So I’m reading the brilliant and provocative ATHEISTIC DELUSIONS: THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS FASHIONABLE ENEMIES by David Bentley Hart. It begins as a criticism of the naive stupidity of the “new atheists” such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett from the perspective of the older atheist Nietzsche. The new atheists criticize religion (or basically Christianity) from an anti-cruelty, pro-dignity, pro-rights, pro-enlightenment perspective. They don’t realize that their humane values are, in fact, parasitic on Christianity and make no sense outside the Christian insight–completely unsupported by modern or Darwinian science–concerning the uniqueness and irreplacability of every human person. Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that.
But Hart also suggests that the Christian insight persists in our claims for autonomy or liberty or unlimited willfulness and even in our nihilism (or our view that what we’re given by nature and tradition is nothing if not transformed or unredeemed). Those claims, too, are unsupported by contemporary evolutionary science or neuroscience. So what amount to our empirical claims about who we are as free beings remain decisively Christian and in opposition to what we think we know through natural science. Modern science characteristically has nothing to say about the free, loving, relational being who is capable of being a scientist. The being with logos, we can see with our own eyes, is a person.
So Hart is right to hit the new atheists hard with the Heideggerian criticism of the vulgarity of their materialism. They cowardly avoid the question of being, of why is there is being rather than nothing at all, or of even why scientists or other free persons could come into being in a world eternally and wholly explained by an impersonal materialism (even or especially the evolutionists assume that this sort of explain has been and will always be true). Our creation by a personal Creator explains better human freedom, love, and creativity–especially artistic (in the broadest sense) creativity–better than assuming the eternity of matter and material causation or, of course, just begging off what might be the most important question for beings open to the truth about who they are. Atheistic materialists can’t explain the Christian revolution in our self-understanding about who we are and its effects on human history. Even the Nietzschean theory that Christianity was little more than expression of resentment about who we are (and the other animals don’t resent who they are!) can’t explain the marvelous and unprecedented monuments to the loving creativity of Christians.
Nietzsche wanted to get us over Christianity, and one criticism of his thought is that he wasn’t anti-Christian enough. Certainly he couldn’t purge himself of his whiny side about the abyss and all, and he, too, arguably attributed too much significance to human creativity. There might be some philosophers–such as Strauss and the later and more Buddhist Heidegger–who worked harder or more consistently in getting us beyond our claims for autonomy and/or being unique and irreplaceable. Are they engaged in mission impossible? Or are they our true scientists? What would be the moral and political consequences of their triumph?
Hart’s view is actually that our true alternatives are orthodox (meaning Orthodox) Christianity or nothing.I actually think he’s wrong on this, because the ground of our freedom in our (merely human) natures is evident to anyone who sees with his or her own eyes. (The openness and longing of the natural human person for a personal God is fact we can perceive without revelation, in my view.) And Hart’s idea that Christ divinized us or made us like him–somehow both human and divine in a wholly reconciled way–misconceives who we are even from a Christian–meaning Augustinian and especially Thomistic–view. Nietzsche, radically orthodox Christian thinkers of a certain kind (including most MacIntryreans), and our fundamentalists all agree on this Christianity or nothing theme. There must be a lot to it, although, again, I finally don’t agree.
Hart’s view seems to be the Aristotelian, impersonal, fatalistic, melancholic natural account of who we are was true until Christ transformed but divinizing us. My view is that it never was completely true, and that the personal logos of the early church fathers has been more true as long as there have been human beings around on this planet. Hart speculates, I thnk with good reason, that the Christian insight that we are meant to be more than slaves informed the emergence of modern, liberating, unsterile or not merely contemplative science. For that reason alone, our Porcher friends might be open to the thought that modern science is about more than nihilistic “mastery.” There might be something unironically charitable about the impetus of modern science, although it goes wrong, of course, with the thought that we need to be liberated from who we are our loving, relational beings.
It’s easy to connect these thoughts to Ivan the K’s fine WEEKLY STANDARD article linked below. Our technocrats are all sentimental Christians without Christ, but unlike our true Savior they’re focused primarily on using their freedom to alleviate their own suffering. Our cultural libertarianism is turning out to be terrible for the unique and irreplaceable beings who are genuinely most vulnerable.
