The “cult” of atheism and its detractors; faux-academics and the theologically partisan media

Firstly, I don’t think there is a “cult of atheism”. The “cult of atheism” is just a caricature built from vexatious exaggerations and omission by outgroup homogeneity bias. Despite the new popularism of atheism, when it comes to being herded, overt atheists are still a bunch of cats, not sheep.

Despite the popular gathering points (usually online), there are no oaths, no loyalties and no formal affiliations gaining traction. Atheist manifestos have been written and by-and-large have been ignored. Many atheists enjoy meaningful discussion, and some may need help articulating their thoughts, but by-and-large not only don’t they need someone telling what their non-beliefs are, but they are downright suspicious of attempts to develop “authoritative” representations of their views, even if by other atheists.

Not that there isn’t cultish behaviour practiced by atheists. I dare say this has more to do with human nature than it has to do with atheism. Less organised (and exploitative) cult worship, and more informal rock-star like fandom of a few atheist writers. Big deal. Sure, I cringe when I see the photogenic pictures of Richard Dawkins on his website. Not to my tastes, but hardly indicative a Stalinesque cult of personality.

I’m not the biggest fan of Daniel Dennett or James Randi (actually, I’m not fannish about the atheist authors that do influence me) and much less the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (although I am far more appalled by what she has had to and continues to suffer than anything she has written.) I think that Christopher Hitchens has made severe mistakes in his dealings with the neo-cons, specifically in his support for the supposedly secular campaign they have waged against the theocratic middle east; one that has utterly failed in Iraq and in Afghanistan has replaced one theocratic regime with another.

But one can’t honestly characterise the passion of any of these atheist authors, nor their popular reception (much less the substantial critical reading of the atheist target audience) as a cult, other than in the afore mentioned rock-star definition and even then the reality is far more sober. Of course, the detractors aren’t talking about a “rock star cult” anyway; they use the word “cult” in the far more pejorative (and more importantly dishonest) fashion.

In any case, atheism lacks a couple of the prerequisites for the development of a cult; a distinct belief system and a uniform and distinct a priori principle.

“The Cult”

Many ethical systems can be employed by atheists; egoism, the categorical imperative, relativism and several breeds of utilitarianism to name a few (which makes a nonsense of the current Pope’s Catholic-absolutism vs. relativism false dichotomy). But none of these a distinct properties of atheism. More than a few conservative protestants (and a few catholics) adhered to some forms of egoism in relation to welfare in the US over the years. I’ve met progressive Christians who have argued the case of the categorical imperative (which for them wasn’t a huge leap from their breed of Christian absolutism).

I’ve met moral relativists of a range of religious persuasions (especially in the inter-faith movement). Heck, I’ve come across more than one Catholic who has been of the opinion that if I died as I am, as an atheist, that I’d go to heaven. Even the previous Pope thought that atheists honored the holy spirit in their own way. And utilitarianism. Seriously, if you haven’t met a Christian who either hasn’t used the harm principle to resolve a conflict of absolutes, or who uses the harm principal as a matter of course, then you need to get out more.

Conversely, take a Roman Catholic-absolutist moral system and try getting it to work as well in a protestant, Greek-orthodox, Hindu, Buddhist, Judaist or any range of Australian aboriginal belief systems. It won’t work. This is because Roman Catholicism actually is a belief system with a host of native terms that won’t work outside said system.

The most common a priori principal (but not the only, and perhaps less prominent in atheists from “continental” cultures) within atheism would seem to essentially be that “reason is reasonable” (which in itself isn’t a good principal to base a cult on). One of those truly self-evident terms that requires no faith at all. But again, not a principal unique to atheism. As an atheist, I have difficulty seeing that the theological beliefs that I’ve come across in my time satisfy this principal. What I don’t have any trouble believing is that many theists hold “reason is reasonable” to be true, and a priori to a whole host of their beliefs if not (IMHO mistakenly) a priori to all of their beliefs.

This idea of atheism as a belief system doesn’t work. Atheists occupy a range of belief systems not unique to atheists. Heck, there are even pagan atheists.

In Australia, as is the case in the UK, parts of the US and continental Europe, I think that generally there is a secular mainstream, wherein there are secular Christians, secular Buddhists, secular Muslims and surprise, surprise, secular Atheists. The non-belief in the existence of a God or any God are more divergences on a point within said mainstream than a new world-view.

As an atheist in Australia, I’ve found my perspective to be similar to that of a number Muslims, Christians and Buddhists. Aside from the obvious difference of a belief in a God, and a few cultural practices (few of which actually exclude atheists) we’ve lamented banal mass-manufactured culture together, made use of utilitarian ethics, derided Intelligent Design’s attack on science and been offended by attempts at divisiveness.

