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The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World is a book by Alister McGrath

Summary

McGrath suggests that "The remarkable rise and subsequent decline of atheism is framed by two pivotal events, separated by precisely two hundred years: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and that of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Two brutal physical structures, each of which served as a symbol of a worldview, were destroyed, to popular acclaim. These dramatic events crystallized massive changes in perceptions in Western culture. They frame a fascinating period in Western history, in which atheism ceased to be the slightly weird outlook of those on the fringes of polite society in the West and became instead its dominant cultural voice. The fall of the Bastille became a symbol of the viability and creativity of a godless world, just as the fall of the Berlin Wall later symbolized a growing recognition of the uninhabitability of such a place. They mark neither the beginning nor the end of atheism, simply providing the historian with convenient boundary posts for a discussion of its growth, flowering, and gradual decay."(p1)

The book is an expanded form of a speech he gave at a debate in February 2002 at the Oxford Union on whether it is possible to rid the mind of God. The other speakers were Peter Atkins, Susan Blackmore and David Cook

The book has the following sections:

Introduction

• 1 The Dawn of the Golden Age of Atheism; The Critics of the Gods: Classical Greek Atheism; The Transition to the Modern Era; An Age of Revolution: The Eighteenth Century

Part 1: The High Noon of Atheism

• 2 The French Revolution; The Failure of the French Monarchy; Voltaire: Critic of a Corrupt Church; The American Revolution: Radical Reform without Atheism; The Rise of French Atheism; The Failed Philosophical Attempts to Defend God; The Marquis de Sade and the Origins of Erotic Atheism; The Critique of Christianity: The First Phase; Institutional Atheism? The Program of Dechristianization; The French Revolution and Atheism: An Assessment
• 3 The Intellectual Foundations: Feuerbach, Marx and Freud A Secular Priesthood: The Rise of the Intellectual; God as an Invention: Ludwig Feuerbach; God as an Opiate: Karl Marx; God as Illusion: Sigmund Freud
• 4 Warfare: The Natural Sciences and the Advancement of Atheism; The Origins of the Warfare of Science and Religion; Atheism as a Science: The Demand for Religious Proof; The Blind Watchmaker: Darwin and a Godless Universe
• 5 A Failure of the Religious Imagination: The Victorian Crisis of Faith; The Birth of Intentional Atheism in England; Nature: Affirming the Transcendent without God; Shelley and the ‘Necessity’ of Atheism; The UnConvert: George Eliot; A. C. Swinburne: The Imaginative Appeal of the Profane; The ‘Life of Jesus’ Movement; A Culture in Crisis: The Loss of Faith
• 6 The Death of God: The Final Elimination of God from Western Culture Dostoyevsky and the Revolt against God; Nietzsche and the Death of God; Camus and the Absurd Silence of God; The ‘Death of God’ Theology; The Suicide of Liberal Christianity; The Execution of God: The Atheist State

Part 2: Twilight

• 7 The Resurgence of Religion A Loss of Faith: A Personal Narrative; The Stalled Intellectual Case against God; The Rebirth of Interest in the Spiritual; The Remarkable Case of Pentecostalism
• 8 Disconnection from the Sacred: Protestantism and Atheism The Divorce of the Sacred and the Secular; The Imaginative Failure of Protestantism; The Atheist Challenge and the Future of Protestantism
• 9 Postmodernity: Atheism and Radical Cultural Change The Birth of Modernity; The Postmodern Respect for Diversity; Atheism and the Challenge of Postmodernity; The Embarrassing Intolerance of Atheism
• 10 The Bizarre Case of Madalyn Murray O'Hair In this section McGrath cites Edmund Gosse's book Father and Son and Ivy Compton-Burnett suggesting that "to reject the faith of the father almost becomes a routine element of the process of growing up ... if this worldview had previaled, the Christian faith in England would have died out years ago. Each generation seems to have believed that Christianity would die out within its lifetime" He calculates that if 100% of the population were Christian in 1880 and this reduced by 33% every 30 years only 20% of the UK's population would be Christians, but cites the 2001 Census showing that 72% of the UK population claimed to be Christian . He suggests that Madalyn Murray O'Hair "siphoned off millions of dollars for he own ends" from American Atheists and that only about 250 people come to their annual convention in 2002, and that it "seemed just like a small denomination, with its own religious goals and gripes ... you don't have to believe in God to be a fundamentalist"
• 11 End of Empire: The Fading Appeal of Atheism Liberators and Oppressors: On Atheist Role-Reversal; Religion and the Creation of Community; Institutional Atheism: A Failure of Vision; The Permanent Significance of Atheism

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly commented that McGrath "has distinguished himself not just as an historical theologian, but as a generous and witty writer who brings life to topics that would turn to dust in others' hands". Here he explores the history of atheism in Western culture, observing that atheism seems to be succumbing to the very fate—irrelevance and dissolution—that atheists once predicted would overtake traditional religion...As a lapsed atheist himself, McGrath is a sympathetic interpreter, but he also relentlessly documents what he contends are the philosophical inconsistency and moral failures of atheism, especially when it has acquired political power. Yet believers will find no warrant here for complacency, as McGrath shows how religion's "failures of imagination" and complicity with oppression often fostered the very environment in which atheism could thrive. Indeed, he warns, "Believers need to realize that, strange as it may seem, it is they who will have the greatest impact on atheism's future." Readable and memorable, this is intellectual history at its best.

