There is an old story of two atheists in Northern Ireland who expressed relief that they had risen above the religious rivalry of their contemporaries. Then one defined himself as a “Protestant atheist” and the other as a “Catholic atheist” and they split apart. The serious point here is that there are many forms of atheism and their meaning depends on what God or gods are being rejected. The first Christians were called atheists because they refused to worship the state deities. John Gray is scathing about the intellectual pretensions of the “new atheists” with their “smears and fulminations” but sees in them a fault line that has run right through most forms of atheism since the 18th century. This is that in reacting against the creator-God of the Jewish and Christian traditions they have at the same time taken over many of their assumptions.

One is the idea of automatic progress. For a monotheist, there is a telos, an ultimate purpose in human history, even if it lies beyond time. Without this faith in God, however, history is going nowhere. Yet most recent forms of atheism have substituted faith in humanity for faith in God and assumed that with the aid of science life will get better. So for Gray most of these forms of atheism are a form of repressed religion. There is no such entity as humanity, only the endless variety of human beings with their different trajectories and what we term civilisation is as likely to collapse as be improved on; there is certainly no prospect of a utopian political order, an idea that again owes everything to religion.

Gray also points out that there is no automatic connection between atheism and liberal values. History shows that atheism is just as likely to be connected to fiercely repressive regimes as liberal ones. Furthermore, the “Enlightenment values” so often appealed to were, even in the greatest Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Hume and Voltaire, likely to be tainted with racism and antisemitism.

Gray argues, rightly, that the real challenge to Christian faith comes not from science but history. In short, can the large claims that the Church makes about Jesus have any basis in historical fact? Gray thinks not and simply repeats a view fashionable in the 19th century that it was St Paul and Augustine who invented Christianity. Unfortunately he does not make any real attempt to understand why the first Christians came to see Jesus the way they did and why, in their terms, this seemed justified.

One of the types of atheist Gray considers he labels “God-haters”. These include here not only the Marquis de Sade but Dostoevsky and William Empson, whom Gray much admires, and whose best-known book Seven Types of Ambiguity is reflected in his own title. However, while Dostoevsky was conflicted about his faith, Gray seriously underplays the strong Christian element both in his life and major characters and Ivan Karamazov is best seen not as a God-hater but as a moral rejectionist. Ivan tells some horrific stories of children suffering and says to his brother Alyosha: “It’s not God I don’t believe in. It’s just that I return him my ticket.”

Ivan further argues that even if everything comes right in heaven, with the victim and torturer being reconciled, it would not justify such suffering en route. This, in my view, is the strongest of all arguments against belief in a loving God, but the implication of it is that it would have been better for God not to have created the world in the first place and this raises the further question of whether, in WH Auden’s words, we are able to “bless what there is for being”. It is a pity that Gray does not engage more seriously with this argument.

Gray suggests that “an atheist is anyone with no use for the idea of a divine mind that has fashioned the world”. It’s a curious sentence. I have no use for the fashion industry or a spacecraft but I recognise they exist. I have a great deal of use for the idea of a wise and loving mind behind the universe, but recognise that the argument against such a mind, such as that of Ivan Karamazov, is formidable.

The argument against the first five forms of atheism discussed in this book will be familiar to readers of Gray’s excoriating reviews and the greatest interest for some will lie in his discussion of the two final forms. One is entitled “Atheism without progress”, that is, without any assumption that human beings can be changed for the better. It contains an interesting discussion of Conrad, for whom life was a tragic accident and consciousness a curse, not a blessing. The only way to live is to eschew the big questions, accept the impersonality of fate as symbolised by the ocean and, like the good seaman that Conrad once was, abide by the tested code of conduct of his shipmates. The final chapter, “The atheism of silence”, contains a surprise. It includes a discussion of a nearly forgotten author of a four-volume history of atheism, Fritz Mauthner, who argued for what he called “a godless mysticism”. Gray argues that there is in the end an affinity between the mystical element in Christianity, which stresses that God is beyond words and incomprehensible, and this form of atheism. “A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity and the difference between the two may be less than you think.” Here, Gray expresses some sympathy with the eastern form of Christianity, with its emphasis on the incomprehensibility of God, beyond all words. At the same time, he seems less aware of the western equivalent with its via negativa and he has a strange statement about Thomas Aquinas, seeming to imply he was unique in suggesting that God does not exist in the same sense that we do.

This is a highly readable, fascinating book that jerks the debate on religion versus atheism right out of its crusted rut into the light of serious intellectual scrutiny.

Richard Harries is a former bishop of Oxford and his latest book is The Beauty and the Horror: Searching for God in a Suffering World (SPCK)

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