05.26.09

Gray reviews ‘God Is Back’

Posted in atheism, Booknotes, Science & Religion, secularism at 5:23 pm by nemo

Faith in the future
John Gray
Published 21 May 2009

Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason to assume that the American religious model will prevail

We have posted on this essay/review of John Gray several times, but it keeps drawing one back, in part because it is almost surreal to read it. Almost scary. Both sides are so far from any sense that it seems we will suffer the worst case, lose religion and lose modernity both.

Evangelicals aren’t the only ones, despite Gray’s framing of the question, who wish to define modernity in association with atheism. The New Atheists seem to propose as much.
But such an equation is complete nonsense, and scientists/Darwkins fans who take such a stance should be wary of what they propose. And Evangelicals need to realize that they are as modern as anyone else.
Premodern Christianity is something they wouldn’t like, because they have already become used to a form of Christianity that never existed prior to modernity.
Please keep in mind that until modern times the public was not allowed to read the Bible. One of the great initial moments of modernity was the translation of the Bible into vulgate languages. The King James Bible, remember? It was a revolutionary text. And the Catholics of that era thought of Protestants the way people on Wall Street think of bolsheviks. A century and a half of bloody battle went into establishing the right to read the Bible.
In 1648 the fight stops and culture becomes secular, which means that the war over theocracy is finished. Noone imagined that religion was finished.

The ahistorical nature of this ‘debate’ between New Atheists and traditionalists is a form of idiocy.
Modernity arose as a ‘secular’ culture in the sense that religion became an individual rather than a theocratic matter. Thus religion’s place in civil society as a pluralistic entity is secure.
That does not mean that we have to let religion off the hook. From Biblical criticism to the findings of Old Testament archaeology new knowledge is forcing the issue of religious renewal. Secularists are probably right that culture is moving past Christianity, despite renewed resurgence in the last generation (scales of one generation can be misleading). The reason is that the Biblical religion simply can’t work for people any more. That is not an argument for atheism, or anti-religion, but a simple statement of fact about Christianity. If we look at the archaeology of the Old Testament, the Bible is off by a mile. A transitional period will obviously occur wherein traditionalists will attempt to produce ‘symbolic’ interpretations of the remnants, but in the end that strategy won’t work. Maybe in another century the passage will be complete.
We can see that ‘new religions’ by the dozen are coming into existence, none of them so far of much solidity: the New Age movement, or movements, for example.
We can hardly predict the future.
Atheists certainly have a place here, but they need to understand their position. Almost the entire transition to modernity was created by men who were in some form Christian, with clear exceptions like Hobbes, perhaps, and borderline cases like Jefferson being the non-exception that proves the rule. The appearance of a few proponents of atheism in the Enlightenment is therefore a form of dialectical balance, not a defining characteristic.
This is not an argument for theism.
Then suddenly in the nineteenth century, after the foundations of modernity are laid, a new brand of atheism, scientism comes into being claiming the whole Enlightenment.
The confusion arises because it seems to some as if modernity started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the birth of scientism, the triumph of materialism (in the last decades before quantum mechanics), and the by then more common atheism. But that is a false definition of modernity.
This is not to deny atheism its place in modernity! But atheists have spoiled their own case, in part because a combination of scientism, Darwinism, and materialistic pre-quantum fundamentalism has generated three strikes and you’re out. Actually you are not out, but the impoverished culture of atheism ends up forcing a resurgence of religion.

The transition to the modern period begins in the sixteenth century, starts to become clear in the seventeenth, and climaxes in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century is then the beginning of the modern period. And a lot of people appear who seem intent on fucking up modernity. One example being the extreme imblance of the proponents of scientism. Or Darwinism. Or, indeed, atheism, with fundamentalists, thoroughly modern types, not far behind.

In all fairness, the position of atheism, although a latecomer in the modern transition, is one way to recreate modernity free of much of the deadweight of the past. But so far the efforts of atheists have been pitiful.

Atheists who attack religion fail to see that modernity is actually the first time in history that a real ‘religion’ is possible, because it founds the freedom required, autonomy in the sense of Kant, to be ‘religious’, instead of the robot created by passive faith in ‘divinity’, that phantom created by priesthoods. The search for ‘real god’ (in the classic cliche) is probably easier for an atheist than for the adherents of dogmatic monotheism.

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