philosophy paper

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Chapter 1

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History

In any discussion of the ‘appearance’ of atheism in the West, it is important to distinguish between two distinct spheres in which this occurred. On the one hand, it is possible to trace the emergence and development of atheism in modern thought as an intellectual phenomenon among writers, philosophers, artists and other elites. On the other hand, one may trace a parallel development of atheism in history as a cultural phenomenon, whereby atheism becomes a possible option, a viable world-view, whether for society as a whole or for groups or individuals within societies. To trace the contours of both these developments is to tell two quite distinct stories, each with their own beginnings and histories. There may be parallels and points of contact between them, but the time and manner of their respective developments are quite distinct.

It is also worth noting at this point that the story of the appearance of atheism is part of a wider story of the appearance of ‘unbelief’ in relation to Christianity. For, as we shall see, atheism is but one species of unbelief that emerged alongside, or in reaction against, other forms such as scepticism, ‘free thinking’ and, later, agnosticism. All these varieties of unbelief have their own distinct characteristics, but they are all part of a wider story of the gradual weakening of the hold of Christian orthodoxy on Western thought and Western society in general. As Charles Taylor has recently emphasised, there has been a remarkable shift in Western society,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 1

the revolutionary character of which is not always fully appreciated.1 In a relatively short period (in world historical terms) of 500 years, we have moved from a situation (in around, say, 1500) in which it was almost inconceivable for an individual to take a stance of unbelief to one (in around, say, 2000) where unbelief has not only become a perfectly viable option, but a widespread and perhaps even the dominant one. This latter situation is the defining feature of what Taylor characterises as a ‘secular age’.

His impressively detailed survey of the emergence of the ‘secular’ is undertaken to counter what he calls the ‘subtraction’ thesis of secularisation, the influence of which is remarkably widespread, even if not consciously acknowledged. This holds that ‘secularism’ is what is left, the remaining residue, once supernaturalism and superstition have finally been expunged. This, indeed, appears to be the underlying assumption of many of the contemporary popularisers of atheism, as discussed in the Introduction. On the contrary, argues Taylor, secularism is a positive and substantive intellectual world-view, the emergence of which is itself in need of explanation and which can be traced in terms of specific and contingent developments in Western thought and practice. Taylor himself acknowledges that his account is complementary to those of several other scholars who likewise dispute the notion that the emergence of the secular was somehow the result of a process of teleological necessity. Indeed, we shall be invoking some of these scholars in the chapters that follow, as their accounts likewise feed into my own, which contends that there is a deep connection between atheism, modernity and (modern) religion. But it is time now to turn explicitly to the question of the ‘appearance’ of atheism in modernity.

Although we have already noted the difficulties in identifying precisely where modernity ‘begins’, it is instructive to note that the term ‘atheism’ as an identifiable outlook is roughly contemporaneous with the birth of modernity itself. It has often been noted by scholars of antiquity that what we understand as ‘atheism’ would have been unintelligible to the classical mind. Certainly, there were disagreements on the nature of the gods or

2 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 2

their activities, and sometimes even the denial of the existence of certain gods. But the notion, intrinsic to the modern understanding of atheism, of immanence – of the world existing quite free of any sort of transcendent realm – would have been almost unintelligible to them. As Jan N. Bremmer has said of Greek and Roman antiquity:

[A]theism never developed into a popular ideology with a recognizable following. All we have in antiquity is the exceptional individual who dared to voice his disbelief or bold philosophers who proposed intellectual theories about the coming into existence of the gods without, normally, putting their theories into practice or rejecting religious practice altogether. If we find atheism at all, it is usually a ‘soft’ atheism or the imputation of atheism to others as a means to discredit them.2

Furthermore, Bremmer goes on to say that such ‘soft’ atheism as existed was constituted not by a resolute denial of a transcendent realm, but, rather, by a form of free thinking that ultimately sought to save the existence of the gods.

