John Gray is an English writer, philosopher, and atheist—one of those atheists who really, really hates New Atheists, doesn’t think much of science, and positively loves religion. I’ve dissected his pieces before on this website (see this collection, for instance), and, truth be told, I can barely muster up the energy to discuss any more of his lame and repetitive articles. But I’ll take up the cudgels just one more time, if for no other reason than to tell him (for he’ll surely see this) that #NotAllAtheists go alone with his mean-spirited and generally mindless lucubrations. (If you think I’m exaggerating the “mean-spirited” part, see here.)

At any rate, his article in Wednesday’s New Statesman, “Why humans find it hard to do away with religion,” is ostensibly a review of a recent OUP book by Dominic Johnson, God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. I say “ostensibly,” because Gray’s piece is his usual jeremiad against atheism. I haven’t read Johnson’s book, so I’ll discuss only what Gray says about religion, much of which seems to parrot and agree with what’s in Johnson’s book.

If you’ve read Gray’s pieces before, you’ll be familiar with his anti-atheist tropes, so I’ll be as brief as I can in laying out his thesis. His main points are three:

a. Religion is an evolved phenomenon, and it evolved because it helped society cohere. (Indented quotes are Gray’s.) It’s not absolutely clear whether by “evolved” Gray means “culturally” or “genetically” evolved, since you can discern both forms of change in his arguments. But here’s what he thinks, apparently agreeing with Johnson:

Human beings never cease looking for a pattern in events that transcends the workings of cause and effect. No matter how much they may think their view of the world has been shaped by science, they cannot avoid thinking and acting as if their lives are subject to some kind of non-human oversight. As Johnson puts it, “Humans the world over find themselves, consciously or subconsciously, believing that we live in a just world or a moral universe, where people are supposed to get what they deserve. Our brains are wired such that we cannot help but search for meaning in the randomness of life.”

Here he implies biological evolution:

But what if belief in the supernatural is natural for human beings? For anyone who takes the idea of evolution seriously, religions are not intellectual errors, but ­adaptations to the experience of living in an uncertain and hazardous world.

Such adaptations would seem to be genetic ones, given Gray’s invocation of the “idea of evolution”—surely organic evolution, since everyone takes “evolution as cultural change” seriously.

But here he might be talking about both genetic and cultural evolution:

Reward and punishment may not emanate from a single omnipotent deity, as imagined in Western societies. Justice may be dispensed by a vast unseen army of gods, angels, demons and ghosts, or else by an impersonal cosmic process that rewards good deeds and punishes wrongdoing, as in the Hindu and Buddhist conception of karma. But some kind of moral order beyond any human agency seems to be demanded by the human mind, and this sense that our actions are overseen and judged from beyond the natural world serves a definite evolutionary role. Belief in supernatural reward and punishment promotes social co-operation in a way nothing else can match. The belief that we live under some kind of supernatural guidance is not a relic of superstition that might some day be left behind but an evolutionary adaptation that goes with being human.

Regardless, it’s still not clear how religion came to be. Social cooperation is one reason, but so is Pascal Boyer’s notion of “agency”—the desire of an ignorant and superstitious species to attribute agency to impersonal events. Another explanation is simply fear of death: we’re the only species whose members know they’re mortal, and much of religion may be an attempt to deny that. Or these reasons could all hold. The fact is that whatever purposes religion serves now may not be the reasons it arose in the first place. And why it arose may be simply a byproduct of our ignorance as early hominins, or of other evolved traits like the attribution of agency as a way to help you survive.

Gray cites psychology experiments showing that religious people are more generous in “dictator games” than are nonbelievers, but adds as well that such generosity seems to come from fear of punishment. In other words, Gray admits that religion holds society together largely through fear of both worldly ostracism and, especially, divine retribution.

