In Defense of Atheism

Speaking of people who may or may not aspire to cling to power for life, Joseph Ratzinger has life tenure written into his contract. Herr Ratzinger fancies himself an intellectual, and a perusal of his newest publication, Spe Salvi ("Saved By Faith") shows him to be a fairly erudite fellow. Because Ratzinger is Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, under his alias of Benedict XVI, his pamphlet (is the Pope the only person on earth who gets to write something called an "encyclical?") is taken to be some sort of authoritative statement. The news media treat it as such, and the headline they draw on it is that Benedict has blamed atheism for the greatest atrocities in human history.

The reporters have dug their tidbit out from fairly deep in the encyclical. The key quote comes near the start of section 42:

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.

The pope is indulging in a popular fallacy: he implies that all the crimes of Leninists over the last century were motivated by, and can be attributed to, their hostility toward religion. This is an argument we hear all the time, and all the major "militant atheist" writers have tried to refute it. Some of them try to fudge things by asserting that Leninism was itself a form of fanaticism akin to religion and therefore alien to genuine atheism. Ratzinger himself says something similar when he describes political atheism as a form of moralism.

I prefer a more forthright defense of atheism from the guilt-by-association charge. Let's concede that a literally militant atheism was part of the Leninist agenda. Let's also insist that it was only part of a multifaceted agenda. In any given country, most of the murders attributed to Leninist governments were not perpetrated specifically to suppress religion. Many religious people were killed or imprisoned, but far more suffered for conventional political reasons. That majority of crimes should be blamed on Leninism specifically, not on atheism generally. Some may object that Leninist atheism left them with no scuples against mass killing, but anyone who wants to try that argument should study history first and see how many devout, practicing Christians proved to be mass murderers and tyrants.

I don't know if it's possible to crunch numbers on this point, but I'd be willing to guess that more people throughout history have been murdered in the name of religion, perhaps even in the name of Christianity alone, than have been murdered to further an atheist agenda. As long as we limit the Leninist toll to those specifically persecuted for religious activity, as objectivity requires, I think the Christians will have killed more, even if only because they had a nearly two-millennia head start. If I'm right, then atheism can't be blamed for the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice," and Ratzinger's case is disproven.

Honesty requires me to note that the pope doesn't blindly condemn Marxism in his pamphlet. He acknowledges that Marx incisively exposed real social injustices, and faults him mainly for assuming that people would just get along once you made the correct economic arrangements. I don't know if that's a fair appraisal of Karl Marx's position, but at least Benedict isn't calling him a servant of Satan.

Another quote will get us to what I take to be Benedict's main point:

Yes indeed, reason is God's great gift to man, and the victory of reason over unreason is also a goal of the Christian life. But when does reason truly triumph? When it is detached from God? When it has become blind to God? Is the reason behind action and capacity for action the whole of reason? If progress, in order to be progress, needs moral growth on the part of humanity, then the reason behind action and capacity for action is likewise urgently in need of integration through reason's openness to the saving forces of faith, to the differentiation between good and evil. Only thus does reason become truly human. It becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man's situation, in view of the imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgement in his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation. Thus where freedom is concerned, we must remember that human freedom always requires a convergence of various freedoms. Yet this convergence cannot succeed unless it is determined by a common intrinsic criterion of measurement, which is the foundation and goal of our freedom. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope.

As a non-believer, I can't agree with this. Like many philosophers, Ratzinger is unwilling to accept the implications of the fact that every great moral idea is a human invention requiring a perpetual exertion of human will for its sustenance. He can't get past the notion that, if people just "make up" morality, as he seems to see it, they can "unmake" it whenever they please. He needs to posit something "outside" that defines everything because he thinks it'll be safer if people feel that they have no choice but to be moral. He is prejudiced by the Christian notion that man is "fallen" and therefore cannot perfect society without help from higher powers. For my part, I don't think a completely perfect society is possible, but I think people can do better with the tools they have, and could come up with at least a pretty good society for everyone if they applied themselves more. I think Joseph Ratzinger believes that too, but I suspect that he also believes that, if not an indispensible man himself, his office and its authority are indispensable to any such project. Let me put this very simply: the pope is wrong.