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Psalm 14 in the Bible begins with the remarkable statement “The fool hath said in his heart ‘There is no God’.” While this designation might cover those whom we today would call honest doubters, the fact remains that even in the days of King David around 1000 BC, or of his Jewish poetic successors, there were atheists of a sort.
Yet one of the twentieth century’s foremost contributions to urban mythology is the notion that atheism and secularism are somehow new and radical, and only became possible once courageous “moderns” dared to challenge the totalitarian church. On the other hand, and as we shall see in this chapter, ideas about the powers or even the existence of God or “the gods” possessed an ambivalence or multilayeredness which is not easy to reconcile with the strident ideological assertions of New Atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens, for whom God is a “Delusion”, “Is Not Great”, or is a symptom of cultural infantilism. For these thinkers – mistakenly – see science, and especially recent discoveries in neuroscience and genetics, as revealing new certainties that transcend the philosophical quibbles of earlier unbelief; indeed, they turn the experimental method itself into an absolutist God before which everything else must stand or fall, while remaining oblivious to the yawning philosophical and interpretative chasm which runs through their grand and godless schemes (in an earlier cultural incarnation this was called “positivism”, as we shall see in Chapter 3).
In Old Testament times in 1000 BC, however, very little was known about the extent or workings of the natural world. As we saw in the last chapter, the whole of Old Testament history was acted out in an area of rivers, fields, and deserts between the Nile and the Tigris that covered a land surface smaller than that of modern-day France and Germany combined. And what better way had the people of those times to explain the facts of their physical lives than through the doings of their perceived gods and spirits? Yet as Psalm 14 (and Psalm 53) tells us, it seems that even people living in that small and vulnerable world could somehow doubt the existence or efficacy of the spiritual realm.
As we shall see, the arguments of atheism, far from developing daring and radical powers, have remained astonishingly repetitious. Indeed, the only “newish” argument that I have encountered that would not have been familiar to the brothers John and Charles Wesley when they were undergraduates at Christ Church, Oxford, in the 1720s, is evolution by natural selection, which came in with Charles Darwin in 1859. Yet even the Wesley brothers – very highly educated young gentlemen with a well-documented interest in the science and medicine of their day – would have been aware of the work of comparative anatomists. For had not Galen in AD 150, Andreas Vesalius in 1543, Dr William Harvey in 1628, Christ Church’s very own Dr Thomas Willis in the 1660s, and many others besides drawn attention to the astonishing parallels between human and animal anatomy? And did not the cardiovascular, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems of men, monkeys, dogs, and pigs share a great many structural and functional features? This may not have been evolution, but it certainly had much to do with the perceived connectedness of living things, and was fully familiar to men of learning long before John Wesley preached his first sermon.
So perhaps we might smile benignly at the New Atheists and their fanatical secularist friends for beating the evolutionary drum with such vigour, for it is the only remotely new trick they have up their sleeves – albeit a trick that is now over 150 years old! And as we shall see below, even the idea that our “souls” are really only mechanistic resonances of our bodies would not have been unfamiliar to John Wesley – or indeed his grandfather!