The varieties of non-religious belief and Alain de Botton’s "Religion for Atheists"

Published in The Melbourne Anglican April 2012

I wonder how many species of atheist you know? In the light of the Global Atheist Convention coming to Melbourne this month, I’m drawing up an atheist taxonomy to make sense of the varieties of non-religious belief. Until recently my neat pigeon-holing of atheism divided my non-believing friends—with no disrespect implied—into the mad and the sad. Let me explain…

The mad atheists typified by the so-called New Atheists, are those at the vanguard of the ‘God wars’ currently fomented by a conflict-crazed media. These people are led by biologist and science populariser Richard Dawkins, the ‘high priest’ of New Atheism and like Dawkins they are very, very angry at religion. Apart from their rage, they can be recognised by 4 further characteristics: their belief that religion is to blame for the world’s woes; their dogma that science is the one and only road to truth; their ability to quote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy verbatim; and being early adopters of technology, they know that the new iPad is called the New iPad and not the iPad 3.

The sad atheists on the other hand are those who wrestle with the God question seriously. They know that the stakes are high and that without God it is notoriously difficult to make sense of the world or of human life or death or joy or justice or even, at the philosophical end of the spectrum, of truth itself. But despite the cost, the sad atheist is convinced that there is no One who might offer a well of life-giving meaning to quell our anxieties.

Such was my neat dichotomy of atheism until it was rent asunder by popular philosopher Alain de Botton. Unless you are mediaphobic you couldn’t have missed the recent visit to Australia of de Botton; he received copious coverage promoting his book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. And it is de Botton who has forced me to expand my taxonomy, adding another category—the glad—to the mad and the sad.

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Why is Heidegger so obscure?

What Heidegger does by writing as he does is to remind us that the things of which he writes are not simple and so his writing points us to them and triggers our thinking about them. We then ask if his ambiguous utterances are the best we can do but we know they are far better than naive thinking that obscures the obscurity of Being.

The varieties of non-religious belief - Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty

Despite the New Atheists' denials that they are any sort of believers at all, atheist beliefs about God and religion seem to come in many varieties. I'm thinking of three: the mad, the glad and the sad.

The mad atheist (think Richard Dawkins' brand of New Atheism) is cranky as hell at religion; the glad atheist (think Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty--more below) floats through the godless life with nary a care for the issues at stake, and the sad atheist knows that the stakes are high but cannot believe in the One who might offer the ground of all being to quell our anxieties.

Currently I'm wrestling with two non-believers of the glad variety--Richard Rorty and Alain de Botton--similar in their conclusions although while de Botton takes a short cut, Rorty takes the long road via a lifetime of serious thinking.

I'm in the process of writing a review of de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. (Published February 2012 by Hamish Hamilton.) RFA's first line is a  shot over the bows of Dawkins and Co. as well as the seriously religious: "The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true."

For de Botton, the tragedy of atheism is to have thrown out some of the wonderful trappings of religion with the dirty bathwater that consists of arguments about religious truth claims. "Of course no religions are true in any god-given sense," says de Botton in the second sentence of the book and then proceeds cheerily to ignore the question that serious thinkers, atheist and religious (and yes, fundamentalists on both sides too) think that matters.

More soon...

Who am I? according to "Being and Time"

Another naively simplistic encapsulation of Heidegger in one sentence; this time his core idea of Being and Time which is pointed to in its title: Who I am (present) is possibilities (future) interpreted through history (past).

So Heidegger says of the human person, Dasein: "Its own past is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it." (Being and Time, 1962, p.41)

Disclaimer: I am not a Heidegger scholar. Just a reader.

Heidegger in 4 words: Everything isn't a thing

That's it really. Heidegger in 4 words. Five if you're pedantic. Everything isn't a thing. And if we think that everything is a thing then we use 'thing' language and think 'thingfully.' Rule number one of living an ontologically virtuous life is not to be thingful.

And (hypothetically) if there is reality that is not describable as a thing or things then if we use thing language we will reinforce the cover-up of all that reality.

And (hypothetically) if in fact it's the 'non-thing' reality that grounds all of what we think of as things, then we are in trouble as far as having any sort of adequate understanding of the world.

Hence Heidegger's dislike of ontotheology which makes God too a thing, reducing God to human thing-type ways of thinking and understanding.

In its attempt to know the world philosophy has covered up Being itself; it has squeezed the world into its own mould but in doing so has distorted our understanding of reality.

So, according to Heidegger, his phenomenological approach is the only way of access to the most basic levels of reality. Why? Because it offers the only means of avoiding thinking of the world as so many entities understood and dealt with in the ways that the history of Western philosophy has dictated.

Heidegger expresses it this way (in an uncharacteristically clear sentence, at least for those who have read some of his work):

Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (Being and Time, 1962, p.31)

The secret police will never get me

"The secret in the poet's heart remains unknown to the secret police,
despite their ability to predict his every thought, utterance, and
movement by monitoring the cerebroscope which he must wear day and
night. We can know which thoughts pass through a man's head without
understanding them. Our inviolable uniqueness lies in our poetic
ability to say unique and obscure things, not in our ability to say
obvious things to ourselves alone."

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.123

The Rise of Atheism

There's an interesting convention on in Melbourne Australia this weekend. A global meeting of atheists led by Richard Dawkins. It is being covered by a blog on the ABC website. It will be interesting to see if the convention rings with the tones Alister McGrath attributes to the new atheists in his book The Twilight of Atheism:

Western atheism now finds itself in something of a twilight zone. Once a worldview with a positive view of reality, it seems to have become a permanent pressure group, its defensive agenda dominated by concerns about limiting the growing political influence of religion.

Gadamer, Polanyi and relativism (A recent presentation)

Michael Dummet calls it “the scandal of philosophy,” that philosophy has no systematic methodology, while Richard Bernstein says the following:

Hovering in the background of this pursuit [of turning philosophy into a rigorous science] is what might be called ‘the Cartesian Anxiety’—the fear or apprehension that if there are no … basic constraints, no foundations, no determinate ‘rules of the game’, then we are confronted with intellectual and moral chaos where anything goes. 

Today I want to consider two thinkers who have overcome their Cartesian anxiety, but who emphatically do not believe that anything goes. The question I am working on in my doctoral studies is whether they are successful in holding on to a sensible notion of truth without either falling backwards into Cartesian neurosis or tripping over their own feet into the relativist puddle.

It is an interesting accident of history that in the space of a couple of years in the mid 20th century, two of the most significant critiques of the Enlightenment dream of certain knowledge and neutral objectivity were published. Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge in 1958 and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960. Yet apparently neither author was significantly influenced by the other.

For Polanyi, once one of the world’s leading physical chemists, the focus of his attention is the knowledge that comes from the natural sciences, while for Gadamer the project is about human understanding, the object of which ranges from history and texts to art and music.

Today I will explore some parallels between Polanyi’s epistemology and Gadamerian hermeneutics, focussing particularly on aspects relevant to the charges of relativism levelled against them.

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Heidegger made easy for the masses

I am working on a mass-market piece on the extraordinary Martin
Heidegger. "Heidegger made easy" if such a thing is possible. The current draft was here but I've posted it elsewhere so you can now find it here.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

I love this painting of Gadamer by Dora Mittenzwei. Thank you Dora for permission to use it here. The painting is of Gadamer at 100 years old and still in fine form. It is a massive 1.9 x 3m in size. Gadamer died at 102 in 2002.