Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Page 14

and humanity could rediscover a golden age of reason and toleration. This
theme is particularly evident in the string of soundbites, implausibly passed
ofif as an argument, in Hitchens’ God is not Great.
It’s a neat idea, which makes for great rhetoric. Yet it is indefensible in
the face of the evidence, rather like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth
Fairy. A core belief of the “New Atheism”, which it persistently tries to
represent as scientific fact, is that religion is the cause of the ills of humanity.
But what is the evidence for this assertion?
The first point to make is simple: “religion” is a false universal. Individual
religions exist; “religion” doesn’t. The Enlightenment was characterised by
a love of universals, most famously stated in the idea of a universal human
reason, whose fundamental characteristics were independent of history
and culture. For the Enlightenment, this universal human reason could be
the basis of a true, global ethic and philosophy, which would sweep aside
irrational superstitions as relics of a barbarous past. In the end, this noble
idea proved to be unworkable, in that human patterns of reasoning turned
out to be much more culturally conditioned than had been realised.
The key point here is that the Enlightenment understandably yet wrongly
regarded “religion” as a universal category. During the period of colonial
expansion, many Europeans came across worldviews that differed from
their own, and chose to label them as “religions”. In fact, many of these
were better regarded as philosophies of life, such as Confucianism. Some
were explicitly nontheistic. Yet the Enlightenment belief in a universal
notion called “religion” led to these being forced into the same mold. In
recent years, there has been concerted criticism of this unhelpful and deeply
problematic approach. It is increasingly agreed that definitions of religion
tend to reflect the agendas and bias of those who propose them. There is
still no definition of “religion” which commands scholarly assent.7
So what is the relevance of this for the “New Atheism”? Let’s take a
statement by the cultural commentator Carolyn Marvin, of the University
7 For further exploration of this point, see Peter Harrison, “Religion"and tbe Religions in tbe Englisb
Enligbtenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of
Religion. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1996; Samuel J. Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism
and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
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