In a previous post I commented on Emma Green’s review of Peter Watson’s: The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. Since then I have finished reading this magisterial work.

WATSON’S STARTING POINT

It is hard to do justice to this extraordinary piece of scholarship—there are over 500 footnotes—and the depth and breadth of Watson’s knowledge amaze. Yet there is no snobbishness in it. I’d guess that Green can’t relate to atheism or the death of god. Like some of my undergraduates who took my course in existentialism years ago, she doesn’t get what all the fuss is about. Why does Kierkegaard think Christianity is irrational, that it takes a leap of faith to be a Christian? Why does Nietzsche think god is dead, that the idea no longer informs culture? Why are questions about meaning, death and freedom such big deals? After all god made the world and if we love and praise him we’ll go to heaven.

Does the previous sentence betray my snobbishness? Maybe. Yet I am just making this observation. If one knows little about the last four centuries of Western culture, then it may seem that not much has changed. But things have changed. The seventeenth century scientific revolution altered the way scientists, philosophers, and theologians see the world. Thus there is a reason that belief in freedom, souls, and gods was once ubiquitous but is now minimal among the intelligentsia—the reason is modern science.

It’s not as if philosophers suddenly decided to ruminate on materialistic theories of mind, the problem of free will, or atheism as idle pursuits. No. These problems arose because of science. It is now a challenge to show how freedom, souls or gods can coexist with science; rather than seeing them as pre-scientific ideas. This is Watson’s cultural milieu, as it is for many in the intelligentsia. The consequences can be seen in the statistics—only 7% of the members of the National Academy of Science,¹ and less than 15% of professional philosophers are theists.² Again, the reason for this is modern science.

THE BOOK

The range of the book is vast covering poets, philosophers, artists, social and natural scientists,  and more. The penultimate chapter surveys those, mostly scientists, who find meaning in the evolutionary or cosmological epics including : Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, and E.O. Wilson. The final chapter surveys today’s great thinkers, mostly philosophers, on the question of meaning including: MacIntyre, Gadamer, Grayling, Rorty, Nozick, Dworkin, and Habermas. Both chapters are masterfully researched, impartial and thorough.

The conclusion suggests—remember the book is not a polemic—that the crux of the answer to the question, how to live without gods, demands that we bring forth something from within ourselves; essentially an appreciation of the joy available in this life and an intense observation of life’s experiences. He quotes from Darwin’s notebooks, “the sublime is reached through the commonplace … the slow accretion of facts.” Such thoughts bring Watson back to the happy moments of life, to the butterflies and flowers of this world, not of an imagined afterlife. What we are called upon to do is to keep experiencing, observing, and naming our world. To continue the long and laborious process of understanding with hope for the future. In the end he echoes Wordsworth,

We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;

1. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

2. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/

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