These thoughs are also crucial for pro-lifers: Robert George, for example, takes the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every human person as a rational being according to nature as being scientific self-evident or not depending on a distinctively Christian insight. Both Hart and I disagree, although for somewhat different reasons. My view is that the Christian insight about our personal freedom doesn’t depend on orthodox (or Orthodox) Christianity to be empirically validated, although the whole truth and significance about that insight is best explained by reflection on Christian revelation. So Robby ought to be more about criticizing Locke, Kant, and even Lincoln for distorting or not properly understanding the freedom they describe–the freedom of the loving, relational being. And he ought not to think that Aristotle helps him out much at all.
October 27th, 2009 | 11:10 am
You write, “They cowardly avoid the question of… why scientists or other free persons could come into being in a world eternally and wholly explained by an impersonal materialism”.
I’d suggest you actually read some Dennett – that’s practically all he does. That question is central to his whole – well-respected though of course not universally accepted – philosophy. You don’t have to agree with his answers, but you can’t accuse him of avoiding the question.
October 27th, 2009 | 11:25 am
Thanks for the tip on Hart’s book. I have just finished reading Don Cupitt’s ‘The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity”. Cupitt, for those who don’t know of him, was previously a deacon in the Church of England, and now considers himself to be a ‘post-Christian’. But here is what he writes in his ‘Apologia’:
“… the postmodern West is secularized Christianity. Since the Enlightenment a vast number of people have supposed that one can reject Christian dogma and leave the Church – and thereafter have no further connection with Christianity. Not so. We remain what Christianity has made us, and in many respects the postmodern West is more Christian than ever. If you are a Westerner and are committed to Western values then you are a Christian. A ‘crusader-zionist’, indeed, says Mr bin Laden indignantly, and he’s right again.”
Cupitt’s post-Christianity ends up in a very European liberal assumption that the state has replaced religious faith as the tool for world improvement. But I don’t think you have to end up there even if you accept (as I broadly do) his narrative about the present day ‘indelible’ imprint of Christianity on life in Europe.
October 27th, 2009 | 11:36 am
[...] Original post: Postmodern Reflections on the Inevitability of Our Post-Christian … [...]
October 27th, 2009 | 12:02 pm
Peter,
You write:
Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity with Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that.
Do you mean to say “Christianity without Christ”?
October 27th, 2009 | 12:24 pm
Gerard,
Cupitt’s point that the imprint of Christianity is inescapable for Westerners living today seems inarguably correct. But how does Cupitt say (if he does say) that Christianity’s stamp will prove indelible over many generations without Christ?
I’ve been reading a lot of Philip Rieff over the past year and Rieff never tires of making the point that it’s Anthropology 101 that no culture can sustain itself without what he terms 2nd world sacred order.
October 27th, 2009 | 12:45 pm
Douglas, Thanks.
October 27th, 2009 | 12:46 pm
Neitzsche was right when he said that everything about Christianity is imaginary.
Enough said.
October 27th, 2009 | 3:17 pm
Peter,
I see why Locke and Kant misunderstand freedom (b/c they see it terms of autonomy), but why do you attribute that view to Lincoln?
October 27th, 2009 | 3:33 pm
“(The openness and longing of the natural human person for a personal God is fact we can perceive without revelation, in my view.)” Yes! And, this is in agreement with classical philosophy in the symbolization of existence as a field of “pulls and counter pulls,” and is touched upon in the Gospel, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws (helkein) him (John 6:44).”
The atheistic dilemma is revealed in the act of anamensis a recollection in existent or non-existent reality brought explicitly into consciousness. I think this has to do with Schelling’s concept of the centripetal movement-the return to God-that is mediate.
October 27th, 2009 | 8:57 pm
Isn’t it ironic that religion which has the truth about personal responsibility in the end actually strips individuals of the power of personal responsibility by making that power conditional. Where as those who through personal responsibility believe they have truth about the absolute power of personal responsibility attempt to convince everyone else that they too can be vested with such power. Is the truth any more real or any more powerful depending on the source? I think so.
October 28th, 2009 | 3:52 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert Hartzell, Darrell Cook. Darrell Cook said: Postmodern Reflections on the Inevitability of Our Post-Christian … http://bit.ly/3af7aX [...]
