Is Atheism Progressive?

Exploring the social consequences of godlessness

Is atheism for the best? Is it “all good” in the end if there’s no God?

If you were to ask the new atheists, the ones that rose to prominence in the war on Islamist terrorism after 9/11, they’d say, “Yes! Emphatically yes! Theistic religion is a blight on humanity, and atheism just frees us from many archaic delusions.”

But a little investigation complicates the matter.

The Modern History of Optimistic Atheism

Putting aside its truth status, optimism about the social effects of atheism stems from the eighteenth-century impact of scientific progress on philosophy in Europe, known as the “Enlightenment” or the “Age of Reason.”

Simplifying the obscurity of GWF Hegel’s progressive theory of history, in which history proceeds through logical stages towards absolute idealism when all dualisms will be overcome, Aguste Comte said, in the nineteenth century, that history falls into three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or empirical. Theism represents a necessary but primitive mode of interacting with the world, and after philosophy does away with our childish, fearful personifications of nature, science will become paramount as we strive to understand the universe’s alien laws.

The later positivists or radical empiricists, from the early Wittgenstein to Carnap, Ayers, and Quine build on David Hume’s extreme skepticism, although the latter reads today like a parody of scientism. Hume divided all knowledge into two kinds: tautologies and fact-based judgments. Thus, you had mathematics and conceptual analyses, on the one hand, and the empirical claims you’ll find in the likes of astronomy, chemistry, and biology on the other.

This skeptical distaste for speculation left no room for theology or for metaphysics — indeed, no room for Comte’s first two stages. Hume implied that the middle ground should be a no man’s land since nonempirical, armchair “theorizing” was so much twaddle and woo.

But Hume curbed the subversive implications of his skepticism by appealing to instinct or to a pragmatic, natural deference to “habit” or to “custom,” as he called it. This arch-skeptic pushed empiricism as far as it could go, and if he’d been as consistent with his pragmatism, he’d have realized that theology and metaphysics might be just as necessary to the cognitive enterprise because we have an instinct for adding meaning to the world with myths and grand metanarratives too. In that case, Hume’s “fork,” the elimination of much theology and philosophy as a candidate for knowledge would be baseless.

In any case, the later positivists set aside Hume’s pragmatism and excoriated all knowledge claims that aren’t “positive” or objective in deriving their content directly or indirectly from observations. This logical empiricism ended up being incoherent even without the pragmatism, since the positivists relied on the verifiability criterion (that statements are meaningless if they’re not empirically verifiable in principle), which wasn’t itself positive in the strict sense.

Nevertheless, the double meaning of “positivism” shouldn’t be overlooked. The tone of the logical empiricists’ writings was thoroughly condescending, the presumption being that the Enlightenment and the anti-religious implications of science and of modern philosophy are stupendous benefits to humankind.

For example, these empiricists were like the neoclassical economists in that they wrote in arcane logical symbols to make their philosophy seem as rigorous as Einsteinian physics. If only everyone were as hyperrational-sounding as those empiricists, all areas of society would progress like science — such was the subtext of positivism. Alas, the hyper-rationalists missed the forest for the trees, so their rigorous logic proved as counterfeit as Hegel’s pompous metaphysics.

Just by its arrival as a response to 9/11, new atheism was implicitly supposed to be progressive. The kind of religious intolerance that drove fundamentalists to kill thousands of American civilians was deemed so much anachronistic savagery. All the world needed was more humanism and liberty, which George W. Bush and the neoconservatives sought to spread by force in the Middle East, and we’d step that much further into Comte’s positive, third stage of history.

As the documentary series, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) shows (especially in the later episodes) — and as has become common knowledge and plain as day after Joe Biden’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and after the collapse of the American-trained government there in 2021 — the neoconservative spreading of liberty and modernity was a full-on fiasco.

Atheism and Technological Advances

So much for some historical context of the new atheist’s and the secular humanist’s conviction that atheism is not only true but a boon to our species. Let’s look now at the question more directly. I see two ways in which you could argue that atheism benefits societies.

First, there’s the connection between atheism and technological progress via the Scientific Revolution, the connection being that the scientific method established by the early modern deists is functionally atheistic.

