How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Unlike Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie (literary figures with their own epistles in Hitchens’s canon), Barnes lacks the fundamentalist swagger of the new atheists. In particular, he lacks their chronological snobbery and their epistemological confidence: If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I’ve acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know enough to know? As twenty-first century neo-Darwinian materialists, convinced that the meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear since the year 1859, we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous knee-benders who, a speck of time away, believed in divine purpose, an ordered world, resurrection and a Last Judgment. But although we are more informed, we are no more evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What convinces us our knowledge is so final? (pp. 23-24) Given his own epistemological tentativeness, Barnes can’t resist a bit of fun, imagining a divine game at the expense of our celebrity atheists: If there were a games-playing God, He would surely get especial ludic pleasure from disappointing those philosophers who had convinced themselves and others of His non-existence. A. J. Ayer assures Somerset Maugham that there is nothing, and nothingness, after death: whereupon they both find themselves players in God’s little end-of-the-pier entertainment called Watch the Fury of the R...