Christianity and the Modern World
A noticeable feature of 19th and 20th century thought was the growth of skepticism about nearly ever feature of life, from moral truths to philosophical reasoning. As the project of the Enlightenment was coming to its fullest flowering, and Christian conviction was, at least among the most educated, reaching rock bottom, reason itself was being contracted. Because of the work of philosophers like Hume and Kant, people became less and less sure that we could have any accurate intellectual grasp of truth, of the moral, philosophical, or even common sense variety. So philosophies like relativism and skepticism and non-cognitivism were born.
This strikes me as a very natural effect of Christianity’s weakened influence and power. There seems very little reason to suppose that we can know moral truth, or investigate the world scientifically, or reason philosophically once we have formally (if not actually) removed theistic premises from our mental culture. Why should there be a perceptible rational structure to reality? How can we know that the world we perceive matches the world as it exists? How can we determine the moral course of action in a given situation? That these questions are unanswerable in an atheist universe was clear to the atheists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nietzsche believed that nihilism would necessarily follow Christianity’s decline (though he hoped the human race would respond to the abyss with creativity, power, and grandeur). It is no accident that Hume was both a thoroughgoing skeptic about our ability to know the external world and also an atheist. The Christian God who was logos had guaranteed our rational and moral capacities. Once that God was removed, there was nothing left except nihilism, relativism, and skepticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Or that is all one would have expected to be left. That was clearly the path 19th and 20th century thought was on. But for some reason Western thought pulled away from those philosophies, and today’s atheists advance positions which only make sense in the Christian universe. They are importing Christian assumptions into their thought. The most aggravating thing about the new atheism, and the modern world in general, is its refusal to acknowledge the theological assumptions that animate our institutions, culture, intellectual life, and moral intuitions. Perhaps the most obvious example of this point is the constant assertion by the new atheists that atheists can be moral too.
Of course, very few Christians would disagree. What Christians would say is that there is no identifiable philosophical reason why one should be moral absent theological premises. When asked to provide reasons why, for instance, one should not kill, today’s atheists generally appeal to some foundational premise that they don’t seek to prove. For instance, in his book Morality Without God, Walter Sinott Armstrong rests his entire attempt to build up an atheist morality on the basic belief that “harm is wrong.” He does not really try to prove this principle, because, well, he can’t. Instead, “harm is wrong” is set forth as an intuitive truth that all can agree with. While it is intuitive for us today, it has hardly always been so in the past, and we can’t guarantee that it will be in the future.
This is because, while there is moral truth, the ability of any particular society to grasp it is always imperfect. The moral and philosophical truths that a particular age latches onto are always contingent and variable. For instance, it wasn’t clear at all to pre-Christian pagans that when one’s primary form of entertainment is watching people die in gladiatorial spectacles or, as in the time of Nero, being killed in a tragic play, something might be wrong. Pre-Christian pagans also generally had no sense it might be one’s duty to care for a poor person unconnected to you by blood or relation. The fact that today we can talk about non-violence and charity for the poor is purely a result of the effect Christianity had on the pagan world. Pagan moral intuitions were very different from ours; our moral intuitions today are only what they are because we live in a world where Christianity’s vestigial influence can still be felt.
All this is to say that the new atheists have no right to continue to live off of Christian moral capital while simultaneously attempting to destroy Christianity. Why should our intuitions be more sound than those of the pagans, unless the force that shaped our intuitions- Christianity- is itself sound? As distasteful as we may find some of the conclusions of 19th and 20th century atheists, we can at least honor them for being philosophically consistent. The new atheists cannot claim even that. Instead, in philosophy, science, morality, and culture, they continue to profit from Christianity. If they want to be honest philosophers, they have got either to embrace Christianity or instead to face the moral and rational abyss that, philosophically speaking, necessarily follows from its abandonment.
June 19th, 2010 at 12:08 AM
Interesting and well argued piece. I’d like to point out a few points of disagreement: first, while pessimism and relativism have been on the rise in philosophy over the past centuries, this hasn’t been the case of all intellectual enterprises. Science has, if anything, become more indomitable in that same period. At least some dimensions of objective truth have been on the rise as Christianity wanes (if that is the case).
I also disagree that an absence of theology can only imply nihilism. Whenever I hear this argument I always want a demonstration of it, because none is ever given. Maybe it’s a result of the aforementioned pessimism and skepticism, but I don’t see how one follows from the other.
I also disagree that atheists must apologize to Christianity for overlapping moral principals. After all, we know the golden rule (at least in a negative form) is seen over multiple belief systems. Which of these should atheists apologize to? All of them? And what of the moral discoveries post-Christianity some of which *depended* on a secular climate to develop? Should Christians apologize for employing them?
June 21st, 2010 at 1:21 AM
Thanks for your thoughts, philosophical accent. I’ll do my best to respond to your points.
1) I agree that notions of objectivity are still around. That was one of the crucial points of my piece, and it was what provoked me to write it. I was (and am) trying to understand why it was that things (like objectivity) which seem to me to have no place in an atheistic worldview are still around even though atheism is on the rise. It was (and is) curious to me that the 20th century skeptical and nihilist atheism has been replaced by an atheism which makes bold claims about truth and goodness and all sorts of normative things.
2) It seems to me that nihilism follows from atheism in this way: we possess certain intuitions and innate senses that, for example, rape is wrong. Now everyone can agree that merely because we possess these intuitions it does not follow that we ought to adhere to them. In other words, a descriptive account of our moral intuitions does not, of itself, produce any normative conclusions about how we should act in a given situation. So we need an explanation for these intuitions that also provides support for normativity. As far as I’m aware, three main accounts of our moral sense have been given. The first is that it arises merely from arbitrary cultural conditioning. This is the explanation often held to by relativists, and as such it fails to provide a grounding for normative claims about how we ought to behave. The second is to give an evolutionary account of morality i.e. we evolved our moral sense because it helped us to survive. But as an explanation (even if it is true), it leaves us no better off then we were to start with, for it too is merely a descriptive historical claim. We cannot infer from the fact that we evolved for purposes of survival the idea that murder is wrong the normative claim that we ought not to murder. The third way is to say that God implanted in us (perhaps through evolution, perhaps through some other means) our moral sense. This is the only explanation of the three that gets us normativity. Remove it and what grounding is there for normative moral claims? Without any such grounding, nihilism is just a short step away.
3) I was not arguing that atheists should apologize for overlapping moral principles. I am glad that there is so overlap and I would think that an apology would be much more needed if there weren’t any such overlap. The point I was trying to make is that a certain popular brand of atheism, because it has been produced by a culture deeply shaped by Christianity, has essentially borrowed certain principles from Christianity while at the same time trying to destroy Christianity as an active force in the world. This simply strikes me as cutting off the branch you are sitting on, and I think it tells against modern atheism. Much more consistent would be to tear down the tree root and branch and admit that it only existed there in the first place because of Christianity. This is the more coherent atheism of the 20th century, the abandonment of which I am still puzzling over.