Seven Types of Atheism Quotes

“The new atheists are unwitting disciples of Comte’s Positivist philosophy. It seems self-evident to them that religion is a primitive sort of science. But this is itself a primitive view, and a remark made by Wittgenstein about Frazer applies equally to Richard Dawkins and his followers: ‘Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages … His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.’1”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Social evolution is an exceptionally bad idea.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“The belief that humans are gradually improving is the central article of faith of modern humanism. When wrenched from monotheistic religion, however, it is not so much false as meaningless.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Science cannot replace a religious view of the world, since there is no such thing as 'the scientific world view'. A method of inquiry rather than a settled body of theories, science yields different views of the world as knowledge advances. Until Charles Darwin showed that species change over time, science pictured a world of fixed species. In the same way, classical physics has been followed by quantum mechanics. It is commonly assumed that science will someday yield a single unchanging view of things. Certainly some views of the world are eliminated as scientific knowledge advances. But there is no reason for supposing that the progress of science will reach a point where only one worldview is left standing.”
― John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

“There was no hint of belief in Santayana’s life in the convent. ‘My atheism, like that of Spinoza,’ he wrote, ‘is true piety to the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.’6 In comparing himself”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity—the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus—an absent God.

The end result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism.

A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.

According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving—at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip—eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity.

If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.

Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
― John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

“Science cannot replace a religious view of the world, since there is no such thing as 'a scientific worldview'. A method of inquiry rather than a settled body of theories, science yields different views of the world as knowledge advances. Until Charles Darwin showed that species changed over time, science pictured a world of fixed species. In the same way, classical”
― John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

“Having renounced theism, liberal thinkers have concocted theories in which their values are the end-point of history. But the sorcery of 'social science' cannot conceal the fact that history is going nowhere in particular. Many such end-points have been posited, few of them in any sense liberal. The final stage of history for Comte was an organic society like that which he imagined had existed in medieval times, but based in science. For Marx, the end-point was communism—a society without market exchange or state power, religion or nationalism. For Herbert Spencer, it was minimal government and worldwide laissez-faire capitalism. For Mill, it was a society in which everyone lived as an individual unfettered by custom of public opinion.
These are very different end-points, but they have one thing in common. There is no detectable movement towards any of them. As in the past the world contains a variety of regimes—liberal and illiberal democracies, theocracies and secular republics, nation-states and empires, and all manner of tyrannies. Nothing suggests that the future will be any different.
This has not prevented liberals from attempting to install their values throughout the world in a succession of evangelical wars. Possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights, western governments have toppled despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it. In doing so they destroyed the states through which the despots ruled, and left nothing durable in their place. The result has been anarchy, followed by the rise of new and often worse kinds of tyranny.
Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind—a vision inherited from Christianity. They pass over the fact that liberal values have no very strong hold on the societies in which they emerged. In leading western institutions of learning, traditions of toleration and freedom of expression are being destroyed in a frenzy of righteousness that recalls the iconoclasm of Christianity when it came to power in the Roman empire. If monotheism gave birth to liberal values, a militant secular version of the faith may usher in their end.
Like Christianity, liberal values came into the world by chance. If the ancient world had remained polytheistic, humankind could have been spared the faith-based violence that goes with proselytizing monotheism. Yet without monotheism, nothing like the liberal freedoms that have existed in some parts of the world would have emerged. A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental, and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
― John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

“This has not prevented liberals from attempting to install their values throughout the world in a succession of evangelical wars. Possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights, western governments have toppled despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it. In doing so they destroyed the states through which the despots ruled, and left nothing durable in their place. The result has been anarchy, followed by the rise of new and often worse kinds of tyranny.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Equally, why should a superhuman species fashioned by humans bother about its creators?”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Above all, science cannot dispel religion by showing it to be an illusion. The rationalist philosophy according to which religion is an intellectual error is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry into religion as a natural human activity. Religion may involve the creation of illusions. But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that a need for illusion goes with being human. The recurring appearance of religions of science suggests this may in fact be the case.”
― John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

