Religion for Atheists – 1

When I was a child I behaved in childish ways. My mother baked wonderful cakes and the house filled with their smell. However, my interest was all in the sweet seductiveness of the icing bowl. As my mother prepared the icing, I would linger in the hope of a spoonful or at least to lick the bowl when it was done. Sometimes mother indulged me, but generally she made me wait until the icing was on the cake.

That’s wisdom: no icing without the cake.

All that is by way of introduction to Religion for Atheists by Alain De Botton (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

I have read several of De Botton’s books and find him a rarity among modern philosophers. He writes in an easily accessible form and with a great concern for practical life applications. His work is enjoyable and stimulating and I find it thought provoking and instructive.

De Botton speaks of being raised in a secular Jewish household where any form of religious belief was a decided ‘no no’. However, he found his faithlessness challenged by encounters with Christian and Buddhist inspired art forms. What was going on there?

In this book De Botton joins the new atheist debate but insists that writers such as Dawkins and Hitchens have it wrong. De Botton takes it as a given that ... of course no religions are true in any God-given sense (p11). Presumably the pun was intended. His concern is with what happens next. What does life look like once God is removed?

This is where the icing and the cake come in and the book gets interesting.

The basic argument of the book is stated in chapter one whose title indicates the agenda: Wisdom without doctrine. I think that the argument can be summarised in four steps:

1.     The truth claims of religions concerning God are false.

2.     However, religions help meet important human needs by providing valued things such as a sense of community and a means to cope with pain.

3.     Secular society is impoverished and incomplete by discarding these useful aspects of religions, along with their supporting dogmas.

4.     The challenge for atheists is to re-appropriate these good things that religions had once colonised and baptised from earlier non-religious sources.

The rest of the book takes up this agenda and will be commented in later blogs in this series. In overview: De Botton notes a contemporary problem, notes how religion has addressed it, removes the religious dogma and identifies the helpful features, and, finally, proposes an alternative that expresses the helpful feature in secular dress. It is an interesting read to see how he does this chapter by chapter.

All this reads like trying to have the icing without the cake. Some words from the end of chapter one illustrate the problem:

… religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hospitality, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture – a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the greatest and most secular movements and individuals in history. For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerized by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnesses. (p18)

This is a significant admission in its recognition of how the ideas of religions have impacted the whole of life in the most practical and applied manner. But still he wants to strip the ideas away and just have their good effects. Can we not see how the effects are the fruit and the ideas the root? Take away the ideas and there is no fruit.

The icing needs the cake.