Is New Atheism philosophically interesting?

Often they stare unblinking, with clear frustration and disdain piercing through their expressions; “What do you mean you don’t care if God exists or not?”, and I sit back filled with a sense of dread as I await another impassioned onslaught, usually incorporating talk of Darwinism, feminism, terrorism and gay rights and often concluding with a rather hasty ultimatum along these lines:  “You are either on the side of oppression, segregation and superstition or freedom, liberty and truth.”  And so I am presented again with the rather trite fork in the road of too many discussions in and around campus with the ‘enlightened’ amongst the Theism/Atheism debate.  Everything seems to be presented in such black and white terms; no doubt this is fuelled by a media culture of sound bites and headlines, propped up by massive book sales as it quite literally rages across forums, social media and YouTube. 

I can vicariously feel my interlocutor’s sense of certainty as he berates me, after all I remember as a young teenager being convinced that my lack of belief formed some important aspect of my identity; I even had some sense of affinity with the rather sweeping claim that ‘religion poisons everything’, to quote the late Hitchens.  Growing up surrounded by religious fundamentalism on both sides in Northern Ireland it was not hard to find the fuel for my resentment.  Over the past number of years however I have come to increasingly associate this New Atheist (NA) movement with fundamentalism, and I want to focus on one aspect in particular which contributes to my finding NA so unsatisfying.

“I do not believe in God”; what are we left with after the negation?  I get the sense both Fundamentalism and NA privilege the epistemological status of belief (or unbelief) over the cultural and political presence of religion; we are told repeatedly by those of the NA camp that belief in God is unjustified, ridiculous and dangerous but for me these claims ring hollow.  It is most often the absolute nature of their statements which I have picked up as a defining feature of this style of discourse and it is ultimately this characteristic which fills me with an acute sense of disillusionment. 

 For both the NAs and religious fundamentalists, religion is at times equated with correct propositional belief (what Dawkins calls the 'God hypothesis' – 'the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other').  William Stahl argues that both new atheists and religious fundamentalists suffer from what Richard Bernstein has called 'Cartesian Anxiety'; this is to be understood as the need for certainty and authority (whether from inerrant text validated by science or from infallible reason validated by science). Steve Fuller argues that both groups depend on a geometrical epistemology wherein the first principles are guaranteed and deductions can be made from them.  In this epistemology the empirical is fused with normative value.  New atheists deduce from atheistic evolution and make social and moral claims on this basis, whereas fundamentalists deduce morals from an inerrant sacred text.  Both view belief as authoritative in that belief establishes what is normative and in doing so downplay the influence or authority of tradition, community or experience.

This focus on some cognitive state of belief/unbelief seems to me to be greatly overstated to the detriment of the great political, moral and cultural questions which face post-enlightenment atheists.  Religion involves community, rituals, moral teaching all of which has contributed to the formation of our cultures worldwide, and if we are to accept that the metaphysical commitments underpinning these belief systems have rotted away, which I do, then there seem to be far more important and interesting problems to deal with than the NA movement has the stomach for. 

When Nietzsche had his madman proclaim the Death of God he has him run into a crowded market place holding a lantern on a bright morning crying out, “I’m looking for God!” before proclaiming: “We have killed him – you and I!”  Instead of an exuberant victory dance, or running home to write a best-selling (and Hume ignoring) treatise on how morality can be securely founded on science, the madman instead announces this event with a great sense of gravity and foreboding:

“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?... How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!  The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood from us?... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us?  Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? ...it has not yet reached the ears of men.” (The Gay Science §125)

There is a certain irony here in that we are told many of those who heard the madman’s cries were atheists, and they simply laughed at him.  I just can’t help but wonder if others out there share my contention that there is certain shallowness to the current state of the debate, a shallowness I have suggested may rest on some latent philosophical presuppositions made by those who carry it out in the public eye.  I appear to be far more pessimistic about what a mere negation of a belief can hope to accomplish.