The varieties of non-religious belief and Alain de Botton’s "Religion for Atheists"

Published in The Melbourne Anglican April 2012

I wonder how many species of atheist you know? In the light of the Global Atheist Convention coming to Melbourne this month, I’m drawing up an atheist taxonomy to make sense of the varieties of non-religious belief. Until recently my neat pigeon-holing of atheism divided my non-believing friends—with no disrespect implied—into the mad and the sad. Let me explain…

The mad atheists typified by the so-called New Atheists, are those at the vanguard of the ‘God wars’ currently fomented by a conflict-crazed media. These people are led by biologist and science populariser Richard Dawkins, the ‘high priest’ of New Atheism and like Dawkins they are very, very angry at religion. Apart from their rage, they can be recognised by 4 further characteristics: their belief that religion is to blame for the world’s woes; their dogma that science is the one and only road to truth; their ability to quote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy verbatim; and being early adopters of technology, they know that the new iPad is called the New iPad and not the iPad 3.

The sad atheists on the other hand are those who wrestle with the God question seriously. They know that the stakes are high and that without God it is notoriously difficult to make sense of the world or of human life or death or joy or justice or even, at the philosophical end of the spectrum, of truth itself. But despite the cost, the sad atheist is convinced that there is no One who might offer a well of life-giving meaning to quell our anxieties.

Such was my neat dichotomy of atheism until it was rent asunder by popular philosopher Alain de Botton. Unless you are mediaphobic you couldn’t have missed the recent visit to Australia of de Botton; he received copious coverage promoting his book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. And it is de Botton who has forced me to expand my taxonomy, adding another category—the glad—to the mad and the sad.



De Botton is a prime example of the remarkable levity of the glad atheist who floats through the godless life with nary a care for the substantive issues at stake. The first sentence of de Botton’s book is a shot over the bows of Dawkins and Co. as well as an upset to the seriously religious: ‘The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.’

For de Botton, the tragedy of atheism is that it threw out the wonderful trappings of religion with the dirty bathwater of belief in God. ‘Of course no religions are true in any god-given sense,’ he says in the second sentence of the book, after which he proceeds cheerily to ignore the question that serious thinkers, atheist and religious, have grappled with for thousands of years.

Religion for Atheists is based on the eminently wise observation that in doing away with God we lose much more than a propositional truth. Religion, and mostly the Judeo-Christian tradition, has given us the best of Western culture and we risk losing it.

Like youth, which is wasted on the young, de Botton says religions are ‘too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.’ So the urgent task lies in the scramble to hold on to religion’s pearls before they are lost forever; as one wag summarised the book, ‘God is dead! Can I have his stuff?’

De Botton is civilized and winsome, smooth and supremely but gently confident. The contrast with Dawkins is chalk and cheese, the one crass, cranky and almost cruel in disparaging those who irritate him, the other dapper, debonair and dripping with mellifluous phrases that hint at a lack of substance.

At times Religion for Atheists is an incisive description of the postmodern malaise as it draws on the received wisdom of religion: it warns of ‘attachments to earthly status and reminds us of ‘the importance of the inner values of love and charity’ and ‘the possibility of being happy without money.’ It challenges the secular world’s devotion to a narrative of improvement with its ‘messianic faith in ... science, technology and commerce’ and it recognises the importance of confession and forgiveness along with the danger of  ‘the sin of pride [which] takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us.’

But Religion for Atheists is also patronisingly moralistic: the book is chock-full of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’, of unfounded pronouncements about what is good for humanity and what we ought to do about it. There seems no rhyme or reason for de Botton’s selection from the moral supermarket shelves. By turns he’s ascetic and libertarian, egalitarian and yet condescending. He applauds discipline but also license, kindness and egotism, fidelity and orgies—albeit only annually. And all in the service of aesthetic and visceral fulfilment.

Notwithstanding his moralism, de Botton writes with style, capturing the imagination with his imagery and prose. For example:

‘The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.’

But despite its striking description of the symptoms of the modern malaise, Religion for Atheists fails to address the cause of the disease. De Botton tries to re-pot the bright flowers plucked from religion’s garden into the drab flower box of atheism but he fails to realise that the flowers will not survive torn from their transcendental roots.

Even more than the Dawkins brigade, which has been criticised by foe and friend alike for its lack of clear thinking, de Botton’s argument is opaque. The book’s appeal is not to reason but to aesthetic sensibilities. As poetic prose this book will find some favour but as serious thinking about religion and atheism it will win few friends in its confusion of an aesthetic appreciation of faith with the hard intellectual work of making sense of religion without God.

Is de Botton really suggesting that we ‘rewrite the agendas for our museums so that art can begin to serve the needs of psychology’? Does he really think that ‘secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers’?

Are we to take seriously the following suggestions?

In this post-God religion, architecture is central: in order to celebrate and maintain ethical norms we need to build temples to kindness, serenity, forgiveness, reflection and self-knowledge.

A new Tate Museum would have seven levels (there is a schematic on page 245) including galleries of suffering, compassion, fear, love and self-knowledge.

Giorgio Armani should ‘run a therapy unit or a liberal arts college.’

Psychoanalytically astute travel agents will ‘carefully analyse our deficiencies and match us up with parts of the world which would have the power to heal us.’

And: ‘It is a failing of historic proportions that BMW’s concern for rigour and precision has not stretched to founding a school or a political party.’

While it presents as a serious proposal for post-God transcendence, Religion for Atheists is better described as the musings of an aesthete who dreams of re-religionising culture. But the dreams are wild and ungrounded and the book finishes up as an elegy for a fading world of religious hopes and values.

Let me finish by quoting a paragraph that captures the essence of this incongruous book. De Botton is convinced of our need for transcendent perspectives and that there are no secular alternatives to serious religious sensibilities. So, in order to invoke such feelings he turns to the stars in heaven:

It is through their contemplation that the secular are afforded the best chance of experiencing redemptive feelings of awe. … Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind [sic] as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes.

There in one paragraph is the essence of Religion for Atheists: the poetry mixed unsuccessfully with serious philosophy, the moralism, the amalgam of psychology and sociology along with a genuflexion to science and finally the banality of the idea that the transcendence of religious belief can be captured by a new law legislating that a percentage of public monitors should be tuned to Discovery Channel.

Who will enjoy this book? Religion for Atheists is for the philosophe amateur who enjoys mixing talk of the paleaozoic age with art and history and the story of Job. With its hundred or so photos and numbered short sections this is a boutique book; a miniature coffee table book for the chattering classes and for book clubs of the ‘let’s never have a disagreement’ type. It is poetic, beautiful at times, but not profound, suited to those who take their religion or atheism with lots of water.