Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist.
What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.
Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.” I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author. From my post:
Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive, which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.
Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets). Stuff like this roils my kishkes:
Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:
Timothy Egan is the author of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith,” among other books, and a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.
So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them. And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.
As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15. As reviewer Egan says:
As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”
Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:
In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.
This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.
But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:
Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.
He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”
But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)
But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning. Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.
Egan:
Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?
I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism. The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:
Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.
If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.
“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”
The proper response to this conclusion is “meh”.
Rule of thumb: if a Christian apologist claims to be a former atheist, forced into faith by evidence, be highly sceptical since that’s likely just a rhetorical device (cf. Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Alister McGrath, et cetera).
[Note that Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be a genuine former atheist, but she does not even claim to have arrived at theism through evidence.]
The only believer that I identify with was expressed in song by the Monkees, nicely covered by Blue Summit – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKIMUOvI4Z8
IMHO / intuitively :
Psyop.
A human can experience an ecstatic experience without it being a religious experience. The “R” label is a confiscation by theocrats.
“The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?”
It is RELIGION that is like non alcoholic beer: You must have faith that there is some alcohol hidden deep within, even though there is no evidence for any alcoholic content
I’m reminded of the great Monkees hit: “I’m a Believer.”
https://youtu.be/5tpxXDILZHs?si=MRWHVe0qCgR7XOOi
“Grounding your life” and “Giving it meaning” are not reasons for believing anything. The only reason for believing anything is evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence.
Atheism or religion may fill you with despair. Or they may fill you with joy. The matter has zero relevance to whether a belief is true. Anyone who believes something because it makes him feel good needs to go away and learn how to think.
Thanks Richard. Your elegance in stating the obvious is much admired and your simplicity and directness is a blessing for critical thinking people. I have read and reread all your brilliant books and watched with an almost a religious devotion your debates on YouTube. You, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett are worthy adversaries and for me, give meaning and richness to the evolution of sentience. But I must confess that the blind process of Darwinian Evolution, for some reason, actually makes me feel important and valuable; it makes me feel good! The God delusion, honestly so implausible, depresses me as infantile for any educated person.
May Goodness bless you.
T.E.Lawrence was once persuaded to contribute a blurb (apparently they had them in the 1930’s) to a book that happens to be a favourite of mine. I shall borrow his words to apply to Richard’s wisdom and clarity: “Admirable. Admirable. Wholly admirable.”
I think ‘giving life meaning’ is Pascal’s Wager re-writ. It’s done forJesus’ elephant stamp, the reward, at the end.
J.M. Bocheński, O.P., a philosopher, had the following definition of the meaning of life:
“Your life has meaning if and only if there is a goal you are now pursuing, or you are in a state of satisfaction (for example, after a significant intellectual achievement, or even while enjoying, worry-free, a day on the beach).”
So even he, a Dominican, did not invoke God as the source of life’s meaning. Even if the belief in God provides meaning to many people, I have never understood how one can “decide” to believe in God simply to avoid the thought that life is sometimes unpleasant. Doesn’t concern for the truth stand in the way of such a decision?
What frustrates me about the book and review highlighted here, and similar conversations, is the assumption that the meaning of “god” is obvious and commonly agreed upon. It isn’t. The late progressive theologian Markus Borg used to say that in his public university religion classes he would often have students come to him and say, “I don’t believe in god.” He would respond, “Tell me about this god you don’t believe in.” After the student answered, Borg would almost always say, “I don’t believe in that god either.” The student would be astonished to discover that his idea of god wasn’t shared by everyone else.
As an example of this is that essays like Beha’s and so many others never even consider the religious traditions of south and east Asia which have very different understandings of god, dating back at least as far as the biblical religions. Worse, in not taking seriously the “spiritual but not religious” movement they have no awareness of the contemporary Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist spirituality present within it.
Lastly, in treating these often non-theistic traditions as “foreign atheism”, Christians reveal their ignorance of the long history of mysticism in all three biblical religions. Mystics were often branded as heretics for their disbelief in the the god-in-the-sky of popular piety, while ignoring the depth of their existential spirituality. Meister Eckhart, for example, (who somehow managed to avoid the stake) is read with appreciation today by Zen Buddhists. And it was a Zen Buddhist who introduced Eckhart to Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. Yet Merton, Eckhart, and the whole mystical tradition (Gospel of Thomas anyone?) seem unknown to Beha, Egan, and their fellow theistic apologists, who only scratch the surface of a deeper and much more interesting story.
True, but somehow they KNOW that the real God is the judeo-Christian god!
That’s indeed a common weakness of atheists, too. They assume that all religion is like the Christian religion they grew up with (emphasising orthodoxy, for example) and remain ignorant of all religions except for the usual three, as Western culture has traditionally labeled everything non-Christian as worthlessly pagan.
There is no such weakness.
Non-abrahamic religions still make supernatural claims, and the most important criticism of the abrahamic religions – that they are not based on evidence – still applies to them.
This talk of a God-shaped hole reminds me of the way many people talk about childlessness. As a child-free atheist, here is my theory: most people want to believe in a God, just as most people want children. This is so important to them they cannot imagine someone who doesn’t share their need for God/children. How unbearable, how dreary and meaningless your life must be! Something terrible must have happened to you to make you that way! It gives them so much pleasure/peace of mind that life without it must seem bleak.
Of course, I realize that some religious people DON’T seem to get any joy or peace of mind from it, just as some parents have kids they don’t want because they see it as some kind of “duty”–religious, familial, cultural, or whatever. Like Puritans and other fanatics who see belief as a moral issue, these people see it as immoral NOT to have kids. I once saw a comment online discussing this point: the writer said something like “You do not have the right to refuse parenthood.” When people ask me why I don’t want children, I answer that I suspect a LOT of people don’t want children; unfortunately most of the people who don’t want kids have them anyway.
False equivalence here. Children are real. People find meaning in the corporal relationship with their children however depressing it can be at times. Gods are not real. To equate children to gods is to commit the same mistakes Beha and the rest are committing. Don’t get it twisted
Please be more civil in your comments. This appears to be the first one, so please read the posting Roolz on the left sidebar.
Well noted
Perhaps some of this reversion-to-the-religion-of-one’s-childhood trend simply reflects the aging brain. I’ve known a number of people who were brought up religious, then gave it up as adults, then later in life reverted back to their childhood faith. As the brain ages, more recently acquired circuits are the ones that tend to go first, leaving the older circuits intact.
I can’t imagine why I would feel like my life lacked meaning without religion unless I had already been brought up in a religious tradition. The complaint that a non-religious life lacks meaning seems very unimaginative to me.
I love that there are people still insisting on reality. Thank you for your work(s).