It is interesting, then, that Michael J. Buckley traces the first use of the term ‘atheism’ in England to the Greek scholar Sir John Cheke, who invokes it in a translation of Plutarch’s On Superstition, undertaken in 1540. Indeed, the fact that the term was first used in this context is instructive. Cheke himself seems to be not entirely consistent in his use of the term. In his translation of Plutarch, the word is used as a form of accusation, directed against those who think there are no gods. But in his own essay appended to the translation, it denotes the denial of the specific doctrine of divine providence. What ‘atheists’ deny, in this usage, is the belief that the gods intervene in the world, guiding it in accordance with their own plans and purposes. Such varied usages of the term are also to be found in society more generally over the next century or so, leading Buckley to speak of ‘the promiscuity of its definition and application’.3 Thus, in this period, in both England and France at least, the term ‘atheism’

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 3

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 3

often denoted some form of heresy, although it increasingly came to denote an outright denial of theism as such. This former usage of the term, though different from ours, is still instructive for our purposes. For one thing, it shows how, in the period from, say, 1540 to 1630, the notion of a world-view that was entirely outside a theistic framework was only gradually becoming conceivable. The rebellious atheist was often one who questioned or denied certain central doctrines of the theistic world-view, and only later one who questioned or denied that world-view as such. On the other hand, this earlier understanding already prefigures our later one, in that, within this more limited context, it is already a negative and parasitic term, which defines itself in terms of that which it is denying. In this sense, the structural logic of atheism – as a denial of something else – is already in place, waiting potentially to be applied to the theistic tradition as a whole rather than to one specific element within it. If this structural logic of atheism had indeed already been established, then the real revolutionary turn was the one that allowed for the taking of an external viewpoint, casting judgement on the theological tradition as a whole from a position outside it. We shall consider in subsequent chapters precisely what it was that created the conditions for this revolution to occur.

By around 1630, however, at precisely the time that Western Europe was making its traumatic transition to modernity, this revolution had occurred, with the result that the meaning of the term ‘atheism’ had transmuted its meaning fairly decisively into a form that is now more familiar to us. This had occurred in reaction to the emergence of a group of individuals, small at first but rapidly growing, who were prepared to deny the truth of theism itself. Michel de Certeau has pointed out that in France:

The ‘atheists’ who first occupy the polemic are the ‘heretics’ of every Church, the nonconformist believers and such. But soon the controversy centers on the existence of God. Around 1630 groups of ‘libertines’, erudite and skeptics [s]pring up; they will fade away around 1655 … before coming back around 1680. ‘Atheism’, which was never

4 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 4

spoken of a hundred years earlier, becomes a recognized fact.4

Given that such a stance was barely conceivable a little over 100 years earlier, we should not imagine that the emergence of the new so-called atheists would have been observed with equanimity. On the contrary, they would have been regarded as a threat to the structure and stability of the whole world order. Furthermore, it can in retrospect be understood as one of several symptoms of wider and deeper intellectual and cultural shifts that we would now understand as constituting the birth of modernity. Old certainties and foundations appeared to be crumbling, and people had no clear idea of what, if anything, might take their place. Such shifts, insofar as they would have been consciously perceptible as such, would have been viewed less as an evolution and more as a degeneration, the imperative thus being to halt them at all costs.

Thus, as de Certeau points out, in early seventeenth-century France, the perceived danger posed by atheism becomes almost an obsession, as clear attempts are made to eradicate this dangerous and threatening other. Atheists became subject to official sanctions and restrictions, and, when these were violated, judicial sentences against them were duly passed. Public warnings against the dangers posed by atheism became widespread. It seems that atheism was perceived as a destabilising threat of the same kind as that presented by witchcraft and sorcery, the incidence of which was high throughout Europe in the early seventeenth century. Both atheism and witchcraft were perceived as being fundamentally malign in their origins and effects, and both were suppressed with the full rigours of the law. But perhaps the most significant difference between them was that whereas witches and sorcerers destabilised the dominant order from within by utilising the symbols and vocabulary of that order, atheists destabilised it from without by questioning the truth and intelligibility of the order as such. Thus, witchcraft and sorcery may perhaps be viewed as embodying an indirect and equivocal expression of a doubt in relation to Christianity that atheism proclaimed more openly and unequivocally. Indeed, this is what Michel de Certeau suggests in