• Bryce Christensen in Booklist commented that "Secular intellectuals have been announcing God's funeral since the eighteenth century... But in the very triumph of atheism, McGrath discerns the causes of its collapse. For once in power, atheism delivered not enlightenment in utopia but rather barbarism in the gulag. Politically discredited and imaginatively exhausted, atheism has been forced into an astonishing retreat before advancing Pentecostal preachers and Christian fabulists. For readers trying to understand this unexpected reversal in cultural fortunes.

• Jane Leapmann in the Christian Science Monitor commented that: "Time magazine spurred public debate 40 years ago with a startling question on its cover: "Is God Dead?" Some estimate that half the world's population was then nominally atheist. And many in the West were predicting that scientific progress would eliminate religious belief altogether by the next century...In this accessible intellectual history, McGrath explores how atheism came to capture a wide swath of the public imagination as the road to human liberation and progress, and why, in a postmodern world, its appeal has faded. Yet he also makes clear that, despite the resurgence in faith, Western Christianity has not fully recovered from the crisis of the '60s."

• Claire Berlinski in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review suggests that "one wishes McGrath had made his case with greater precision and care. He offers scant sociological data and few statistics about rates of religious belief over this period." She doubts whether "post-modernism will provide a nurturing climate for theists...If he is still prepared to make this case after a weekend spent sharing the Good News at the annual Modern Language Association Convention, I am prepared to listen." She comments that "The object of his historic inquiry is not atheism per se but one particular and influential strand of it: a conjunction of so-called hard atheism — the explicit denial of the existence of God, as opposed to mere lack of belief — with a series of beliefs that exceed any ontological claims about God to encompass moral and political arguments for the eradication of theism. Only this species of atheism, thus defined, is by his reckoning cast in twilight. As a limited case it is somewhat successful — who can dispute that atheist regimes failed to cover themselves in glory, or that strident atheists are a particularly unattractive bunch? Richard Dawkins...is hardly a figure to inspire affection: has denounced his critics as ignorant, stupid, insane, and wicked, adding recently that this “sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.” But McGrath defines atheism so narrowly that the most interesting questions are unaddressed and unresolved, and his ebullient conclusions are unsupported by the arguments."

• Julian Baggini considers that "A book like Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism no longer looks perversely contrarian, but a fair reflection of social reality"

• John Gray in The Independent said "The decline of secular thought is the subject of Alister McGrath's provocative and timely The Twilight of Atheism. (...) His aim is not so much to analyse atheism as demolish its intellectual credentials, and in this he is largely successful. (...) At the same time, his zeal as a Christian apologist gives his argument a strident and parochial tone. McGrath's difficulties begin when he tries to define atheism."

• Tim O'Neil writes: "But throughout his history McGrath offers more puzzling elisions and leaps of logic. The most serious is his insistence on discussing atheism as a`"faith", treating it in the context of history like just another of many competing spiritual enterprises. He is correct in assuming that the claim is "astonishing" to many atheists, because despite his philosophical maneuverings he simply fails to make the argument anything less than an oxymoron. (..) Believing in God or any supernatural agency therefore requires that the believer make an external assumption. To say that the act of not believing in God is similarly an article of faith is to misread the question entirely, to presuppose that an awareness of divinity is in fact the default position for human intellect to take — quite a leap, but McGrath isn’t the only one to make it (..) In conflating the concepts of atheism and the conventional understanding of "faith", McGrath also makes another crucial error — mistaking atheism, an idea, with atheism as a mass movement. (..) The fact that Stalin just happened to be an atheist has no impact on the legitimacy of the idea anymore than the fact that Torquemada just happened to be a Christian impacts the legitimacy of Christianity".

Notes and references

1. Twilight of Atheism Introduction, p XIII
2. taken for convenience from summary here
3. he mentions Compton-Burnett's Daughters and Sons (1937) and A Family and a Fortune (1939)
4. op. cit. pp238-241.
5. op. cit. p253. He claims "an investigation by ABC-TV's Nightline on June 1, 1998 suggested a figure of $8M"
6. op.cit. p 254-5, citing the June 2002 issues of the National Review
7. review quoted in Amazon.com
8. review quoted in Amazon.com
9. A funny thing happened on way to disbelief
10. Claire Berlinski Policy Review Feb & March 2005 Is God Still Dead?
11. Julian Baggini The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Secularism in Public Policy Research Volume 12 Issue 4 Page 204 - Dec 2005 - Feb 2006
12. quoted in Summary of reviews - see also summaries of reviews in several other publications

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