The Dogmatic Atheists of My Youth

After posting the item on the website To the Source, I started pondering the skepticist dogmatism of Dawkins, Harris, and their many peers, and remembering how little this kind of thing moved me as a secular, though semi- or sporadically-churched, young man. It was the secularist's dogmatism that put me off, and gave me some sympathy for the religious, as odd as I found them.

When the secularist declared that God did not exist or that a particular belief was incredible, I always wondered how they could be so sure. Friends and teachers would sweep away the supernatural with all the confidence of the Fundamentalists they laughed at, and with fewer arguments than the Fundamentalists offered. Beyond that old staple, the problem of evil, that is.

They would declare, for example, that Christianity was a myth based on the ridiculous claim that a man rose from the dead. When you're dead, you're dead. But since lesser men than we can't live with this reality, they invent the idea of an eternal paradise, and in the first century this wish was attached to a particularly popular preacher and was developed into what we know as Christianity.

This seemed to me likely, but still, I always wondered, how could they know? How could they be so sure that they knew the universe so intimately that they could rule out life after death? How could they know that the idea of an Incarnation was intrinsically impossible? How could they be so confident that the religious didn't sense something they didn't sense, like the possibility that we hope for a next world because we were made for that world?

I saw, as did many of my friends, that if God existed, he might not make himself known in the ways they required. How could we predict what God would offer us and why? If he existed, he didn't come to you on your terms. He came on his, and he might prove somewhat indifferent to your demands.

And even then I saw that he might make himself known in ways the secularist would refuse to see, and that the atheist may have made himself unable to see the evidence, no matter how clear it is. I had no confidence that my atheist friends and teachers wanted to meet God, because God was likely to prove excessively disruptive. This insight was made easier by the fact that some of these confident atheists were unsatisfactory people.

I'm sure I've put this more coherently than I did as a sixteen-year-old, but I did always think like this when I heard atheists speak about religion. My first response was always, "But how do you know?" Now I thank God for the gift of agnosticism in the face of confident atheism, because it left me open to the force of the Christian message when I met it lived out by Christians who were no fools.

I still see the world like this, though an agnostic temper of mind is no barrier to being a convinced, and yea, a dogmatic, Christian. Here is something I wrote a few years ago, dealing with the same problem, but as a Christian: Close Your Mind, from the October 2000 issue.

Comments

[Gene Godbold]

I recommend David B. Hart's skewering of Daniel Dennett's book (that seeks to debunk "religion") in the latest issue of First Things. It is delicious from beginning to end.

[Peyton Reed]

Re. Dominic's comment above: It is not for nothing that the adversary is identified in Genesis 3 as a serpent. The scene in C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, after the Prince is freed but has not yet escaped, comes vividly to mind. The Lady in Green weaves a spell, broken finally by the drastic action of the Marshwiggle. The situation gets quite nasty, and the Lady becomes the green snake that she is.

Uncharitable thoughts flood my mind about the Presiding Bishop of "The Church formerly known as ECUSA."

[Reid]

Well said! What a great article! I especially appreciate the comment being able to build a bookshelf even though unified field theory remains elusive. As a mathematician I understand the principle of approximating a number that I cannot calculate exactly. My approximation is not the truth, but I can often put limits -- sometimes quite small ones -- on how bad the error may be. There may be genuine debate about whether normal body temperature is 98.2 F or 98.6 F, but there is none about whether 104 F constitutes a serious fever. We must distinguish between imperfect knowledge and total ignorance.

It strikes me -- and I suppose you really say it in the article -- that the proper attitude for Christians is not open-mindedness but humility. The open-minded man theoretically (but, as you note, not actually) considers everything open for consideration. He insists, quite literally, that nothing is sacred, nothing is off-limits. Civilized men should be able to discuss every topic civilly, regardless of what emotional associations the topics evoke in the "ignorant." This is, to our harm, the view that infests academia. The humble man knows that some matters are sacred, that some topics are truly unfit for discussion (e.g., whether to allow the slaughter of the unborn), even if his own understanding of them is often imperfect and sometimes plain wrong. The wise man of Proverbs lives in the fear of the Lord even while he readily accepts correction about what the fear of the Lord is.

[Tony Esolen]

Excellent post, David. You remind me of a passel of political scientists at my school, who consider themselves "empiricists" ("empirics" I should rather say), because they admit nothing for discussion other than what can be quantified, by means of polling, demographics, and so forth. Naturally, their own political predilections do not fall under that ban; but everything else human does. Art, for instance, is not a worthy field of study, and as for religion, it is simply irrational and there is no point arguing one way or the other about it. (They have moderated their rhetoric somewhat, ever since a fellow liberal in their department -- not a leftist, but a genuine liberal -- read Augustine's Confessions several years running and up and got himself baptized.)

My take on their "empiricism" is that they're not empirical enough. They exclude from their vision all kinds of evidence regarding human behavior. They're also not skeptical enough. It's the Chestertonian trap, isn't it? You never meet a worse dogmatist than is a self-styled skeptic. He hasn't argued his way to that epistemological conclusion -- if you could do that, you would not be a skeptic. You might be a Catholic, or a Flat Earth Society member, or a devotee of the divine Gaia, but as soon as you say that man can know certain things, you have parted company with the skeptic. And in my experience, almost all atheists are just skeptics, only more unpleasant, because the atheism is streaked with aggression and vengefulness.

[Ariel]

I like your thoughts on the "fundamentalist" certainty innate to convinced atheism. "But how do you know?" will continue to be a very pertinent question...

[Judy Warner]

I think most atheists are such because of their emotions, not because of rational argument. There are more secularists now not because more people have accepted false arguments, but because it is more fashionable and less reprehensible in our society. This is not to minimize the importance of good arguments. But fewer people all the time are susceptible to arguments, since the schools do not teach that this is important, and learning seems to be more and more an emotional experience. In any case, people -- always, not just nowadays -- are moved more by stories and emotional experiences than by intellect. This may be unfortunate, but it's true. I myself was "talked" out of my atheism by C.S. Lewis's fiction, not his nonfiction.

Given this state of affairs, I think the ACLU and its secularist allies are very clever in trying to remove all symbols and emotional reminders of religion from our public life. A nativity scene has religious power; a Christmas tree does not. (Well, maybe nowadays it does, when Christmas trees are sometimes a symbol of last-ditch resistance to secular hegemony.) The Ten Commandments, carved in stone in the town square, call up an image of Moses, make people remember God's word, give us a sense of being a nation under God. Prayers at graduation, church bells in a town -- these and similar things pull people in to a common understanding -- and these are the things that the secularists hate and fear.

[Caryl Johnston]

Hi David Mills-Something you might like - Theodore Dalrymple commenting on Richard Dawkins. From my blog, "Atheism Lite":

I’m a little baffled by Theodore Dalrymple’s piece, "Let’s Be Rational,"--- but mainly because there wasn't much to get baffled about. It is apparent that Mr. Dalrymple is a much nicer atheist than Richard Dawkins, but on the other hand Mr. Dawkins is much more what you’d expect an atheist to be: presumptuous, arrogant, overweening, self-infatuated, foolish and vain. Mr. Dal is none of these things. On the contrary, he is a gentleman with a real sense for ethics and good manners, and can put in a kind word for religion, even acknowledging its good side ("Religion [is] useful…from the point of view of improving human behavior and keeping it lawful.") Rather like Gibbon, to whom he alludes in his piece, Mr. Dal finds no inner impulse to believe in it, even from the standpoint of the moral and civilizational ruin that he has been chronicling so well these last few years. More...
http://from-the-catacombs.blogspot.com/2006/12/atheism-lite.html