Dolan Cummings
posted 6 September 2007

William Boyd’s dustjacket endorsement of Onfray’s polemic is not encouraging: ‘A wonderful, invigorating blast of sanity delivered against the fog of high-toned mumbo-jumbo we have to endure every day’. The tone is all too familiar: theatrical relief from overstated exasperation. At last!! Somebody speaking up for common sense!! It raises the spectre of the boring relative or acquaintance who says the same thing every time you see him, and still thinks it’s a radical new idea. ‘I don’t believe in religion, you know. I’m a militant atheist!’ Jesus wept.

Atheism is a one-idea creed. What’s new? Still don’t believe in God. How interesting! It is testament to the sterility of atheism that it makes religion look dynamic. Religion, after all, generally manifests itself in concerns about this world, whether it is a charitable impulse to make the world more just, or a righteous condemnation of worldly corruption and sin. Atheism, at most, tells us to start from the world as it is rather than deferring to supernatural authorities, but that raises far more questions than it answers. It is a rejection of other someone else’s way of understanding and engaging with the world, not a worldview in its own right. That is not to say that atheists can’t have a worldview, but that this is not given to them by simple virtue of not believing in God. The closer Michel Onfray gets to elucidating a positive worldview of his own – based on a version of hedonism – the further he leaves behind other ‘atheists’ who don’t happen to share it. Indeed, atheism itself ought to be the least interesting thing about its advocates.

But Onfray refuses to move on. In long, boring detail, he states his uncreed. Indeed, he is annoyed that there is not more recognition for atheists, and especially that atheism is used as a term of abuse. At length, he ponders ‘atheology’, monotheisms, Christianity and theocracy. Onfray is certainly not ignorant about religion, and nor is he stupid in his rejection of it. In Defence of Atheism is erudite to a fault, packed with clever allusions and references to Onfray’s extensive travels as well as an impressive cast of historical and philosophical figures. But the result is anything but ‘invigorating’. Charitably, I suppose it’s possible the polemic works better in the original French, but I don’t envy the book’s translator Jeremy Leggatt, who must have felt like Hercules in the Augean stables. More importantly, the book’s fault lies in Onfray’s refusal to consider religion as anything other than an intellectual error or moral failure. Religion is a social more than an intellectual phenomenon, which makes his tirade, however learned, ultimately futile.

As an atheist, I refuse to say I do not believe in God. To be brutally honest, I don’t know what it means to believe in God. Because religion is complicated; it’s not like believing in the Loch Ness Monster, which I just don’t. When people talk about God they mean something else. They are up to something. And it makes me nervous, too nervous to resort to a simple response like claiming not to believe in something I don’t understand. Don’t mistake this for humility or misplaced respect for irrational belief. People make all kinds of objectionable arguments in the name of religion, but these must be and generally can be refuted in secular terms, not those given to them by believers. Why should atheists acknowledge the role of God, or worse, bring religion in as an unacknowledged explanation for prejudice. How can that possibly help? Rather than saying, ‘you’re only taking that position because you’re religious’, atheists should aim to pull the rug from under religious antagonists by explaining how their religious beliefs reflect their social position.

It is a weird paradox of the contemporary debate that self-styled atheists use religious language and concepts much more than many religious people, never mind the rest of us. The title of Christopher Hitchens’ book, God Is Not Great, sounds rather too much like ‘The Loch Ness Monster Is Not Pink’ (unless there is a missing full stop after Not). So there is a God, but he’s not great? Hitchens is spoiling too hard for a fight to worry about such logical niceties. A better title is Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which the Queen orders Alice to believe these impossible things when the girl says she ‘can’t’. Apart from having the unfortunate effect of making the author sound like an annoyingly precocious little girl, this title at least reminds us of the involuntary nature of all belief: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.

The question of why people believe what they do, of what it means to believe, or not to believe, is certainly worth asking, but for all his erudition, Onfray does not even scratch the surface any more than the other atheist polemicists. 'Atheism' does not need to be defended, much less worked up into a philosophy. The division of the world into believers and unbelievers stems from a religious mindset: atheists ought to reject it and move on, engaging with the world on our own terms rather than those of religion itself.