My religious position is clear enough: I am a High Church atheist. I like church music and church architecture, but that doesn’t mean God exists. You could say I was Anglican by temperament but not by belief.
I had many good friends when I was doing my first degree, but in those days I was something of a professional atheist. I saw it as part of my job as a Philosophy student. In particular, I found the arguments of the Christian Union (CU) simplistic and its habit of appealing to the emotions of lonely or immature young people unattractive. Interestingly, in view of what follows, my impression is that the majority of keen CU types were studying science subjects.
Over the years, though I find the Evangelical style of Christianity that the CU represented distasteful to this day, I have lost my enthusiasm for arguing with religious people. As you get older you come to realise that we all live by beliefs that we cannot possibly prove – in politics quite as much as religion.
And even when I was at university and sending for humanist publications, I resented the idea that if you were an atheist then you automatically embraced a whole range of predetermined positions on social issues – what you might call today ‘the full Evan Harris’. Then and now I had more doubts about the morality of abortion than are fashionable amongst Liberal atheists, though today I am a stronger support of assisted dying than I used to be.
Times moves on and I find the modern proselytising atheist movement unattractive – unattractive in the way that I used to find the CU unattractive, and often for the same reasons.
The version of atheism that attracted me as a student had Bertrand Russell and David Hume as its leading figure and it shared its best qualities: it was wise, witty and sceptical. This philosophical atheism gently but firmly pointed out that Christians were making claims about the universe that they could not begin to prove.
Russell was certainly an atheist, whereas Hume probably believed that there was a deity of some sort, but that there was little we could sensibly say about him. This philosophical form of atheism, you will see, was a broad church.
Today’s atheism is different. It does not deal in scepticism but in certainties.
I do not underestimate the brilliance of Darwin: everyone should read The Origin of Species, if only for the quality of the prose. Why isn’t scientific writing like that now? I suggest it is because of the emphasis on ‘publication’: papers are written to be published, not read.
And Darwin was a wonderful liberator of human thinking. If you read William Cobbett, an intelligent but not conventionally academic writer from the early 19th century, you will see that he cannot make sense of nature without God. (I remember using a quotation from Rural Rides in an essay on miracles to make just this point. Some linguistic philosophers would see the cry “it’s a miracle”” as an expression of joy but to Cobbett – I was rather proud of this phrase – it was an explanation, not an exclamation.) But after Darwin we could explain nature without God. The world looked different.
Yet somewhere this modern scientific atheism has hardened into a dogma. Just take a look at Twitter, where the stars of the movement spend their time mocking those who do not share their views and their acolytes send them links giving new names to laugh at. It does feel remarkably like a religious movement.
Such an approach does not accord with the view of science I learnt from the works of Karl Popper, where what characterises it is precisely a willingness to see its hypotheses refuted. The modern atheist does not entertain the possibility that he or she may be wrong.
Take the recent court case involving prayers before meetings of Bideford town council. Our modern atheists have rejoiced over this: to me it looks like an unreasonable demand that everyone else must share their views.
The strongest argument against prayers at such meetings is that they may discourage people from standing for the council in the first place. But I am not convinced.
I became a member of Harborough District Council at the age of 26 and a year later found myself part of a sizeable Liberal Alliance group with two member who were younger than I was.
Not surprisingly, we found many of the council’s ways of doing things stuffy and old fashioned. Some we tried to change (successfully or not), some we put up with, some we ignored and some we came to see the wisdom of.
In all of this, the existence of prayers at the start of full council meetings was the least of our concerns. But if they had worried us we would have sought to change things in Harborough, not looked for outside help to fight a court case in London.
And that is at the heart of my distaste for modern atheism. My Liberalism is sceptical and thus is happy to tolerate local difference: philosophical atheism could live with that, but I am not sure this new scientific atheism can.
