as James Joyce also said). Helping others is a “little death,” a petite mort; it helps us to live well but is not the real deal. The meaning of life is less a proposition than a practice—it is not an esoteric truth but a certain form of life. Happiness, as we noted earlier, Eagleton describes as a “feeble, holiday-camp sort of word,” maintaining, as others have, that it is a by-product of a practical way of life, not some private inner contentment.14

  THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRANSCENDENCE

  The American philosopher Thomas Nagel concurs with Bertrand Russell: he does not believe that we can ever be fully content, because there is an inherent paradox or dual aspect to our existence which just cannot be overcome, and we need to learn to live with it if we are to have satisfaction. A religious solution, he says, gives us a “borrowed centrality” in the paradox through the intervention of a supreme being.

  A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Nagel likes to give his books arresting titles: Mortal Questions, What Does It All Mean?, The View from Nowhere, The Last Word. In The View from Nowhere and Mortal Questions, he tackles the problem of meaning in our lives, which he believes stems from this basic, unavoidable predicament—namely, that we inhabit both a subjective world and an objective world. We all face the predicament, he says, of looking at the world from our own points of view, while at the same time realizing that we are but an insignificant part of that world, looking down on ourselves as if from a great height. We are ambitious to get outside ourselves, but can’t quite manage it. It is this “dual vision,” he says, which accounts for our bewilderment and our wish for—and failure to find—transcendence.

  He is particularly critical of what he calls “scientism,” which “puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it.” But scientism is myopic when it assumes that everything must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories, “as if the present age were not just another in the series” of theories that have been generated to date. Set against this, philosophy has the difficult task of seeking to express “unformed but intuitively felt problems in language without losing them.” At every point, he says, philosophy faces us with the question of how far beyond the relative safety of our present language we can afford to go without risking completely losing touch with reality.15 Religion does the opposite, in that it places the supernatural beyond the limits, so that those limits are never extended here on earth.

  Nagel is at pains to show that we don’t really possess the language to describe our experience. Realism is most compelling when we are forced to recognize the existence of something that we cannot describe or know fully, because it lies beyond the reach of language, proof, evidence or empirical understanding. “Something must be true with respect to the 7s in the expansion of π, even if we can’t establish it.” The world of reasons, including “my” reasons, does not exist only from my own point of view.16 A further problem between subjectivity and objectivity is that we have an enormous mental capacity that is not explicable by natural selection. In an important way, natural selection does not explain everything.

  In Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012), Nagel takes this argument daringly—some would say recklessly—further. While he robustly declares himself an atheist, he argues that the reductive account of evolution—that life has evolved accidentally by purely physical and then chemical and biological principles—goes against common sense, and moreover that “almost everyone in our secular culture” has been “browbeaten” into regarding the reductive research program as “sacrosanct,” on the grounds that anything else “would not be
science.”17 It is “an open question” as to whether there has been enough time for evolution to have produced the teeming life we see around us, having begun as a “chemical accident.” Though he distances himself from the advocates of “intelligent design,” he insists they do not deserve the scorn that has been directed at them, because some of their objections to classical evolutionary theory have been well made.

  He is careful not to invoke any “transcendental being,” but feels justified in speculating about an alternative to reductive physics as the basis for a theory of everything. Instead, as he puts it, there might be “complications to the immanent nature of the natural order.” What he means by this—and it is his guiding conviction and his main complaint against reductive physics—is that “mind” is not just an afterthought, or an accident of evolution, or a simple add-on. It is “a basic aspect of nature.”

  In particular, he does not think that the three aspects of mind—consciousness, reason and value—could result from natural selection because they do not obviously confer selective advantage. Evolutionary naturalism, for instance, is indifferent to morality (value), as is higher mathematics (reason, logic). Why should evolution prefer the perception of moral truth to whatever happens to be immediately advantageous for reproduction? For that matter, what is evolutionarily advantageous about knowing the theory of evolution? For Nagel this is no more than commonsensical, but it is these matters, he says, that we have been browbeaten over.

  It is also obvious to him that we find it impossible to abandon the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe. Although he continues to reject any notion of a transcendent being, he sees this as further underlining the fact that any explanation of the universe as just “a physical process” cannot be justified: it has to include teleological elements.18 Teleology is the nub of the argument in Mind and Cosmos.

  This vacancy in our understanding, as he puts it—that physics and evolution are inadequate—he addresses by speculating about the “possibility of a principle of change over time tending toward certain types of outcome.” This is a coherent view, he maintains, which implies that the physical laws we are familiar with are not fully deterministic. Moreover, consciousness is permeated with intentionality, intentions based on capacities that were unimaginable in the remote past. And he repeats: there is no adaptive need for many mental capacities, and it is not easy to see how they have survival value.

  But, he goes on, if we believe in a natural order (an order we recognize), “then something about the world that eventually gave rise to rational beings must explain this possibility.” Natural teleology is the answer, he says, and is distinct from the other alternatives—chance, creationism and disinterested physical law. Seeing the world in teleological terms means that in addition to physical laws of the familiar kind we have to accommodate other laws of nature that are “biased toward the marvelous.” There is, in other words, “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness and the value that is inseparable from them.” “The process seems to be one of the Universe gradually waking up.” He found all this entirely congruent with his atheism, but “I conclude that something is missing from Darwinism.”19

  Nagel offers the view that there is a “cosmic predisposition” over and above the laws of physics, “without positive conviction.” He is simply trying to extend the boundaries of “what is not regarded as thinkable,” but adds that he is willing to bet “that the present and right-thinking consensus will come to be seen as laughable in a generation or two.”

