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.