20AR25-12

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AR 25:12 - Exploring the emotional roots of atheism

In this issue:

ATHEISM - why scientific discovery isn't inexorably crushing the life out of theism

ISLAM - why increasing European violence isn't a "figment of alt-right propaganda"

Apologia Report 25:12 (1,469)

March 25, 2020

ATHEISM

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie, British historian of Protestant Christianity and Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London [1] -- Publishers Weekly (Sep 2 '19) explains that Ryrie "explores the experience and practice of 'unbelief' as it emerged in the modern Western cultures. He defines unbelief as a state of dissociation from or dissatisfaction with a dominant Christian religious narrative, and categorizes these responses as either an emotional story of anger or an anxiety that individuals put upon themselves. The former he considers a reaction against an overwhelmingly homogeneous Christian society; the latter as the inability to keep one's faith as sturdy as one feels it should be. Ryrie begins with a careful discussion of the history and changing definitions of atheist and unbeliever, and his reasons for using these particular terms. The bulk of the work concerns unbelief in Western Europe in the centuries around the Reformation, through the experiences of Protestants, Catholics, and various breakaway groups that sought to locate belief outside the organized church. Wrapping in and analyzing the writing of Machiavelli, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh [and others], Ryrie's comprehensive research makes this a masterly piece of work. [A]n enlightening ramble through intellectual history of opposition to Christian belief that will appeal to any reader interested in religious scholarship."

The more recent review by Jeffrey Collins (a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario) for the Wall Street Journal (Feb 28 '20) is summarized: "It wasn't the books of Hobbes and Spinoza that shook the faith of the people. Rather, the people's weakening religious certainty cleared the ground for godless philosophers.

"From Thomas Hobbes to Bertrand Russell, atheists have presented theism as a projection of terror and ignorance, a fantasy produced by the desperate desire to find purpose in a pitiless universe of brute matter. It is the ingenious strategy of Alec Ryrie's Unbelievers to reverse this mode of analysis. 'It is not only religious belief which is chosen for such instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons,' he writes. 'So is unbelief.' He has thus produced an 'emotional history of doubt.'

"Mr. Ryrie, a distinguished historian at Durham University in Britain and an avowed Christian, is fairer to atheists than they often are to believers. 'In writing an emotional history of atheism,' he writes, 'I am not arguing that atheism is irrational. I am arguing that human beings are irrational; or rather, that we are not calculating machines.' Our belief or disbelief is often intuitive and felt. Particular intuited or emotion-laden beliefs, he argues, may in fact be true or false. This even-handed approach should go without saying, but it is rare in the contentious public debates over the veracity of religion. ...

"Mr. Ryrie further investigates the lineage of today's atheism and finds that the emotional 'reasons' for it are 'deeply rooted in religion itself.' ...

"Unbelievers devotes itself to the watershed period between Martin Luther in the 1520s and Baruch Spinoza in the 1670s. ... The Scientific Revolution plays no role in his book, for the excellent reason that virtually all of the pioneering natural scientists of the era were devoutly religious. ...

"Instead of science, Mr. Ryrie emphasizes the dissolvent effects of the Renaissance and, still more, the Reformation. The former revived certain unorthodox views of the ancient pagans, such as Machiavelli's opinion that religion was a noble lie useful only for governing the vulgar. Renaissance humanists also brought sharper critical methods to bear on ancient texts. ...

"Renaissance culture, however, remained an elite milieu and barely rippled broader society. Far more disruptive, as Mr. Ryrie shows, were the Reformation schism and the cataclysmic religious wars that followed.

"As Catholics and Protestants divided, they deployed philosophical skepticism against the theological claims of their opponents. This intellectual trench warfare stirred up a miasma of religious doubt. 'The Reformation,' writes Mr. Ryrie, 'by choosing scepticism as its key religious weapon, in effect required believers to transition to a different kind of post-sceptical faith.' Protestants in particular were encouraged to search the Scriptures on their own, seeking personal theological understanding without clerical guidance. Some found the pressure of justifying their own beliefs too much to bear. In this context, Mr. Ryrie identifies two emotions of the age that began to corrode religious certainty: anxiety about the instability of one's own beliefs; and anger at the churches for failing to guide and unify believers.

"Responses to this fragmented and fraught context varied. Some humanists reduced religion to its ethical teachings, stripped of theological mystery. Other contemporaries recast their belief as a felt allegiance or faith, 'reasons of the heart,' as Pascal put it, rather than purely rational assent to theological creeds. ...

"Alongside figures counseling patience or retreat, a growing minority began to voice radical doubts about Christianity itself. Mr. Ryrie eschews the hunt for formal, philosophical atheism and instead delves into trial records, diaries and passing rumors about the state of popular belief. He is interested in the 'social, political, and emotional' history of atheism, not its intellectual history. ...

"Unbelievers is an elegant and canny book. Fixed within the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, its commentary has a distinctly modern relevance. ...

"Mr. Ryrie doesn't intend this point to justify a chaotic relativism but to suggest that our own ideas, and not just those of our ideological opposites, can be more visceral than rational. ...

"In an intelligent conclusion, Mr. Ryrie observes that the 'humanist-materialist argument against Christianity' has arguably weakened over the past century. ...

Collins sums up: "It is thus not really the case that a slow accumulation of scientific discovery is inexorably crushing the life out of theism. ... Our ancestors doubted and despaired in the face of moral disagreement and institutional failure. There is no reason that we moderns shouldn't react similarly to the same conditions. In these respects, the New Atheism may not be so new." <www.on.wsj.com/2WaJ4vv>

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ISLAM

Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali [2] -- Library Journal (Aug 8 '20): reports that the "Somali-born Dutch American women's rights activist and free speech advocate argues that the Muslim immigrants must not be allowed to bring the harmful and regressive gender attitudes of Islamic extremism to the West. She points especially to an increase in sexual violence in European cities, which she blames on immigrants, urging Western feminists not to turn their heads."

HarperCollins asks: "Why are so few people talking about the eruption of sexual violence and harassment in Europe's cities? Because almost no one in a position of power wants to admit that the problem is linked to the arrival of several million migrants - most of them young men - from Muslim-majority countries. [Hirsi Ali] shows that, after a period when sexual violence in western Europe barely increased, after 2014 it surged. In Germany 'offences against sexual self-determination' in 2018 were 36% above their 2014 level. Nearly two-fifths of the suspects were non-German. Asylum seekers were suspects in 11% of all reported rapes and sexual harassment cases in Austria in 2017, despite making up less than 1% of the total population. This violence isn't a figment of alt-right propaganda."

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie (Belknap, 2019, hardcover, 272 pages) <www.amzn.to/2wTzTVE>

2 - Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Harper, June 2020, hardcover, 336 pages) <www.amzn.to/2TYJ6oP>

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