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 5

his study of the infamous case of demonic possession in the convent at Loudun in the early seventeenth century. As de Certeau points out, the first appearance of ‘atheists’ who deny the existence of God is contemporaneous in Europe with the sudden rise in the incidence of witchcraft. For de Certeau, both are manifestations of the doubt and uncertainty that plagued societies as the old edifice of medieval theology began to crumble and give way to some- thing else. In this sense, the ‘witch craze’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was perhaps a transitional manifestation of the traumatic paradigm shift that was occurring at this time. The fading away of the witch craze at the end of the seventeenth century was perhaps a sign that this fearful crossing had been made.5 Henceforth, religious doubt would be expressed in a clear and unambiguous guise, through an atheism that explicitly denied the existence of God.

If one development in the meaning of ‘atheism’ lay in the transformation from it carrying an internal ‘heretical’ connotation to it conveying an external and direct attack upon theism itself, then the next important development lay in the evolution of the term into one that could be adopted as a means of self- identification. For it has to be said that in the French context we have been discussing, and in other contexts too, the term was used primarily in the manner of an accusation or a term of abuse. In the public pronouncements, declarations, legal acts and court sentences of the time, the term ‘atheist’ was used rather in the way that such terms as ‘nihilist’ and ‘relativist’ were later used; namely, as a means to denounce others with whom one disagreed, rather than as a means of self-definition. The next major development, therefore, lay in attempts to reclaim the term as a respectable and acceptable one for atheists themselves, both in intellectual and social terms. The former was achieved before the latter, but both took some time to come to fruition. Atheism as a declaration of one’s own belief (or lack thereof) does not really appear until the mid-eighteenth century, when it became increasingly widespread in the fashionable salons of Parisian intellectuals.

In particular, Denis Diderot (1713–84), whose statue stands in the Boulevard St-Germain in Paris, is widely recognised as being

6 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 6

the first explicitly and self-confessedly atheist philosopher. As Buckley puts it: ‘in many ways, Diderot is the first of the atheists, not simply in chronological reckoning but as an initial and premier advocate and influence.’6 He was not always an atheist, for his thought was constantly evolving, and at certain periods of his life he would more accurately be described as a theist, a deist, and at other times as a pantheist. Indeed, even in this evolutionary movement, he was paradigmatic of the Enlightenment mind. Furthermore, he became editor-in-chief of the infamous Encyclopédie, an enormous undertaking and another quint- essentially Enlightenment project in its scope and aims. As Buckley points out, Diderot ‘argued his case not by repudiating the mathematical physics of Descartes or the universal mechanics of Newton but by bringing them, as he contended, to fulfilment’.7

He accepted Descartes’s view of the universe as a single physical system, which is nonetheless dynamic in its obeying immutable laws which are assigned to matter in motion. But he believed that Descartes was not sufficiently faithful to his own foundational epistemology, making leaps and assumptions that were unjustifiable in its own terms. Likewise, he saw himself as freeing Newton from an urge to point beyond itself to non-mechanical principles. He saw the revolutionary character of Newton’s discoveries for our whole understanding of the natural world and the way in which this had been advanced in an unprecedented way. But he saw that these had been achieved through a consistently empirical approach to the natural sciences, unhindered by extraneous presuppositions and beliefs. When Newton turned to his discourses on theology, he appeared to be setting these tried and tested methodologies to one side in a way that could only give rise to error and fantasy. Newton had discovered an indubitably successful methodological path; having done so, Diderot believed that it was his duty to follow it without deviation. Diderot thus passed the discoveries of Descartes and Newton through the purging fire of consistency. It was not that he denied their presuppositions or fundamental methodologies; on the contrary, it was precisely his commitment to these that led him to apply them in what he considered to be a more thoroughgoing, unflinching

