There has been a rash of books in recent years by thinkers for whom the human race is getting nicer and nicer. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley and Sam Harris are rational humanists who believe in progress, however many famines and genocides may disfigure the planet. We are en route to a vastly improved future. Perhaps this return to the values of the western Enlightenment is not unrelated to the threat of radical Islam. The philosopher John Gray’s role has been to act as a Jeremiah among these Pollyannas, insisting that we are every bit as nasty as we ever were. If there is anything he detests, it is schemes of visionary transformation. He is a card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance, and for whom history has been little more than the sound of hacking and gouging. One might note that Christianity is as pessimistic as Gray but a lot more hopeful as well.

The answer to the question of whether history has been improving is surely a decisive yes and no. For Marx, the modern age was both an enthralling emancipation and one long nightmare. The wide-eyed optimism of Pinker or Ridley is just as one-sided as the prophets of doom who refuse to concede that there is something to be said for such modern inventions as feminism, spin-dryers and antibiotics. The truth is that everyone believes in progress, but only a dwindling band of Victorian relics such as Dawkins believe in Progress. So this book is really hammering at an open door. How many champions of a vastly improved future are there in a postmodern culture?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Locke’s liberalism is repressed religion, according to Gray. Photograph: Alamy

Gray also believes that humanists are in bad faith. Most of them are atheists, but all they have done is substitute humanity for God. They thus remain in thrall to the very religious faith they reject. In fact, most supposedly secular thought in Gray’s view is repressed religion, from the liberalism of John Locke to the millenarian visions of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. The popular belief that atheism and religion are opposites is, in his view, a mistake. Gray also takes a swipe at the kind of atheism that sees religion as a primitive stab at understanding the universe, one that science will later replace. Gray, to his credit, sees that religions are not theories of the world but forms of life. They are less systems of belief than acts of faith. Fanatical God-haters such as the Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky and the literary critic William Empson are also sent packing as no more than inverted believers. (God, Empson wrote with an agreeable flourish, “is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man”.) What remains is the kind of atheism that renounces God while having a low estimate of humanity. Since you could probably find this in most Oxbridge senior common rooms, it is hardly the most mind-shaking of conclusions.

Unlike the rational humanists, Gray takes a dim view of reason. Yet although reason does not go all the way down in human affairs, without it we perish. He is right that there can be no perfect society, but wrong to imagine that things could not feasibly be a good deal better than they are. He relishes the folly of humankind while discreetly skating over its stupendous virtues. He also dwells on the racism of the 18th-century Enlightenment while remaining silent about its passion for freedom and justice. He seems not to recognise that his own gloomy outlook reflects less some universal truth than the dark times in which we live. One of his heroes is the 19th-century thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, perhaps the most morose philosopher who ever lived, for whom human life is driven by an insatiable, voracious Will, the world is an illusion and the whole of human history a blood-soaked battleground. Gray would rather embrace meaninglessness than the absolute truths of the political utopianists. The only question is why he should posit such an absurdly polarised choice in the first place.

Gray belongs to a group of thinkers who turn to transcendence without content, epitomised by Hollywood spirituality

Gray belongs to that group of contemporary thinkers, of whom George Steiner is the doyen, who disdain the secular but can’t quite drag themselves to the church or synagogue. They turn, instead, to a kind of transcendence without content, of which there is no finer example than what one might call Hollywood spirituality. Those celebrities who dabble in Kabbalah or Scientology do so as a refuge from a material world crammed with too many chauffeurs, masseurs, bank accounts and swimming pools. The spiritual for them is the opposite of the material, a mistake that Gray also makes in his less luxury-laden way. This is not the view of Judaeo-Christianity. When Jesus speaks of salvation in terms of feeding the hungry and visiting the sick, he speaks as a devout Jew, for whom the spiritual is in the first place a matter of how one behaves towards others. Those who seek some otherworldly comfort in religion are apparently deaf to Jesus’s warning to his followers that if they were true to his word they would meet with the same fate as himself.

Another aspect of Judaism is its iconoclasm. You are forbidden to make images of God, because the only image of God is human flesh and blood. But since the Jewish God is the God of the future, you are equally prohibited from making graven images of what is still to come. Besides, if you can represent the future here and now, then it can’t be the future. Gray, with his aversion to utopian blueprints, would surely agree. What he might be slower to concede is that the only image of the future is the failure of the present. The task of the Old Testament prophet is to remind his people that unless they change their ways here and now, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich and providing for the widows and the orphans, there won’t be any future worth having. Marx, a secular Jew who urged his wife to read the Hebrew scriptures, was true to this ban on visions of the future. In fact, his work is notorious for how little it has to say about the nature of communism. For a writer who began his career in fierce contention with utopian thought, this is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising that the viscerally anti-Marxist Gray doesn’t see fit to mention it.

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Seven Types of Atheism is an impressively erudite work, ranging from the Gnostics to Joseph Conrad, St Augustine to Bertrand Russell. In the end, it settles for a brand of atheism that finds enough mystery in the material world itself without needing to supplement it with a higher one. Yet this, too, is just as much a throwback to the Victorian age as Dawkins’s evangelical campaign against religious evangelism. Authors such as George Eliot, reeling from the death of God, took solace in the unfathomable intricacies of the universe. Gray condemns secular humanism as the continuation of religion by other means, but his own faith in some vague, inexplicable enigma beyond the material is open to exactly the same charge.

• Terry Eagleton’s Radical Sacrifice is published by Yale. Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray (Allen Lane, £17.99). To order a copy for £15.29, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.