Fundamentalist Atheism: Why Does This Phrase Exist?

I’ve been looking through comments on Greta Christina’s article, Against Ecumenicalism: Why Atheists Don’t Have to Show “Respect” for Religion, and at a guest post by The Philosophical Primate at the Choice in Dying blog, which is about “Values & the New Atheism”.

One of the charges that is often leveled at atheists, and which was out in full force in the AlterNet comments on Greta’s article, is that we are just like fundamentalists. Specifically that we are oh-so-sure that we are right, and that we are hostile and intolerant towards all those people who we think are wrong.

Our knee-jerk reaction, as atheists, is to just dismiss this as a harmful stereotype. There is, of course, great diversity among irreligious people. Even among people who call themselves atheists specifically, there are not only liberal and libertarian rational skeptics, but Objectivists and Marxists and Zeitgeist Movement members and even some postmodernists and all kinds of other people. By and large we know that atheists in general cannot be summed up so easily, that we have no “party line”. And, perhaps more importantly, the more philosophically homogeneous, skeptical and scientific core of our movement consists of people who are obsessed with proper standards of evidence, knowing the difference between justified and unjustified beliefs, and/or the civil rights necessary for a secular society to function.

Even there, we often argue amongst ourselves. When and how should we combat the excesses of religion? Are we being dicks (who is, and how, and why)? When and how can we support religiously motivated projects without any risk to personal integrity? How much does science have to do with morality, and how much respect have we gained/lost for Sam Harris since he took such an extreme position on the issue?

Having learned to live while constantly at odds with theists and often even with other atheists (or, at least, while constantly a spectator to such battles), and with education and skepticism being such strong values within our communities, it’s easy to scoff at the idea that atheists are dogmatic, close-minded, intolerant automatons like those crazy fundamentalists. Especially given the literal meaning of the word “fundamentalist”, which requires strict adherence to some single text or set of doctrines, something that doesn’t even exist within atheism. In fact, insofar as these stereotypes are usually based in profound ignorance of the people they regard, or in careful reading of atheist writings through confirmation-bias-tinged (that is to say, nearly opaque) glasses, I think we are right to scoff.

But.

There’s still something of interest in these accusations. Not so much that they might be right in their mind-numbing oversimplifications, but in that they are so strongly hooked into the popular perception of atheists, and there may be interesting reasons why this is. In order to catch on, an idea like the fundamentalist-atheist connection must be repeated quite often, and one might suspect that this is either because there’s something intrinsically rewarding to the idea, or because it fits into a highly salient mental model of religious discourse. Knowing that the charge of fundamentalism is an absurd accusation, we can explore why it is made so frequently anyway.

There are a few candidates for an intrinsic reward in the idea. An obvious benefit to thinking that atheists are “just like” fundamentalists is that it allows atheism to be dismissed, thus preventing it from incurring any cognitive bias in the mind of a moderate believer (or anti-atheist agnostic). This upholds the believer’s own loyalties to some other ideology, over competing ideas. Any reason to dismiss atheism will do; one can believe that it’s a conspiracy, or that there are no true atheists, or that atheists have simply closed their eyes to some kind of obvious perception or sensus divinitatis. The best reasons, of course, are those which have already been delivered by some trusted authority figure (apologist or preacher or theologian or philosopher of religion or historian…), and thus automatically seem weightier.

This explanation is very appealing to atheists, which is a good reason not to immediately give it too much weight; we may be overestimating ourselves in assuming that so many believers will instantly invent absurdities to defeat us. Yes, apologetics is consistently fallacious, but it’s not arbitrarily fallacious; some arguments are more effective than others in different situations, due to the different intuitions and desires to which they appeal. One also wonders what circle of authorities has spread this idea across so much of the spectrum, and has even embedded it into irreligious critics of atheism. Are all these people just willing to believe absolutely anything negative about atheists, or is the accusation of fundamentalism somehow special?

So maybe the atheism-fundamentalism connection does have some justification within a wider model of religious discourse, and there are bad generalizations within this larger model, which allow the more specific mistake of calling New Atheism a kind of fundamentalism.