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 7

and logically consistent way. In so doing, he made ‘the initial but definitive statement’ of atheism: ‘the principle of everything is creative nature, matter in its self-activity eternally productive of all change and all design.’8

But in making the ‘initial but definitive statement’ of atheism, he also thereby inaugurated the process of establishing ‘atheism’ as a respectable position that one could, with impunity, apply to oneself. Part of his efficacy in this respect was that he clearly could not be dismissed as a malevolent or frivolous mind. On the contrary, it was widely acknowledged that Diderot had been led to atheism as a consequence of his disinterested quest for truth, undertaken with intellectual integrity. Furthermore, he reached his atheistic conclusions by furthering and intensifying the insights of Descartes and Newton – the very thinkers upon whom Christians depended as modern defenders of the faith. Descartes was thought to provide a defence of theism using the weapons of modern philosophy, while Newton was thought to do so using those of modern science. Diderot’s contribution in this respect was to show how clearly these weapons could turn out to be double-edged swords. Indeed, in the French context, atheism’s ascent to respectability was crowned by the French Revolution. In socio-political terms, atheism was suddenly transformed from being an enemy of the state to being almost the official state creed. The newly-built Temples of Reason and the founding of the Cult of Reason bore witness to this in a particularly vivid and tangible way (although there has been disagreement amongst scholars as to the extent of continuing adherence to Christianity below the level of revolutionary officialdom).9

All of this was in marked contrast to the revolutionary experience of the then newly-emerged United States of America. It is often thought the American inauguration of the separation between church and state was one of its most significant contributions to the development of the modern polis, but the significance of this is often misunderstood. Certainly, it was a deliberate attempt to found a new political order as distinct from that of its former colonial masters. The founding fathers believed it to be essential to the new order that the state should not favour

8 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 8

any one particular religion or denomination over others. But it should not be thought that this entailed the founding of a religiously ‘neutral’ state or, if it did, this was so only in a very specific sense. The new constitution did not envisage a public political space that was devoid of religion; on the contrary, it was saturated with it. But the point was that the religious dimension of the state should be limited to the tenets of ‘natural’ religion; that is, those elements of religion (and we were at this time, of course, talking exclusively of Christian religion) that were shared by all churches and denominations. Thus, the religious foundations of the state should be ones that could be shared by everyone, while the absence of an established church meant that everyone was also individually free to ‘supplement’ this natural religion with their own denominationally-specific religious beliefs and practices. This was the fundamental purpose behind the separation between church and state, rather than that the sphere of politics and government should be a religion-free zone.10 Thus already, in the American and French Revolutions, we see the beginnings of what has become the notorious split between a ‘secular’ Europe and a ‘religious’ America. In the USA, there was nothing remotely resembling the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. Consequently, the new USA was as inhospitable to atheism as France was the contrary.

But if the French Revolution made atheism officially respectable in France, it appeared to have precisely the opposite effect in Britain. The British reaction to events of the revolution was one of horror, and this was to be found not only among the aristocratic elites. Memories of Britain’s own act of regicide were still relatively fresh, and the experience was not a happy one. In the British mind, the French Revolution was marked by violence, extremism, murder and immorality, however unbalanced such a characterisation was. The fact that many priests had perished with the peers loomed large in the public consciousness, and it was inevitable that an indelible connection would be made between atheism on the one hand and immorality, lawlessness and far-left revolutionary politics on the other. As a consequence, the old seventeenth-century usage of ‘atheism’ as a term of abuse and a marker of suspicion continued to

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 9

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 9

echo throughout nineteenth-century Britain. This situation was further exacerbated by the fact that immorality and lawlessness emerged as the two great fears of the Victorian mind. These were to be combated at all costs as being detrimental, indeed fatal, to the health and well-being of society. Given that atheism inevitably brought these very things in its wake, this meant that atheism too was an evil to be combated, and this was further fuelled by the remarkable resurgence of religious belief and practice that Britain experienced in the Victorian era. As a result, the attempt to make atheism a respectable term of self-definition, which had made such strides in France, was one that still had to be fought by atheists in Britain throughout the nineteenth century in what must often have appeared to them to be a losing battle.

