What’s new about the new atheists?
Damen Linker has a characteristically interesting post in which he extends his long-standing critique of the “new atheists” (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc). His argument is that the new atheists miss a distinction between what and good and what is true. Linker continues by making a distinction between the new atheists, who don’t deal with the possible downsides of the loss of religion, and the “catestrophic atheists” (chiefly Neitzsche) whose rejection of atheism came with a heavy dose of regret and personal struggle.
Linker clearly has sympathy for the catastrophic atheists because they show the proper level of disenchantment and confusion over losing their religion. Of the new atheists:
There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious.
Mightn’t it be the case that the great sense of loss and confusion experienced by the catastrophic atheists is not so severe as it once was? Linker seems to follow the flawed logic that because atheism was a difficult choice 150 years ago that it remains as difficult and wrenching a decision today. Further, there’s something almost nostalgic about the idea that God is so fundamental to the human psyche that atheists should be in throws of angst (or else they are hiding something). My reading of Dawkins’ The God Delusion reveals an author living a powerfully fulfilling life in science, not someone who is hiding his secret internal chaos.
-John
Related posts:
- Homo Religiosus
- Trouble in Asheville
- Strains of modern conservatism
- Linker, Sullivan, and torture (continued)
- Banning the burqa
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