Hi Lee,

Thanks for the note on Wittgenstein and Frazer – I have the lectures on religion earmarked for a re-read latter in the year (I have not looked at it for over a decade). In any case I will look out for the attack on Frazer. To me though Frazer is significant, not for what he said but for the fact that his work is an important part of the history of thinking about religion – faint praise. The kind social Darwinian approach to thinking about religion is very unhelpful, and kind of reinforces the notion that religion is primitive science, which is so common in the contemporary analytic atheism: as if the need to explain the world is prior to all other engagements with it. We might be interested in explanatory accounts that map out causal relations, fine, but one ought not imagine that such an activity has priority. I have a point to make about social Darwinism and the new atheism but I will return to that. What strikes is that the assumptions of the news atheists are important for your point about language-games. The presumption is that religion is more or less playing the same game as science – attempting to give a causal/explanatory account of the world and everything in it. But they are given a massive boost in this enterprise by fundamentalist and literalist theism. Fundamentalists and literalists are vital to the new atheism as they are the evidence that religion is what the atheists say it is, an inferior rival to science an inadequate way of explaining the world. Okay they can also draw on some rather crude readings of Medieval philosophy but most of the New Atheist crew and analytic atheists are not know for their capacity to work with historical texts – so set that aside. In any case while many people probably have suspected that Fundamentalist and literalist religiosity is an albatross around the neck of religion it is probably for reasons other than the one I cite above – the resonance between it and the new atheism on idea that religion and science compete on the same ground. But only a truly unsophisticated reading of religion could assert that! Here I think that it is quite clear that Continental philosophy has dealt with religion in more sophisticated ways.

But the social Darwinism stuff is interesting. J.G. Frazer held the idea that we progressed from magic, through religion to science. As such while the West had reached the pinnacle, the further east one went the more ‘religious’ things got and the further south one went the more ‘magical’ things got. The new atheists, and analytic atheists generally, seem to share some of this view. What they share is the idea that one can replace religion with science and that science represents a pinnacle, again the foundational presupposition is that religion and science must be doing the same thing – if they are doing different things one cannot so readily replace the other. But apart from this (in my opinion) interesting point, the role of Darwinism in the new atheism and analytic atheism is interesting. The new atheists tend to stress that religion is the cause of violence and the major horrors that people do to one another and they assert that this can be demonstrated historically. This is a poor reading of history, sure religion has been instrumentalised as a reason for, or justification of, aggression, but this mostly dissembles other motives (wealth and power being primary). No one could doubt that religion has been used in this way. But science and higher-learning can just as easily be instrumentalised for the same reasons. There is more than a little Darwin in the NAZI attempt to build a master race. Sure, the NAZI’s did not really care to much to be faithful to Darwin. Sure, its bad science. But that is not the point, the point is that science can be instrumentalised and used as a way of justifying what one wants to do anyway. Its not that religion and science are so similar that one can be replaced with the other. The point is that one cannot just commit a crime of the scale that modern warfare (or warfare generally) demands, one has to rationalize one’s way into it, here we cast about for ‘good’ reasons to do what we want to do. We instrumentalise the resources that are at hand.

Just finally to engage your point about 20^th century attempts to prove or deny states of affairs in the world. Yes, much philosophy of religion has this flavour. But it seems more to flow from analytic atheists. They assume that if someone believes in God then they believe that God is ‘part of the furniture of the universe’. So if God exists there should be evidence for God’s existence – their conception of God, apart from the tri-omni attributes, is one of an interventionist God who acts (causally) in the world. They often get excited about miracle stories in the bible (as do fundamentalists) and suggest that believing them to be true is ridiculous, but like most fundamentalists they neglect all good bible and scriptural scholarship on these matters. In any case I don’t want to defend the bible or theism – its not for me to do – but again Continental philosophy seems to be much better on these issues than analytic atheism, which just seems to be the dialectical other of fundamentalist and literalist Christianity. Okay, that’s the atheists, the theists for their part often seem to be doing something slightly different from trying to prove a certain state of affairs, many of them seem to be trying to rationally underwrite belief. They seem to want to show that they are justified in believing that things are a certain way despite the lack of demonstrative proof. Here I think that they are on par with naturalism – they marshal reasons why they are justified in having certain metaphysical commitments.

Phil