Atheism is in the news these days. Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great are runaway bestsellers. The books seem but the tip of an iceberg. Every time one turns on the radio or television, there is an earnest proselytizer telling us that religion is the worst thing to happen to humankind since we left the jungle and moved onto the plains. If only someone could rid us of our turbulent priests, we could move forward to a happy, secular, New Jerusalem, where milk and honey would flow in abundance for all. A kind of Toronto without the winter.
I have mixed emotions. On the one hand, I share the skepticism of the God-deniers. The essential claims of religious belief - water into wine and that sort of stuff - excite but fail to convince. On the other hand, I don't much care for the present crop of books. In main part, this is because the critics refuse to concede religion any good points. This is absurd. Without the Quakers of the 18th century and the evangelicals of the 19th, we would still be slave-holders.
I am not here to whine and moan, however. As a non-believer, what books would I recommend to the curious? First: Why I am Not a Christian (Simon & Schuster, 1957), by British philosopher Bertrand Russell. The title essay of this collection is based on a talk given in 1927. Russell runs through the arguments for God's existence, demolishing them briskly in turn, but he tries also to grapple with the positive aspects of Christianity.
Russell was deeply sympathetic to some of the ethical preachings of Jesus, and appreciated their historical importance. He did not want to accept everything, and the need to sort and choose was an important part of his sense that morality needs a base external to God's will. But one comes away with the strong feeling that religion is not stupid. It may be false, it may sometimes be dangerous, but it has earned the intellectual and moral right to be treated seriously.
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Second, as a professional philosopher, I choose a work by one of my own, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Published around the time of the American Revolution, this is one of the wittiest and most devastating critiques of religion ever penned. Hume's target is the design argument for God's existence - the eye is like a telescope, telescopes have designers, hence the eye must have a designer, namely the Great Optician in the Sky.
Once compelling, this line of thinking was ripped apart by Hume. Most things well designed have many prototypes, are still open to further refinements and have several designers responsible for their finished state. Does this mean that there are many gods, many proto-worlds, and that ours is still not perfect? And in any case, what of the problem of evil? If God is all-powerful and all-loving, Hume asked in good 18th-century fashion, then why do people suffer from gout? Surely the God of Christianity could have done something about this.
Paradoxically, at the end of his work, Hume has to admit that there might be something to the God business after all. The eye really is design-like. It cannot have come about by random processes. As Murphy's Law tells us, if things can go wrong they will. If not God, then what?
Darwin, in his Origin of Species, gave the non-God response. Natural selection, the survival of the fittest, leads to change in the direction of design-likeness. Those organisms with eyes did better than those without, and those with better eyes did better than those with worse eyes.
This leads to my third choice. If you are going to reject the God stuff, is life simply meaningless - without rhyme or rhythm? Why not commit suicide now and get it all over with? Most of us, including us non-believers, recoil in horror from such nihilism. We want to understand what makes things - what makes human things - tick, and why and how it is possible to have a life of worth and happiness. From Darwin on, evolutionists have tried to show how our human origins lie in a shared animal past, and how and why this helps us to make sense of life today.
Today's most prolific writer in this vein is Harvard entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, and it is his On Human Nature (Harvard, Cambridge, 1978) that I now nominate. Wilson argues that we humans at love and play and work and war are to be seen as creatures of our biological past, and that once this truth is grasped, we have understanding of the power of religion and a way forward without it.
I am not sure how much I agree with Wilson, but I share his concern to make sense of life without God. At the very least, his is a provocative and thought-inspiring first step.
Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University. His attempt at explaining it all is Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy.
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