"Back when I didn’t believe in God..."

I found this book review very much worth reading. David Brooks:

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins, and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years, religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom. ....

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because, without a concept of what life is for, it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong. .... (more)

David Brooks, "More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism," Comment