It was this that led many who were unable to subscribe to orthodox theism to coin new terms of self-definition, thus allowing them to remain uncontaminated by the stigma of atheism. George Jacob Holyoake, for instance, preferred to describe himself as a ‘secularist’, with the need to avoid being regarded as morally suspect being uppermost in his mind.11 We see the same concern in other unbelieving writers in the later Victorian period. The novelist George Eliot, for instance, was both deeply influenced by and a translator of the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, and one of her chief preoccupations was to separate religion from morality so that the latter could be preserved independently of the former. It was partly this that motivated her quest for a ‘religion of humanity’ in later years. She too resisted any overt use of the term ‘atheism’. But there were also other motivations for non-theists to find an alternative term of self- definition. The renowned naturalist Thomas Huxley, for instance, was unhappy with the term ‘atheism’ because he felt that it had now come to stand for a position that was too dogmatic. It made a definitive metaphysical claim about the nonexistence of God, for which Huxley believed there was insufficient evidence. In this sense, Huxley was among the first public figures to give prominent expression to a Humean metaphysical scepticism. Consequently, he believed that atheism was as guilty of metaphysical hubris as was theism. Furthermore, as we have already noted, memories of the

10 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 10

French Revolution resulted in ‘atheism’ being linked with far-left revolutionary politics, which further tainted the term in polite society. As Adrian Desmond has pointed out, ‘Huxley’s scientific civil service needed its own brocade banner. “Atheism” was out, there being no disproof of God; and anyway, it was a red republican flag, a political weapon to smash the spiritual basis of privilege.’12 These concerns led Huxley and his associates to coin a new term,‘agnosticism’, suggesting that the term represented not a new creed, but a metaphysical unknowing.13 The term, of course, derives from the Greek word gnosis, to know. Thus, it did not denote a negation or denial of theism, but rather a negation or denial of (metaphysical) knowledge. That it was able to attain the respectability that still eluded atheism is suggested by Desmond, when he says that ‘the word would push alienated intellectuals off the defensive for the first time since the French Revolution’. Henceforth, agnosticism would rival atheism as an alternative disposition for those unable to profess belief in God. Desmond even goes so far as to say (with perhaps a touch of hyperbole) that ‘as the social axis shifted in late Victorian times, agnosticism was to become the new faith of the West’.14

We have observed that one of the reasons for the continuing stigma that attached to atheism was its connection with violent revolutionary politics, which had been vividly established by the French Revolution. But the developments of political philosophy in the nineteenth century reinforced this impression still further. In Karl Marx’s thought in particular, revolution and atheism went hand in hand. It was not that atheism was a necessary precondition for revolution, but, rather, that revolution would necessarily bring atheism in its trail. For Marx, Christianity was an ‘ideology’ that emerged out of society’s economic base; it both reflected and reinforced capitalism. When the economic base of capitalism disintegrated (as, for Marx, it inevitably would), then Christianity would simply fade away, so entirely was it a reflection of that base. For both would-be revolutionaries and those for whom revolution was their chief horror, Marx had reinforced the connection between left-wing revolution and atheism that had already been established in Western consciousness by the French Revolution.

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 11

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 11

The results were considerable and long-lasting. Not only would atheism be tainted with blood, violence and revolution, but also Christianity came to be regarded as inherently conservative and reactionary, an upholder of the status quo. It is significant, for instance, that when one of the pioneering British Christian Socialists, the scholar–clergyman F. D. Maurice, was being censured by his superiors at King’s College, London, where he held a Chair, it was as much his left-wing political activities as his unorthodox doctrinal writings that perturbed them. One inevitably seemed to entail the other.