And that brings up an important question. Gray is an atheist, so he doesn’t believe in religious myths, or even God. So is it useful for society to be held together by mass belief in pure fiction? Apparently, yes:

Unlike practitioners of polytheism, who seek and find meaning in other ways, Christians have found sense in life through a mythical narrative in which humankind is struggling towards redemption. It is a myth that infuses the imagination of countless people who imagine they have left religion behind. The secular style of modern thinking is deceptive. Marxist and liberal ideas of “alienation” and “revolution”, “the march of humanity” and “the progress of civilisation” are redemptive myths in disguise.

So false beliefs can motivate good morality—as opposed to atheist “myths” that are not only false, but don’t promote comity or morality. Gray doesn’t mention secular humanism, or point out that purely secular societies behave at least as morally, if not more so, than religious ones. Where would you prefer to live: Saudi Arabia or Denmark? In a Mormon enclave, where Christianity regulates everthing, or Sweden? In the Catholic Phillipines or in France (and don’t say that I’m deciding this way because the Philippines are poorer, for that’s one reason they’re so Catholic!)? And this brings us to Gray’s second point:

b. New Atheism is a doctrine promulgated by simple people, and it’s based just as much on faith as is religion. To wit:

[The idea that religion is an evolutionary adaptation is] a conclusion that is anathema to the current generation of atheists – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and others – for whom religion is a poisonous concoction of lies and delusion. These “new atheists” are simple souls. In their view, which derives from rationalist philosophy and not from evolutionary theory, the human mind is a faculty that seeks an accurate representation of the world. This leaves them with something of a problem. Why are most human beings, everywhere and at all times, so wedded to some version of religion? It can only be that their minds have been deformed by malignant priests and devilish power elites. Atheists have always been drawn to demonology of this kind; otherwise, they cannot account for the ­persistence of the beliefs they denounce as poisonously irrational. The inveterate human inclination to religion is, in effect, the atheist problem of evil.

That’s just bogus; people like Dennett and Dawkins have spent a lot of time thinking about why people are religious, and the conclusion is not invariably that their minds are deformed by “malignant priests and devilish power elites.” That may be one way religion is perpetuated in some places, but that’s a different question from what Gray is posing, which is how religion got started in the first place. And talk about “simple souls”—what an ad hominem argument! The simple souls are in fact the religious ones, those who grasp at simple myths of old men in the sky rather than grapple with the complexities of evolution and culture. Which soul is simpler: that of Dan Dennett or that of a snake-handling preacher in West Virginia? How dare someone like Gray describe people like Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris in that way? I’d put any of their intellects against Gray’s (clearly a “complicated soul”) any day.

Gray goes on with the “evangelical atheism” canard:

For some, atheism may be no more than a fundamental lack of interest in the concepts and practices of religion. But as an organised movement, atheism has always been a surrogate faith. Evangelical atheism is the faith that mass conversion to godlessness can transform the world. This is a fantasy. If the history of the past few centuries is any guide, a godless world would be as prone to savage conflicts as the world has always been. Still, the belief that without religion human life would be vastly improved sustains and consoles many a needy unbeliever – which confirms the essentially religious character of atheism as a movement.

Surrogate faith? Haven’t we gotten past that yet? Or does Gray not know what “faith” means in religion? Yes, many atheists believe that the world would be better off without religion, but there’s evidence for that: not only the divisiveness that plagues our world at present and the malevolence of many faiths (does Gray really think that a world without Catholicism or Islam would be palpably worse?), but the observation of what happens in societies that reject religion and rely on Enlightenment principles of reason—societies like those of northern Europe. If Gray were right, these societies would be markedly worse off than religious ones, for they lack that religious glue that causes people to cohere. But, of course, places like Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands, are not only very well off using sociological scales, but are some of the happiest societies in the world.  Religious Palestine, Uganda, India, and Tunisia—forget it. Deeply unhappy lands.

And we mustn’t forget Pinker’s argument, forcefully made, that violence is declining in society over time. One of the reasons he gives is the displacement of superstition by reason and Enlightenment values. If the history of the past few centuries is any guide, the more godless the world becomes, the more moral and less violent it becomes.

