This is one of the feature articles at Salon.com today (Dec. 18, 2007)
Interviewer: Your forthcoming book, "God and the New Atheism," is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?
J.H. The only thing new in the so-called new atheism is the sense that we should not tolerate faith because, by doing so, we open people's minds to any crazy idea -- including dangerous ideas like those that led to 9/11. In every other respect, this atheism is similar to the secular humanism of the modern period, which said that faith is incompatible with science, that religion and belief in God are bad for morality, and that theology should be purged from culture and academic life. These are not new ideas. But there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what's going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they're the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity -- the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.
Interviewer: You're saying older atheists like Nietzsche and Camus had a more sophisticated critique of religion?
J.H. Yes. They wanted us to think out completely and thoroughly, and with unrelenting logic, what the world would look like if the transcendent is wiped away from the horizon. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have cringed at "the new atheism" because they would see it as dropping God like Santa Claus, and going on with the same old values. The new atheists don't want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.
Interviewer: Didn't they see the death of God as terrifying?
J.H. Yes, they did. And they thought it would take tremendous courage to be an atheist. Sartre himself said atheism is an extremely cruel affair. He was implying that most people wouldn't be able to look it squarely in the face. And my own belief is they themselves didn't either. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus eventually realized that nihilism is not a space within which we can live our lives.
Interviewer: But it seems to me that Camus had a different project. He thought there was no God or transcendent reality, and the great existential struggle was for humans to create meaning themselves, without appealing to some higher reality. This wasn't a cop-out at all. It was a profound struggle for him.
J.H. Yes, it was. But his earlier life was somewhat different from his later writings. In "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus," he argues that in the absence of God, there's no hope. And we have to learn to live without hope. His figure of Sisyphus is the image of living without hope. And whatever happiness Camus thought we could attain comes from the sense of strength and courage that we feel in ourselves when we shake our fist at the gods. But none of the atheists -- whether the hardcore or the new atheists -- really examine where this courage comes from. What is its source? I think a theologian like Paul Tillich, who wrestled with the atheism of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, put his finger on the real issue. How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it's difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work -- as an alternative to the new atheists -- is a universe in which hope is possible.
Interviewer: But why can't you have hope if you don't believe in God?
J.H. You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don't have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.
Interviewer: For years, we've been bombarded by arguments over religion and evolution. And yet you say theology has not yet come to grips with Darwin. What are theologians missing?
J.H. Well, this has been one of the most dramatic events that theology -- at least in the West -- has ever had to face. The Darwinian story of evolution seems to give people a whole new creation story. You have to remember that our sense of ethics and the divine came into our religious awareness fixed to a static, vertical, hierarchical understanding of the universe. The fact that there's a special place for humans gave us the sense that we were cared for in a special way by divine providence. But if you suddenly switched to a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and an evolutionary process that takes almost 4 billion years to lead to humans, then it's very difficult for many people to map this new horizontal, temporal, historical unfolding onto the static hierarchy, which was the backbone of spirituality for so many centuries.
You can read the rest of the interview at: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/12/18/john_haught/
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