Atheism, Modernity & the Enlightenment Mentality
The new atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative – a totalizing view of things, locked into the worldview of the Enlightenment. The new atheism wants to take us back to what it portrays as the cool rationalism and sanity of the Enlightenment. Yet it fails to confront even a representative sample of the many contemporary critics of Enlightenment rationalism. It is much easier to defend a position when its critics are ignored. The new atheism is widely dismissed on account of its deeply flawed and biased account of religion; it seems we must extend that criticism by pointing out its total failure to confront the deep flaws, all of which have been known for some time, in its positive proposals.
Philosophical and cultural critics of the Enlightenment have exposed its intellectual indefensibility on the one hand, and its intolerance toward alternative worldviews, which it declares to be irrational, on the other. Modernity, its critics argue, created an intellectual context that legitmates suppression of what it regards as aberrant or irrational beliefs. The new atheism is thoroughly modernist, excoriating postmodernism precisely because it challenges and subverts its core assumptions.
The new atheism advocates a “return to the Enlightenment” without any attempt to confront the dark side of modernity. The same Enlightenment that the new atheism asks us to accept as a model of toleration and excellence is now charged with having fostered oppression and violence, and having colluded with totalitarianism, by its postmodern critics. The new atheism deals with this by ignoring it. Hitchens, for example, woodenly and somewhat implausibly persists in locating the roots of totalitarianism in religion. There is no recognition of the deeper truth that a significant incentive to oppression and even violence lies to hand in precisely the worldview that he advocates as the solution to our ills.
The new atheism’s response to postmodernism is to demand a reversion to an older way of thinking, long since abandoned by intellectuals as history ruthlessly exposed their flimsy foundations and faulty reasoning. The old intellectual frameworks that gave atheism such stability in the past are crumbling. The new atheist’s only solution seems to be to put them back up again.
Adapted from The Passionate Intellect, Alister McGrath (2010, p.154-155). This same book was released in the UK/Australia under the title Mere Theology.
