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

by Watson, Peter

  Truth is not the goal of inquiry, whatever the churches or secular scholarship tell us. “The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better.” The Enlightenment was mistaken when it replaced the idea of supernatural guidance with the idea of a “quasi-divine” faculty called “reason.” Reason involves choice and choice is invariably a compromise between competing goods, not between absolute right and absolute wrong; and the same applies to moral struggle. Likewise, the struggle for existence—there is no invisible tribunal of reason, just as there is no God. In this way we must hope that the human race will gradually come together as a community—this will be an evolutionary achievement, with consequences. We like to talk about our responsibility to truth or reason, but this must now be replaced by our responsibility to our fellow human beings.

  Rorty believed that there has been, or is or ought to be, a paradigm shift from metaphysics to what he called “weak thought.” Whereas the metaphysical tradition has been dominated by the idea that there is something non-human that human beings should try to live up to, something grand and all-encompassing that provides the largest possible framework for discourse, “weak thought” acknowledges its limitations and “just wants to make finite little changes,” piecemeal reformulations rather than intellectual revolutions. Instead of claiming that their ideas stem from something profound, advocates of “weak thought” “put forward their ideas as suggestions that might be of use for certain particular purposes.”

  The way to regard religion is as a “habit of action,” from which it follows that our principal concern must always be the extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the needs of others—this is what matters, rather than the extent to which religion gets something right. “Our obligation to be rational is exhausted by our obligation to take account of other people’s doubts and objections to our beliefs.” The truth is not some absolute but, rather, “what would be better for us to believe.” The religious believer has a right to his or her faith only insofar as it does not conflict with his or her intellectual responsibilities. Believers’ need to justify their beliefs arises only when their habits of action interfere with the fulfillment of others’ needs. This means that religion is inevitably privatized. If a private relationship with God is not accompanied by claims to knowledge of the divine will, there may be no conflict between religion and utilitarian ethics. But there is a duty not to believe without evidence: “A belief accepted without evidence is a stolen pleasure.”22

  That said, there is no way that a religious person can claim the right to believe as part of an overall right to privacy—because believing is inherently a public project: “All language-users are in it together.” We all have the responsibility, Rorty says, not to believe anything that cannot be justified to the rest of us. “To be rational is to submit one’s beliefs—all one’s beliefs—to one’s peers.” Other, non-cognitive states—such as desires and hopes—can be held without evidence, but belief cannot.

  Whereas science gives us the ability to predict and control, religion holds up before us a larger hope, something to live for (Rorty’s words). “To ask which of the two accounts of the universe is true may be as pointless as asking: Is the carpenter’s or the particle physicist’s account of tables the true one? Neither needs to be answered if they can keep out of each other’s way.” Moreover, people have a right to faith, just as they have a right to fall in love, to marry in haste and to persist in love despite endless sorrow and disappointment.

  Scientific realism and religious fundamentalism, Rorty contends, are products of the same “urge,” the attempt to convince people that they have a duty to develop what Bernard Williams calls “an absolute conception of reality.” But, claims Rorty, both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are “private projects which have got out of hand,” having become attempts to make one’s own private way of giving meaning to one’s own life obligatory for the general public.

  The contemporary pragmatist philosophy of religion, therefore, must make a sharp distinction between faith and belief. Rorty argues that Tillichians strive not toward some elaborate creed or doctrine, not to produce any specific habit of action, but rather “to make the sort of difference to a human life which is made by the presence or absence of love.” (Echoes here of Robert Musil’s “other condition.”) He draws a parallel between Tillich’s religion and being in love with someone the rest of us can’t love. “We do not mock a mother who loves her psychopathic child, [William] James said, on the same basis we should not mock people who say ‘the best things are the more eternal things.’”23

  Rorty ends up with a “faith” in the future possibilities of moral humans. “I shall call this fuzzy overlap of faith, hope and love ‘romance.’” Our insistence that some or all mortal humans can be far more than they have yet become is what counts; what matters is the insistence itself, the romance, “the ability to experience overpowering hope, or faith, or love etc.” What is distinctive about this “overpowering” state is that it “carries us beyond argument, beyond presently used language. It thereby carries us beyond the imagination of the present age of the world.” At one point in our history, he says, to be religious and to be imaginative were the same thing. But things are different now, because of human beings’ success (however slow at times) in making their lives and their world less wretched. It is non-religious forms of inspiration that have brought us to this point.

  In the end, Rorty feels, democracy has had more to do with the demise of religion than has science (though the way science operates is of course itself a form of democracy). “Democracies contain people who retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of life, about the path to private perfection.” And he returns to his hero, John Dewey. “The core of Dewey’s thought was an insistence that nothing—not the Will of God, not the Intrinsic Nature of Reality, not the Moral Law—can take precedence over the result of agreement freely reached by members of a democratic community.”

