The best New Atheist book?

The New Atheism, one hears from time to time (e.g. here, here, here, and here), is dead.  Maybe.  It depends on what you mean by “New Atheism.”  I would say that its key marks are three: first, an unreflective and dogmatic scientism; second, an extremely shallow understanding of religion; and third, an obnoxious, evangelical fervor.  The third probably has by now worn out its welcome.  Even many secular people are tired of hearing the ever more unhinged rants and calls to action of the likes of Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers, and appalled by the lemming-like behavior of the kind of people who show up at a Reason Rally or Jerry Coyne’s combox.  As a self-conscious movement the New Atheism might be a spent force.

On the other hand, the first two marks of the New Atheism seem to me to be by no means on the wane.  Many, and indeed I would say most, secular people do not have a very deep understanding of the religious ideas they reject, and neither do they have a very sophisticated understanding of the philosophical problems inherent in the scientism they take for granted.  Unlike Dawkins, Myers, Coyne, and Co., they are not shrilly and militantly dogmatic and ignorant.  But they are politely and complacently dogmatic and ignorant. 

What would be interesting and remarkable would be a secularism whose best intellectual expressions were typically as sophisticated as, say, Walter Kaufmann, J. L. Mackie, or William L. Rowe, to cite three writers I admired in my own atheist days.  These were thinkers who recognized the intellectual and/or moral attractions of religious ideas and who also tried to grapple with the moral and intellectual problems posed by atheism.  They respected their opponents even when they disagreed with them vehemently – not out of mere politeness to the other side, but rather out of an informed perspective on it.  These thinkers are, of course, still known and their works still in print.  But even most (though of course not all) civil and educated atheists these days seem to lack their depth.

Anyway, if a postmortem on the New Atheism is in order, we might start by asking if anything of intellectual interest ever came out of it.  And the answer, I would say, is: Not much, but not quite nothing either.

One of the remarkable features of philosophy is that it is possible for a philosophy book to be well worth reading even if it gets things wrong, and even very badly wrong.  To take just four famous examples from early modern philosophy, Spinoza’s Ethics, Leibniz’s Monadology, Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature each put forward philosophical positions that are, frankly, nuts.  And yet every philosopher considers them classics, and for good reason, because each of these works is brilliant and worthy of careful study.  For though each starts from erroneous premises (in my view, anyway), each also makes the premises seem plausible, and also plausibly draws out their (often bizarre) implications. 

You can learn a lot from this sort of thing.  For one thing, if certain premises can be shown to have absurd consequences, that of course gives us reason to rethink those premises.  But there is more to the study of works like the ones in question than merely the caution against error that they afford.  A thinker who falls into a deep error can also sometimes see certain truths that others miss.  Why?  Precisely because he often focuses obsessively on some aspect of reality.  His mistake is that he exaggerates its significance, but precisely because he pays it far more attention than a more balanced thinker would, he notices things the more balanced thinker doesn’t.

Then there is the mundane fact that it is difficult for an intelligent thinker to go totally wrong, even when he is beholden to serious errors.  He is bound to get something right, even if it is not always what he thinks he is getting right.  For example, Hume’s account of the mind is ridiculous if applied to human minds, but it can be an illuminating way to begin to think about animal minds. 

A truly bad philosophy book, or a bad book of any kind for that matter, is one that not only gets things wrong, but fails to be interesting in any of the ways just described.  It simply has nothing going for it.  Now, a lot of New Atheist work is like that.  Consider, for example, Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact, which I reviewed for First Things and commented on further here at the blog.  For the reasons I set out in those places, it is possibly the worst of the New Atheist books.  The only thing that is interesting about it is that there is nothing at all interesting about it, and that fact – the fact that an otherwise intelligent man could produce so worthless a piece of work – is alone worth pondering. 

You might think I am just being abusive out of some animus toward Coyne, but that is not the case.  For one thing, I certainly don’t deny that Coyne is worth reading when he writes about something he actually knows about, such as biology.  For another thing, if I have been hard on Coyne, I have also been very hard on other New Atheists, such as Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett.  But I would not say about their New Atheist volumes what I say about Coyne’s.

For example, while Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is cringe-makingly bad as an argument for atheism, it has some value as a pop science summary of some current ideas in cosmology.  I’ve often pointed out how ill-informed and dishonest is Dennett’s treatment of theistic arguments in Breaking the Spell, but that book too is not entirely without interest, because of Dennett’s account of the cognitive science of religious belief.  The theory is not plausible at the end of the day, but it is at least a theory, with substantive claims and arguments that are worth evaluating.  It is not a complete waste of time to read these books, the way reading Coyne’s Faith versus Fact is a complete waste of time (other than as a source of blog fodder, anyway).

Unfortunately, most New Atheist stuff is closer to Coyne’s book in value rather than to these other books.  For example, what is probably the best-known New Atheist book, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, is a step or two up from Coyne, but not as good as Dennett, say. 

None of the books named so far is really a good book, though.  Some are just less bad than the others, that’s all.  None of them is really much worth reading all things considered, and that is true of almost everything in the New Atheist genre. 

I would make one exception, however.  Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality certainly counts as a New Atheist book, at least if we take the three marks identified above as definitive of the New Atheism.  But it is also of real intellectual interest, and worth reading and thinking about.  Like the books by Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, the philosophical position it defends is nuts.  Indeed, it is far more crazy even than anything those writers have to say.  That is because it draws out the extreme, eliminative materialist implications of scientism far more consistently than other New Atheists do.  And though it is semi-popular in style, its arguments are also more philosophically interesting (however badly wrongheaded) than those of other New Atheist books.

That is not to say it ranks with the classics by Leibniz, Hume, et al. mentioned above.  Few books reach that status.  Nor is it to say that its arguments are very challenging.  They aren’t.  I did, after all, devote a long series of blog posts several years ago to cataloguing its failings.  However, it was worth examining in such depth because it very clearly and systematically articulates certain common errors, and shows how they, and even more radical consequences, follow from yet other and more fundamental common errors.  And it does so with much more sophistication than most other books informed by scientism.  It is in many ways a work that is representative of the intellectual pathologies of our age, and its study helps one to understand our age.  It is probably the only New Atheist book that might still be read years from now, and it is certainly the only one that will deserve to be read.

So, in my opinion, Rosenberg’s book stands out as clearly the best book in the New Atheist genre.