Religious Atheism

Harvard brings worship of Charles Darwin to new heights

By Christopher B. Lacaria

“When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in everything,” G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said. The non-theists at Harvard, in their intense and awkward bouts of evangelical enthusiasm, have again proved the truth of that maxim.

Last February 12 marked the two-hundredth birthday of Charles Darwin, the biologist who formulated the infamous theory of evolution and ignited a powder keg of controversy that has persisted ever since. At the center of many present debates about church and state, between faith and reason—between the residue of Christianity and increasingly militant secularism—lie Darwin and his theory. Indeed he has become the symbolic standard around which not only evolutionary biologists, but also secular humanists have rallied. In a post-Christian world, where faith in the material progress that science promises has replaced traditional religion, Darwin has become a cultic figure.

As such, his birthday was greeted by some on campus with all the tasteless exuberance typically reserved for Christmas. The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy—an official “religious” organization at the college, as its website describes, “dedicated to building, educating, and nurturing a diverse community of Humanist, agnostic, atheist, and non-religious students”—threw Darwin a birthday party. The lavish affair, hosted in the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub, featured free beers, a cake molded in the shape of a tortoise and the H.M.S. Beagle—the famous bark that first took Darwin to the Galapagos—and enough tinsel, banners, and balloons to complete the garish parody of a first-grader’s birthday party. 

The Humanists, however, did not stop at the tacky setting and overwrought festivity. The organizers invited guests to approach the “open mic” to “crack out the toasts and roasts” for “the great D.” In between the toasts and cake, Boston Atheists, a local support group for non-believers—who, their website claims, “are no less (or more) human than anyone else” and thus “still crave the same sense of community”—held a Darwin trivia game. And, to emphasize the random and purposeless results of evolution, affiliates from the Center for Naturalism—i.e., as opposed to “supernaturalism”—distributed dozens of fluorescent pipe-cleaners with which pub patrons were admonished to “make their own monster,” with prizes for the most creative contortion. As no party would be complete without music, “science-themed student rock bands” provided the entertainment. 

Of course, slightly more academic events marked the anniversary as well. Aramont Professor of the History of Science Janet Browne delivered a lecture on how Darwin has come to symbolize scientific “progress”; the biology labs played host to a symposium; and the entirety of Darwin’s Origins of Species was read aloud in an all-day marathon. 

But unlike other commemorations of important intellectual milestones, the tenor of “Darwin Day” veered away from the typical sober and staid and to the cartoonish excesses of a marketing ploy. Most academic convivia convened to discuss the legacy of some influential personage indeed tend to adulatory accounts of the honoree or at least to keep critical comments few and respectful. Yet “Darwin Day,” with its extensive humanist-sponsored program, certainly aspired to something more than academic: an opportunity to promote acceptance of evolution and the apparent atheism that such acceptance implies. 

All religions revere their founders, and often celebrate the crucial events of their life and ministry; and perhaps no one figure symbolizes the life spirit of secular humanism better than Darwin himself. Those who reject traditional religion do not necessarily desire to replace their forsaken creeds with an alternate philosophy. Many, if not most, do so simply to abandon inconvenient moral conventions: certainly the ease of material comforts can keep less restive minds even from thinking of such abstract matters as God and the afterlife. But for many others who pine for that comprehensive view of the whole that tradition religion affords, such unphilosophical nihilism is insufficient. Reflective, and often ironic, atheism—of the type at which the wise ancients like Socrates hinted—does not suit them either: for some “converts,” who consider their development to be an intellectual breakthrough of cosmic significance, feel the need to undertake the cause of public enlightenment. And since atheism today is most often the conclusion of a radical skepticism, the most convenient and appealing repose for the creedless in search of a creed is science.

To the nonreligious and openly atheist at more intellectually serious locales like university, science has achieved the status of a religion of sorts. Science provides the most convincing proofs, thanks to the precision of mathematics and increasingly sophisticated technology. And its affected modesty, in posing questions that only its relatively restricted method can attempt to answer, belies at utmost confidence in the inevitability and desirability of progress. Science’s record of success is likewise astounding—the pace of discovery and innovation continues to increase, and its immense practical fruits are manifest. While traditional religion has suffered a severe decline in prestige, the status of science has concomitantly risen. And in an environment where piety is so vulgarly stereotyped by ignorance and provincialism, science seems the preserve of the highly educated and cosmopolitan.

Religion has come to represent if not a quaint convention, then an arbitrary set of codes and dogma that at best are superfluous and at worst an aid and accessory to prejudice and oppression. Traditional faiths like Christianity, when interpreted too strictly, can justify antiquated attitudes in conflict with the presumptions and prejudices of our multicultural society—everything from homophobia to misogyny and intolerance. Furthermore ancient moral codes, ignorant of contemporary social intercourse, put strict constraints on what individuals may do in pursuit of what they deem most pleasing for themselves. Science, on the other hand, requires innovation and an inquiring mind, in short, freedom—to think, to act, to experiment. In a country where political notions of “freedom” and “liberty” have such historic resonance, not the fact of increasing secularism—but rather, the still widespread persistence of religion—should seem most surprising.

Naturally to high-spirited youth—especially to those of the ambition and self-esteem of Harvard students—freedom exerts great allure. College students can easily be tempted to view the world from the narrow prospect of early adulthood, at the prime of life, with the certainty of death and decline too distant in the future to be of much concern or consequence. Inexperienced in life’s many small hardships and cruelties, they often remain indomitably optimistic in their ability to shape their own destiny, achieve greatness, remake the world anew. The most prominent fact of life, from this vantage point, is freedom: for men of sufficient talent and drive, there are manifold directions to follow and goals to pursue. 

