Scruton on the New Atheism

Among the claims defended in The Last Superstition is that the secularism of the New Atheists has no positive moral content, but can be seen on analysis to reduce to nothing more than an animus against religion, an entirely negative vision of the world. In the latest issue of The American Spectator, Roger Scruton reminds us of an earlier and more noble-seeming atheism and humanism and laments its decline into negativism, pseudo-scientific posturing, and shallow pleasure-seeking. Scruton suggests that the decline should not be surprising, but stops short of saying that it was inevitable. As I argue in the book, such a decline was inevitable, and further degeneration of secularist culture is also inevitable. The reason is in part that the high ideals of earlier generations of humanists were parasitic on the Christian worldview and cannot be coherently maintained in its absence. But another reason is that the metaphysical worldview the moderns put in place of the classical philosophy of the ancients and medievals, and which underlies modern atheism, is thoroughly mechanistic or anti-teleological; and (again, for reasons explained at length in TLS) any consistent development of this worldview necessarily undermines the very possibility of morality or rationality. The history of the West over the last four or five centuries – revolution after revolution, one authority, institution, or standard collapsing after another – can be seen as the gradual unfolding of the implications of the mechanistic, anti-classical, anti-Scholastic philosophical (not scientific) revolution inaugurated by Bacon, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, et al. The breathtaking decline in private morals over the last several decades just marks the acceleration of this development, as the revolution has now reached into the core institution of all human society, the nuclear family. And things are only going to get worse. Much much worse. Brace yourselves.

UPDATE: Reader Jime calls attention to this interesting and somewhat related article by Julian Baggini, a far more reasonable and honest atheist than Dawkins and Co.