Peter Watson - The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

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This book is dedicated to
Guislaine Vincent Morland
and to
Nicholas Pearson

The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs.

C LIFFORD G EERTZ

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

L UDWIG W ITTGENSTEIN

Thinking out how to live is a more basic and urgent use of the human intellect than the discovery of any fact whatsoever.

M ARY M IDGLEY

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

C ARL J UNG

Life cannot wait until the sciences have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready.

J OS O RTEGA Y G ASSET

We must wager on meanings existence.

J AMES W OOD, PARAPHRASING G EORGE S TEINER

Meaning is not a security blanket.

S EAMUS H EANEY, PARAPHRASING W . H . A UDEN

What is so admirable in being ruled by a need for peace of mind?

J OHN G RAY

Religion is being replaced by therapy, with Christ the Saviour becoming Christ the counsellor.

D R. G EORGE C AREY, FORMER A RCHBISHOP OF C ANTERBURY

[E]xistence may have no meaning, yet the rage to live is stronger than the reason for life.

J OHN P ATRICK D IGGINS

A meaningful world is one that holds a future that extends beyond the incomplete personal life of the individual; so that a life sacrificed at the right moment is well spent, while a life too carefully hoarded, too ignominiously preserved, is a life utterly wasted.

L EWIS M UMFORD

[T]he problem of the meaning of life... arises because we are capable of occupying a standpoint from which our most compelling personal concerns appear insignificant.

T HOMAS N AGEL

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.

F YODOR D OSTOEVSKY

All religions share the same grievance.

O LIVIER R OY

But is there something where God used to be?

I RIS M URDOCH

There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to expresstogether with the obligation to express.

S AMUEL B ECKETT

We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate.

E . M . F ORSTER

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I dont know.

W . H . A UDEN

He who has the most toys when he dies wins.

M ATERIALIST SLOGAN

A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness, but rather in search of a reason to become happy.

V IKTOR F RANKL

It isnt just that I dont believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I dont want there to be a God; I dont want the universe to be like that, as I hope to show.

T HOMAS N AGEL

The concepts of redness and roundness are as much imaginative creations as those of God, of the positron, and of constitutional democracy.

R ICHARD R ORTY

A life which contains nothing for which one is not prepared to die is unlikely to be very fruitful.

T ERRY E AGLETON

The final value of our lives is adverbial, not adjectival. It is the value of the performance, not anything that is left over when the performance is subtracted.

R ONALD D WORKIN

Happiness is something we can imagine, but not experience.

L ESZEK K O AKOWSKI

There is another world, but it is in this one.

P AUL LUARD

Men should walk as prophecies of the next age, rather than in the fear of God or the light of reason.

R ICHARD R ORTY

Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians.)

R ONALD D WORKIN

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Is There Something Missing in Our Lives? Is Nietzsche to Blame?

B y the summer of 1990 the author Salman Rushdie had been living in hiding for more than a year. This had followed a fatwa, an Islamic juristic ruling, issued by the Iranian supreme cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, on February 14, 1989, in which he had said, I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.

This was by any standard a monstrous event, made all the more terrible by Khomeinis claim of authority over all Muslims. But, however wrong, the threat had to be dealt with and Rushdie was given police protection and the use of a bulletproof Jaguar, though he had to find his safe houses himself. In July of that year, the police had suggested a further refinement for his safetya wig. Youll be able to walk down the street without attracting attention, he was told. The Metropolitan Polices best wig man was sent to see him and took away a sample of his hair. The wig was made and arrived in a brown cardboard box looking like a small sleeping animal. When he put it on, the police said it looked great and they decided to take it for a walk. They drove to Sloane Street in Londons Knightsbridge and parked near the fashionable department store Harvey Nichols. When he got out of the Jaguar every head turned to stare at him and several people burst into wide grins or even laughter. Look, he heard a mans voice say, theres that bastard Rushdie in a wig.

It is a funny story, despite the grim circumstances in which it took place, and Rushdie tells it again himself in his memoir, Joseph Anton (the cover name he adopted), which he felt safe to publish only in 2012, nearly a quarter of a century after the original fatwa.

There was certainly something missing in his life during those anxious times, the most precious thing of allhis liberty. But that is not exactly what the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas had in mind when he wrote his celebrated essay, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age (2008). He, too, was concerned with the impact of religion on our lives but meant something no less precious perhaps, and far more difficult to pin down.

NO AMEN: THE TERMS OF OUR EXISTENCE AND THE IDEA OF A MORAL WHOLE

This something had first occurred to him after he attended a memorial service for Max Frisch, the Swiss author and playwright, held in St. Peters Church in Zurich on April 9, 1991. The service began with Karin Pilliod, Frischs partner, reading out a brief declaration written by the deceased. It said, among other things: We let our nearest speak, and without an amen. I am grateful to the ministers of St. Peters in Zurich... for their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service. The ashes will be strewn somewhere. Two friends spoke, but there was no priest and no blessing. The mourners were mostly people who had little time for church and religion. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that followed.

Habermas wrote much later (in 2008) that at the time the ceremony did not strike him as peculiar, but that, as the years passed, he came to the view that the form, place and progression of the service were odd. Clearly, Max Frisch, an agnostic, who rejected any profession of faith, had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage which brings life to a close.