I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? The New Athe­ists them­selves point to 9/11 and the elec­tion of George W. Bush as the twin prods that made them decide they’d had enough, but is it really so simple as that?

A second obvi­ous ques­tion is what accounts for the sim­i­lar­i­ties between the books in ques­tion: how did so many writ­ers come to share not only a sub­ject (the bad­ness of reli­gion), but also a tone (exas­per­a­tion), a style of humor (Oxford Union-​style wit), a favorite causal metaphor (Dar­win­ian nat­ural selec­tion), and a mode of argu­ment (find­ing the argu­ments one prefers and naming them the only ones tol­er­a­ble to reason)?

I haven’t yet seen the arti­cle I’ve been hoping for, but this week the Guardian pub­lished the next best thing: an essay by John Gray called “The Athe­ist Delusion.” Gray doesn’t tackle the soci­ol­ogy behind the New Athe­ist phe­nom­e­non, but he does a pretty good job with the phi­los­o­phy and the (anti-)theology of it. (And I can’t help but note that in his dis­cus­sion of Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, he comes very close to some of the con­clu­sions I made in my response to Amis’s “Horrorism” essay.)

In gen­eral, Gray’s point is that the ratio­nal­ist argu­ments that drive the New Athe­ist polemics—on the basis of which they claim their intel­lec­tual authority—very often depend on irra­tional or ara­tional beliefs, metaphors, and/or premises. (Jacques Der­rida made the same argu­ment, mutatis mutan­dis, about the human­ism of Hegel, Husserl, and Hei­deg­ger in “The Ends of Man.” The implicit sug­ges­tion of his essay is that any human­ist system of thought–i.e. any system that assumes a spe­cial status for human beings in the world–is “metaphysical,” i.e. it depends on some non-​rational belief.)

Specif­i­cally, Gray makes the point that many of the cher­ished ideas of the New Athe­ist pro­gram owe their devel­op­ment to a reli­gious (and in par­tic­u­lar a Chris­t­ian) out­look, and fur­ther that this debt raises ques­tions more seri­ous than those of mere prove­nance. In his dis­cus­sion of A.C. Grayling, Gray writes:

[T]he belief that his­tory is a direc­tional process is as faith-​based as any­thing in the Chris­t­ian cat­e­chism. Sec­u­lar thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of prov­i­dence, but they con­tinue to think humankind is moving towards a uni­ver­sal goal–a civil­i­sa­tion based on sci­ence that will even­tu­ally encom­pass the entire species. In pre-​Christian Europe, human life was under­stood as a series of cycles; his­tory was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemp­tive. With the arrival of Chris­tian­ity, it came to be believed that his­tory had a pre­de­ter­mined goal, which was human sal­va­tion. Though they sup­press their reli­gious con­tent, sec­u­lar human­ists con­tinue to cling to sim­i­lar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the con­so­la­tions of a faith, but it is obvi­ous that the idea of progress in his­tory is a myth cre­ated by the need for meaning.

And though Gray doesn’t spell it out, the con­clu­sion we should draw from all this seems pretty obvi­ous: that while a person might find the philosophical-​political pro­grams of the New Athe­ists prefer­able to reli­gion for any number rea­sons, he should not delude him­self into think­ing that they con­sti­tute a pure expres­sion of human reason. As Niet­zsche rec­og­nized, when rig­or­ously and hon­estly applied, reason alone can no more prove the idea of progress in his­tory or the supe­ri­or­ity of polit­i­cal lib­er­al­ism than it can the doc­trine of the Trin­ity. This doesn’t mean that the Trin­ity is as easy to believe in as the supe­ri­or­ity of polit­i­cal lib­er­al­ism; but it does mean that both are beliefs.