Issue 11: The Atheism Issue

It’s easier than ever to be an atheist: our stores are filled with how-to guides, essential readings, and philosophical treatises that proclaim the good news of atheism, insisting that science can emphatically answer the riddle of God. And with the gauntlet thrown, theists have swarmed to the debate. Wielding their own swords of science, they declare that there is ample scientific evidence to support God's existence.

In this particular duel of science, many of the arguments for and against God miss their mark. For both the atheist and the science-spawned theist, God is considered a potentially verifiable entity. Atheistic science reasons that such a super being cannot exist because it cannot be counted among or inferred from all other observable beings, and scientific theism gathers data to tilt the verdict toward the divine. The debate becomes a war of attrition as each side seeks to garner the most empirically verifiable facts in order to make God appear (or not appear) in some measurable form.

Other forms of Christianity uphold God as radically transcendent and beyond such reductions, but they may view God as so abstract, distant, and hidden that it no longer matters whether this God is or is not. There are also claims that the God of Christianity is a worthwhile supplement to science because of this God's psychological and sociological use for human survival. But all of these religious responses seem unable to truly engage and challenge the atheist's science on the question of God. Rather they unwittingly accept the terms set within this scientific way of seeing and knowing by already confining the shape of God to a range of observable possibilities or functional values.

We believe that heavily publicized science-religion debates tend to obscure the broader influence and character of modern atheism and how it might be more genuinely and critically engaged. Although currently popular atheists may disguise atheism as the result of scientific thinking, atheistic roots predate modern science—and what is more, famous atheists like Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who potentially offer a more rigorous challenge to Christianity, tend to argue from a larger cultural ethos rather than a specific scientific position.

Therefore, in this issue we seek to pursue greater insight into the question of atheism by moving beyond the walls of this narrow science-religion debate and reintroducing a historical perspective. Our writers explore how modern atheism may be far more than merely an intellectual position within a certain scientific framework, and rather a more pervasive cultural ethos. Moreover, in this issue we search out how this ethos has settled deep within the structures that underwrite and organize the shape of all modern social reality.

Through such explorations we wish to free up space in order to ask more poignant questions with regard to the modern phenomenon of atheism rather than to provide answers before the tribunal of a narrow science. This means considering questions that are no longer confined to measurable facts or the use-value of something like god but that instead seek a more critical and creative consideration of the value of a humanity that has forgotten, in a certain way, God.