  Rorty says that Habermas’s idea of communicative reason—that reason emerges from communication between people and is like a conversation, not something laid down logically “out there” somewhere—rightly lowers our sights from the “unconditional above” to the communities around us. Once that happens, other things come into view—progress, for instance. Progress, as Rorty defines it, is in fact nothing more than an idea absurd to one generation that becomes common sense to the next. In any case, we shall never be “purified” or perfected because we can never do more than tinker with ourselves. Which in turn sabotages the idea of redemption and redemptive truth, the need to fit everything into a single context, the true realm beyond appearances. For there is no one true realm—as Harold Bloom said, the point of reading a great many books is to realize that there is an infinity of viewpoints, all more or less equally valid.24

  Rorty observed that the question “Is it true?” was being replaced by “What’s new?” and that worked for him because “A life not lived close to these limits is not worth living.” The aim of life is the enlargement of the self; by our joint efforts more and more ways of being human are becoming available. “Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal, but of surpassing the past. Increased knowledge is not an increased access to the Real, but an increased ability to do things, to make possible richer and fuller lives. . . . We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative re-description will become pointless. . . . Men should walk as prophecies of the next age, rather than in the fear of God or in the light of reason.”25

  WHY DO WHAT IS RIGHT?

  The Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002, believed that philosophy needed to take account of recent scientific developments. In the three books he was most proud of—Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), The Examined Life (1989) and Invariances (2001)—he drew on relativity, q
uantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and game theory to arrive at his own ethical system. He thought that ethics had been generated by evolution, the “core” of ethical belief being the coordination of activity for mutual benefit. But unlike other evolutionary ethicists, if we can call them that, he believed there are four layers of ethics.

  The first layer is the ethic of respect: that is, the rules and principles respecting another person’s life and autonomy and restricting interference with another person’s domain of choice. The second level is the ethic of responsiveness, which “mandates acting in a way that is responsive to people’s value, enhancing and supporting it, and enabling it to flourish.” Next comes the ethic of caring, which mandates “non-harm, ahimsa and love to all people, perhaps to all living creatures.” The last he terms the ethic of light, which encompasses the dimensions of truth, beauty, goodness and holiness: “Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus, along with various less-known rishis, tzaddiks, saints and sages point the way.” His view was that only the first level is mandatory, the only one that societies should compel, and that the others are a matter of choice and personal development.26

  He also tackled another question that has taxed scientists and others: namely, why has it been so difficult for psychologists to formulate an accurate predictive theory of human behavior? Why have psychologists been unable to account for more than 50 percent of the variance in human behavior?

  His answer lies in the fact that a major cause of the explosion in the size of the human brain “was the need of our ancestors to anticipate and counter the actions of reasonably intelligent conspecifics in situations of conflict of interest, when those others were also trying to anticipate and counter actions. . . . Survival of the fittest led to survival of the brainiest.” In such circumstances violence would sometimes have been needed, but—surprisingly—unpredictability, even irrationality, would have paid off at other times. We would have learned to veil our behavior, to behave in non-linear ways, so as to disguise our motives. By this account, unpredictability would have had a biological function and would have led to more complex behavior. Breaking from the norm can sometimes be exactly what is needed. Self-awareness is necessary for ethical behavior, but from time to time non-ethical behavior is a successful adaptive strategy.

  Why this is of particular interest to us is that such behavior, unpredictable and complex, may well be where our ability to do higher mathematics and abstract cosmology comes from. The argument of biologists like E. O. Wilson and philosophers like Thomas Nagel—that this kind of behavior cannot have evolved because it confers no evolutionary advantage—begins to be addressed by these arguments of Nozick’s.27 As we saw, Nagel thought it was at the root of the dilemma we feel about our position in the cosmos.

  In The Examined Life, Nozick makes a partial return to Socrates, who according to Plato made the well-known statement “The unexamined life isn’t worth living” at his trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens in 399 B.C. And Nozick had the interesting idea of considering what an examined life would be now (1989). He wrote as a philosopher but in everyday, non-technical language—in the form of “meditations”—tackling the questions that he thought every reader would want to ask: What would immortality be like and what would be its point? Why isn’t happiness the only thing that matters? Are Eastern doctrines of enlightenment valid? What has gone askew when a person cares mainly about personal wealth and power? Can a religious person explain why God allows evil to exist? What is especially valuable in the way romantic love alters a person?28

  The choice of questions he thought important, as a philosopher and as an individual, is perhaps as interesting as are the answers, together with the aspects of life he thought worth meditating about: dying; parents and children; creating; the nature of God and the nature of faith; the holiness of everyday life; sexuality; being in love; happiness; focus; when do we feel most real? when do you feel most yourself? our stance toward life; what is importance and what is important? theological explanations.