But in spite of atheism’s growing connection with immorality, metaphysical presumption and left-wing revolution, there were still some who were committed to making it an acceptable and respectable outlook. One of the most prominent of these was Charles Bradlaugh, the first explicitly and self-confessedly atheist member of the British Parliament. He was able to take his seat in Parliament only after a lengthy and hard-fought battle of wills. To take their seats, members had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, an explicitly religious oath sworn on the Bible, thus presenting what appeared to be an insurmountable barrier to atheists sitting in the British Parliament. Bradlaugh was first elected for the seat of Northampton in 1880, but his attempt to take his seat failed at the moment at which he was required to take the oath. He was re-elected in 1882 and again, with an increased majority, at the general election of 1886. Between 1880 and 1886, he was involved in various unsuccessful attempts to take his seat, each involving a personal appearance in the chamber of the House of Commons. There were also several court cases and appeals at which Bradlaugh pleaded his case, but which were ultimately futile.15 The battle was one in which much was at stake. The British Parliament had ceased to be an exclusively Anglican body in 1828, when dissenters were admitted. In the following year, Roman Catholics were also admitted and the process of the religious pluralisation of Parliament culminated with the admission of Jews in 1858. Controversial though each of these concessions was, opponents were nonetheless still able to console themselves with the thought that, although no longer exclusively

12 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 12

Anglican, the British Parliament was still a ‘religious’ body. The admission of an atheist would end that final residual religious requirement for participation in the legislative arm of the state. Nonetheless, after the general election of 1886, the Speaker of the House of Commons bowed to what was increasingly appearing as the inevitable, and allowed Bradlaugh to take his seat. Atheists, secularists and free-thinkers alike hailed the decision as representing an historic turning point. But momentous though this undoubtedly was, of perhaps equal importance, albeit less dramatic, were Bradlaugh’s various attempts to rehabilitate atheists as full and equal members of society. To this end, he conducted a number of public campaigns, the most prominent of which was his fight for the right of atheists to give evidence in court.16

If, by the end of the nineteenth century, atheism was finally beginning to rear its head as a respectable intellectual position, it was still far from widespread as a cultural phenomenon, and remained the preserve of the intellectual elite. This is not to say that all but the intellectual elite were filled with religious fervour. On the contrary, in Victorian England, for instance, the working classes were notoriously irreligious. This, indeed, was the main conclusion of Horace Mann’s innovative religious census undertaken in 1851. Conducted on the day before the general national census, its purpose was to illuminate patterns of church- going on a national scale and, in addition, to determine the extent of the accommodation that was available nationally for religious worship. Mann himself concluded that

the most important fact which this investigation as to attendance brings before us is, unquestionably the alarming number of the non-attendants... Nor is it difficult to indicate to what particular class of the community this portion in the main belongs ... while the labouring myriads of our country have been multiplying with our multiplied material prosperity, it cannot, it is feared, be stated that a corresponding increase has occurred in the attendance in this class of our religious edifices.17

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 13

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 13

Subsequent commentators have pointed out the limitations of Mann’s figures and, in particular, have suggested that the incidence of working class religious observance was somewhat higher than he supposed.18 Nonetheless, the general trend he identified cannot be doubted. What is open to doubt is how this non-attendance was to be interpreted. Did this mean that the British working-class population were predominantly atheists, secularists and agnostics? Mann himself addressed this question and suggested that

the prevalence of infidelity has been exaggerated, if the word be taken in its popular meaning, as implying some degree of intellectual effort and decision; but, no doubt, a great extent of negative, inert indifference prevails, the practical effects of which are much the same.19

There was thus a prevalence of indifference which Mann characterised as an ‘unconscious secularism’. The historian Owen Chadwick tends to agree, suggesting that contemporary priests and ministers confirmed Mann’s general line of analysis: ‘most slum pastors agreed that [the working classes] were free or almost free of infidelity. They found apathy and indifference and hostility, not unbelief.’20

