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The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered.
Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces made the time ripe for unbelief — because the early internet served as a novel transmission belt for skepticism, because Sept. 11 advertised the perils of religious fundamentalism, because the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis undermined the West’s strongest bastion of organized Christianity and because the digital-era retreat from authority and institutions hit religious institutions first.
The point of listing such forces is not to diminish the influence of Dawkins and the rest. By seizing their opportunity, the anti-God polemicists pushed secularization and de-Christianization farther than they might otherwise have gone. It’s just to emphasize that success in the battle of ideas is often about recognizing when the world is ready to go your way, when audiences are suddenly primed to give your ideas a fuller hearing than before.
Such an opportunity confronts religious writers today. The new-atheist idea that the weakening of organized religion would make the world more rational and less tribal feels much more absurd in 2024 than it did in 2006. Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays. The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off.
So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground — especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia — as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief.
It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for “cultural” Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.
I have skin in this game, since I will be offering my own attempt at persuasion next year. But the past few months have brought three religious books that enter this debate — covering the philosophical, the scientific and the experiential cases for a religious perspective on the world.
The philosophical case comes from the polymathic philosopher-theologian David Bentley Hart, who has probably forgotten more about obscure Hindu sutras than I know about my own family. His new book is “All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life,” the culmination of decades of argument against the new atheists and all reductive accounts of human consciousness.
As a culminating work, it is not necessarily the best place for a neophyte to start: That distinction belongs to Hart’s 2013 book, “The Experience of God,” a much more straightforward introduction to religious understandings of reality. Whereas “All Things Are Full of Gods” is written in the form of a Platonic dialogue (!) among a group of retired Greek deities (!!) hanging out on Eros and Psyche’s estate (!!!) and arguing with one another about contemporary mortal debates in philosophy of mind and neuroscience and information theory.
If that sounds like your jam, it will be, but the new-atheist polemics were written to be whipped through, and this book is not.
The dialogical format does have one great advantage, though: It requires Hart to give extended space to ideas that he’s famous for treating with, well, Olympian disdain. Through the god Hephaestus, to whom he assigns the skeptical and anti-supernatural part, you get an extended elaboration of the arguments that mind and self and thought are reducible to mindless matter. That makes it more compelling when those arguments are defeated (as I think they clearly are) by Hart’s argument that mind and spirit have to precede the physical world for our experience of the universe to make any sense at all.
If you think this sounds like interesting philosophical noodling but also fundamentally anti-scientific, you can turn to the next book in my trio, Spencer Klavan’s “Light of the Mind, Light of the World,” which is an argument that the development of modern science supplies laboratory evidence for the primacy of mind.
This is not just the familiar case that the fine-tuning of the universe is proof that some Divine Intelligence set the whole thing up. It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there is to measure and observe.
Klavan argues that really reckoning with this discovery should force a decisive choice. On the one hand, we can embrace some kind of “multiverse” conceit (popular in today’s pop culture for a reason), in which there is no singular reality and all possibilities somehow coexist. But that yields incoherence, nihilism, the death of the very scientific project that it’s trying to preserve.
Which is why the other choice is preferable, if you really trust the science: Accept that there is only one reality and that it’s “created when consciousness gives shape to time and space” — created in some sense every time we look upon it, and created fundamentally by the Power that said let there be light in the first place.
This is wild stuff from a materialist perspective, but in my experience with open-minded skeptics, it’s not the place where they hit their limit. That’s more likely to happen when you proceed one step further, into the territory of the real old-time religion, and start talking about the more personalized and unpredictable ways that supernatural mind might shape material reality — the realm of miracles and revelations, visions and portents, legit angels and real demons.
This realm is the subject of the last book in my troika, Rod Dreher’s “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.” It’s partly a how-to guide for seekers after the more mystical relationship to reality that most human societies have enjoyed but ours has unwisely amputated. But it’s also a collection of anecdata about the persistence of enchantment even under allegedly disenchanted conditions, the supernatural happenings that flower constantly in our notionally secularized world.
This means that of the three, the Dreher book is the most fun, it tells the best stories, and it covers aspects of human life that are more fundamental to religion’s resilience than any argument or theory — above all, the fact that even in societies that exclude any hint of supernaturalism from their systems of official knowledge, strange experiences just keep on breaking in.
But from the perspective of the keepers of official knowledge, the supernatural is often the place where I’m interested gives way to I just can’t. A God of the philosophers or physicists is one thing, but a God of exorcists, miracle workers and near-death experiences is just a bit too disreputable — at least until you have such an experience yourself.
From the religious perspective, of course — Hart’s and Klavan’s no less than Dreher’s — it’s all the same God. So the test for all their arguments is whether a world that’s unhappy in its unbelief can be pushed all the way to this conclusion — or whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion, but something more than argument is required to pull them through.
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