Dreams can certainly be more inspiring than facts: In defence of decent atheists

I had a dream recently where I found myself in a church; in some sort of general, relatively secular meeting. The vicar was an earnest man of substantial yet indeterminate age with surprisingly youthful vigour and a powerful sense of religious conviction. Though certain of his own opinions and attempting to persuade others of the correctness of his thinking it was not a faith borne of unquestioning adherence to dogma, more in the vein of a self-assuredness of his own self knowledge.

As is often the case with dreams my recollections are of a vague, almost shifting nature, though something left an impression upon me. The subject under discussion blurs away, the vicar encouraging me to attend his church on non-secular occasions and to engage in religious conversation with a likely hope of conversion.

I politely, but with a hint of condescension, deflect his invitations and enquiries and make my leave. What I am struck by is, for want of a better phrasing, his faith. I personally hold a number of ideas to be true that have led me to become an irreconcilable (but polite!) atheist. Such ideas on their own, used in trains of evidence-based argumentation can be as empirically and logically convincing as any argument but they can lack the dream that shone from that vicars’ eyes to make them truly compelling.

At present there is a vigorous ‘New Atheist’ movement making its voice heard in public discourse which I think suffers from a deficiency in persuasiveness as well as other flaws. Such names as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins spring to mind. The flaws in their approach lie not in the arguments they make for the non-existence of deities but the personal prejudices they conflate such arguments with and their lack of understanding of the need for facts to inspire new dreams.

For example, Christopher Hitchens, whist a fine raconteur with an encyclopaedic knowledge of religion that could blast any religious apologist out of the water was also excruciatingly blunt to the point of plain rudeness. In his later years he also appeared to focus all critiques of religion at one in particular whilst getting rather too cosy with some rather ‘hawkish’ neocons who were more than happy to utilise his influence to promote a rather questionable political agenda. As far as I am aware he also never appears to have debated with a woman which is something I would also allege of many of the other New Atheist crowd which is very much a boys’ club; and a white, straight, upper-class one at that.

Having been inspired by some of Hitchens’ works and his dry wit to discover much of his hypocrisy and slow decline into incoherent alcoholism I found particularly sad. Another prominent New Atheist, Richard Dawkins, is, I would argue, an excellent biologist but a poor philosopher and a terrible anthropologist. In the heady world of academia removed from the everyday experiences of human beings it is very easy to play intellectual football with ideas and poor scorn on those with which you disagree. It is quite something else when you put yourself forward as an ambassador for biology and atheism and then proceed to act like a total jackass!

I call Dawkins a poor philosopher because he often falls on crude socio-biological explanations of human behaviour. This matters; how human beings are viewed percolates through to political discourse and affects the nature of society. Self-aggrandising, rude comments about people’s religious beliefs can serve to act as a sounding board for existing prejudices and scapegoating.

On a purely pragmatic level viewing human beings as hard-wired shaven apes using overly reductionist sciences such as evolutionary psychology to explain our behaviour provides an inaccurate and incomplete picture of our nature, public policy derived from which is likely to create greater harm than good. 
You can, after all, no more describe a human being as ‘simply an ape’ than you can describe a Monet as some dried paint.

Dawkins' poor anthropological skills relate partly to the points above and also to his lack of understanding as to what religion actually is and what purpose it serves in human experience. It is one thing to argue that deities do not exist and quite another to be able to engage with the religious and open up a discussion about what future dreams we would like to weave for human societies that might indeed be preferable to the current mythologies that constitute much of their functioning apparatus.

I use the term 'dream' as the best definition as to what religion actually is I have come across is by the 20^th Century anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard:

“A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [ed. and women] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

The points I make above are of course allegations and my own opinions, but there are wider issues at stake than the conduct of such individuals: I regard atheism [in the sense of a lack of belief in supernatural entities of any description and the conviction, based on evidence, that such entities are the products of human culture] to be of profound philosophical and moral importance. For clear discussion about such ideas a move needs to be made away from vitriolic shouting matches and the cult of personality to veins of enquiry much more of the vein of thinkers such as Raymond Tallis who wittily and humanely analyses arguments with the goal of seeking out truth.

If we do truly live in an atheist universe and religion in its many incarnations is a product of human cultural life (which fulfills genuine needs but much of which is potentially harmful to the individuals involved and surrounding society) it is quite reasonable that a debate be launched, or rather developed, about such issues and the promotion, potentially, of secular atheism. 
Currently there is nothing revolutionary about the ‘New’ Atheists and they offer no dreams with which we can work, we all deserve much better.