John Gray: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we look at physics circa 2023, is a true atheism really viable? If I see the leading contenders as string theory, many worlds quantum mechanics, to many observers, they appear at least as absurd as actual theology, which has a kind of simplicity. “Well, God created the world.” Hasn’t atheism become more theological than theology itself? No, not the kind of atheism I hold. But what you say, Tyler, is, of course, very true of many traditions of atheist thinking, perhaps even the dominant ones, because the dominant traditions of atheist thinking in Europe and America and elsewhere — remember, atheism in this sense is something that comes from within theism, from within monotheism — reproduce the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs. A lot of atheism is categories taken from theism but then turned upside down. So, what you say is true of that, but my atheists I’m influenced by would include writers like Schopenhauer, who was an atheist and a pessimist, of course. And the key kind of atheism I attack in my new book — but I’ve been attacking for 20 or 30 years — is the one which attributes to the human species some of the characteristics that used to be attributed to the deity, to God. That’s to say they think that the human history is a narrative with some kind of built-in structure. Doesn’t necessarily produce inevitable results, but there is a providential move from ignorance to knowledge which has consistently greater benefits over time. That seems to be a secularization of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history. For me, there’s no providence of any kind in history. There’s no logic in history, although particular situations may have a logic of their own. But the logic, of course, may not be benign. It may be, to use your word, absurd. That’s to say, we may find human beings recurrently trapped in situations in which what they do is bound to produce results different from, or even opposite from, the ones they want. I think that is a recurring human situation. There’s no logic like Hegel thought or Marx thought or even Mill thought, taking that idea from Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism. There’s no logic in which history develops through a series of successive stages to some higher and higher levels. There’s nothing like that. My atheism and the atheism of Schopenhauer or Samuel Beckett, or a number of other writers I could cite, isn’t the same as the theological atheism to which you refer, which, as I say, that’s been around for an awful long time. It’s not just recent. Of course, you are right in another sense, which is that the highest, I would say the highest point of recent science, recent physics, might be a recognition that the world is finally unintelligible or absurd. But that, of course, is a view that an atheist like Samuel Beckett or Schopenhauer and I would endorse, too. There is a convergence in that sense, but it’s an anti-theological convergence, not a theological convergence. Aren’t you then a kind of gnostic of a sort, where the random forces of history or the evil demiurge — the true nature of creation — is forever hidden from us? You don’t call it God, but the actual moral structure of your beliefs is theological nonetheless.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.