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

by Watson, Peter

  Living, we should never forget, involves a performance that can be better, or worse. We value great art not just because the end product enhances our lives but also because the whole enterprise embodies a performance, “a rising to artistic challenge.” A human life well lived also embodies a performance, “a rising to the challenge of having a life to lead.” The final value of our lives is adverbial, not adjectival. It is the value of the performance, not anything that is left when the performance is subtracted. It is the value of a brilliant dance or dive when the memories have faded and the ripples died away. “Performance value is the value of a life.”32

  Value is not entirely about consequence. As Dworkin puts it, “Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians.)” If we did measure the value of life by its consequence, “all but a few lives would have no value and the great value of many others would have only accidental value (like carpenters who worked on Shakespeare’s Globe).”

  There are two principles governing the fundamental requirements of living well. The first is self-respect. “Each person must take his own life seriously; he must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity.” Collecting matchbook covers is not just wrong but silly—the choice of something trivial is not ethically reasonable. The second is the principle of opportunity. Every individual is responsible for identifying those opportunities that count as success in his own life through “a coherent narrative or style that he himself endorses.” Together the two principles offer a conception of human dignity: dignity requires self-respect and authenticity. Acts are wrong if they insult the dignity of others.

  Living well means not just designing a life as if any design will do, but “designing it in response to a judgment of ethical value.”33 Enjoyment is in most cases an epiphenomenon of the conviction that we are living as we should.

  All this poses problems for theocratic communities that impose their own closed ethical regime by coercion, which compromises their subjects’ authenticity. On the other hand, in liberal political communities, individuals who subject themselves to the ethical authority of their church do so voluntarily, unless their adherence is mechanical and plays no part in the rest of their lives.

  The idea that the universe houses some force “bigger than we are” is held by us all, Nagel included. Dworkin admits that even atheists may have some cosmic notion. But he says that the main ethical import of the “force larger than we are” idea, in a secular world, is not to provide a distinctive (religious) way of living but rather “to provide a defense against the frightening thought that any way we live is arbitrary.” This is, of course, the basis of the whole notion of the “absurd” that so taxed the existentialists and others. But Dworkin challenges this. Why, he asks, is it not as valuable to live up to the pointlessness of eternity, if the universe is pointless, as to live up to its purpose if it has one? For even if there is no eternal planner, “we are planners—mortal planners with a vivid sense of our own dignity and of good and bad lives, that we can create or endure. Why can we not find value in what we create? Why must value depend on physics?”34

  The wholly unexamined life, as the ancient philosophers warned us, is also a bad one. Some effective ethical conviction, “at least [being] sometimes engaged,” is essential to responsible living. You live badly if you do not try hard enough to make your life good. Just government is drawn from dignity and aims at dignity. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands. The meaning of life is dignity.

  THE BEAUTY OF MYSTERY AND THE MYSTERY OF BEAUTY

  In Religion without God,I Dworkin argues that the familiar stark divide between people of religion and people without it is too crude. This distinction leaves many people out in the cold, he says, but many who do not believe in a personal God or who reject the “inanity” of the biblical account of creation, for instance, nonetheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” It is this, he says, that leads them to “an inescapable responsibility” to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; and if they feel their lives are wasted, they suffer inconsolable regret. Religious atheism is not a contradiction in terms, because even atheists can feel “a sense of fundamentality,” that there are things in the universe that, as William James put it, “throw the last stone.”

  Life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty, Dworkin says, are the main ingredients of a religious attitude, irrespective of whether people believe in a personal God. When scientists confront the unimaginable vastness of space and the astounding complexity of atomic particles, they find the universe awe-inspiring and deserving “of a kind of emotional response that at least borders on trembling.” This recalls Nagel’s comment “existence is something tremendous.” Moreover, Dworkin adds, these are convictions that one cannot isolate from the rest of life.

  He suggests that some of the confusion we experience arises from the fact that the Abrahamic religions in particular have a “scientific” part (the Creation, the afterlife, the dialogue of prayer and judgment) and a “value” part, whereas the religious attitude depends on the full independence of value—the world of value is self-contained and self-certifying and quite distinct from the “scientific” part of the traditional monotheisms. He argues that we find it impossible not to believe the elementary truths of mathematics and, when we understand them, even the complex equations, we do not need any independent corroboration. We have this capacity but we do not know how we have it, and the religious attitude insists that we embrace our values in the same way. “I do not mean that value judgments are in the end only subjective. Our felt conviction that cruelty is wrong is a conviction that cruelty is really wrong: we cannot have that conviction without thinking that it is objectively true.” The fact that theodicy has produced no answers to evil that are even “remotely satisfying” is perhaps the strongest argument against the existence of a personal God (in this he agrees with Robert Nozick).

  And Dworkin believes that what he calls the “scientific” part of theistic religions—their claims about historical events, about causes and effects (miracles, for example), about how people should live, via ritual duties of worship, prayer, turning to Mecca and so on—can be discarded by nonbelievers without damaging the value part of religion, which determines ethics and morals. Whether traditionally religious or not, people “accept that nature is not just a matter of particles thrown together in a very long history but something of intrinsic wonder and beauty.”

