CITAZIONE
Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers.
He has also proposed an atheists' temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, "You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die."
De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality.
This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?"
First, a definition. By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism. Secularism. Darwinism
“There is this strange supposition," says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, "that if you're a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I'm an anti-Darwinian and I'm an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it's hard for me to figure out what is driving them."
First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the "perverse kind of secular" believer, who wants to "wipe religion from the public sphere" on principle.
Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party: “Why," she asks me, "are the followers of reason so unreasonable?"
Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin's Origin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser's point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: "Oh, God!"
De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.
"There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him."
Coming from a scientific family, I had accepted the common-sense orthodoxy that religion and science were two separate but complementary and non-conflicting entities, or what the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA).
Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion. It was strengthened even further in the popular imagination when Dawkins expounded the outlines of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in his fine book The Selfish Gene (1976). In the 1990s it became routine to hear scientists - notably in this country Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert - pouring scorn on the claims of philosophy and religion. They were, for entirely non-scientific reasons, in a triumphant mood. The sales of A Brief History of Time had sent publishing advances for popular science books soaring, and the more astounding the claims, the better the money.
While observing this, I became aware that the ground had shifted beneath my own cosy orthodoxy. Scientistic thinkers were no longer prepared to accept NOMA, the separate, complementary, non-conflicting realms. In the early 1990s I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue. If, in effect, God could not live up to the standards of scientific proof, then He must be declared dead. There were no longer two magisteria, but just one, before which we must all bow.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. "I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway."
For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. "I think the story is that we are supposed to
understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it's true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It's just sloppy thinking."
Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion - or, indeed, the human experience - in scientific terms is futile. "It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love," de Botton says.
In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. "No," he replied. I almost crashed the car.
The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't.
Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult's own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: "Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?" At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.