“A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Today everyone is sure that civilization has improved with modern times. As we are forever being reminded, the medieval and early modern world was wracked by wars of religion. But faith-based violence did not fade away with the arrival of the modern age. From the French Revolution onwards, Europe and much of the world were caught up in revolutions and wars fuelled by secular creeds such as Jacobinism and communism, Nazism and fascism and a belligerently evangelical type of liberalism. In the twenty-first century a potent source of faith-based violence has emerged in Islamist movements, which blend ideas borrowed from Leninism and fascism with fundamentalist currents from within Islam. It is”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Thucydides has been called the father of ‘scientific history’. But for him there were no laws of history, only the fact of recurring human folly. A cyclical view of history was revived”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“monotheistic way of thinking. The belief that humans are gradually improving is the central article of faith of modern humanism. When wrenched from monotheistic religion, however, it is not so much false as meaningless.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“to poetry, but it is also illuminating when applied to religion and atheism. Describing ambiguity as ‘any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’, he observed that ‘any prose statement could be called ambiguous’. There could be no such thing as ultimate clarity. ‘One can do a great deal to make poetry intelligible’, Empson wrote, ‘by discussing the resultant variety of meanings.’2 It was the nuances of meaning that made poetry possible. In a later book, The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Empson showed how the most straightforward-looking terms were ‘compacted with doctrines’ that left their meaning equivocal.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism. A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus – an absent God. The end-result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“mocked the attempt to find any sense or logic in history: People seek the meaning of history, and they find it. But why must history have a meaning? The question is never raised. And yet if someone raised it, he would begin, perhaps, by doubting that history must have a meaning, then continue by becoming convinced that history is not at all called to have a meaning, that history is one thing and meaning another.15 Shestov spoke from”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“may seem strange that a thinker should seek to prove that the God of monotheism cannot possibly exist, and then go on to assert that love of God is the supreme good. What Spinoza is trying to do is bring into a single system of ideas two radically divergent ways of looking at the world – a view from an imaginary Absolute, necessarily infinite and eternal, and the view of a finite, mortal human individual. But these perspectives are too different to be compared, let alone melded into one. Why Spinoza”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“radical nominalist who regarded our concepts as no more than useful tools, he believed language became deceptive when it dictated our view of the world. Unrecognized in philosophy aside from a dismissive remark in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Mauthner’s work had an enduring influence on Samuel Beckett, who for many years kept Mauthner’s books at his bedside.3 Schopenhauer’s thought has some limitations.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“His philosophy was the polar opposite of modern Gnosticism, in which a self-deified humanity brings history to a triumphant conclusion.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“He dismissed with contempt the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the foremost German thinker of the age, according to which history was the progressive unfoldment of a world-spirit – a view Schopenhauer rightly believed was Christian theodicy in disguise.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Less well known than Heart of Darkness but no less powerful a story about the Congo, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ mocks the conceit of European colonialists who imagined they were bringing freedom to savages: Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd … But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Less well known than Heart of Darkness but no less powerful a story about the Congo, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ mocks the conceit of European colonialists who imagined they were bringing freedom to savages: Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“a mechanical cosmos: There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting … And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without heart. It is a tragic accident … It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.35 Later he wrote: The machine is thinner than air and as evanescent as a flash of lightning … The ardour for reform, improvement, for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances … Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t even know our own thoughts … Faith is a myth and belief shifts like mists on the shore.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Progress in this sense may well accelerate while the quality of civilization declines: We all feel at this time the moral ambiguity of mechanical progress. It seems to multiply opportunity, but it destroys the possibility of simple, rural or independent life. It lavishes information, but it abolishes mastery except in trivial or mechanical proficiency. We learn many languages, but degrade our own. Our philosophy is highly critical and thinks itself enlightened, but is a Babel of mutually unintelligible artificial tongues.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics. With the revival of religion in recent times, we may seem to be living in a post-secular era. But since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era.”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Transhumanism is a contemporary version of a modern project of human self-deification. One of the few to recognize this is the Israeli historian of science Yuval Noah Harari. In Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, first published in Hebrew in 2011, and Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow (2016), Harari suggests that the expanding powers that humankind is acquiring through the advance of science could end up bringing about human extinction”
― John N. Gray, Seven types of atheism

“Schopenhauer’s thought has some limitations. He denounced the world as illusion, but nowhere explained how or why this illusion had come into being. His conception of salvation is no less problematic. If what lies behind the world is nothingness, the simplest path to salvation is suicide. Schopenhauer resists this implication with the argument that killing oneself solves nothing, since the will simply renews itself in some other form. But if life is nothing but pain, death resolves everything for the suffering individual – however illusory he or she may be.

On the other hand, accepting that the world is an illusion need not mean seeking to escape from it. As Schopenhauer pictures it in much of his work, human life – like everything that exists – is purposeless striving. But from another point of view, this aimless world is pure play. In some Indian traditions, the universe is the play (in Sanskrit, lila) of the spirit. Schopenhauer held fast to the belief that the world was in need of redemption. But from what? Everything that exists is only maya, after all. Seeking no deliverance from the world’s insubstantial splendour, a liberated mind might find fulfillment by playing its part in the universal illusion.”
― John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism