Atheists were rare before the mid-18th century. The 200 years from then to the mid 20th century were their moment, especially among intellectuals. Much opinion imagines their success will continue. Professor McGrath thinks it has already turned into decline. ‘Religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the 21st century.’
He here gives us a potted history of atheism over those two centuries. He helpfully dissects its various strands. Some atheists reject religion on ‘logical’ grounds. Some indict it as old-fashioned and out of date. Others reject it for justifying war and oppression and class domination. Yet others see it as a man-made invention to solve psychological problems or reject it as pleasure-denying. And of course there are the triumphalist scientists who oppose their science or scientism to religion.
Alister McGrath selects various figures he thinks are key. Feuerbach argues that Christianity’s other-worldism trivialises the one and only life we have and distracts us from its joys, concerns and possible improvements. Ridding the world of Christianity would not only remove a corrupt church and illogical idea but it would remove illicit and oppressive political authority as well. Comte divides intellectual history into phases in which scientific facts displace former metaphysical ideas and personal gods. Marx inverts religion’s place and makes it the creation of material needs and structures, the tool of class oppression and the legitimator of exploitation. Freud has Christianity as a ‘projection’ of fundamental desires, a distorted form of obsessional neurosis and an obstacle to science. McGrath continues with many other figures including those Romantics who rejected religion in favour of a particular version of nature, Sade, Godwin, George Eliot, Swinburne, Lessing, D. F. Strauss, Darwin, Ingersoll, Dawkins, Russell and Nietzsche. In each case he shows and, except with Nietzsche, counters their arguments rather effectively.
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