How might this happen? Well, for one, atheism is sometimes labeled a “religion” that requires “just as much faith” as others. This is an odd objection, but if you can get someone to accept it, it does a decent job of undermining atheism. If one believes that faith is a generic virtue that everyone should aspire to, and that spirituality is a basic part of the human condition, than labeling atheism as a religion has some appeal. After all, under this view, everyone has a religion, which is just their personal collection of views about God and the afterlife, and there’s nothing unusual about calling the view “They don’t exist.” a religion. An amusing and exasperating consequence of this is that, through equivocation or outright confusion regarding the meaning of the word “religion”, people begin to assume that atheism has all the other features of a religion, such as prophets, holy books, dogmas, moral rules, tenets of faith, etc. Creationists will label evolution the core of the religion, whereas moderates will instead raise the specter of excessive “faith in science”, (for the sophisticated, “scientism”). Although the two groups mean different things by this, they will both tend to assert that true science and true religion are compatible, neglecting that most atheists think that religion is of limited or negative value, and thus don’t personally desire it, whether it is compatible with science or not.

But this doesn’t quite get us to the “fundamentalist” accusation. For one, people who take this line of reasoning don’t usually equate “religion” with “fundamentalism”. For another, the atheism-as-religion argument is really just a way of stripping atheism of its natural advantages. Unlike the various religions, atheism has few distinct features to criticize (no holy books, moral doctrines, prophets, supernatural or even natural claims, or tenets of faith…). At its very broadest, atheism might be regarded as principled disbelief in the supernatural, really just the single epistemic claim that supernatural beliefs are not justified (and seem unlikely to ever be). At its narrowest, atheism is simply any psychological state whatsoever that doesn’t include belief in at least one god (what PZ Myers has irritably labeled: “Dictionary Atheism”).

These are extremely small, hard targets for a religionist to aim at. By bringing up secularism, skepticism, and modern science, not for what they are (the contingent support and motivation for espousing atheism in a religious world), but as somehow part-and-parcel of an atheist “religion”, an apologist can fire upon the entire history of secularism and the entire history of the institution of science, and claim that any hits are in fact strikes against atheism itself. The central point of atheism, that no reasonable standard of evidence would give the green light to religious claims, is passed by entirely.

This is a brilliant and, if done intentionally, extremely unethical tactic. But calling atheism a religion is enough; a religion pretending not to be a religion would be a pretty silly thing, after all. Why this extra step of calling it “fundamentalism”, insinuating that it’s not just a religion, but the really bad kind of religion?

Well, one possible reason is that this is a special kind of appeal to moderation. Being a moderate has positive connotations, while being an extremist clearly does not. Because extremism is often caused by a strong and irrational emotional and social connection to an ideology, and because such a connection can lead someone to embrace dangerous and untested policies, moderation is considered good by default, even on issues where the optimal position really is on one side of the spectrum. The moderate position is comfortably distanced from the views most open to harsh criticism. People who find themselves to be moderates on a particular issue may also build this trait into their identity, such that their feelings of competence on that issue are dependent on declaring the middle preferable to both sides. Seeing oneself as reasonable and morally responsible, and one’s opponents as dangerously slavish to ideology, is appealing to people in any political/ideological position. For moderates, the draw is therefore to paint oneself as existing in a reasonable compromise, while ideological competitors are dangerous and stubborn extremists.

xkcd has noted the appeal of feeling superior to other viewpoints on religion, and it seems to be a point well-made, that talking about how “both sides” are “just as bad” as the other is often a signal that the speaker is looking to place himself above both.

And yet we’re still missing a part of the puzzle. There are progressive believers and agnostics, people who believe that all faiths are true, or partially true, or at least valuable in some way. People who believe in equal rights for people of other faiths and women and GLBT people. People who are enthusiastic about ecumenical or interfaith efforts.

