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Religious belief has been challenged from every direction — philosophical, scientific, psychological and sociological — and the ability to set out these challenges precisely, and to weigh the religious responses to them, is central to the AQA dialogue between religion and philosophy of religion. This lesson examines four great lines of attack: the New Atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens, which presses the scientific and moral case against faith; the psychological challenge of Freud, who treats religion as an illusion born of wish-fulfilment; the sociological challenge of Marx, for whom religion is the "opium of the people"; and the problem of evil, the oldest and arguably the gravest philosophical objection to a good and powerful God. Throughout, a single methodological point recurs and must be wielded carefully: explaining why people come to believe something does not by itself show that the belief is false.
Key term: Atheism — the position that God does not exist. It is distinct from agnosticism (that we cannot know whether God exists) and from secularism (a claim about religion's place in public life, not about the truth of religious belief).
Key term: The genetic fallacy — the error of inferring that a belief is false (or true) merely from an account of its psychological or social origins. A belief produced by wish-fulfilment or social need might still happen to be true; the question of origin and the question of truth are logically separate.
The label "New Atheism" was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 for a cluster of writers who mounted a public, combative assault on religion in the early twenty-first century, often called the "Four Horsemen".
| Thinker | Key work | Central claim |
|---|---|---|
| Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) | The God Delusion (2006) | The "God hypothesis" is a very improbable scientific claim; religion is harmful |
| Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) | God Is Not Great (2007) | "Religion poisons everything"; it breeds oppression and violence |
| Sam Harris (b. 1967) | The End of Faith (2004) | Faith is dangerous, and moderate religion shelters extremism |
| Daniel Dennett (b. 1942) | Breaking the Spell (2006) | Religion should be studied naturalistically as a human phenomenon |
Dawkins's central arguments are:
Religious responses. The theologian Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion?, 2007) argues that Dawkins attacks a crude, literalist target that serious theology does not recognise, and that the complexity objection presupposes — falsely — that God is a complex object within the universe rather than the metaphysically simple ground of being. The literary critic Terry Eagleton charged Dawkins with "theological illiteracy", engaging popular piety while ignoring centuries of sophisticated thought ("imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge... is the Book of British Birds"). Defenders of Dawkins reply that popular religion is exactly what most believers hold, and that abstract theology should not be allowed to immunise faith from scrutiny.
Hitchens's case is moral and political rather than scientific: religion, he argues, is a principal source of violence, oppression and the suppression of inquiry, from the Crusades and the Inquisition to the policing of sexuality and the obstruction of medical research. His subtitle — "How Religion Poisons Everything" — captures the totality of the indictment.
Religious responses. Critics note that Hitchens attributes to religion conflicts whose principal drivers were political, ethnic or economic, and that the twentieth century's most murderous regimes — Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia — were militantly atheist, which complicates the claim that removing religion would reduce violence. Keith Ward (Is Religion Dangerous?, 2006) argues that, weighed in the balance, religion has been a vast force for good: inspiring hospitals, universities, abolitionism and the civil-rights movement, and that the abuses are betrayals of, not expressions of, its core teaching.
The other two "horsemen" press distinct lines. Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) argues that the real danger is faith itself — belief held without proportionate evidence — and, controversially, that moderate religion is part of the problem, because by insisting that faith is inherently worthy of respect it shelters the extremist from the criticism that might otherwise contain them. He also contends (in The Moral Landscape) that science, not religion, can in principle ground objective moral values, by studying what conduces to the well-being of conscious creatures. Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006) takes a cooler, more analytic approach: he urges that religion be studied dispassionately as a natural phenomenon — an evolved feature of human life with identifiable causes — rather than treated as a sacred no-go area, and develops the by-product account of why belief spreads.
Religious responses. Harris's claim that moderate faith "shelters" extremism is widely contested: critics argue that moderate believers are often the most effective opponents of extremism within their own traditions, and that the historical record of religiously inspired reform tells against treating all faith as latent danger. Dennett's call to study religion scientifically is largely accepted by religious scholars — there is nothing threatening to faith in explaining its psychology and sociology — provided the genetic fallacy is respected: a naturalistic account of how religion spreads leaves entirely open the question of whether its claims are true.
Key term: New Atheism — the assertive, public, science-aligned atheism of the early twenty-first century (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett), which treats religion as both intellectually false and socially harmful, and faith as a vice rather than a virtue.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) treated religion as a symptom of distorted social and economic conditions rather than a freestanding truth. In the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843–44) he wrote:
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
The "opium" image is double-edged and often misread: opium is at once a painkiller (genuine consolation for real suffering) and a narcotic (which dulls awareness and prevents action). For Marx religion therefore performs two functions:
Marx expected religion to wither once its cause — class exploitation and alienation — was abolished by revolution; religion was a flower on the chain that should be plucked so that the chain itself could be broken.
Religious responses.