The implicit philosophy of science closely accords with such an outlook, for it likewise abjures teleology and remains agnostic as to the proper end of man as such. By its own admission, science cannot deliberate on questions once thought the most pressing: How should I live? Science deals only with matters that can admit of certainty; and, even if we can admit that one way of life could be wiser or more desirable than another, we can never have scientific certainty on the matter. Once you have decided—for whatever reason, good or ill or even dishonest—on a particular end, science can be supremely helpful in determining the best means conducing thereunto. Science, by understanding the natural processes and implicit laws, can manipulate nature—it can treat diseases as well as spread them, and build skyscrapers as well as nuclear bombs—yet it cannot decide, without recourse outside itself, which if any manipulation is most choiceworthy. 

Perhaps some non-theists recognize the inherent limits of science in providing a holistic and comprehensive view of life, and consequently reject the need or desirability of such a view. To a radical skeptic, that which we cannot determine with a great degree of certainty is not important to know or consider. Those who subscribe to such a view must be few indeed; for the basis of any morality—from traditional Christianity to secular “human rights”—then becomes arbitrary and evaporates. 

Yet secular humanists—at least at the Harvard chaplaincy—aspire to similar nostrums of “social justice” and political morality that many contemporary religious denominations preach. The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy claims to “[defend] the right of each individual student to choose the meaning of his or her life,” yet also supports and promotes charitable causes. Certainly any sentient being can admit, without much doubt, that he would prefer to live than not live, and that we are born with an instinct of self-preservation. But that obvious preference cannot—without some moral framework that can determine what is the best way to live—thus conclude it is better to help the poor or downtrodden than not. Reason does not clearly dictate, from the standpoint of a healthy if not radical skeptic, that just because you prefer to live and live comfortably you owe your help or financial support to ensure that for anyone else. Such a moral stance presumes, in some however vitiated form, a proper end for man—to help his fellow man. 

Such is the case with the Darwin Day celebration’s “special guest”—Sebastian Velez, a tutor in Kirkland House and a graduate student in organismic and evolutionary biology, invited to talk about his work at Children of the Border, the non-governmental organization he founded. This outfit, funded in large part by humanist organizations and philanthropists—including the Norwegian Humanist Association, the American Humanist Association, Jean Schultz, the widow of the Peanuts illustrator, and, incongruously, the Santa Rosa Letter Carrier’s Union—putatively aspires to bring succor to the impoverished, neglected, and marginalized women and children of the borderlands between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Velez’s intentions and goals seem irreproachable, even commendable. The area, so his organization claims, is among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, and for the people there poverty as well as discrimination limits access to much-needed healthcare. But Mr. Velez and the humanist institutions that support his work in Hispaniola care not only to attend to the material afflictions of the people there.

In addition to providing transportation to hospitals and documenting human-rights abuses, Children of the Border “recently . . . allocated funding to help women in the region have control over their own reproductive futures.” The website does not specify, but the organization must either distribute contraception or fund abortions—hardly a public service, unless humanism, contrary to its professed agnosticism to questions of ends, has defined “population control” as a moral imperative. More children may imply less money—but only an ethic that prefers greater wealth to a larger family can find a moral from that fact, and humanism by its own admission cannot privilege one view over the other.

But Children of the Border, and other similar humanist endeavors, have an additional purpose: to undermine religion by better attending to the material needs of its adherents. 

“Religious folk really have a leg up on Humanists when it comes to fundraising for their projects,” the Harvard chaplaincy helpfully explains in a feature article on Children of the Border, but nonetheless Mr. Velez is making due progress against the region’s traditional faith. Rehearsing the stale slanders of a previous generation’s bigots, the article maligned the Catholic Church, which in the area “has two huge buildings,” used only for Mass—at which, they have the audacity to “pass a collections basket, of course”—yet “while children and women die every month just a few meters away.” Of course, an itinerant beetle-collector from Cambridge, Massachusetts, can conclude that these people suffer because of the apathy and cruel neglect of their oppressive and superstitious religion—and to think it his business to cure them of this spiritual disorder.

“Every single day that I’m there, people are more and more receptive to the idea that atheists can do things a lot better than religionists,” Mr. Velez confidently described, “they’re learning that for us, the bottom line is meeting human needs, not obeying sacred texts.” 

Zealots like Mr. Velez have not entirely abandoned the superficial trappings of religion. They bravely claim to have left the facile world of dogmas and doctrines, and to support everyone’s right to “choose the meaning” of his life. Ostensibly charitable operations like Mr. Velez’s NGO therefore ought not limn any greater moral good from their activities. At best, it is only Mr. Velez’s personal choice that helping Haitians contracept is the morally choiceworthy way of life. At worst, it is a cynical and disingenuous attempt to insinuate his religion of irreligion, his godless creed, on a poor and unsuspecting people. If humanists like Mr. Velez truly think what they are doing is moral or right, they are ignorant of the religion they profess—and the nihilism that it explicitly necessitates.

Atheism, in the form epitomized by the Darwin Day enthusiasm, is not so much the absence of faith—as in the case of many thoughtful and reflective non-believers. Rather it is a militant and proselytizing creed, actively opposing and seeking to supplant other faiths. In its zeal for a doctrine without content and a morality without philosophical support, this new atheism is a and contemptible phenomenon.