Two more points. Gray, who apparently knows little about evolution, rejects the proposition that human minds evolved to find out what’s true about the world. In this he echoes the argument of Alvin Plantinga that naturalism can’t explain humans’ constant seeking of the truth, for there’s no evolutionary payoff for such a search (my emphasis in paragraph below):

Certainly there is an element of comedy in the new atheist mix of proselytising Darwinism and ardent rationalism. There is no way in which a model of the mind inherited from Descartes and other rationalist philosophers can be squared with the findings of evolutionary biology. If you follow Darwin in thinking of human beings as animals that have evolved under the pressures of natural selection, you cannot think that our minds are primed to seek out truth. Rather, our ruling imperative will be survival, and any belief that promotes this will have a powerful attraction. This may be why we are so anxious to discern a pattern in the drift of events. If there is none, our future will depend largely on chance – a dispiriting prospect. The belief that our lives unfold under some kind of supernatural direction offers a way out, and if this faith enables us to live through disaster, that it may be groundless is irrelevant. From an evolutionary perspective, irrational belief isn’t an incidental flaw in human beings. It has made us what we are. In that case, why demonise religion?

I discuss this argument on pp. 177-185 in Faith Versus Fact. And it’s clear that for many purposes, our minds have indeed evolved to find out what’s true about our world. For finding out what’s true—where the animals are, how they behave, what plants are safe to eat, what other members of your group are like—will very often promote the survival of your genes. Does Gray not see any connection at all between finding out what’s real and one’s survival? If not, he’s more ignorant than I thought.

But of course our minds are limited by evolution as well, and, as Trivers has shown, sometimes it pays us to deceive others, or even ourselves, so we’ll often believe stuff that is wrong. And there are, of course, things we believe, based on experience with other things, that are also wrong: that a severed tetherball will fly off in a spiral, that we saw things we never did, and that we ourselves are generally better than other people. No evolutionist thinks that natural selection will always lead us to believe what is true, for some of the “adaptive” behaviors and beliefs that have led us to truth also have spandrels that cause us to believe things that are untrue. Optical illusions are one example.

And why demonize religion? That brings us to Gray’s final point:

c. The Good “Old Atheists” were better than the “simple” New Atheists because they made fun of religion but didn’t try to do away with it. These “Old Atheists” invariably include Mencken and Camus, but often leave out people like Ingersoll and Russell—people who were not only atheists but anti-theists. Ingersoll and Russell, for instance, constantly pointed out the dangers of faith, and touted a world without God. Gray’s big hero, though, is H. L. Mencken:

 Atheism need not be an evangelical cult. Here and there one finds thinkers who have truly left redemptive myths behind. The American journalist and iconoclast H L Mencken was a rambunctious atheist who delighted in lambasting religious believers; but he did so in a spirit of mockery, not out of any interest in converting them into unbelievers. Wisely, he did not care what others believed. Rather than lamenting the fact of incurable human irrationality, he preferred to laugh at the spectacle it presents. If monotheism was, for Mencken, an amusing exhibition of human folly, one suspects he would have found the new atheism just as entertaining.

I am trying to understand the mindset that leads one to say, “Wisely, he did not care what others believed.” When you think about it, that’s a reprehensible and selfish thing to say. Why do you care what others believe? Because beliefs lead to actions, and sometimes those actions are harmful to other people and society as a whole. Would Gray say the same thing about politics: “We shouldn’t care what Republicans believe”?

Mencken was a satirist and a sybarite, not a social activist. He preferred to mock religion before a fire in his Baltimore home, comfortably ensconced behind a schooner or three of beer. In contrast, Russell and Ingersoll were activists, and wanted to do something about religion’s harms. Following Gray’s advice, let’s by all means just laugh at the Republicans, but let us not try to do anything about their views on promulgating guns, banning abortion, and demonizing women, gays, and immigrants. After all, as philosopher Gray tells us, that’s the WISER thing to do.

I’ve also pondered at length why an atheist philosopher who clearly thinks highly of his own intellectual acumen nevertheless promulgates the Little People’s Argument. Apparently Gray doesn’t need religion to be a good person, but believes that nearly everyone else does. What a low opinion of human nature, and what a recipe for inaction!

h/t: Rodney