Science is in the business of understanding the universe by positing natural laws, which is the opposite of surrendering human pride by positing magic or miracles that are beyond our comprehension. In their professional capacity, then, scientists proceed as though there were no God, regardless of whether they’re personally religious. That is, the institutions and methods of science are effectively atheistic.

And the rise of modern science generated the explosion in technological advances which have powered the emerging Anthropocene, which is to speak of our species’ geological impact. Most species fly under the planet’s radar, as it were, in that they master, at best, a niche and are otherwise dominated by the flow of natural evolution. Our species has arguably stepped outside that flow: our big brains enable us to master all niches and to seemingly rule over nature with our technological prowess.

Thus, atheistic science empowers us technologically and that power benefits us. Therefore, atheism is indirectly progressive.

Technological versus Social Progress

But there’s a problem with that argument, which is that the link between our empowerment and our overall benefit is questionable. High technology has benefited us in various ways, such as in the areas of medicine, education, and entertainment, but technology also imperils us. Whether technological advances will ultimately be for the best or whether our tools will only hasten our collective demise is almost up to a leap of faith.

The environmental impact of our planetary domination, however, supports a pessimistic interpretation. We use science to understand nature, not to preserve natural processes but to alter them, in theory, to suit us. Those alterations are supposed to be progressive, but that assumes we know what we’re doing.

Just as medicine or surgery is intended to improve people’s lives, but almost always has negative side effects, our attempts to improve on nature are two-sided at best. Even if we achieve our immediate objective with a piece of technology, our use of it will have unintended consequences which can even trigger a cascade of disasters. That’s what climatologists are telling us about the damage consumerism is doing to the food chains. Consumerism is supposed to make us happy, but the result may ironically be the opposite.

This is the point of Goethe’s poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Whereas in the prescientific period we routinely posited theological powers that were beyond our ken, we may still be meddling with natural forces that are beyond our understanding, having removed the religious constraints on our hubris and short-sightedness. The crucial point here is one that’s often been made, which is that technological advances can outpace social ones.

Indeed, the greater the empowerment, the more likely we’ll rest on our laurels and become complacent and infantilized by our successes, in which case technological and social progress may be inversely related: increasing the former may decrease the latter. And perhaps increasing the latter, or gaining wisdom, amounts to decreasing the former or to restricting technological innovations.

If the relation between technological empowerment and social benefits is problematic because technology has both tempting advantages and perhaps a catastrophic downside, atheism’s progressiveness, too, must be in doubt because of the historical connection between atheism and such empowerment.

Atheism, Delusions, and Mental Health

Perhaps a better strategy is the second one, which is to show how atheism is more directly beneficial in elevating society by freeing us from religious delusions. The contention here would be that atheism is good for our mental health, since religions are anachronistic and intrinsically harmful. Freeing us from unbecoming delusions ennobles us and allows us to stop wasting our time on fantasies about pleasing gods or winning a pleasant afterlife.

Of course, we know from history and sociology that religions were instrumental in keeping societies together, even if they did so largely by demonizing foreigners and promoting religious wars and oppression. Those tribal, class, and civilizational struggles were just extensions of the pride each person needs to prioritize his or her individual welfare. We’re genetically inclined to be preoccupied with promoting our survival; after all, we’re in our heads but not directly in anyone else’s.

This natural self-interest extends to family, clans, tribes, nations, and finally to our species. At each level there’s a love of self or of our kin that ranges beyond what’s logically permissible. As a matter of strict, objective fact, the world is morally neutral, so these value assessments are based on illusions and prejudices. No one is better or worse than anyone else, at least not in a way that will matter in a million years. The inevitability of death for everyone, regardless of what we say or do, means that all levels of this pride are arbitrary. That is, our self-interested prejudices are forced on us and are justified mainly by embarrassing leaps of faith.

Still, as a matter of historical fact, religion bonded people by expressing the tribal or ethnic character in a mythos or cultural brand identity. That’s largely how such large groups were able to live together, by subscribing to the same myths and practicing the same ludicrous traditions that tested their faith. The more harebrained the ritual and creed, the more you confirmed your allegiance to the group and to its leaders since you thereby sacrificed your dignity and intellectual integrity on the altar of group cohesion. That cohesion was known symbolically as the “will of the gods.”

