Phil Ryan is the author of After the New Atheist Debate. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a number of best-selling books which not only challenged the existence of god, but claimed that religious faith was dangerous and immoral. The New Atheists, as writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett have become known, sparked a vicious debate over religion’s place in modern society. In After the New Atheist Debate, Phil Ryan offers both an elegant summary of this controversy and a path out of the cul-de-sac that this argument has become
What inspired you to write this book?
I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith with a book group back in 2006. As someone who had read a fair bit of liberation theology in the 1970s and 80s, I was struck that religion for Harris seemed to be narrowly associated with such characters as Osama bin Laden or Jerry Falwell. He appeared unaware of the extraordinary diversity of religious thought and experience. When I went on to read the other “New Atheists,” I found that they generally suffered the same narrowness. So I drafted a long response to Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens & Co., from a progressive perspective. Before proceeding further, I checked out Books in Print, and found that quite a number of responses had already been written. I got my hands on as many of these as I could, including some very strange works indeed. Reading various responses to the New Atheists convinced me that the world didn’t need yet another one, but a critical look at the whole New Atheist debate, at the way that many theists and nontheists think about each other and about religion in the modern world.
I was struck, first, by the debate’s “toxicity.” Perhaps I’m naïve, but I was unprepared for the level of vitriol that permeates so many of the critiques and defences of belief. While doing research for Multicultiphobia, I found that many conservative criticisms of multiculturalism are very confused and ill-informed. But I never came across anyone who displayed the contempt for members of minority ethnic groups that some theist authors express towards atheists, and vice versa. If the sort of polarization that is manifested in the debate should come to characterize North American society as a whole, I can’t imagine how we could ever heal that.
At the same time, I noticed how apparently diametrically opposed positions shared certain common assumptions. Almost everyone who has written on the debate, for example, assumes that human actions flow rather directly out of beliefs. This leads them to imagine that the whole fate of civilization -even humanity- hangs upon their debate about religion. They ignore everything the social sciences have taught us about the complex relations between social contexts, actions, frameworks of belief, and so on. This, obviously, ratchets up the debate’s temperature even further.
What’s the most surprising thing you discovered during the course of your research?
We think we live in a pluralist world, in which we interact on a daily basis with people whose beliefs are quite different from ours. But the tone of the New Atheist debate suggested to me that many believers and nonbelievers have very little sense of what makes other people tick: how other people understand questions of right and wrong, for example.
I also found, by extension, that many people have little understanding of the structure of their own beliefs. Some New Atheists proudly proclaim that atheists are absolutely open-minded, that they live only “by evidence.” For someone trained as a social scientist, this sounds much like the bravado of crude positivists, who believe that all “values” have been purged from their work.
On the other hand, many theists claim that they have a firm and clear moral foundation, while atheists do not. Clearly, many believers are unaware of the complexity of their own web of beliefs, of the way social conditions influence their understanding of religious doctrine, for example.
What do you wish other people knew about your area of research?
One of the lasting insights of feminism is that “the personal is political.” We have to recognize that “the religious is political.” The ways in which belief and unbelief are imagined and debated have consequences for modern democracy, and thus affect all of us, whether or not one personally holds strong views on religious questions.
Healthy, non-toxic, debate on the politics of religion is possible, and vital. There is no reason to accept “conversation stoppers”: the fact that people differ passionately about all sorts of “big questions” need not block respectful debate. As I stress in the book: there’s always something to talk about, if we’re willing to talk.
What are your current/future projects?
My reading for After the New Atheist Debate repeatedly came across a claim that my book rejects: the claim that the consistent atheist must be a dangerous nihilist, because only religious faith provides a firm foundation for morality. I was struck by a parallel between this claim and a dogma that haunts the social sciences, the dogma that values are subjective and arbitrary. That is, those who claim that only believers have an ethical foundation effectively embrace the positivist claim that all values are subjective, but grant themselves a special exemption from it. Oddly, both camps in the New Atheist debate are shaped by positivism, though in different ways. So my work on the debate has segued into an attempt to address the problematic understanding of values and norms within much of the social sciences, an attempt that aims to be more comprehensive than earlier ones.
