Nielsen and Cooke: The Necessity of Thoroughgoing Atheism

Naturalism and Religion. Kai Nielsen. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001. 512 pp. $40.00 h.c., 1-57392-853-4.

A Rebel to His Last Breath:Joseph McCabe and Rationalism. Bill Cooke. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001. 320 pp. $32.00 h.c., 1-57392-878-X.

The publication in 1770 of Baron d'Holbach's The System of Nature marks the beginning of what David Berman refers to as a tradition of speculative atheism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people who behaved immorally were considered atheists, even if they professed belief. Such people were frequently referred to as practical atheists. Speculative atheists, by contrast, formally and systematically rejected the God-concept and a theological worldview. The nineteenth century witnessed remarkable developments in speculative atheism, as seen in Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay on "The Necessity of Atheism"; Ludwig Feuerbach's and Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical analyses of the psychological and semantic production of meaning (including the construction of God and truth); and T. H. Huxley's and Leslie Stephen's post-God visions of science, politics, and community, just to name a few notable examples. By the twentieth century, writers like Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf took an atheistic orientation as an epistemological given, developing philosophies about the Entzauberung der Welt (Max Weber), the Entsinnlichung der Welt (Arnold Gehlen), or the de-divinization of the world (Richard Rorty). But what constitutes being an "unconditional honest atheist" (Nietzsche), a "thorough atheist" (Berman), or an "absolute atheist" (James Thrower)? Bill Cooke and Kai Nielsen have recently published books that seek to answer this question but also indicate how extremely difficult it is to shuffle off the mortal coils of religious belief.

Nielsen's book is relentless, unforgiving, bulldoggish, but it works. Only someone with Nielsen's comprehensive grasp of intellectual history and subtle understanding of complicated arguments for and against God's existence could convincingly call religion "a dead option" (62) or "morally debilitating" (236). The book is offensive, intentionally so I suspect, but Nielsen's detractors will find themselves hard pressed to refute his position. What makes the book so deeply satisfying is his ability to use a rigorous language of philosophical analysis to articulate intellectual developments from Kant to Adorno and Horkheimer, from Frege to Wittgenstein and Quine, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Nielsen does philosophy as if the stupid and debilitating split between the analytic and continental traditions never occurred, and therein lies one of the major reasons for the success of his book.

Above all else, Nielsen argues, coherently and cogently, for an "antimetaphysical and antiontological" (200) contextualist naturalism, an internally consistent philosophy that is "secular all the way down" (56-70). Although Nielsen locates himself within a very rich tradition of atheists (Hume, Feuerbach, Russell, among others) who reject "God-talk," he resists the temptation to valorize science and to reify reason (200). In fact, he claims that science is limited and reductivistic (29-54), while "rationalism is philosophical fantasy" (229). His philosophical approach is neopragmatic in the tradition of Rorty and Putnam, but his distinctive goal is to illustrate that the neopragmatist's nonfoundationalist contextualist naturalism is not vulnerable to critique from religioso-metaphysico-transcendento God systems. Furthermore, he tries to show that all God- and metaphysical-assertions are incoherent because there are no "truth-conditions or assertability conditions for such claims" (354).

Cooke has written a much-needed biography of Joseph McCabe, an ex-Catholic priest who became an early twentieth-century champion of a very humane atheistic vision of modern living. Like Nielsen, Cooke makes a number of comments that are calculated to offend many readers, but unlike Nielsen, Cooke is not the master of his material, and as a consequence his gratuitous remarks considerably undermine his credibility as a scholar and a thinker. On the surface, Cooke writes a biography about McCabe, a...