More from Gray, paraphrased from
What Scares the New Atheists:
There are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values.
(The Soviet State was founded on an atheist position, declared itself to be at the forefront of science, and was supremely illiberal. National Socialism provided a scientific foundation for recial suprematicism. Scientific enlightenment in the post-war US saw the widescale practice of eugenics and lobotomisation.)
The New Atheism however, seeks to assert just that.
There is an intrinsic assumption that the modern west is the high point of human development. The missionary atheism of the NA movement whips up a populist fervour to cover the unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the New Atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.
Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist and author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004) and The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral Values (2010), was among the first to asset this belief. He wants a “scientific morality”, taking for granted that what he calls a “science of good and evil” cannot be other than liberal in content. (Not everyone will agree with Harris’s account of liberal values, which appears to sanction the practice of torture: “Given what many believe are the exigencies of our war on terrorism,” he wrote in 2004, “the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary.”)
As society becomes ever more reliant on science, the assumption goes, religion will decline. The grand march of secular reason will marginalise religion, making it no more important than a personal hobby or a favour for a particular ethnic cuisine. This is what David Bentley Hart refers to as 'boutique religion', lifestyles options chosen from the buffet of the belief pick-n-mix. It's a subjective spirituality, and it's cultural and ephemeral, shaped by fads and fashions.
The resurgence of religion is a worldwide development. Russian Orthodoxy is stronger than it has been for over a century, while China is the scene of a reawakening of its indigenous faiths and of underground movements that could make it the largest Christian country in the world by the end of this century. Despite tentative shifts in opinion that have been hailed as evidence it is becoming less pious, the US remains massively and pervasively religious – it’s inconceivable that a professed unbeliever could become president, for example.
Those who assert that science can bridge fact and value assert the unprovable, it's an act of faith. There is no reason to think science can determine human values. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science.
In fact, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism.
It was the ancient Greeks' mystical faith in reason — The Good — that has shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged.
To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism. A liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism. The belief that the human species is a moral agent struggling to realise its inherent possibilities is a narrative of redemption and a hollowed-out version of, for them, a theistic myth. The idea that the human species is striving to achieve any purpose or goal – a universal state of freedom or justice, say – presupposes a pre-Darwinian, teleological way of thinking that has no place in science. Empirically speaking, there is no such collective human agent, only different human beings with conflicting goals and values. If you think of morality in scientific terms, as part of the behaviour of the human animal, you find that humans don’t live according to iterations of a single universal code. Instead, they have fashioned many ways of life. A plurality of moralities is as natural for the human animal as the variety of languages.
Anyone who wants their values secured by something beyond the capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring values.
Humans are like other animals in having a definite nature, which shapes their experiences whether they like it or not. No one benefits from being tortured or persecuted. Being chronically poor is rarely, if ever, a positive experience (although some would claim so). Being at risk of violent death is bad for human beings whatever their culture. Such truisms are manifold. Universal human values can be understood as something like moral facts, marking out 'goods' and 'evils' that are generically human. Using these universal values, it may be possible to define a minimum standard of civilised life that every society should meet; but this minimum won’t be the liberal values of the present time turned into universal principles.
The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and other minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any different in future.
The modern western liberal wonders how could all of humankind not want to be as we imagine ourselves to be? To suggest that large numbers hate and despise values such as toleration and personal autonomy is, for many people nowadays, an intolerable slur on the species. This is, in fact, the quintessential illusion of the ruling liberalism. It is peaceful coexistence and the practice of toleration that are exceptional. Nothing upsets a liberal like a Moslem woman who chooses to wear a hjab.
Liberal societies are well worth defending. But there is no reason for thinking these societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular civilisation of the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
The answer that is often given is that religion is implicated in many human evils. Of course this is true. Among other things, Christianity brought with it a type of sexual repression unknown in pagan times. Other religions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable human animal. Like religion at its worst, contemporary atheism feeds the fantasy that human life can be remade by a conversion experience – in this case, conversion to unbelief.
Evangelical atheists were, are, and always will be missionaries for their own cultural values. An earlier generation promoted racial prejudice as a scientific truth, The current NA aims to give contemporary liberalism a similar illusory basis in science. What today’s freethinkers want is freedom from doubt, but having shucked off a 'blind faith' in what they see as bad religion, they've replaced it with a 'blind faith' in bad science.
