On “fear of religion”

Art by Elliot Skow

It’s at the end of The Last Word by Thomas Nagel that fear of religion comes onstage. Capping a run of chapters with pleasingly-simple titles—Language, Logic, Science, and Ethics—the topic of the final chapter is an outburst of complexity: “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.” This fear, Nagel asserts, has had “pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.” While he opposes those consequences, he also understands them, because, Nagel admits, he is “strongly subject to this fear” himself. It’s not a fear of religious people; Nagel isn’t worried that a passing Mormon will pinch him on the arm. Nor is it a concern that religious institutions will, say, use their power to influence politics for the worse. It’s “much deeper,” Nagel says, a “fear of religion itself.” If that’s not much help, neither is his elaboration:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Cover: Young Aristotle

Only a philosopher would distinguish hoping I’m right to believe there is no God, and hoping there is no God. But a real distinction does exist here, even if it’s not drawn in the most felicitous way. If I turned out to be wrong in my belief that New York is bigger than Boston, of course I’d be (mildly) upset, because I value having true beliefs. But I wouldn’t be upset for any further reason; balance would be restored simply by amending my opinion. It’s different, for Nagel, when the topic is God. He wants to be generally right in what he thinks, but also, separate from that, he wants to live in a Godless world. If the oracle revealed to him the divine nature of reality, Nagel could get one of the things he wanted—accurate beliefs—by becoming a theist; but his other desire, for a Godless world, would forever remain frustrated.

Nagel doesn’t want the universe to be like that. The question is why. It’s certainly odd, right? Of course many people want to know whether God exists, in fact think the question is tremendously important, but maybe their desire is instrumental: they’re like a driver, getting behind the wheel, wanting to know whether, around here, people drive on the left or the right. One’s survival depends on knowing and acting on the answer, but as to the answer itself, left or right, one is indifferent. Nagel himself doubts that anyone is “genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God,” but doesn’t say whether he means an instrumental or an intrinsic indifference. Even if he means the latter, the mirror of Nagel’s attitude is surely more common than his own: wanting God to exist, for the comfort or authority, or the possibility of benevolent intercession, that God’s existence would bring.

Nagel brings all this up to defend anti-reductionism. Science will never discover how minds arise from physical processes: that’s Nagel’s position. Opposition to it, Nagel suggests, has an emotional, not a rational cause: the same fear of religion that drives (his) atheism. Appreciate this, eliminate or at least bracket the fear in your deliberations, and anti-reductionism is supposed to become easier to believe. In the religious case, however, Nagel remained an atheist.

In my memory, Nagel goes on, in The Last Word, to explain why he doesn’t want the universe to “be like that.” Re-reading the book, I find that he doesn’t. I think my unconscious must have mashed up the book with his famous essay, “The absurd.” There he discusses attempts to find meaning in life, including “in service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advance of science, or religion and the glory of God.” Such service, Nagel thought, cannot make life meaningful, and his argument used a startling analogy:

If we learned that we were being raised to provide food for other creatures fond of human flesh, who planned to turn us into cutlets before we got too stringy—even if we learned that the human race had been developed by animal breeders precisely for this purpose—that would still not give our lives meaning.

Of course theists of various stripes think service to the glory of God is, or would be, quite unlike service to these alien human-farmers. Aware of this, Nagel, in one of his funniest lines, admits that

One is supposed to behold and partake of the glory of God, for example, in a way in which chickens do not share in the glory of coq au vin.

That’s funny because, I’ve always thought, Nagel didn’t really believe it. If God (exists and) has a purpose for us, then doing as He wills isn’t actually different from a chicken whispering “thy will be done” on his way to the butcher. The chicken’s life is still meaningless and absurd; so is one lived in submission to a divine will.

Maybe Nagel says more, somewhere, about why he “doesn’t want the universe to be like that.” If so, I don’t know where. It seems I’ve always recklessly read his answer off the coq au vin remark. If the universe were like that, God would have a plan for us, and for him. What if Nagel’s own plan for himself diverged from God’s? Only suffering could result. But the alternative, conforming his plan to God’s, well, for some, such a restriction on how one should live is apt to raise hackles and inspire sales of the Gadsden flag. On this interpretation Nagel is a kind of idealistic Romantic, opposed to anything that restricts our power of self-creation.

What do I know, but this seems a bad reason to want there to be no God. Atheists too must accept “restrictions on how one should live”: it’s false that if God is dead, everything is permitted. And they also must accept that reality “has a plan” for us, at least in an attenuated sense: human nature is real. Natural selection has put in us certain needs and wants, and divided our lives into stages of growth, strength, and senescence, and from too much fighting against these only suffering can result.

In a recent book, The Virtues of Limits, David McPherson argues more thoroughly against existential freedom as an ideal. He calls it the Promethean Ideal, and he is as interested in the desire for complete mastery over the world outside us, as in the desire for supreme authority over ourselves. He includes this quote from Mary Midgley, a good place to end:

A great deal in the life of each of us is completely out of our power, and our freedom must consist in the way we handle that small but crucial area which does actually come before us for choice. The situation is far more benign than people obsessed with freedom make it sound, because what comes to us by no choice of our own is a gift—a whole world which we could not possibly have made and at which, in spite of all its horrors, we can on the whole only bow our heads in wonder. ... Our inheritance, both social and natural, is not a shocking intrusion on our privacy and freedom, but a realm for us to live in.