There is no atheist world view. There is no “cult of atheism”. Just a lot of atheists interested in atheist writing. No biggy there, especially when said atheists have been popularly under unprovoked, dishonest and hateful attack in one form or another, from Webster’s dictionary (and earlier), to the current Pope’s mis-representative pontifications, to contemporary popular anti-atheist hatred.

So where is this “cult” fabrication coming from.

Faux-academics and the media

Academics are doing it. The popular and even independent media are doing it. It’s theologically partisan prejudice. It’s also dead easy to prove.

The God Delusion is the most popular of the “cult of atheism” texts and the one to receive the most prejudicial criticism from the detractors. Let’s have a look at but a few representative criticisms in circulation.

• Richard Dawkins is a proponent Social Darwinism (John Cornwell of Cambridge University, Stephen Crittenden of the ABC’s Religion Report).
• Richard Dawkins is blaming violence on religion and claiming an innate relationship between the two (Stephen Crittenden of the ABC’s Religion Report, in cahoots with Alister McGrath – Historical Theologian from Oxford University).
• Richard Dawkins is ignoring the history of atrocities of science! (Pulitzer Prize (for fiction) winning, Marilynne Robinson in Harper’s Magazine).

This is a non-exhaustive list. Further research can easily find more examples that follow the fraudulent criteria they all share; namely, they aren’t true and they are criticisms that have been levelled in the same dishonest manner for at least the last 15 years.

Richard Dawkins isn’t, nor has he ever been a Social Darwinist. Moreover, Dawkins has been an overt critic of Social Darwinism and one only has to read his essay A Devil’s Chaplain in the book of the same name (2003) to realise that the claim that Dawkins is a Social Darwinist is categorically false. That is unless something has changed between now and then, i.e. in The God Delusion Dawkins adopting Social Darwinism. As someone who has actually read the book, I can state that Dawkins has not adopted Social Darwinism.

Indeed, this “Social Darwinist” smear tactic has been around since before Dawkin’s career, starting with early Young Earth Creationist attempts in the 1960s to link Darwin to Eugenics and Hitler. It’s a smear that has repeatedly since been exposed as a deception. Anyone familiar with the debate and with Dawkins’ writing, at least in as far as a basically competent journalist or academic, would know the falsity of this claim.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins says neither that religion is either the sole cause of violence, nor necessarily a cause of violence. He simply states that religion can give motivation and means that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Indeed, he takes pains to point this out.

“Religion is undoubtedly a divisive force, and this is one of the main accusations levelled against it. But it is frequently and rightly said that wars, and feuds between religious groups or sects, are seldom about theological disagreements. Then an Ulster Protestant paramilitary murders a Catholic, he is not muttering to himself, ‘Take that, transubstantionist, mariolatrous, incense-reeking bastard!’ He is much more likely to be avenging the death of another Protestant killed by another Catholic, perhaps in the course of a sustained transgenerational vendetta… Yes yes, of course the troubles in Northern Ireland are political… [but in this case] without religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge.”

(Richard Dawkins, 2007, The God Delusion, P. 289.)

Now say what you will about this line of reasoning, one thing you can’t honestly say is that Dawkins places soul blame or an innate link between religion and violence. Crittenden takes the Religion Report down a notch further, and the reputation of McGrath goes along with him.

Now for the final one in the list; Dawkins glossing over the supposed atrocities of science.

“Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion.”

(Marilynne Robinson, 2006)

Marilynne is flat out, categorically wrong. Eugenics, at least the eugenics of the NAZIs, wasn’t science. Her argument is simply argument from assertion.

Popperian falsificationism wasn’t in vogue at the time, so to be fair, I can’t use that to exclude eugenics. However, the “results” of NAZI Eugenics programmes weren’t informative under other heuristics of science at the time, be they positivist or classical inductivist. NAZI Eugenics, with its twisting of Mendelian notions of inheritance to match presupposed notions of race (born from integralism – a notion inspired by Catholic theology) was an ideology.

By the standards of the time, Mendel’s work was science, but it didn’t assume or indicate that any given trait (say Aryan character or any other integralist trait). Mendel’s work was rhetorically appropriated to legitimise an ideology in vogue somewhere in the humanities.

The same method is true of Lysenkoism, except instead of Mendel’s assumptions being used, Lamarkism (previosuly discredited in the late 19th Century and again in the early 20th century) to prop up ideologically palatable notions of how to engineer a populations of people and crops (genetics was considered bourgeois and led to the executions of several geneticists). Like NAZI eugenics, Lysenkoism rather than conform to a scientific epistemology, was the product of the ideology of the Bolshevik branch of Marxism (i.e. a case of a part of the humanities appropriating an old, ideologically palatable scientific notion to rhetorically legitimise presupposed notions).

