Man at the Center of a Godless World

Michelangelo’s masterpiece (revised and corrected).

I already cross-posted to this list my recent piece in The UnPopulist on atheism as a foundation for “liberalism.” (I think I have already trained my readers to interpret that word, not in its partisan 20th-Century usage, but in the political philosopher’s meaning: advocacy of a free society.) I wanted to say a few more words about this topic.

I pitched this article to The UnPopulist in response to a series they’ve been running in which they make the case for liberalism’s compatibility with pretty much every religion except Zoroastrianism. My brief was not to attempt to refute those other claims, but I couldn’t resist just one dry expression of skepticism. “With such solid support from every major faith, you would think liberalism ought to be winning hands-down.”

As you know, this is me dialing back the snark by about 80%. Look, if people want to argue that Christianity or Buddhism or even Islam is compatible with individual rights, far be it from me to discourage them. A free society can use all the support it can get, and historically the rise or liberty is accompanied by the reform of religious creeds to more enlightened and less authoritarian forms. But I also had to point out in this piece that each of the major religions had centuries, usually millennia in which to produce liberalism, yet somehow never did so unless at the very end of that time. Here's how I put it.

[T]he argument for a purely Christian origin for liberalism has a conspicuous gap in it. In Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West, for example, he is forced to acknowledge that “Christianity’s emphasis on human dignity and equality did not destroy monarchy, aristocracy, and serfdom, or slavery for more than 16 centuries. But the fuse, one could argue, was lit.” Given such a large chronological gap, it is far more plausible that something else—some other set of ideas—was introduced that helped give birth to liberalism.

This is why the early section of my article focuses on the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers and the ways in which their outlook was moving toward a purely secular worldview.

I know my readers are going to be primed to accept that an atheist outlook is not only a philosophical foundation for freedom, but the only such foundation. Yet I knew that for a wider audience, I would have to address the big counter-argument. In the 20th Century, an atheist doctrine, Communism, produced totalitarian regimes to committed crimes on a mass scale. This gave religious conservatives the opportunity to argue that atheism necessarily leads to tyranny.

The problem is that “atheism as such is not a belief, but the absence of a belief.” So I had to address the history of Communism, summing up the problem this way: “In effect, Communists rejected the metaphysics of religion but kept the epistemology of faith.“

My goal was to reconnect atheism back to the older tradition of Enlightenment ideas. The two key philosophical ideas I focused on are reason and individualism.

As for reason:

There is a direct connection between the naturalist worldview of atheism, its reliance on observation and reasoning, and political freedom. To value reason is to value the process of reasoning. In a universe without supernatural revelation, no one arrives at the truth instantaneously—or infallibly. All knowledge requires a process of inquiry, deliberation, rigorous questioning and debate, and above all a free flow of information. To value reason requires that you value the freedom to engage in this process.

As for individualism:

All authoritarian systems are built on the idea that there is some higher purpose that takes precedence over your own life and goals, justifying the supervening coercion of church and state. But in a godless worldview, this makes no sense. Our individual lives and our enjoyment of them are the highest purpose, by virtue of being the only purposes. 

But most of all, I wanted to convey that an atheist worldview can be more than just a set of philosophical arguments. It can also be its own secular form of spirituality.

To grasp the power and grandeur of the human mind does not require any leap of faith or specialized theology. We only need to look out at the world and observe. There is abundant evidence of the human capacity to think, to understand, to create, to build, and to express itself. There is also abundant evidence that this capacity is a necessity of our survival and the source of mankind’s greatest accomplishments: the scientific and technological achievements of the modern world; the debates that led to crucial political reforms; the highest expressions in art and music.

If you look at everything that humans have accomplished, you realize that the individual human at the center of a godless world is not a small or pathetic figure. We are giants.

Read the whole thing, and please recommend it to others.

The Faithless Are the More Reliable Liberals

You will notice the connection here to my other recent piece on the secular spirituality of popular culture.

A number of my recent articles are attempts to respond to the precipitous ongoing decline of religious belief and to define and defend the godless future mankind is hurtling toward.

The “New Atheists” of a few decades ago were engaged in a pitched battle to make the case for atheism and pry people away from their residual loyalty to the old creeds. That battle is over, and we’re going to need a new wave of atheist advocacy to help give philosophical and spiritual substance to a new era of unbelief that is already upon us.