  Mind and Cosmos is a short but breathtakingly ambitious work. Despite Nagel’s avowed atheism, his book received a warm reception from creationists and believers in the concept of intelligent design; the Discovery Institute, advocates of intelligent design, have approved his supposed “deconversion from Darwinism.” Orthodox scientists have been less appreciative, arguing that he has confused the fact that evolutionary theory is incomplete with the idea that it is false. Others point out that “epistemic humility”—the recognition that one could be wrong—is a hallmark of science; no one has been “browbeaten” into any sacrosanct view—it is simply that, so far, Darwinism has had the better of the argument.

  Yet others have confessed to being confused by Nagel’s notion of natural teleology in view of the fact, for example, that there are so many different forms of life on earth, and so many instances of extinction. Also, mindless creatures far outnumber sentient ones. Several evolved eyes and then lost them as they adapted to dark environments; several parasites, having begun their evolutionary careers as complex organisms, became simpler after taking up their parasitic lifestyles. How, these scientists have asked, can teleology account for any of this?

  Steven Pinker, the Harvard experimental psychologist and author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, has described Nagel’s book as a piece of “shoddy reasoning by a once-great thinker.” Others have argued that Nagel makes no attempt to back up empirically what is in effect an intuitive argument, and in that sense has contravened simple scientific (not to mention commonsensical) principles. They say that recent research, with which Nagel appears unfamiliar, points toward an “RNA world,” of a simple ribonucleic acid, where self-replicating molecules may have emerged—still accidentally, but much less accidentally than previously thought. And philosophers point out that values—ethics and morals, for example—are guides to behavior, not explanations for it. We should give up the idea (as other philosophers have done) that there are objective moral truths, applicable everywhere and in all circumstances.

  It is much too early to gauge the impact of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, but it is nonetheless notable—together with Paul Davies’s The Goldilocks Enigma, which argues for a “life principle” in the universe—as yet another example of what we might call the “what is missing?” genre in recent philosophy.

  THE UNSATISFIABILITY OF LIFE

  Imaginative and provocative as Mind and Cosmos is, however, from our point of view it is more instructive to return for a moment to The View from Nowhere, where Nagel says that we have to live not just within the predicament of being on the edge of language, but with the realization that natural selection does not explain everything.

  There are three possible routes out of the impasse he identifies. Rather, what he actually says is that there is no way out but there are “adjustments” we can make “to live with the conflict.” One, tried in the past, is to withdraw from the specifics of human life as much as possible, “minimize the area of one’s local contact with the world and concentrate on the universal”—contemplation, meditation, abandonment of worldly ambition—so that we achieve “a withering away of the ego.” He suggests this is a high price to pay for spiritual harmony. “The amputation of so much of oneself to secure the unequivocal affirmation of the rest seems a waste of consciousness.”

  The second adjustment is the opposite of the first: “a denial of the objective unimportance of our lives, which will justify full engagement from the objective standpoint.” This is in many ways the narcissist’s view; the extent to which it can fail was discussed earlier, when it was suggested that narcissists sometimes have an unrealistic appreciation of their own abilities. The objective world is there, and always will be, whether we like it or not.

  Nagel’s third adjustment is to accept that the dual vision—the coexistence of a subjective and an objective world—is part of our humanity, which means accepting that we cannot break free of the predicament—that is what being human, with consciousness and language, means. Objectivity transcends us, has a life of its own, is always changing, with implications for our subjective identity, including its limits.

  One of the ways this predicament can be eased, if not escaped entirely, says Nagel, is to live a moral life. In so doing we seek to live as individuals who affirm the equal worth of other individuals. “The most general effect of the objective stance ought to be a form of humility; the recognition t
hat you are no more important than you are, and the fact that something is of importance to you, or that it would be good or bad if you did or suffered something, is a fact of purely local significance.” We don’t have to be pious about it, he says: humility falls between nihilistic detachment and blind self-importance. We must try to avoid the familiar excesses of envy, vanity, conceit, competitiveness and pride. “It is possible to live a complete life of the kind one has been given without overvaluing it hopelessly.”

  To this he adds what he calls the “non-egocentric respect for the particular.” He is alluding here not just to the aesthetic response (though that is included too): “Particular things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self. This also helps explain why the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant. . . . It is hard to know whether one could sustain such an attitude consistently towards the elements of everyday life.”

  To repress either side—the subjective or the objective—impoverishes life, he concludes. “It is better to be simultaneously engaged and detached, and therefore absurd, for this is the opposite of self-denial and the result of full awareness.”20

  BELIEVING IS PUBLIC

  Richard Rorty, who in chapter 24 was extolling the merits of “old chestnut” poetry, agreed with Nagel that the aim of life is full awareness, but he was convinced that it can be achieved only via our relations with other people. “The candidate for the most praiseworthy human capacity,” he said, prefiguring Sam Harris and Matt Ridley, “is the ability to trust and co-operate with others.” We must abandon the search for something stable outside of us (such as deities or universal human nature) and that we think provides us with an independent criterion for judging. On the contrary, there are no unconditional, transcultural moral obligations, rooted in an unchanging, ahistorical human nature. Being Darwinian, he said, means accepting a world where the aim is to devise tools that help us have less pain and more pleasure. By this account, the benefits of space travel and modern astronomy “outweigh the advantages of Christian fundamentalism.”21