The Pragmatic Case for Atheism

Religion has long been regarded as necessary for sustaining people’s moral convictions and uniting large societies.

George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

This predates by almost a century Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notorious remark, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”

Similarly, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”

This alludes to the root meaning of “religion,” which is to bind or tie back, from the Latin “ligare,” as in a ligature or a filament that binds the skin and covers over a wound in surgery. This original sense is that religion is needed to civilize us, lest we revert to wild, tribal impulses and act like savages. Religions proclaim that inescapable supernatural powers watch everything we do, so we should abide by the law and our conscience.

The Bible itself encourages this dismissal of doubts about religion. According to Psalm 53:1, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none that does good.’

But is religion still needed? Indeed, is there a pragmatic case for atheism that supersedes that old conservative defense of religion?

Theistic religion, meaning the kind that affirms the soul’s immortality and a miraculous personal lawgiver who assigns us a cosmic destiny, may once have been needed to sustain the civilized order. That order was hardly impeccable since slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, theocracy, and tribal wars were rampant. But assuming we think that for people, civilization is better than animal life in the wild, we might concede that religion was like the scaffolding that’s instrumental in a large construction project.

What the ancients lacked, though, was an independent basis for progress. Religion offered a mythos that branded the civilized endeavour. Theism includes a supernatural cast of characters and a spiritual plot that assigns folks salutary roles in society. The gods blessed the civilized order, including the wars and the inequality between castes. Indeed, the gods themselves were mascots for civilized norms, since they, too, warred and split into dominance hierarchies.

With much hindsight, we might liken that mythos to the so-called big lie, as in the one Adolf Hitler made infamous in Mein Kampf, in which he said, “The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

The big liar’s reasoning isn’t hard to puzzle out, since when someone lies brazenly, this liar exploits people’s sense of decorum. To suspect that someone would stoop to such a reckless feat of gaslighting would amount to the dire realization that insane or evil individuals may be loosed even in polite society. We prefer to give the liar the benefit of the doubt to stave off that fear. After all, we want to feel comfortable in our normal operations, rather than alienated from basic social conceits, and mistrustful of everyone we meet.

In any case, as I said, while civil society may once have depended on the big, Hitlerian lie or, to use the euphemism, the “faith in traditional myths” about gods, miracles, magically inspired scriptures, religious authorities, and a transcendent role for humankind, it turns out that there’s another way to ground civility. This is the way that characterized the overcoming of European medievalism with global-caliber modernity, the kind that sustains objective rather than just culturally relative progress.

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Science was crucial to the new faith that we could solve our problems without kidding ourselves by praying to gods or sacrificing virgins or livestock to priests. Scientists discovered the truth about our position in nature, and science in turn rested on quasi-Gnostic alienation that built on pre-Christian secular humanism in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and Jewish satire (the implicit repudiation of theism in Ecclesiastes and Job, and in the monotheistic conversion of God into a “transcendent” irrelevancy).

That humanism gave us individualism, the conviction that all people are precious, regardless of their sex, age, wealth, creed, or skin color. Humanism, in turn, grounded capitalism, democracy, and laws that enshrined the principle that people should be free to think for themselves, not just in private but in public.

Here, then, is a nonreligious way of motivating civility. Science provides overwhelming evidence for philosophical naturalism (the view that everything is fundamentally natural, so there are no miracles in a metaphysical sense), and humanism responds to that existential condition with pride in the human ability to progress with reason, imagination, and empathy.

In the early modern period, holdovers from the medieval outlook could still have dismissed this “liberalism,” deeming it blasphemous, insolent, and foolish.

Thus, in his Essay on the Generative Principles of Political Constitutions (1809), Joseph de Maistre said, “Man is a free, intelligent, and noble being: without doubt; but he is not less an instrument of God.” Indeed, “since every constitution is divine in its principle, it follows, that man can do nothing in this way, unless he reposes himself upon God, whose instrument he then becomes.” In a footnote, he adds, “We may even generalize the assertion, and pronounce without exception, that no institution, whatsoever, can endure, if it is not founded on religion.”

Or in railing against the French Revolution, in Considerations on France (1796), Maistre said, “Orderly government excludes an infinity of schemes, but under the rule of a false sovereignty there is no end of chimerical plots. All passions are unchained and every hope is licensed.”

