{"id":3922,"date":"2014-03-07T17:49:11","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T22:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3922"},"modified":"2014-03-08T05:25:16","modified_gmt":"2014-03-08T10:25:16","slug":"christians-comic-books-and-the-happy-and-sad-atheists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2014\/03\/07\/religion\/christians-comic-books-and-the-happy-and-sad-atheists\/","title":{"rendered":"Christians, Comic Books, and the Happy and Sad Atheists"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the world you imagine resembles a comic book, it could be there are some flaws in your fundamental assumptions.\u00a0 So it is with Catholic apologist Ross Douthat<\/a>, whose fantasies would not be out of place in the literary productions of Dell or Marvel.\u00a0 However, they’re actually more likely to turn up on the opinion pages of the New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0 That’s where\u00a0 I found his latest, entitled The Return of the Happy Atheist<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It’s actually the second of a pair of replies to another collection of musings about atheism and the decline of belief by Adam Gopnik entitled Bigger than Phil<\/em><\/a>, which recently appeared in The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For Douthat and many others like him, it’s impossible to conceive of atheism as simply a lack of belief in God or gods.\u00a0 He conceives of atheists as a monolithic outgroup, whose atheism implies all sorts of other ideological connections.\u00a0\u00a0He declares himself in broad agreement with Leszek Kolakowski,\u00a0according to\u00a0whom there was once a “cozy world”\u00a0\u00a0for our “movement” back in the days of the Enlightenment, under leaders such as Diderot, Feuerbach, and Helvetius, the latter of whom actually happened to be a deist.\u00a0 Then, Nietzsche announced the death of God, and since that day, “there have been no more happy atheists… that world was transformed into a place of endless anxiety and suffering.\u00a0 The absence of God became a permanently festering wound in the European spirit.”<\/p>\n

No need to despair, fellow atheists!\u00a0 Douthat is pleased to announce that “we” have swung from “glad” to “sad” back to “glad” once again.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

Among polemicists and philosophers alike, there’s what feels like a renewed confidence that all of the issues – moral, political, existential – that made the death of God seem like a kind of “wound” to so many 20th century writers have somehow been neatly wrapped up and resolved and can now be safely put aside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And why have “we” all suddenly become so happy?\u00a0 Douthat notes that in the piece by Gopnik that he’s supposed to be writing about, the author claims that, at least in part, it’s because of “the broad prestige, in the past twenty years, of evolutionary biology.”\u00a0 And here is where things get really interesting.\u00a0 Douthat continues,<\/p>\n

But he doesn’t pursue this idea quite far enough, writing that “the details of the new evolutionary theory are fairly irrelevant to the New Atheism.” which strikes me as quite wrong:\u00a0 It’s precisely the specifics of socio<\/em>biology, of evolutionary psychology<\/em>, that have helped give atheism its swagger back, because ev-psych promises a theory of human culture in a way that other evolutionary theories don’t.\u00a0 And with that promise has come a sense, visible throughout atheist commentaries nowadays, that by explaining human culture in scientific terms they can also justify the parts of that culture that they find congenial, ground their liberal cosmopolitanism firmly in capital-S Science, and avoid the abysses that seemed to yawn beneath the 20th century’s feet.\u00a0 This reading of evolutionary psychology hasn’t quite made Nature itself seem completely “friendly” again, but it has ;made a kind of contemporary scientism seem friendlier to moral visions in general and the progressive moral vision in particular, in a way that has made “if there is no God, all is permitted” feel (to many writers, at least) like a less troubling point against atheism after all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amazing!\u00a0 Apparently David Bentley Hart, who included a fact-free diatribe against evolutionary psychology in his The Experience of God<\/em><\/a>, the latest redoubt of Sophisticated Christians, isn’t just an outlier.\u00a0 It would seem the unfortunate evolutionary psychologists are doomed to be the whipping boys of ideological zealots of all stripes.\u00a0 The fact that conservative Christians are now piling on with the rest really stands things on their head.<\/p>\n

