Russell Blackford reviews Mitchell Stephens’ compelling and pleasing account of the origin and rise of atheism.
Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, by Mitchell Stephens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-00260-0). 328 pp. Hardcover, US$30.00.
American journalist and academic Mitchell Stephens has provided us with a fine historical study of the rise of atheism and the widespread decline, over the past two centuries, of sincere, naïve religious belief. Church attendances and professions of faith have somewhat held up in the relatively pious United States of America – as compared to other industrialized countries, especially those of Europe – but even in the US there has been a discernible withdrawal of the sea of faith. Throughout the Western world and in many non-Western countries, fewer of us show a wholehearted trust in supernatural dogmas. Indeed, outright atheism is now attractive, prevalent, and even fashionable.
How could this have happened, given the Christian hegemony throughout Europe at the beginning of Western modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Even within living memory, there has been a large-scale loss of faith. How did that happen?
Imagine There’s No Heaven should sit next to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and Gavin Hyman’s A Short History of Atheism (2010). These examine much the same course of events and tendencies, but from viewpoints more sympathetic than that of Stephens to the claims of religion. Taylor, in particular, is a practising Catholic, though his book offers a magisterial and largely objective account of the rise of non-belief over the past five hundred years. Hyman digs further back into history, again offers a largely objective account, but views modern atheist thought as largely unnecessary: as a rejection of theological positions that never should have thrived in the first place. (Hyman seems to like the idea of an indescribable, undefinable, generally ineffable God.)
My own book, 50 Great Myths About Atheism (2013), co-authored with Udo Schuklenk, includes a final chapter of nearly 50 pages covering the origins and rise of atheism. This is written from a viewpoint based more than any of the above in atheistic philosophy of religion. I clearly have a dog in this fight, but I also think it’s useful to consider the historical trajectory of atheism and other forms of non-belief from a range of viewpoints. We all have biases, and it’s notoriously easy to “read” the historical record in ways that confirm them.
Stephens’ book begins with a detailed and useful look at non-belief in classical Western antiquity and ancient India. From there it works forward through medieval Europe, the emergence of modern science, and the Age of Enlightenment, to more recent historical events and their participants, and finally to present-day sociological trends. In explaining the rejection of religion by isolated individuals living within religious milieux – and more recently by entire secularizing societies – Stephens identifies five varieties of irreligious thought, or perhaps these are better regarded as psychological factors undermining religion’s credibility. They are worth a brief summary (in fact, one minor fault of the book is that it never lists them together in a clear way):
1. Robust, commonsense skepticism expressed by the thought how can that be? when the claims of religion just don’t seem logical or fail to connect with our understanding of how things happen in the everyday, practical world.
2. The anacreontic philosophy (after the pleasure-loving Greek poet Anacreon), a simple, joyous, often anti-religious approach to life with a commitment to living with intensity and exuberance. Variants of this philosophy identify human flourishing with quieter, more tranquil, but nonetheless real pleasures – as in the philosophical system of Epicurus and his followers.
3. An inclination to seeking natural explanations of human actions and the phenomena of the observable world. As more events can be explained in this way, rational understandings tend to replace and render redundant the old supernatural ones. Soon, the human tendency to believe in gods can itself become a topic for rational inquiry. According to Stephens, this process sometimes develops as a virtuous cycle: a tendency to disbelieve in supernatural beings encourages the search for natural explanations, while successes in finding such explanations further undermine belief in supernatural beings. Thus, science and reason disenchant nature, diminishing the role assigned to God or the gods and tending to erode religion’s perceived authority.
4. A response to the real hell of political and economic repression often associated with religion. As Stephens tells the story, Enlightenment thinkers were correct to view the Christian churches as complicit in social evils. They were guilty of repressing individual freedoms and far too closely involved in the terrible conditions endured by the poor and otherwise marginalized. While most people in Europe lived in a real hell, eschatological fantasies of Heaven, Hell, and divine judgment distracted them from doing much about it.
5. Yearnings for an open sea (to adopt some words from Nietzsche). These have inspired more recent artists, philosophers, scientists, political thinkers, and other creative individuals. Many have yearned to be free from old dogmas and traditions – free to create the culture, knowledge base, and politics of the modern world.
These varieties of irreligion are, I think, somewhat impressionistic, and Stephens himself would not claim that they exhaust the reasons for atheism’s successes over recent centuries and decades. There is doubtless much to say about the effects of urbanization, economic growth, increasing personal security, and many other complex causal factors. Nonetheless, all five – how-can-that-be? skepticism; the anacreontic philosophy; increasingly successful quests for natural explanations; religion’s complicity in the real hell of social and political repression; and our modern yearnings for an open sea – appear to be genuine phenomena, apparent in the cultural and political record.
Thus, the account rings true and aids our understanding.