A similar picture emerges if we look at the situation with respect to the working-class population of France. Although there was no national religious census comparable with that conducted by Mann, it is possible to get a general sense of the levels of active religiosity from statistics relating to Easter communicants and from contemporary accounts of priests and other observers. The abbé François Courtade undertook eight years of pastoral work in Paris from 1863, at the end of which he commented that ‘[t]he labouring population of Paris is on the way to becoming atheistic... The people of Paris are without faith and without God. The notion and the feeling of the divine seem to have entirely withdrawn from them.’21 Commenting on this, Thomas Kselman says that ‘Courtade’s response was typical of the Catholic clergy, who complained of the rising wave of indifference throughout the nineteenth century, an indifference that could on occasion turn

14 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 14

into hostility and violence’.22 But Kselman goes on to argue that this impression is based too narrowly on statistics relating to church attendance, which may be an inadequate measure of assessing the ‘religious’ or ‘atheistic’ sensibilities of a population. He suggests that the situation in nineteenth-century France would better be characterised in terms of a process of religious ‘pluralisation’ rather than of ‘secularisation’, marked by an outright denial of theism. If he is right, then the situation may be regarded as being somewhat analogous to that in England. The comparatively ‘indifferent’ attitude of the working classes in England and France towards the church at this time does not necessarily indicate a positive avowal of atheism or unbelief. This in turn, however, raises the question of how this indifference should be interpreted. Was it the case that the working class consisted of predominantly theistic believers who were nonetheless suspicious and distrustful of (in England especially) a class-ridden and intimidating Church? Or was their indifference such that it amounted to a practical agnosticism? It may well be that both interpretations are, to some degree, correct, but either way it appears that, even among the notoriously irreligious working classes, the avowal of outright atheism was still comparatively rare; it could not be equated with the emerging secularism of Holyoake or the atheism of Bradlaugh.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth century, however, the tide began to turn. Two prescient prophets, though unlikely soul mates, were Friedrich Nietzsche and John Henry Newman. Both were aware that a new spirit was stirring and, although people were scarcely aware of it yet, they knew that this new spirit would have far-reaching consequences. As Buckley observes:

What Nietzsche and Newman foresaw was that religious impotence or uninterest would not remain a private or an isolated phenomenon, that it would increasingly characterize the ‘educated intellect of England, France and Germany’, and that its influence would eventually tell upon every routine aspect of civilization.23

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 15

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 15

And yet Nietzsche and Newman’s prophecies did not come to fruition for at least another 60 years. What may be described as the ‘age of atheism’ (to borrow Gerhard Ebeling’s phrase) did not become a reality until the last 40 years of the twentieth century. This has led some commentators to ask why the new spirit detected by Nietzsche and Newman took so long to come to birth. Stephen Toulmin, for instance, has suggested that the intellectual, psychological and artistic conditions for the emergence of the cultural Zeitgeist of the 1960s were already well in place by as early as 1914. But the turbulent nature of world historical events over the ensuing decades delayed the consummation of this world-view for a further 50 years.24

But whatever the explanation for the apparent delay, there can be little doubt that by the 1960s the predictions of Newman and Nietzsche were rapidly coming to pass. In the affluent West, at least, there emerged a ‘radical godlessness’ that was, by world historical standards, unique. As Buckley expresses this:

It is critical to notice the historical uniqueness of the contemporary experience: the rise of a radical godlessness which is as much a part of the consciousness of millions of ordinary human beings as it is the persuasion of the intellectual. Atheisms have existed before, but there is a novelty, a distinctiveness about the contemporary denial of god both in its extent and in its cultural establishment.25

This raises the question of precisely how this transition was made; how a secular world-view of radical godlessness transformed itself into a general cultural condition over a period of 50 years or so from, say, 1950 to 2000. Indeed, this question has been the subject of a whole corpus of sociological literature, the task of which has been not only to provide some sort of descriptive account of this change, but also to develop an interpretative account of how this is to be understood and a predictive account of where this is likely to lead.