  The “science” part of the traditional monotheisms cannot ground the value part, he insists, because they are conceptually independent. “Human life cannot have any kind of meaning or value just because a loving god exists. The universe cannot be intrinsically beautiful just because it was created to be beautiful. There is no direct bridge from any story about the creation of the firmament, or the heavens and earth, or the animals of the sea and the land, or the delights of Heaven, or the fires of Hell, or the parting of any sea or the raising of any dead, to the enduring value of friendship and family or the importance of charity or the sublimity of a sunset or the appropriateness of awe in the face of the universe or even a duty of reverence for a creator god.” The principle is this: one cannot support a value judgment—an ethical or moral or aesthetic claim—just by establishing some “scientific” fact about how the world was, is or will be. What divides godly and godless religion, he says, is the “science” of godly religion, but that is not as important as the faith in value that unites the two.

  What finally creates the religious attitude, Dworkin says, is aesthetic—that we find the universe beautiful—but how we can do so (because we have no extra-cosmic standards with which to compare it) is a mystery; and he agrees with Einstein (and, it should be said, with Wallace Stevens) that mystery is the greatest beauty.

  We feel that the explanation (o
f what is) has to end somewhere more fundamental, in a cascade of ever deeper reasons, but is this really the case? There is a beauty in the inevitability of mathematics, but mathematical solutions just end, without the need to go anywhere else, anywhere more fundamental. Is there a lesson in that? On this analogy, any activity in life—aesthetic, moral, ethical, scientific—can be an end in itself, with nothing further to be said. Liberty is one’s right to define one’s life and its end. There need be no more fundamental answer.

  In this argument, taken in conjunction with those in Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin is articulating an aesthetic meaning to life, that it should be beautiful morally and ethically and above all not trivial. His concern with the centrality of value overlaps with Thomas Nagel’s, but that is as far as the overlap goes. As indicated, on this Dworkin has more in common with Nozick.

  A SYNTHETIC UNITY HAS HELD US BACK

  Jürgen Habermas has led the way in a new kind of thinking. He coincides with Rorty, Dworkin and Hilary Putnam in arguing that we now inhabit a world of “intersubjective acceptability” so far as what we know is concerned—what Putnam calls “warranted assertability,” derived from science. Habermas says it is not that the multiplication of roles in modern life has increased our autonomy, but that we simply have more socially binding roles, and what is needed, if we are to lead fulfilling lives, is a concept of individuation “that captures the missing dimension of autonomy and the capacity to be oneself.” He identifies the crucial change as coming not with Nietzsche but with Rousseau, who said that we should not appeal to God for truth, but instead to the “unrestricted universal public.” There is no transcendental perspective, he asserted, but a plurality of perspectives. Progress comes from “unforced agreement in dialogue,” what Dewey called “the unforced flowers of life.”36

  But Habermas goes on to say two things more. First, we should think of ourselves as a “me” rather than an “I.” This captures the—what is for him—social and reflexive nature of individuality: that, whether or not we know it, or like it, we live surrounded by norms. Only by being aware of norms can we break out of them and achieve autonomy.

  Second, he argues that the fallibilism of science has been as important as its technological successes and its theoretical breakthroughs. It is the “procedural reasoning” of science that counts, the process by which understanding is built up by trial and error. This goes counter to the previous (religious) manner of living, which “crystallized around the theoretical attitude of one who immerses himself in the intuition of the cosmos.” The same question is posed again and again: “How are the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, related to each other?” The answer: “The cosmological idea plays the role of a methodological principle of completeness; it points to the goal of the systematic unity of all knowledge.”37 The triumph of the one over the many is, for Habermas, the most important aspect of metaphysical thinking, underpinning much of religion as well.

  Even idealism traced everything back to “the one,” he says, with the consequence that the metaphysical mind regarded “mere phenomena” as secondary. “Transcendental singulars introduced a synthetic unity into the pluralities of history, cultures and language”: that, he feels, held us back. Post-metaphysical thinking is an important step forward.38

  THE RATIONALITY OF RELIGION: A POST-SECULAR SOCIETY?

  In Between Naturalism and Religion, Habermas tackled the problems of what he called a “post-secular world.” He thought that archaic religious doctrines had been overtaken but that ideological polarization threatened to undermine civic cohesion across the globe, as the use of religion for political ends increased. He observed that religious traditions and faith communities have become more important since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the concomitant changes of 1989–90, and that it is around religious family law in particular that the problems congregate. He therefore felt that some plain speaking was needed in regard to relations between the religious and secular sectors in the modern state.