The question, then, is whether the traditional, religious view of mental health is sustainable in view of modern psychology and cognitive science. Is it healthy to believe in gods, miracles, or divine revelations? At least, is it healthier to establish social bonds based not on transparent fantasies and sanctimonious theologies, but on recognition of the universal, existential facts of life and of the physical universe?

A Myriad of Secular Delusions

Here again, the atheist faces some problems. First, the atheist might only be exchanging religious delusions for secular ones. We might doubt, then, whether freedom from delusions is possible at all. As I argue elsewhere, exaggeration is baked into every concept since a concept or a mental generalization is a model that simplifies the real facts to be of practical use in helping us manage our circumstances. To the extent that the practical aspect of our ordinary concept of trees, for example, projects our self-interest, that concept is delusional since the independent reality of trees is likely indifferent to our welfare.

Beyond the universal delusions of self-interest, there are those of the modern civic religions that replace the myths and rituals of ancient and medieval theocratic monarchies. There are political myths of democracy, economic myths of consumerism and capitalism, and hedonistic myths spread by the entertainment industry. Hollywood, for example, isn’t just a dream factory but a mythmaker. Urban legends abound thanks to the narrative formulas that are convenient to filmmakers.

The question, then, might not be whether unrealistic enlightenment is healthier than the rabble’s default delusions. Instead, we might have to ask whether secular delusions are better than religious ones, and that’s likely a closer call. You could compare a secular libertarian to a religious fundamentalist and have difficulty deciding which form of vanity is more obnoxious. Or you could compare an urbane, atheistic academic to a sophisticated theologian and be unable to tell whether one is a greater intellectual than the other.

Enlightenment as Disappointment with Objective Reality

But perhaps that’s just a word game or a play on the meaning of “delusion.” As I point out elsewhere, we can speak more narrowly of delusions as deviations from historically relative commonsense. Atheism itself was once deemed delusional since the ancients took the religious mindset for granted. After the Scientific Revolution, the opposite happened. And even in the ancient world, the cynical or broadminded philosophy that was commonsense to the literate elites differed from the quaint folklore that seemed obvious to the unwashed masses.

To call the exaggerations that support common self-interest “delusions” might be a stretch. Those useful generalizations are more like tools that serve a necessary function, as in our use of concepts to understand the world. Yet in the context of the modern zeitgeist (individualism, freedom of thought, science, capitalism, democracy, technological mastery, mass decadence or infantilization), the old religious creeds are delusional in the narrower sense that they’re anachronistic and thus at least subjectively preposterous.

Not every modern atheist may be fully enlightened, and perhaps no one has ever been so. But on average, these nonreligious folks have fewer outrageous core beliefs than do those that cling, say, to fundamentalist, exoteric monotheism. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument, at least, that there’s a sense of “delusion” according to which modern secularists are less delusional than modern theists.

There would still be a question of whether that kind of enlightenment is better for our mental health, making atheism progressive in being ultimately good for us. Think of Lord Byron’s poetic line, which springs from the cynical book of Ecclesiastes, that “sorrow is knowledge” since “they who know the most must mourn the deepest over the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”

Or think of Leo Strauss’s point about the difference between how the ancients and the moderns treated the dichotomy between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. The ancients kept those kinds of knowledge apart because esoteric knowledge is subversive and disconcerting, whereas moderns want to democratize everything so we abandon that elitism and pretend the masses can handle the most rigorous formulations of pessimism and nihilism. The result is our so-called “postmodern” shallowness and apathy.

The underlying question here is whether enlightenment is compatible with happiness. Although spiritualists or self-help gurus like Eckart Tolle insist that you can be perfectly happy living in the now or subscribing to some trendy Stoicism, genuine philosophers are likely to resign themselves to disappointment, and to renounce many thoughtless, counterproductive worldly pleasures.

Thus, if the atheist can show that a naturalistic worldview is more enlightened, say, than Christianity or than monotheism in general, we’d still be entitled to ask whether atheism can therefore be part of a progressive society.

It goes without saying that if atheism’s implications were depressing or somehow repugnant, that would have no bearing on whether atheism is true or false. The confusion at issue is only whether atheism is obviously for the best, which is an empirical question about the social consequences of adopting one worldview or another.

And the answer is more complicated than the slick new atheist would let on.