October 29th, 2009 | 11:30 pm
Just out of curiosity–see earlier post on Stanley Fish–but have you read Terry Eagleton’s book that also takes its start from the “new atheists”?
November 2nd, 2009 | 12:37 am
[...] PoMo Conservative against New Atheism. “…hit the new atheists hard with the Heideggerian criticism of the vulgarity of their ma… [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 3:50 am
[...] of Mormon Metaphysics points to this screed by Peter Lawler over at Postmodern Conservative by way of praising Atheist Delusions: The Christian [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 1:29 pm
[...] Peter Lawler at PoMo Con: So I’m reading the brilliant and provocative ATHEISTIC DELUSIONS: THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS FASHIONABLE ENEMIES by David Bentley Hart. It begins as a criticism of the naive stupidity of the “new atheists” such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett from the perspective of the older atheist Nietzsche. The new atheists criticize religion (or basically Christianity) from an anti-cruelty, pro-dignity, pro-rights, pro-enlightenment perspective. They don’t realize that their humane values are, in fact, parasitic on Christianity and make no sense outside the Christian insight–completely unsupported by modern or Darwinian science–concerning the uniqueness and irreplacability of every human person. Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable, and that the sentimental preferences of the new atheists are no more than that. [...]
November 3rd, 2009 | 10:40 pm
The New Atheism is a superficial conflation of descriptive science, normative philosophy and interpretive metaphysics, which amounts to an Enlightenment fundamentalism or scientism. It is the obverse side of the epistemic coin of the same philosophically bankrupt realm as religious fundamentalism or fideism, which similarly conflates these approaches to reality.
This wimpy atheism is but a caricature of the kind we encounter in the history of philosophy and I am thus reticent to engage what’s tantamount to a straw-man argument in bothering to refute them at length. For their part, they don’t hesitate to engage only those religious fundamentalisms that are but a caricature of modern theology.
As for any suggestion by Hart that an authentic Christianity nurtures its own nihilism insofar as it’s our supposed view that what we’re given by nature and tradition is nothing if not transformed or unredeemed, that is poppycock. At least there are those of us with a radically incarnational outlook, who do not view at-one-ment as a response to some ontological rupture located in the past but instead as a teleological striving oriented toward the future, who, with Scotus and the Franciscans, hold that the incarnation was not occasioned by some felix culpa but was otherwise in the cosmic cards from the get-go. Even among those who take a more classical approach to atonement, not all buy into a notion of total depravity, anyway. And this leads into my next point, which is that we do not believe that special revelation is or was necessary in order for humankind to discern right from wrong, to distinguish good from evil. At the same time, we would not deny that the Good News helps us to journey more swiftly and with less hindrance through all of Lonergan’s ongoing conversions (intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious, as expanded by Don Gelpi).
As a radically social animal and story-teller, humankind is inescapably liturgical, although the liturgy will be either doxologic or nihilistic. Among the doxologic approaches, in addition to such as the Eucharistic stance (of thanksgiving), there is the existentialistic, which even if not explicitly theistic need not be necessarily considered nihilistic, whereby people of large intelligence and profound goodwill realize such values as truth, beauty, goodness and unity, as they care deeply, are concerned with ultimates and celebrate whole-heartedly. How such people were formed and how many are where are historical and sociologic data, which are beyond me. That we should expect to encounter them, however, is our own theological anthropology grounded in a pneumatological (or even Christocentric) inclusivity? (And I do not ground mine in any Kantian-inspired, transcendental Thomism, which is a tad too optimistic.)
It does seem that the Enlightenment project ran amok on the Continent in its marginalization of religion but that the US approach properly integrated and even strengthened the influence of religion through its separation and non-establishment provisions. Still, while we needn’t bracket our metaphysical and religious views in the marketplace, we must translate them in a pluralistic society. And, amen, “the ground of our freedom in our (merely human) natures is evident to anyone who sees with his or her own eyes.”
November 5th, 2009 | 2:06 pm
No wonder that the theist havent figure it out that nobody seeks athena for wisdom nor jesus for redemption. I think they already begin to feel the coldness of the oblivion when they god and savior joins the ranks of the forgotten pantheon.
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