  On the one hand, reason must be detranscendentalized and the self-understanding of the constitutional state must rely on public natural reason, arguments equally accessible to all. Church and state must be separated, religious traditions must accept the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis religious questions and practices; we must accept that we have a duty of civility. More controversially, he stated that “people must not be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language (even when they cannot find ‘secular translations’ of them)”; and, no less controversial, that faith and reason are “two forms of dogmatism.”39

  Habermas then considered what most people found his most original argument: namely that, although the disagreements between secularists and religious believers “can never be solved at the cognitive level,” religions are far more rational than atheists think, and it is the responsibility of secularists to accept this [his italics]. “Today religious traditions perform the function of articulating an awareness of what is lacking or absent [in our lives]. They keep alive a sensitivity to failure and suffering. They rescue from oblivion the dimensions of our social and personal relations in which advances in cultural and social rationalization have caused utter devastation.”

  He then elaborated, arguing that concepts like autonomy and individuality, emancipation, solidarity and inspiration all developed under religious systems; that the deeds and words of prophets and saints are to be understood as edifying narratives to help us overcome the weaknesses of human nature; that revelation is to be understood merely as a concept that “shortens the route to the dissemination of rational truths”; that piety has the rational function of sustaining the conduct of the believer. Moreover, he believed that transcendence is a way of transposing the divine standpoint into a functionally equivalent inner-worldly perspective; that religions make truths accessible in doctrinal form that human beings could and ought to have arrived at [his italics]; that modernity and science should be understood as the outcome of a history of reason “of which the world religions are an integral part.”40

  He thought it worth making these points for two reasons. First, if different religions were to recognize that they had the same origin, it would make tolerance much easier. Second, because of the adjustments religious people have to make in a secular state, they bear “cognitive burdens” that secular citizens do not. So to even up the score, so to speak, he proposed that if secularists accept that we are in a post-secular society, then they, too, must accept some cognitive burdens: “In line with the standards of an enlightenment endowed with a critical awareness of its own limits, the secular citizens [must come to] understand their non-agreement with religious conceptions as a disagreement that it is reasonable to expect [his italics].” Religious and secular citizens must undergo complementary learning processes.

  Habermas wasn’t so unworldly as to think that all this would come about easily. He noted—as Dworkin noted, as Freud devoted a career to noting—that “the sources of sensuousness escape the understanding,” and that the secular consciousness would always find it easier to be neutral. “For the religious, other ways of life are not merely different but mistaken. To be made to understand is felt as an imposition.” Therefore, there will always be an asymmetry as regards the burdens borne by believers and by unbelievers. We should seek to minimize them in the knowledge they can’t be removed entirely.41 II

  • • •

  Finally, we return to where we came in, to Habermas’s An Awareness of What Is Missing. This book was a collaboration with Jesuits from German universities, who were responding to the essay from which the book took its title. In it, Habermas repeated many of his views, concluding—more vigorously than before—that what is missing now is “solidarity.” We have not mastered the dynamics of modernity, he insisted, and most of us feel that it is “spinning out of control.” Religion cannot be characterized simply as irrational; reason has its limits; and the “scientistic” belief that scienc
e will give us a new self-understanding is, moreover, bad philosophy. The modern world encourages a retreat into the private domain but this is, for the most part, “awkward and prickly.” Secular morality is not embedded in communal practices, and we lack any “impulse to solidarity.”42

  Is there something disappointing in this conclusion? Is it true that secular morality is not embedded in communal practices? Certainly, such contemporary minds as Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Nozick and Dworkin agree in foregrounding ever more inclusive communities. Recent developments in the law—which are practices of a sort—reflect this impulse. The cognitive divisions, as Habermas or Dworkin would put it, between secular and religious people are here to stay, and are conceivably ineradicable. Those differences have not as yet led to conflicts of the kind that we see routinely between religious groups across the world.

  And maybe there is a lesson here, one that Habermas has not written about. He is probably right in saying that the secular bear less of a cognitive burden in living in modern society than do the religious. And that shows in their tolerance. In modern societies, it is easier—less of a burden—to be secular than to be religious.

  Among other things, that is the collective achievement of the figures introduced in this book. What does it tell us?

  * * *

  I. This had not appeared in book form as The Age of Atheists went to press, but several long extracts had appeared, on which this discussion is based.35

  II. In 2012, the British writer Alain de Botton published a popular version of this argument in Religion for Atheists, where he accepted the proposition that religious practices are grounded in reason and speculated on how some of these practices might be “updated.” For example, he thought we might have “Agape” restaurants, where guests could not sit with their friends but would be made to meet new people. Taking their seats, they would find a guidebook in front of them, “laying out the rules for how to behave at meals.” “The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. . . . Thanks to the Agape restaurant our fear of strangers would recede.” Another suggestion was for quarterly “Days of Atonement,” on which it would become institutionalized for people to apologize for their mistakes over the previous weeks, and scores would be settled and not allowed to fester. A third idea was an annual night off from our spouses, when everyone would be allowed “to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been doing something similar, both sides knowing that it was nothing personal.” De Botton’s ideas were either, as one critic put it, just plain “silly,” or else heroic. Possibly both.43