K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.’ John Gray, one of the most pernickety and carnaptious of contemporary philosophers, presents here a kind of taxonomy of not atheism, per se, but of the vacuums and nothings into which the loss of belief has rushed. It is, as one would expect, an exhilarating read. The title winks to Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, and he appears as one of the figures in these essays.
One might think that atheism is a fairly simply proposition. There is no God. The argument here is that in the absence of God, atheist philosophies supplant a (mostly) Christian version of religion in terms of salvation, destiny and the definition of the human. Gray does look at other faiths, but tends to rely on a sleight of hand between practice and belief. You can observe the injunction on not wearing wool and linen (Deuteronomy 22:11) and not actually believe in Yahweh, or that He made the world and the heavens. You just stick to what your people have chosen to do. His comments on Hinduism, Tao and Buddhism follow the same form. The Bad Christians set up a dangerous story and the happy heathens just got on with being nice to each other.
So what are the seven types of atheism? The Dawkins style is airily dismissed in the first chapter as almost beneath serious intellectual scrutiny. Chapter Two takes in Ayn Rand and John Stuart Mill — not the easiest of bedfellows, but comfy down here — as representatives of secular humanism. The third chapter is on how science has overwritten religion, from Mesmerism to Transhumanism, a topic Gray explored in his previous book, The Immortalisation Commission.
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