A couple of centuries later, this reads like projection. It’s theistic lunacy that licenses “an infinity of schemes,” providing a “false sovereignty” and “no end of chimerical plots” needed to shore up the childish, ludicrous presumption that the universe’s source cares about human politics or sexual habits.

Granted, that mockery of the Church’s counterrevolution depends on the naturalistic, humanistic outlook that early modernity established, but that’s the point. Once civilization gained an independent foundation on science, capitalism, democracy, and other liberal institutions, we’re poised to wonder whether we still need theistic narratives to make us civil and moral. Wouldn’t a solid humanist education in the sciences and arts suffice?

More than that, we can afford to call attention to the harms that religion causes or exacerbates since there’s another game in town. We can point out that the emperor is naked since we don’t need emperors anymore.

For instance, we can observe that naturalistic humanism would be superior to theistic religion in binding societies since the former explicitly establishes a biologically human nature, whereas religions tend to be tribal. Christianity binds Christians, not Christians with Muslims and Hindus. Also, religions divide themselves according to purity tests, so religions give us schisms, religious wars, patriarchal rule over women, and theological excuses for everything from torture and slavery to feudalism and the worst excesses of capitalism.

At this point, the proponent of religion may insist that if naturalism is true, there’s no basis for a humanist evaluation of people’s merits. Humanism couldn’t unite anyone since this secular value system would be vacuous. What you need for the assertion of a moral direction or a grand purpose is the magic of a divine commandment or the mystique that only theology can provide.

Of course, that appeal to magic and mystery only obfuscates the problem of how moral claims should be justified. Religion offers mere pseudo-explanations and hand-waving defenses of authoritarian prejudices. If you want to understand how morality could be possible, or what would justify morality in the modern condition of rational enlightenment (about our scientifically established position as clever mammals in a natural cosmos), you could hardly be content with ancient myths or theology.

I’ve discussed this in more detail elsewhere, so I’ll just point out here that humanism at least has the merit of addressing head-on our existential condition, whereas the theistic account of morality settles for a happy-talking fantasy that personifies nature’s staggering inhumanity.

Secular humanism responds to the truth of naturalism, to the fact that we evolved as animals eking out a living despite the solar system’s neutrality to our welfare. Humanism is a heroic, epic reply to the void, based on the conviction that people are special in the animal kingdom. Religions frequently demonize this pride, even as modern civilized progress has demonstrated that while this secular heroism may end up being tragically misplaced, it’s hardly groundless or absurd.

Scientific, capitalistic, democratic, and free-thinking advances proved the validity of humanist concepts, so there can be no more counterrevolutionary, religious bigotry against atheistic “blasphemies.” Even if world-historic modernity ends up sabotaging our species, as our progress demolishes the biosphere, there would be no intellectually responsible way for religious apologists to maintain that secular progress was impossible all along.

At some point in debating this question of the respective utilities of theistic religion and naturalistic humanism, we might be inclined to draw up a list of which side has committed the most or the worst atrocities. Of course, it’s a mixed bag in either case. Ancient religions have been oppressive rationalizations of authoritarian and tribal impulses that sustained civilizations, but only by making those societies grossly unjust for most of the inhabitants. Modernity has given us progress, but also the world wars, weapons of mass destruction, existential alienation, and the attendant mental illnesses and ironic neofeudal social arrangements that are only superficially progressive.

But neither worldview must be flawless for the other to be obsolete. The question isn’t whether theistic religion is evil and secular humanism makes us all saints. Instead, it’s whether this kind of religion is no longer socially necessary, or whether this mode of propping up civility is counterproductive in developed societies in the twenty-first century.

What do those religions add to science, capitalism, democracy, and the free-thinking arts that’s needed for our social welfare? Doesn’t religious faith clash with the implicit humanist ethos that supports those progressive institutions? Don’t modern religious folks make fools of themselves when they vote or buy high-tech products one moment and pray to a messiah or guru the next?

Allegedly, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”’ But couldn’t we just as easily say, ‘The fool says hypocritically, “There is a God,” while adopting a thoroughly godless lifestyle’?