Two further projection theories sharpen the sociological and philosophical challenge.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), whose The Essence of Christianity (1841) deeply influenced both Marx and Freud, argued that theology is really anthropology: human beings take their own finest qualities — love, wisdom, power, goodness — abstract them, magnify them to infinity, and project them onto an imaginary being called God, before bowing down to worship their own alienated essence. "God" is humanity's idealised self-portrait, and the more we attribute to God, the more we impoverish ourselves. Feuerbach's remedy is to reclaim those projected perfections for humanity. The theistic reply, once again, invokes the genetic fallacy (that we might project an idea of God does not show no God exists, and a theist may say we project the idea because we are made in God's image), and notes that Feuerbach simply assumes the atheism he claims to demonstrate.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) offered the classic sociological projection theory. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), studying the totemism of Aboriginal Australian clans, he concluded that, in worshipping the sacred, a society is really worshipping itself: the god is the clan, symbolised in the totem, and religion is the system of beliefs and rites by which a society represents and renews its own collective life. He drew the influential distinction between the sacred (things set apart and forbidden) and the profane (the ordinary), and argued that the real function of ritual is to generate "collective effervescence" and reinforce the shared values — the conscience collective — that hold the group together.
Key term: The sacred and the profane (Durkheim) — the universal religious division of the world into the sacred (set apart, treated with awe and prohibition) and the profane (everyday); for Durkheim the sacred is society representing itself to itself.
Religious responses. Durkheim's functionalism brilliantly explains religion's social role and why it weakens as community bonds dissolve (linking to the secularisation lesson), but it faces serious objections: it generalises from one small-scale society to all religion; it cannot easily account for the great universal faiths that transcend and even criticise particular societies (the Hebrew prophets denouncing their own nation, the Church standing against the state); and, as with Marx and Freud, explaining religion's social function does not show its claims false. William James (whose study of religious experience you meet in the philosophy unit) insisted that the intense, transformative, first-hand experiences of mystics and converts have a depth and authority that cannot be reduced to social bonding. Functionalist explanation and the truth of religion are, once more, distinct questions.
A challenge of a quite different kind questions not whether religious claims are true but whether they are even meaningful. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, whose ideas A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) brought into English in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), advanced the verification principle: a statement is factually meaningful only if it is either a tautology (true by definition, like the truths of logic and mathematics) or empirically verifiable (testable, at least in principle, by sense experience). On this criterion, the sentence "God exists", since it can be neither proved nor disproved by any observation, is not false but meaningless — a pseudo-statement that fails to express any genuine proposition at all. Ayer concluded that theology, like much traditional metaphysics, is literally nonsense, and notably added that this disposes of atheism and agnosticism too, since they are responses to a "claim" that turns out to be empty.
Key term: The verification principle (logical positivism) — the claim that a statement is factually meaningful only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable; on this view "God exists" is neither true nor false but meaningless.
Religious responses. The verification principle was eventually abandoned by most philosophers because it is self-refuting: the principle itself is neither a tautology nor empirically verifiable, so by its own standard it is meaningless. Beyond that internal collapse, religious thinkers developed positive accounts of religious language's meaningfulness — John Hick's "eschatological verification" (the parable of the Celestial City: the claim that God exists will be verified after death, so it is meaningful after all), R.M. Hare's notion of a "blik" (an unfalsifiable but meaning-giving way of seeing the world), and Wittgenstein's "language games" (religious language is meaningful within its own form of life, governed by its own rules, not by those of empirical science). These are studied in detail in the religious-language topic; here the point is that the verification challenge, once apparently devastating, is now widely regarded as having failed — though it leaves a permanent legacy in the demand that believers say what, if anything, their claims rule out.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) mounted a challenge that is neither scientific nor sociological but cultural and existential. His famous declaration, through the madman of The Gay Science (1882), that "God is dead... and we have killed him" is not the claim that a being once literally died, but the diagnosis that belief in the Christian God had become incredible in European culture — that the intellectual and moral foundations of faith had quietly collapsed, even among those who still went to church. Nietzsche's point is double-edged: he welcomed the liberation from what he saw as a life-denying "slave morality", yet he insisted, against complacent secularists, that the "death of God" was a catastrophe of the first magnitude, removing the ground beneath Western morality and meaning and threatening an age of nihilism. His call was for humanity to create new values — the task of the Übermensch — rather than to coast on the borrowed moral capital of a faith it had abandoned.
Religious responses. Nietzsche is, ironically, often cited by religious thinkers, because he agreed with them on a crucial point against liberal secularism: that you cannot simply keep Christian morality (compassion, human equality, the dignity of the weak) once you have discarded its theological foundation. Believers argue this exposes a tension at the heart of secular humanism — it lives on values it can no longer ground — whereas atheists reply that morality can be re-founded on reason, sympathy or human flourishing without God. Either way, Nietzsche reframes the challenge: the deepest threat to faith may be less its falsity than its cultural exhaustion, and the deepest threat to unbelief is finding a substitute for what faith provided.
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