In both cases, scientists in the USSR and Germany were critical of these pseudo-science theories, it’s just that they either escaped or were executed that these criticisms aren’t easy to find.

Robinson’s tactic is as old as the hills. Have a flexible definition of the criteria/beliefs/standards of a group/vocation (in this case science) that you leave open so as to assert whatever is rhetorically convenient, utterly ignoring what the group/vocation has as its own criteria/beliefs/standards, then flexibly define any atrocity to fall within the remit of said group/vocation. Then condemn said vocation for either glossing over the atrocity or for simply being a part of it in the first place.

For example, start with an argument from assertion that ignores the criteria/beliefs/standards of a group. “But chainsaw-baby stress-tests are as much a part of Pulitzer-prize winning as Catholicism is a religion. While condemning Dawkins for glossing over history, Robinson glosses over her own clique’s experimentation on babies with chainsaws.” Of course, this is blatantly stupid. But this is a reductio and Robinson is making a stupid excuse for an argument, that has been repeated by stupid people with a stupid problem with modernism ever since Kant defined the enlightenment.

Robinson, in true anti-science fashion, goes on to casually dismiss those working on the Manhattan project as somehow being indifferent to the consequences of their work. This while criticising Dawkins for glossing over history. The reality is much, much different. Just Oppenheimer himself provides for a complex tale of much moral consideration and political dissent. The participants were not as mercenary as Robinson makes out.

Indeed, the history of the Einstein-Szilárd letter is another telling part of this complex tale of science and the atom bomb where indifference was not the mode. Robinson’s treatment of this matter is more casual and careless than anything she criticises in Dawkins’ work by far.

But back to her specific meme, rather than her MO. Robinson claims “There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation.” In part I have dealt with this in the above quote from The God Delusion; Dawkins doesn’t give such unqualified condemnation of religion and its relationship to violence.

More in relation to what I have been criticising Robinson for, Dawkins does not claim that science or atheism are solutions to the evils of the world (indeed, nowhere in The God Delusion is there the proposition of a utopian salvation on offer). A good part of the second half of the book deals with ethics, and nowhere in this discussion are these ethics categorically incompatible with religion, nor categorically reliant upon science.

Personally I think science is good at informing these ethics (especially in “new topics” such as stem-cell research and drugs like RU486 – I think only a fool would discuss the ethics of RU486 without consideration of the pharmacology), but the ethical heuristics employed in The God Delusion were not scientific in and of themselves. Robinson’s “sanitised science as savior” argument in all its memetic glory (by that I mean I’ve seen it all before) makes like the ranting of someone who has never read the book.

Robinson, true to type, is criticising arguments and persuasions that the book does not possess.

Conclusion

So. We have criticisms that neglect the content of the book and Dawkins work in general, going as far as to criticise arguments not only not made in the book, but arguments categorically denied or even criticised by the book. These types of memetic faux-criticism judgements have been made before, and long before The God Delusion came to the shelves. Reading of The God Delusion, given the contradiction, should have prevented these judgements, but alas, the judgements were made before hand and repeated as they have been repeated before; without consideration of what they criticise.

This is prejudice, not critical inquiry. Not reading comprehension, not intellectual honesty and quite simply not good work. As journalism, they are fraudulent claims. As academic arguments, they are fraudulent. These “critiques” are nothing more than the dishonest ramblings of those with characters less than their titles mandate, enthralled to a pathetic chip on their shoulder.

Which brings us back to the cult (and like) accusations. It’s a cult! New Atheism! Etc!

There is a divisive, and importantly dishonest line being spun in various ways and to no surprise its being spun by the types of people who have a dishonest prejudice against atheists. Why are academic and journalistic frauds trying to mischaracterise atheism out of the mainstream? Why are they making atheism and atheists (aka “New Atheists”) out as some kind of threat?

Why the lovechild of Bogeyman and Strawman?

Perhaps more importantly, in the case of Crittenden, Cornwell and McGrath, why are state resources (state funding for Universities, funding for the ABC) going towards the generation of bigoted, theologically partisan (read “state preference of religion”) , fraudulent black-propaganda? It’s not that they are being offensive. I think academics and journalists have the right to offend. It’s that they are being dishonest and that they are using state resources in a religiously preferential manner.

As an atheist, a tax payer and an Australian citizen, I not only maintain that I and others have the right to expect Crittenden and others like him in the ABC to be fired, but further that I and others like me have the right for him (and others like him) to actually be fired on the grounds of his misuse of state resources for his own petty religious prejudices. If the Crittendens of the ABC want to act out prejudice motivated fraud, they can do it by way of the private sector, just like Catch the Fire Ministries or as in The Australian.

~ Bruce

Update: More shameful, prejudicial and dishonest anti-atheist bigotry at the ABC; this time its Rachael Kohn.