Stanley Fish Smacks Down Three Atheists

I have an online subscription to the New York Times. Sometimes I wonder why. Not today. Stanley Fish carries the day with a review of three books: Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and The Future of Reason” (2004, 2005), Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006) and Christopher Hitchens’s “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007).

Basically, he takes all three to the cleaners with wit and sparkle. As Fish says, “the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking; rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse, impelling the conflicted questioning of theologians and poets (not to mention the Jesus who cried, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and every verse of the Book of Job).”

Thinking about canon we are. The canon includes and embraces wails of doubt and despair that make the atheism of the above three seem tame. The psalms of lament, one of which Jesus appropriates in his darkest hour (Ps 22). In the darkness of despair, the psalmists blame God and no other for an unjust fate. The book of Lamentations, with its stark descriptions of exile, rape, cannibalism, and devastation, the author of which is said to be God. The protests of Jeremiah, who saw himself as a victim of sexual abuse, with God as the abuser, and he tells Him so (Jer 20:7-8). The defamation of God’s character by the innocent sufferer of the book of Job: see my introduction for an unwhitewashed overview of the whole. The searing skepticism of Qohelet, who saw no justice in the world.

Atheists, that is, those who passionately doubt God, are servants of God, as far as I’m concerned. They knock believers out of their complacency. In a paradoxical way, they are believers.

Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin. If strong enough and sincere, doubt leads to faith, as it did for Thomas (John 20:24-28). And get this: if strong enough and sincere, faith leads to doubt before doubt leads back to faith again. We call this a circolo virtuoso in Italian. The opposite of a vicious circle.

The absence of faith is not doubt. It is saying, “God doesn’t care,” therefore, “I don’t either.” The non-caring folk: these, and these only, are the enemies of God in this world.

So how well do are our three atheists perform their service? Not very well, according to Fish. The three deal in straw men rather than the real thing. Fish remarks:

“I know of no religious framework that offers such a complacent picture of the life of faith, a life that is always presented as a minefield of the difficulties, obstacles and temptations that must be negotiated by a limited creature in his or her efforts to become aligned (and allied) with the Infinite. St Paul’s lament can stand in for many: “The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, I do…. Who shall deliver me?” (Romans 7:19, 24). The anguish of this question and the incredibly nuanced and elegant writings of those who have tried to answer it are what the three atheists miss; and it is by missing so much that they are able to produce such a jolly debunking of a way of thinking they do not begin to understand.”

The most lucid presentation of atheism was penned, not by coincidence, by a believer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote The Brothers Karamazov. The chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor” is one of the great masterpieces of western literature. It is also Dostoevsky’s indictment of tradition’s perversion of the Gospel. This too, is thinking about canon.

If one makes a distinction between Tradition with a capital “t,” and the abuses of it by the church, which, if recurrent and systematic, are termed tradition with a small “t,” it is still possible to define all of Tradition as infallible. I for one find the distinction disingenuous, unless the person who makes it is willing to list ten abuses past and present the tradition of the religious formation he belongs to is guilty of.

By the way, Stanley Fish is just warming up in his review of the three. If you want to read the column he wrote today and the ones coming up for free, you can sign up for a 14 day free trial of premium content on the newspaper’s site.

Comments

[Michael Krahn]

Hey,

I'm a Christian who is working on a series on Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" at my blog at:

http://michaelkrahn.com/blog/richard-dawkins/

There's already a good discussion underway. Join in!

"Atheists, that is, those who passionately doubt God"
feel free to use ordinary english however you like, but this is not what atheists are so your argument is pointless.
There are no gods. At all.

[John Hobbins]

Atheism, like most cultural phenomena, comes in many colors and flavors. My generalization, quoted in the comment above, does not do justice to all varieties. Casting doubt on God (or on God as understood by many) describes nonetheless the position of many atheistic thinkers from the Enlightenment to the present. Atheists rooted in the Enlightenment often self-identify as practitioners of radical doubt, suspicion, or skepsis vis-à-vis belief in God and other examples of widely held nonsense from their point of view.
For example, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Engels, and Freud, each in their own way, deploy doubt and suspicion in the exploration of human error and self-deception. The pars destruens of their arguments is worthy of perennial consideration. The pars costruens often amounts to a replacement strategy whereby one or more new illusions fill the vacuum left by a dethroned predecessor. Unlike fine wine, the determinisms proffered by the likes of those mentioned above have not aged well. Reductionism is a heady brew, but is known to provoke disorientation followed by a hangover in those who imbibe too much in one sitting.
The atheism of the anonymous commenter is of a different kind. Atheism understood as a bold, flat, and apparently self-authenticating assertion eschews construction and is indicative of a lack of curiosity. It is a way of giving authority the finger. The assertion tends to elicit spasmodic pleasure in the one who makes it.
In conversation with said atheism, I find similar pleasure in seeing how far my interlocutor is willing to go. Are not all politicians, journalists, and ideologues in general, including atheist ones, self-serving (expletive deleted), especially those who claim to be in it for the common good? Are not all mothers (expletive deleted), with no care for anything but their self-importance? As for you and I, are we not base, self-serving, and untrustworthy observers, capable of denying even the most obvious of facts? Reason, as luck would have it, turns into its opposite in less than a moment’s notice.
Reason is a powerful tool. But that is all it is. Like a genie able to grant three wishes and no more, its power, when all is said and done, is limited, and you must be very careful what you wish for.