Considering atheism’s genius for myth-making and inducing delusion, the simple answer must be “yes”! But let us look in more detail at what atheism does and seems to believe before giving a definitive answer.
We saw in Chapter 3 how “scientism”, or the worship of science and the scientific method, developed among certain positivist followers of Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Nowadays we find “scientistic” modes of thinking everywhere, and so firmly lodged in officialdom, that those who believe in God or describe spiritual experiences are not infrequently written off as deluded, out of date, or socially dangerous. And what the advocates of modern-day scientism do is give us new words and concepts to “explain away” religious experience. God becomes a father-figure projection; religious experience might even be consigned to a form of schizophrenia; a yearning to be with Jesus is regarded as a morbid death-wish; and a desire to tell others of the joy of Christ is declared to be social bullying and a human rights offence.
In the new world of psycho-socio-scientism mythology, we are presented with the doctrine that asserts that all human beings are really autonomous brains, with “rights” to pursue their own secular good, and if they are irrational enough to believe in God, then they must do it in private, and not in any public context: at least, that is, if they are Christians. In that way, we proclaim “tolerance”. (Of course, this right to one’s own mental and physical space applies only to protecting people from the Christian religion: advertising agencies, highly politicized government departments, and the beauty, fashion, body-worship, and lifestyle industries, to name but a few, are free to bombard us with what they like for the purposes of secular government control or commercial profit. After all, being made to feel a loser to the point of despair because you cannot afford the approved lifestyle or look like a film star is not cajoling or bullying or trying to “convert”, is it?)
And the sciences to which these cases generally relate are those termed the “social sciences”.
Yet the amazing thing is that even when we fervently deny any kind of religious affiliation, and insist upon our physical or social “scientism”, we invariably lapse back into what one might call “religious” premises or hypotheses and structures through which to describe and express it.
Let us enumerate some of these. (1) Scientism is characterized by a belief that our way of seeing or doing things possesses significant “truth”, is “rational”, and the opposite of “superstitious”. (2) It has its own priestly hierarchies, from mere laity to PhD students (curates) and on to Nobel Laureates, FRSs, heads of prestigious institutes, or eminent TV pundits (bishops). (3) It has its own prophets and “enlightened” beings, such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, Dawkins, and others who show us the path to follow. (4) It has a need to control the laity and protect it from “heresy”, or religion. (5) It has its own heretics, such as high-profile scientists who not only speak positively of Christianity, but even join the ranks of the rival priesthood, such as the eminent Cambridge physicist the Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, FRS, KBE. (6) And it has its secular “vision glorious”, when superstition is abolished and science in its various branches is the only acknowledged way. A secular heavenly state, in which all the neuronal connections have been elucidated, and evolutionary genetics has explained every part of our being, and shown us, QED, to be no more than the products of our DNA. A blind faith in the future, no less!
But it is this last myth, scientism’s blind faith in the future, that most fascinates me as a science historian; for time and again over the last 300 years or so we have had one prophet after another – and some of them traditional Christian believers – assuring us that before long, this or that branch of science will have been conclusively worked out, and we will know all. In the early eighteenth century, for instance, and in the full flow of Newtonian gravitation theory, the science writer, popularizer, and lecturer Benjamin Martin was assuring his contemporaries that soon astronomy would be perfected and thoroughly explained. Lord Kelvin made a similar remark relating to physics at the end of the Victorian era, while more recently, the neurologist Baroness Susan Greenfield has told us that within a century or so, we will most likely know all about the human brain and its workings.
Yet what rings down the centuries to a secularism-sceptic such as myself is that all of these predictions evaporate with the passage of time, and “perfection” is never reached. Could Benjamin Martin ever have imagined the state of astronomy today, with its black holes, relativistic time-warps, and interplanetary probes? And while I have every expectation that, in 100 years’ time (Western civilization surviving), we will know vastly more about the human brain and its attached bodily structures than we do now, I suspect we will still be chasing through the synapses for that elusive ghost in the machine: the human soul.
For one thing that being a science historian has taught me – religion apart – is that the future is rather like the weather: fairly predictable in the very short term, guesswork for the next month, and pure wishful thinking beyond that! I also suggest that it is a bit similar to releasing the proverbial cat from a bag. When we let the cats out, there is one thing of which we can be pretty well certain: they will all run away from the bag. Yet where Ginger Tom, Tabitha, Black Beauty, Attaturk (yes, I once knew a cat named Attaturk, and another called Nebuchadnezzar!), and their friends will individually run to, which tree each will climb, which mouse each will catch, and what else each one will get up to, is wholly unpredictable.
I think that scientific research is rather like that. We can never predict what new discovery or insight will fundamentally rewrite the “rules” we know today. The future is a mighty tricky beast which has, for the predictor and the control freak, a distressing habit of doing what the heck it likes, and casting our orderly aspirations to the dust.
And it is for this reason that I believe so much modern-day atheism and secularist thinking to be rooted in superstition, self-delusion, and groundless blind faith in the future. Whether one is avidly listening to the messianic sermons of the secular psycho-socio-babblers, predicting what we will know in AD 2100, or affirming that computers will turn us into semi-eternal super-beings, we are dealing here with something which, if it were said by a religious person, using different imagery, would be dismissed as rank superstition.
Of course, Christian thinkers over 2,000 years have become very switched on to what can be demonstrated as a fact, what is an interpretation, and what is a belief, and, within the mainstream churches, know how to speak of spiritual experience. But the secular visionaries have a worrying habit of consistently failing their maturity exam, going back to the start of the growing-up course, and defaulting yet again in their claims!
One reason for this repeated failure is the secularists’ touchingly naïve faith in the neutral power of education: just protect the young from God-talk, and reason will prevail! Yet they utterly fail to see that teaching secular idealism is no more neutral or value-free than teaching the Ten Commandments. For all systems of education aim to impart values that will mould the recipient’s thinking: be they the values expressed in the Christian Beatitudes, the principle of Darwinian natural selection, the works of Plato, or The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. Then, horror of horrors, the ungrateful pupils not infrequently rebel and reject what they have been so painstakingly taught! For humans have a troublesome habit of going off and thinking as they like. And religion has a persistent appeal.
And so, to return to the question about whether atheism and secularism are more superstitious and given to myth-spinning than Christianity, with which I began this section, I would like to add a final observation. In his or her unproven and unprovable denial of the existence of God, is not the atheist taking an intellectual leap into the dark and calling it knowledge? At least the theist is honest enough to admit to a “leap of faith”, which might not be susceptible to experimental proof, yet which is as serviceable an explanation as any others on offer for why things exist. And if this is so, then is not the atheist’s fervent assertion of nothingness no more than a spectacular example of superstitious thinking?