Evolutionary psychology, referred to in the vernacular as “sociobiology” after E. O. Wilson coined the term, and even earlier, in the heyday of\u00a0Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz,\u00a0as “ethology,” although all three terms now have separate “academic” definitions, has long been, and to a large extent still is, the b\u00eate noire<\/em> of the very leftist atheist “progressives” who Douthat claims now embrace it.\u00a0 Quick, someone run and tell John Horgan<\/a> and Marshall Sahlins<\/a>!\u00a0 Where on earth is this fable about New Atheists enthusiastically embracing evolutionary psychology coming from?\u00a0 Certainly not from Richard Dawkins, who declared in The Selfish Gene<\/em> that Ur-evolutionary psychologist Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz were “totally and utterly wrong.”\u00a0 Jerry Coyne, who also spilled some ink <\/a>over Douthat’s latest? I don’t think so<\/a>!\u00a0 The latest I’ve seen emanating from that realm, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes<\/em>, embraces not EP, but John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism.\u00a0 His only interest in evolutionary psychology is in thinking up clever ways to circumvent its findings.<\/p>\n

None of these Christian gentry seem to have the faintest clue that that basis of evolutionary psychology is merely the recognition that there actually is such a thing as human nature.\u00a0 The fact that it is now supposed to be “in fashion” is really nothing more than that recognition, following decades in which the so-called behavioral “sciences” were in thrall to the ludicrous ideological orthodoxies of the\u00a0Blank Slate.\u00a0 Douthat is much more likely to hit pay dirt in his hunt for atheists\u00a0whose tastes run to leftist progressivism among the flotsam and jetsam left over from the demise of that orthodoxy than in the EP\u00a0journals.<\/p>\n

None of that matters to the Douthats of the world, though.\u00a0 EP is too useful to their narrative to pay any attention to the truth.\u00a0 And it turns out that the narrative in question is nothing more\u00a0sophisticated than the hoary old naturalistic fallacy.\u00a0 Quoting once again from the above passage, “…by explaining human culture in scientific terms they can also justify the parts of that culture that they find congenial.”\u00a0 In other words, hidden in some dark cranny of academia, New Atheists, who are not otherwise identified, are supposed to be busily cobbling the “is” of evolutionary psychology into the “ought” of their nefarious, godless philosophy.\u00a0 Whatever.\u00a0 I suppose it’s not much of a stretch if you actually believe the rest of Catholic dogma.<\/p>\n

In any case, “we” the monolithic atheist “movement” of today, are now “glad” again, thanks to the crutch of evolutionary psychology combined with a generally benign and prosperous world.\u00a0 “We” are also no longer embarrassed by Communism, which, of course, “we” foisted on the world.\u00a0\u00a0That revelation came as news to me,\u00a0an atheist who volunteered to fight Communism in Vietnam at a time when to do so was not considered fashionable.<\/p>\n

No time for the “movement” to relax, though, fellow atheists!\u00a0 The far-seeing Douthat, after scrutinizing related articles in the opinion columns of the New York Times<\/em> and running across some other articles in popular magazines that clearly reveal that we face “problems that should be obvious to those with eyes to see,” is convinced that the pendulum will soon swing back from “glad”\u00a0to “sad” once again.\u00a0 “Dark forces,” he writes,\u00a0are\u00a0driving “secular liberalism toward the kind of intellectual crisis that seems to me to lurk, iceberg-like, somewhere out ahead.”<\/p>\n

Well, to tell you the truth, as\u00a0a conservative atheist I wouldn’t mind having a front row seat to watch that ship slip beneath the waves, either.\u00a0 The only problem is that, according to the Douthats of the world, people like me can’t exist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If the world you imagine resembles a comic book, it could be there are some flaws in your fundamental assumptions.\u00a0 So it is with Catholic apologist Ross Douthat, whose fantasies would not be out of place in the literary productions of Dell or Marvel.\u00a0 However, they’re actually more likely to turn up on the opinion … Continue reading “Christians, Comic Books, and the Happy and Sad Atheists”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[85,181,91,105,28,7],"tags":[257,99],"class_list":["post-3922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-blank-slate","category-christianity","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-human-nature","category-religion","tag-christianity-2","tag-evolutionary-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-11g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3922"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3927,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3922\/revisions\/3927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}