Needless to say, such studies have by no means produced a consensus. That there has been a precipitous decline in formal religious observance in the West is not open to doubt. What is in

16 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 16

dispute, however, is the question of how this decline should be interpreted. Some, like Steve Bruce, have argued that the sociological data for church attendance and other manifestations of faith commitment have declined in so pronounced a way since the 1960s that the outcome for religion can only be fatal. In the absence of any evidence indicating an even partial reversal of this decline in the West, Bruce believes such a conclusion to be irresistible. He suggests that the time will come when people will no longer even define their beliefs negatively as a reaction against religion. Rather, the phenomenon of religion will become an irrelevant and distant memory.26 Grace Davie, on the other hand, has argued that statistics relating to church-going and other overt religious activities are an unreliable guide to the ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ character of a population. She has developed a notion of ‘believing without belonging’, suggesting that many still maintain a residual sense of commitment to religious beliefs, but without manifesting them in the public way that was once common.27 Still another line of analysis has been proffered by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead. They have suggested that although modernity has undoubtedly witnessed a turn from tradition-based religious commitment, this has not resulted in the widespread atheism that many had previously predicted. In fact, outright atheism remains a minority confession, and the modern Western world has witnessed the proliferation of alternative ‘spiritualities’ of various kinds, particularly what Heelas has gone on to characterise as ‘spiritualities of life’.28 Steve Bruce apart, it seems that many sociologists are convinced that many today are dissatisfied with atheism as an embodiment of the ‘final truth’ of the human condition. This would appear to qualify Ebeling and Buckley’s characterisation of the contemporary condition as being an ‘age of atheism’.

But this also raises the question of the extent to which our contemporary world has witnessed a transition from modernism to postmodernism. Could it be that current preoccupations with ‘spiritualities’ and the much touted ‘return of the religious’ are manifestations of this transition to a postmodernism that is somewhat more hospitable to religious concerns? This is to raise a complex question, not least because it has often been commented

The ‘Appearance’ of Atheism in Modern History 17

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 17

that spiritualities of life are as much modern phenomena as they are postmodern ones. But on the other hand, Mark C. Taylor and Graham Ward have both drawn attention to various aspects of the return of the religious in contemporary culture, a development that they both see as being bound up with a postmodern cultural turn. This phenomenon does not necessarily constitute a return to religious orthodoxy, but it does, they believe, indicate that the postmodern sensibility is one that is more open to the question of the religious than was the modern one, with its disguised or explicit commitment to immanence.29

I shall return to the question of the ‘end of modernity’ in more detail in Chapter 8. But for the moment, it does seem as though we are in a position to say something provisional about the link between atheism and modernity. For even on the basis of this very brief and sketchy historical survey, we have seen how closely linked atheism and modernity appear to be. The term ‘atheism’ was coined at precisely the moment that the birth pangs of modernity began to be felt: atheism as a direct and external challenge to the truth of theism emerged at the time that the modern epistemology and its sensibilities became explicit; atheism developed as an intellectual phenomenon, increasing in respectability and wider incidence as modernity itself developed. Both modernity and atheism seem to reach their ‘high noon’ in the mid/late twentieth century before they begin to crumble, giving way to something more nebulous and variegated as the twentieth century turns into the twenty-first. Already, it seems that the respective fates of modernity and atheism are intertwined. It could be, of course, that this parallel development was a coincidence, and it has to be admitted that the future development of cultural sensibilities and of atheism itself are still open to question. But in the chapters that follow, I shall argue that the link between atheism and modernity is far more than coincidental, suggesting that modernity itself is, at its heart, an atheistic edifice, even if this was something that only progressively came to light. I now want to look at the nature of this progression, and the movement by which modern thought passed from theism to atheism.

18 A Short History of Atheism

01c_Atheism_001-018 22/6/10 9:10 am Page 18