I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.
I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.
That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality. Since religious concepts of morality are mostly divine command theory and thus reside in the impetuous mind of God, there is little objective about it except that it is arguably external to the human mind. For a moral impetus to be objective, it would need to reside in mathematics or logic or science, which is how we return to evolutionary concerns about how social organization leads, in turn, to Sam Harris’s objective relationship between thriving and individual choices. While curious, I always questioned why anyone thought that having an external reference for a moral code was critical to anything other than arguing against the straw man of “without God, why not just kill and rape?” It’s beyond silly. As Pinker points out, and as we know from our earliest childhood spats, harming each other is bad because we know the consequences to ourselves. Law and societies build on that without much reference to divine commands.
There was another layer to New Atheism that involved detailed critiques of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, like the Kalam Cosmological Argument or the Ontological Argument for God. The former deepens due to big bang cosmology as an additive, and cosmology also informs the fine tuning argument. In all of these cases, however, there is a missing ingredient for the believer and that is the content of their religious texts and doctrines. There is only a tentative brush of Biblical creation stories against an idea like Kalam. Whatever is hypothesized to have set our universe in motion, it need not be Adonai, Yahweh, or El. It could be a timeless, immaterial space pig farting. It is only in the medieval and later theologies that deductive constraints about an “omni God” (omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-benevolent) came to be seen as filling that gap. The ancient deities were much different: migratory, physical, protective, cruel, demanding, and war-mongering.
And that is where I am delighted by recent public intellectuals and scholars who are improving our understanding of the mythic foundations of these ideas. I call this “Post New Atheism,” but there is nothing very new about it since critical scholarship, classicism, textual criticism, and archaeology have long, storied histories. More, many of the contemporary figures are religious believers. They are following the scholarship and the facts toward a critical understanding of how religion is very much a human construct built for power, control, and explanation.
My Post New Atheism YouTube recommendations include the following:
- Dan McClellan, a Mormon critical scholar of the Bible who interrogates and responds to Christian apologists as well as commenting on and discussing highly varied aspects of the Old and New Testaments, as well as the cultures and mythological backgrounds of the Judeo-Christian heritage.
- Esoterica, a Jewish scholar who does deep dives into everything from Gnosticism to Lovecraft and the occult.
- Deconstruction Zone, a call-in show that takes on Christians and an occasional Muslim on their faith backgrounds and arguments for the existence of God, often uncovering and analyzing the truly disturbing aspects of the Bible concerning morality and prophecy, as well as sometimes taking on some of those philosophical arguments.
- Paulogia, a Canadian former Christian from a devout background who used to lampoon young Earth creationists (funny and bizarre but a single-note gag, too), but has recently settled into doing his own scholarly work on analyzing the “Minimum Facts Hypothesis” for the resurrection of Jesus Christ by scholar Gary Habermas. Paulogia is developing his own “Minimum Witness Hypothesis” that posits that it only took one (Peter) or two (Peter and separately Paul) who were sincerely convinced by post-death bereavement hallucinations or other form of experience in order to kick off Christianity. And here we are.
- Ronald Hutton, the eminent English classicist who explores how pagan and folk traditions weave through European cultures before and during the rise and influence of Christianity.
Since my photo, above, is of a 3rd to 1st millennium BCE Astarte figure in iron, I’ll point to what I consider to be an important touchstone for Post New Atheism: the mythic origins of all religions. From scholars like Mark Smith with The Early History of God to Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy, or even to Dan McClellan’s discussion of creation ex nihilo, we see the elaborate genesis of a religion from some of the earliest textual and material evidence, and then on to the influences of Persia and Hellenistic Greece. Yahweh emerges from the south and merges with Ugaritic El. Foot washing is a central concern as is ritual human sacrifice. Ashera (sometimes seemingly syncretized to Astarte) is scattered through the OT, often referring to cultic objects, sometimes translated as groves of trees, and as the consort of Yahweh as El/Yahweh merge.
For me, this beautiful and rich history is not something I can cognitively or emotionally elevate to a spiritual platform that is religious in character. There is no sense in which I can pray to this tapestry of human inventions. The elevation instead is in the scholarly excavation of how our ancestors thought about their worlds, lives, and relationships to invented supernatural forces. So, here in the time of Ostara, Easter, Paques, Pascha, and Passover, we see the resilience of these mythologies as ritual touchstones, with rebirth, sacrifice, obedience, sin, and redemption as romantic appeals to something foundational that predates Pinker’s enlightenment. It is numinous but not supernatural. It is a fascinans, a mysterium ingens to pierce the obscurum. Christopher Hitchens would be proud of this Post New Atheism, bathed in engrossing detail and teaching an essential realization about the human condition.
Enjoy your holidays!
Two minor edits