New Atheism, Fundamentalism and the Eclipse of Belief

“I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway… Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.”

Richard Dawkins

For all their real and apparent differences, one of the things that unites religious fundamentalism and New Atheism is a distrust of belief. Both make claims to direct knowledge, and both show ambivalence to the idea of a passionate commitment to something that fails in the courthouse of Foundationalism (we should have a solid rational base for our claims) and Evidentialism (the stronger the evidence for our claims, the more justified we are in having them).

It is this point of agreement that can help us to both a) discern the relationship these positions have with each other, and b) articulate an alternative that places both into question.

To approach the first of these we need to draw out the way that fundamentalism is a child of the scientific revolution, albeit a rebellious and belligerent one. For while fundamentalism rejects the general consensus of biologists, they do affirm the idea that their religious claims need to be rooted in some kind of correspondence to what philosophers call the “in-itself,” i.e. the way things are outside of our interpretation and interference.

Fundamentalism does not simply embrace the scientific approach, it seeks to enlist its support by attempting to show that methodological atheism ultimately supports metaphysical theism. What this means is that methodological atheism (the idea that a scientist should always seek natural explanations for phenomena regardless of their metaphysical commitments) is viewed as an earthly path that leads to heavenly destination.

The religious apologist argues that some of the things we can’t currently understand in terms of natural cause and effect are inherently impossible to understand in these terms. While methodological atheism always involves an “ignorance of knowledge” (phenomena we hypothetically could know scientifically, but currently don’t), the Fundamentalist apologist attempts to expose a different field of reality justified by the scientific method that could be termed “knowledge of ignorance” (phenomena we know cannot be explained in purely scientific terms). This latter field is used as a means of justifying the idea of God as a scientific explanation. Such an approach can be seen most clearly in the Intelligent Design movement, which argues for Irreducible Complexity as a legitimate scientific theory. In this way, fundamentalist apologists attempt to show that their metaphysical claims correspond with the in-itself as revealed through the scientific method.

As an aside, it should be pointed out that the claim of Irreducible Complexity is very different from what we witness in physics with the Uncertainty Principle. For while the latter also points out a certain necessary ignorance that arises from knowledge (we cannot know the mass and velocity of a particle at the same time) this is mathematically grounded and requires no recourse to transcendent justification.

In contrast to serious philosophical and theological rejections of such an approach, New Atheism rests upon certain structural similarities to fundamentalism. For its advocates also show skepticism regarding religious and political beliefs that would lack rational justification; something evidenced in Richard Dawkins’ recent comments regarding fairy tales.

Both religious fundamentalists and New Atheists here agree that personal commitment based upon direct knowledge is the ideal, and that the legitimacy of beliefs is directly proportional to the proximity of their orbit to this Absolute Sun. As such New Atheism can be read as a type of dialectic offspring of fundamentalism: the dissident antithesis of its parent that actually shares the same underlying commitments.

It is against such a shared position that Paul Tillich positioned himself when he wrote of how unconditional commitment is inherently risky and lacking in some Ultimate Justification. In his article “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” he outlined how humans cannot help but offer unconditional commitment to conditional and contingent reality. He argues that this commitment to a person or cause is not something that can be justified in some empirical way, but is a basic mode of being in the world.

He goes on to write that the problem does not lie in making unconditional commitments with regard to conditional things, but rather in thinking that what we commit to is Absolute Truth. Instead he makes the claim that we must give ourselves over to concrete concerns with the full realization that what we are giving ourselves to has no ultimate guarantee and may well end in disaster. An example of this is, of course, love. When we fall in love we offer an unconditional commitment to someone who is a contingent being with shortcomings and imperfections. As such, the commitment is saturated in risk. The problem only arises when we enter into such a commitment without acknowledging this risk and without taking responsibility for the inherent danger.

The argument that such an idea is impotent when faced with something like Female Genital Mutilation misses the point that such systemic practices gain their very justification from a Big Other (i.e. through justification to a cultural, political or religious Absolute). Once the death of the Big Other is acknowledged (barring the way to the idea that any symbol gives us direct, unmediated access to an Absolute), the communities concern will no longer be enslaved to this justification and will land on the plane on immanence. When this happens, protest against such inhumane practices can have a real and lasting effect for the scaffolding that justifies them has been effectively dismantled.

For Tillich, theology proper involves celebrating Ultimate Concern while untiringly undermining our tendency to mistake our commitments for the Absolute itself. Seeing them instead as symbols that reflect a personal response to a deeper call.

The problem for Tillich then did not lie in the fact that our commitments fail to pass the exams set by foundationalism and evidential, but rather in the mistaken idea that they would need to sit such tests in the first place.

—

If you’d like to read Tillich’s insightful article, you’ll find it in Theology of Culture

—