Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray

My review of John Gray’s superb new history of atheist thought (Allen Lane) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

There are no gods. There is no such thing as “humanity” – only human beings with disparate beliefs and desires. The soul and its modern analogue, the self, are illusions. There can be no such thing as a universal morality. Human beings are no different from animals. We may never be able to understand the universe in which we live. Science and technology will not deliver us from suffering or death. Human beings are not rational creatures. History is not leading anywhere in particular. Old evils, apparently stamped out, will return in new guises. There is no such thing as moral progress. 

This list of heresies is a crude distillation of the thought of John Gray, the author of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013), and The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015). For many years a right-leaning political philosopher – he taught at Oxford and at the London School of Economics – Gray has become, with these books, perhaps the one truly indispensable thinker of the 21st century.