  He points out that to live an examined life is to make a self-portrait, that the activities of a life are “infused” with examination, not just affected by it, and their character is also different when permeated by the results of concentrated reflection. There are three types of happiness: being happy that something or other is the case; feeling that your life is good now; being satisfied with your life as a whole. But happiness is only a small part of the interesting story, and there is no benchmark out there—we have to set one for ourselves.

  He agrees with Nagel that we all have two viewpoints, our own and “that of the universe,” but that neither is more real. “The realm of reality is not the same as what exists. The greater the reality a feature has, the more weight it has in our identity.” He argues that a properly lived life involves giving everything its proper due, and he invites us to think of reality as a score where the maximum is 1. “This is what poets and artists bring us—the immense and unsuspected reality of a small thing. Everything has its ‘own patient entityhood.’” We should live proportionally and give everything its due.29

  To seek to give life meaning, he says, is to seek to transcend the limits of one’s individual life, achieving an enlarged identity. “If we go beyond our boundaries a regress is launched. Religion used to be a stopping place for this regress, for questions about meaning, by speaking of an infinite being, which was not properly seen as limited.” The question of limits is all-important, for us and for God. For Nozick the central problem is the question of the existence of evil and whether God can be omniscient, omnipotent and good. As he puts it, God cannot proceed “merrily” along—this question must be answered, and is all the more urgent now because the Holocaust was a “rift” in the universe. With the Holocaust, humanity has desanctified itself. God, he says, cannot be detached; we must have a two-way relation with him, whatever the Jewish philosophers say. For him, the Holocaust “shut the door that Christ opened. In this sense the Christian era has closed.”

  His final word: “We must become a vehicle for truth, beauty, goodness and holiness, adding our own characteristic bit to reality’s eternal processes. The wanting of nothing else, along with its attendant emotion, is . . . what constitutes happiness and joy.”30

  THE DUTY TO LIVE RESPONSIBLY

  The philosopher who many other philosophers defer to, or refer to most, or whose ideas they take as their starting-off point, is Ronald Dworkin, Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, until his death in 2013. Dworkin was, at one stage, clerk to the exotically named Judge Learned Hand, the most quoted judge in U.S. legal history, so he had an excellent pedigree to justify his eminence, as well as a number of books on the evolving law of human rights. In Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), his argument culminated in a magisterial account of how we are to live now. In Religion without God (2013), he advanced the argument that the term “religious atheist” is not an oxymoron.

  His basic premise in Justice for Hedgehogs was that ethical value and moral value depend on each other, and he offered this as a creed—they support a consistent way to live. But this depends on two things that come first: we must cherish both our dignity and our self-respect. “The only value we can find living in the foothills of death is adverbial value. We must find the value of living—the meaning of life—in living well, just as we find value in loving or painting or writing or singing or diving well. . . . There is no other enduring value or meaning in our lives, but that is value and meaning enough. Dignity and self-respect are indispensable conditions of living well [italics added].”31

  He accepted what the ancients said when they commanded us to seek “happiness” not as episodic glows of pleasure, but as the fulfillment of a successful life conceived as a whole. “Our existence precedes essence [as the existentialists said] because we are responsible for the latter”; and he deferred to Nietzsche as the most influent
ial figure in this tradition, who said, “The only real imperative of life is living—the creation and affirmation of a human life as a singular and wonderful creative act.”

  Dworkin thought that one of the boons of science has been that the widespread agreement over phenomena has given us confidence that there is truth to be had. The linearity of science is also a comfort in the sense that new ideas are built on firm ground. But once we accept the crucial distinction between ethics and morals, he thought, truth is as possible in law as it is in science. Moral standards prescribe how we ought to treat others; ethical standards how we ought to live ourselves. We must distinguish between living well and having a good life. “Living well means striving to create a good life, but only subject to certain constraints essential to human dignity. . . . Living well means creating a life that is not simply pleasurable but good in that critical way.”

  Responsibility to whom? he asks. His answer: We are charged to live well by the bare fact of our existence as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead. “It is important that we live well; not important just to us or to anyone else, but just important.” An illustration: a person who leads a fairly humdrum conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, who is merely “marking time” until he goes to his grave, has not had a good life, “even if he thinks he has” and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had. For Dworkin, “He has failed in his responsibility for living.”