These are, in fact, extremists. That is, they are not moderates between atheism, or irreligion, and fundamentalists. Rather, they are the ultra-egalitarian side of the religious spectrum, whereas fundamentalists are on the ultra-authoritarian side. People like the New Atheists, or other anti-theists, who see no value in religion at all, do not fall on this scale, for the same sort of reason that completely asexual people have no position on the Kinsey scale. If moderate or progressive believers see themselves assailed on two sides by extremist atheists and fundamentalists, it can’t be because they actually occupy a center ground between the two, because they simply do not. Moving from “believes in no gods” to “believes in a vengeful anthropomorphic deity from a specific holy book”, one does not pass through the position “believes in something like a deity described in thousands of different traditions”.

At best, only agnostics can claim to be moderates between the two viewpoints, and even then, only on Dawkins’ “spectrum of theistic probability”. But on this spectrum, a convinced progressive believer is potentially more extreme than a fundamentalist with mild doubts. Yet the progressive believer is still not regarded as an “extremist”, and is considered a natural ally to the agnostic who dislikes atheism. Atheism and fundamentalism are still not the opposite ends of any scale.

So let’s ask the obvious question: how might atheism, particularly the “New Atheism”, which broadly criticizes religion on epistemic and moral grounds, look like fundamentalism? There must be something that sparks the comparison, right? It might seem odd that I didn’t ask this very question in the first place, but I wanted first to address the other possibilities that might be raised by atheists, so that we have an idea of the environment in which this question might be asked, as well as why it’s likely impossible to evade it completely. So what are people looking at, when they say we look like fundamentalists?

We have the oft-cited answer: atheists are dogmatically/arrogantly attached to their one certain view (like fundamentalists) and intolerant of other views (like fundamentalists). What this references is, in fact, one of the few clear similarities between atheists and fundamentalists. Both are quite happy to say, “The other viewpoints are wrong, so you should believe us instead.” Or to put it differently, fundamentalism and atheism are both exclusive viewpoints against all other religious viewpoints. Some ecumenical or relativist sorts would like to assign a certain amount of value to all religions, but they can’t fully absorb viewpoints that explicitly state that all the other viewpoints are false or immoral.

Because of this, one of the few major “flaws” that can get such a person to criticize a religious viewpoint, is if that viewpoint is intolerant and uncompromising. Not intolerant in the sense of demanding intolerant behavior from its adherents, but even just “intolerant” in the sense of stating explicit incompatibility with other viewpoints, that one or the other of them must be wrong. Not uncompromising in the sense that the adherents are unwilling to make compromises, but even just “uncompromising” in the sense that the viewpoint does not readily cede ground to competing positions.

It’s this exclusivity, this assertion that, if atheism is correct, all religions are wrong, and the frequently stated corollary that people should stop following those religions, that generate the comparison to fundamentalism. Ecumenical and interfaith efforts, and even traditional etiquette, have a severe aversion to ever discouraging a major religious belief directly. The idea is that all faiths should be accepted as nearly as possible to how they already are, with any inherent virtues or cultural traditions more or less intact. The assertion that the matter can be settled, and that one viewpoint can be shown to be true, that is the idea that’s thought to be the hallmark of “extremism”, and what gives rise to the viewing of New Atheism as a kind of fundamentalist intolerance. It threatens the position of moderate belief as a sort of crossroads between different viewpoints, since this perspective is no longer seen as a particularly privileged or enlightened position, producing a backlash in which more progressive believers compare atheists to their old enemies, the fundamentalists. (This tendency, to treat all outsiders as being more similar than they really are, is known as the out-group homogeneity bias, and it seems more or less universal.) Interfaith dialogue is no longer the single, obvious, egalitarian answer to religious conflict. Atheism strides in with a harsh and unwelcome suggestion: “Why don’t you just stop all this nonsense and find something better to do?”

So what are we to think of this position we find ourselves in, and the seed of legitimacy that can be found in the comparison to fundamentalists? Can we claim tolerance of believers, while holding a viewpoint that has no respect for so much nonsense? Can we have our cake and eat it too? More on atheism, fundamentalism, and exclusivity next time, when I will discuss how atheism and fundamentalism are similar, how they are different, and what it is that I believe shields atheism from the moral failings of fundamentalist religion.