The Secular Outlook

1 Atheism, Agnosticism, and Theism

Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

(Derek Parfit, 1984)1

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

(Micah 6:8)

Let us start with what people most often associate with "the secular outlook." If with anything at all, they associate it with atheism. But what is atheism? Sometimes atheism is presented as a coherent worldview, encompassing all the other traditions supposedly associated with the secular outlook. On this basis the Christian theologian and physicist Alister McGrath (1953- ) writes: "Atheism is the religion of the autonomous and rational human being, who believes that reason is able to uncover and express the deepest truths of the universe, from the mechanics of the rising sun to the nature and final destiny of humanity."2 The first thing that strikes us is that atheism is presented here as a "religion." A second point that is remarkable is that McGrath depicts as "atheism" beliefs that most people would associate with "rationalism." In clarifying his definition the author even introduces other elements, such as optimism. Atheism, so McGrath writes, "was a powerful, self-confident, and aggressive worldview. Possessed of a boundless confidence, it proclaimed that the world could be fully understood and subsequently mastered."3 Often these definitions seem animated by an aversion to the denial of God. This also seems true in the case of McGrath. McGrath wrote a history of atheism based on a claim that its significance was declining.

A similar thesis is defended by the prolific Catholic historian Paul Johnson (1928- ). "Atheism as a positive set of beliefs, including a code of moral behavior, has failed to flourish," Johnson writes.4 It may be that fewer and fewer people in Western countries practice religion, Johnson tells us, but the number of those prepared to state their disbelief in God openly and specifically is extremely small. There is only a small minority that does that, whose numbers are probably no greater today than in the time of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), who was expelled from Oxford University for his atheism. Shelley's Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813) was a forceful attack on organized religion. It takes the form of a dream-vision allegory in which the fairy Queen Mab takes the mortal maiden Ianthe on an extraterrestrial excursion in order to show her the past, present, and future states of the human world. According to Shelley, the past is irrational. It is the record of one mistake after another. The present is irreversibly corrupted by kings, priests, and statesmen. But the future will be a supremely glorious affair.5 Several atheistic passages were removed from the first edition, but they were restored in the second. The poem's publisher, Edward Moxon (1801-1858), was prosecuted and convicted of blasphemous libel. In the 1820s the British intellectual and bookseller Richard Carlile (1790-1843) issued a new edition of the poem.

That the development of atheism is still at the same stage as Shelley left it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Paul Johnson contended in 1996, is not very convincing given the vast quantity of literature that has appeared on atheism recently. But maybe this has to do with the fact that it is far from clear what Johnson means when he uses the term "atheism."

More attention is given to this matter in monographs explicitly devoted to the subject. According to Julian Baggini (1968- ) atheism is "extremely simple to define," because "it is the belief that there is no God or gods."6

In other definitions atheism is contrasted with theism. Robin Le Poidevin (1962- ) writes: "An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe rather than one who simply lives life without reference to such a being. A theist is one who asserts the existence of such a creator. Any discussion of atheism, then, is necessarily a discussion of theism."7 So, in contrast to Baggini, Le Poidevin asserts that atheism is related to a specific concept of god: god as a personal and transcendent creator of the universe. According to Le Poidevin, atheism also implies a conscious and explicit position in the sense that simply living a life without God is not sufficient to call someone an "atheist."

We find the same contrast between theism and atheism in Daniel Harbour who writes: "Atheism is the plausible and probably correct belief that God does not exist. Opposed to atheism, there is theism, the implausible and probably incorrect view that God does exist."8

Atheism is generally considered to be an integral part of the tradition of the secular outlook. In what follows I will delineate what seems to me a defensible approach to atheism. Nevertheless, as I will try to show, few people approach atheism the way I do. Atheism has negative overtones. That does not make it necessarily untrue, of course, but the forces united against atheism as a creed, voiced by McGrath, Johnson, and many other detractors, are so formidable, and the misunderstandings about atheism so widespread, that it seems advisable to be somewhat cautious in using the term. In any case one should not identify the secular outlook entirely with atheism.9 It would surely be wrong to say that if atheism goes, the secular outlook goes. That, at least, will be my conclusion. Secularism is not atheism. Most atheists are secularists.10 Not all secularists are atheists. Atheism is about the existence of God. Secularism is about the role of religion in public life and about the way we should legitimize our moral commitments. But let us start with a defensible approach to atheism.

The Alpha Privative

I recommend the terminology used by Le Poidevin and Harbour. Atheism is a-theism. So: "a," hyphen, "theism." An atheist is someone who does not subscribe to the central tenets of theism. The "a" is an alpha privative, it denies what follows. So an atheist denies what a theist tries to assert. Someone who is a-religious is simply what it says: not religious. It is not the case that by denying a religion you, by some magic trick, invent a religion of your own: the religion of irreligious or a-religious people. Atheism is no more a religion than not playing chess is a hobby. Perhaps this sounds like a commonplace, nevertheless it is necessary to state it. Atheists are often considered to be driven by a religious impulse: the religious impulse to deny religion. Denying religion is in itself a religion, it is said. As a matter of fact, we have seen this with McGrath. I consider this form of reasoning to be a strange rhetorical trick.

Because atheism is the denial of theism, every tract on atheism should also address the question "what is theism?" Theism is the same as - monotheism, which is the more current term. Theists are adherents of one of the three theistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Theists believe in one god. That makes the word "monotheism," strictly speaking, a pleonasm. But theism is more than belief in one god; it also requires a conception of a specific god. God, according to theists, is good. And not only "good" in the sense you and I can be good, but perfectly good. Someone who identifies God with evil ("the supreme evil, God"), as the great Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) did,11 cannot be a theist. The god of Jews, Christians and Muslims is eo ipso good.

Goodness is not the only attribute of the theistic god. He is eternal, the creator of the universe, almighty, transcendent, omniscient, holy, and personal. Western theology has tried to reflect on those characteristics and construe a concept of God that is consistent (I will elaborate on these attributes in the first section of Chapter 4, Pope Benedict XVI on the Apostles' Creed).12

Atheism and Liberal Concepts of God

Theism as outlined above is something different from religious belief in general. So atheism in the sense outlined here is not opposed to religion as such. Atheism is concerned with one specific concept of god: the theistic god. The theistic god has a name and this is written with a capital: God.13 At face value it may be strange to limit atheism so that it is opposed only to the theistic concept of god and not to all the other gods that have been venerated by man. Buddhists or Hindus subscribe to polytheistic apprehensions of the divine. Should not they be included in the atheist rejection of the divine, as they are in Baggini's definition of atheism, mentioned above? I think not and I will now spell out my reasons for using the narrow definition.

The best way to make my position clear is by means of an example. There are people who are in awe of, or even venerate, vague and wide dimensions of reality that they identify as "the totally other" (das ganz Andere).14 Or who refer to a particular mystical experience.15 There are people and theologians who claim to worship "the absolute" or "ultimate reality" or the "unsearchable region out of which all phenomena...