BOOK REPORT: “Seven Types of Atheism” by John Gray

The most recent brand of atheism is not the most interesting.

To think all atheists believe the same thing is as wrong as thinking all religious people do, too. In “Seven Types of Atheism,” professor and author John Gray lays out the great diversity amongst those who have “no use for the idea of a divine mind that has fashioned the world.”

It is a multitudinous lot. In his mind, the “new atheists” of the past 20 years (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) are the absolute least interesting of the crew, offering little that is original or sensible. But beyond and before that, atheists came in a variety of shapes and sizes. He wrote this book to introduce us to them. They include the God-Haters like Marquis de Sade, the secular humanists like Mill and Marx, the scientific (and racist) atheists like Hume and Mesmer, the political atheists seen in Bolshevism and Jacobism, the non-progressive atheists like Santayana and Conrad, and the mystic atheists of Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Getting each of these godless camps to agree on the justifications and goals of “atheism” (if it’s even a thing, instead of the absence of a thing) would be like expecting Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists to worship at the same altar. Or Cubs and Cardinals fans to root for the same outcome.

Gray is an atheist but not out to make converts.  Nor does he spare his fellows non-believers (if you can call them “fellows”) from the sharp edge of his prose. He finds much of atheism philosophically incoherent, and even unknowingly hypocritical. Modern atheism, he argues, is just an extension of monotheism: “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of trans-humanism.” Indeed, the difficulties many sorts of atheists have arguing that anybody should think or behave in any particular way—as even some of the most strident non-believers have advocated—are well-known. If anything Gray prefers the “atheism without progress” of Santayana, who was honest enough to acknowledge that human “progress” is a myth and that “humanity” is a mostly meaningless construction. Or he prefers the silent atheism of Spinoza, whose atheistic mysticism looks downright religious in its pantheism. (This only serves to illustrate one of Gray’s major points: when seen in a certain light, atheism and religion start looking strangely alike.)

I read “Seven Types of Atheism” because I don’t want to be guilty of lumping my non-believing opponents into the same camp. “Love others the way you want to be loved,” someone once said. I get frustrated when people assume I’m a Christian like all the other Christians, or religious like all the rest. I’m not. As I expect some of my atheist friends would be similarly frustrated, I need to honor their uniqueness by learning more.

And it was educational, and challenging. As I’ve tried to explain to my fellow Christians, atheists and agnostics aren’t stupid. They are responding in a perfectly logical way to the deus absconditus—the hiddenness of God. (At least in their minds it’s logical.) On certain days, I’m right there with them. Like many, my most common prayer is that of the desperate father in the gospels: “Lord, I do believe, help me in my unbelief!” The reasons for unbelief are ever-present. While it was fun and satisfying to see John Gray slash away at the incoherent beliefs of his fellow non-believers, he was also unsparing in his critique of historic Christianity. To him, Christianity is more logically understood as an accident of history, rooted in a Jewish apocalyptic figure adapted to the modern world by the universalism of Paul and adopted by the Roman Empire, which took it global. We have as much reason to think Jesus really rose from the dead, or that God fashioned the earth, as we have to believe any other religious myth. On top of that, the inability of Christians to truly live like Christ is a stain on the Church that has not been scrubbed clean, the smell of which continues to drive non-believers away. And of course the presence of suffering in the world is a problem for an all-powerful, all-good God, to say the least. No theodicy really satisfies.

These are common critiques that honest Christians like me wrestle with. Now, I have considered them, and I reject them based on logic, experience, study and faith. The arguments concerning the early origins of Christianity and the implausibility of the resurrection and the incoherence of trinitarian theism have been answered by scholars and theologians much smarter than me. But it was nonetheless unsettling to once again subject my worldview to such a non-believing brain as John Gray’s. He dismisses the Christian faith as drivel. To an unbelieving world, Christians will always be taken as fools.

But we are not the only ones. While atheists are not (necessarily) stupid, there is much foolishness in atheism, as atheist John Gray points out. This is a much-needed book for the current cultural moment, in which atheists are searching for their place in a world that, dammit, just won’t stop believing in God. And it is an important book for Christians and other religious types to read as well, in our ongoing efforts to show the love of God to people who reject the Premise. For starters, we can stop dismissing them as all the same, and show them the dignity of understanding we would want to be shown.

-MRH (9/7/2019)