Leaving Humanity Behind: The Evolutionary Divinity of New Atheism

What would it mean to view New Atheism (or atheism generally) as a kind of divine-humanism? What does divine-humanism even mean? Before answering these questions, I need to provide analysis on the nature of purpose, potential, and evolution. I need to contextualize the surrounding implications about the role that language will play in providing the New Atheism a divinized home within religion, and Mormonism in particular. I will need to carefully frame how the New Atheistic assumption of “being human” existentially supports the general image of theosis, and, more particularly, the Mormon version of theosis. What is immediately at stake is a desire for what Hitchens calls a “renewed enlightenment,” interpreted here as an endeavor that does not mistake religious language for the truth but rather sees religious language as pointing to the truth (283). What it will mean “to be human” under this new paradigm will be contrary to whatever authority has narratively determined for us so far, thus making the option to choose who we are to be, who we are to become, an action laden with existential significance.

To begin, it first should be understood that some New Atheists have found a penchant for purging “purpose” from all living things. They believe that an adept understanding of physics and Darwinian evolution actually unhinges all purposes, goals, ends, or meaning from having any real, objective significance in the lives of human beings. In Alex Rosenberg’s 2012 publication of “The Atheist’s Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions,” he argues that human beings are “natural-born conspiracy theorists” in the sense that they are meaning-making machines who cannot help but see motives and patterns everywhere in nature (13). Religious people, he says, are especially good at this, and love to make a midrashic sport out of forcing natural events to fit their supernatural narratives. “We are not really psychologically satisfied by an explanation unless it’s a good story. The drive to force events into the mold of a story with a plot is a hangover from our evolutionary past” (14).

Rosenberg, of course, hints at the ruinous effects that Charles Darwin’s theories have had on religion since his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. With his theory of natural selection, Darwin built a formidable case against our traditional religious narratives by breaking down the elegance found in nature as being not a product of divine design, but of small, cumulative changes over millions of years that eventually led to the development of our species. This cumulative growth is evolution, the guiding force that provides us an explanation to the overwhelmingly complex universe we find ourselves in.

Darwin certainly did not take organic complexity for granted. He was not satisfied with using divine design as a trump card. Such would only leave another complex entity, namely “God,” left unexplained and irreducibly complex. Hence, when religions invoke agentive purpose on the universe as a favorable explanation for its elegant workings, they take for granted the very thing that atheists like Darwin (along with all other atheists) have tried to understand and simplify into gradual, step-by-step beginnings. Religious people absolve themselves, in other words, from the wisdom of “how-things-work,” or how our universe and species was environmentally engineered.

Victor Stenger has argued extensively on this point, stating when gaps in the scientific record are erroneously attributed to “God” such explanations “provide no more information and [are] less economical than a simple statement: “Nature did it”” (185). Many New Atheists agree with Stenger. According to Lawrence Krauss, the divine is nothing but a trump card: “Surely, invoking “God” to avoid difficult questions of “how” is merely intellectually lazy. ….It is an argument by fiat that goes nowhere and yields nothing useful about the physical laws governing the universe, other than perhaps providing consolation for the believer” (xxv, 122). God-of-the-gaps theories will often masquerade as knowledge, lulling those who rely upon them to keep from digging deeper. The New Atheism is merely warning us not to avoid the hard work of asking, seeking, and knocking after further light and knowledge for ourselves.

The religious custom of giving divine purpose to inexplicable, mysterious events finds its roots in teleology (from the Greek telos, meaning “end”, “purpose”, or “goal” that seeks to achieve an outcome). Teleological explanations are of the kind we’ve been discussing. It is when we attribute to nature an inherent purpose that works to fulfill an aim, and then, when no purpose can be learned, assign those purposes to the heavens. Rosenberg illustrates the concept as follows: “No explanation of heat in Newton’s laws? God must have added heat in separately. Why do electric fields produce magnetic fields and vice versa? God’s clever design. Gravity is so mysterious, the way it moves through total vacuums at infinite speed and penetrates any barrier at all. How come? God made it that way to keep us from floating away from the ground” (40).

Teleological explanations have had a long track record of being seemingly debunked. At first blush, they disguise the intricate workings of the universe with a veiled, mythic-religious language. Later, when enough time passes, when knowledge is acquired, they are scientifically unveiled as “purely physical processes” (42). Again, this summons the notion that cosmic items in question never change, but rather linguistically and conceptually “move — in our minds — across the line from supernatural to natural.” This paradigm shift occurs every time we grow in knowledge, too. Its benefits allow for human explanatory precision to increase, new narratives to unfold, while tired religious metaphors become arguably no longer necessary.

There are other challenges with teleological explanations. While nature seems replete with obvious marks of purpose and immaculate design, Darwin’s theory of natural selection demonstrates how nature works by passive necessity, without foresight. “Unconscious selection,” Darwin called it, is the blind filtering processes involved in the variation of traits in organisms that, over millions of years, create the illusion of design but “have absolutely no foresight about what variants will be useful to their bearers in the future” (55). Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s foremost interpreter, elaborates further: “Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution” (72). It is we humans, in other words, who ascribe vision, purpose, and subjective value upon an otherwise unconscious, automatic process; the same process that supposedly spawned us.

What makes Darwinian evolution so elegantly, seamlessly brilliant is also what makes its implications so dramatically staggering: How could passively unintelligent processes give rise to highly sophisticated intelligent beings? This is not a question that merely invites us to break down the statistical improbability of our current situation. Nor is it merely to ask how dumb matter could become smart over exhaustive amounts of time based especially on “blind forces” within environmental constraints. These are questions from ignorance, though their implications are nevertheless titillating. We might perhaps ask ourselves which narrative is more likely:

That we are the culmination of accidental, unconscious chemical reactions who have grown to consciously fathom this fact about ourselves? (Krutch 210–11). Or, that there dwells within us an independent, existing principle of intelligence that can neither be created nor destroyed, susceptible to small, successive improvements over time?

Both origin narratives selectively espouse Darwinian evolution but with one local exception. The former narrative (what we will call the “accidental theory”) reveals the limits of Darwinian evolution and will forever be caught in an infinite regress trying to explain our origins from still smaller, simpler components. Then, from those “basement level” components discovered, such a theory will have to regressively explain how the “first faithfully self-replicating cells” magically popped into existence (Krauss 147). The latter narrative (what we will call the “eternal theory”) avoids the reductio ad absurdum sequence of regression but posits something equally mind-blowing: Intelligence has no beginning or end. Intelligence has always existed. Intelligence is Darwin’s irreducibly “complex organ,” though still responsive to “successive, slight modifications” and improvements over time (232).

Whichever narrative we choose to believe in, notwithstanding other absurd options, one thing remains clear: The fact that we humans have become intelligent enough to be aware of these narratives presupposes the option for how we will choose to arrange the evidence learned into meaningful patterns that make most sense to us. And doing so cannot exclude purpose either way if sensible discourse is to be shared. There can be no obligatory ban on how we might teleologically explain away teleological explanations. Purposive language can neither be avoided nor expunged from any description we might give about the universe, even if we are the product of absurdly mindless processes (to borrow a humorous phrase from Harris: “I don’t know what [the last part of] that sentence actually means — and I don’t think anyone else does either”) 56.

Furthermore, attributing purpose in nature does not have to necessarily foreclose deeper investigation into the workings of the cosmos. As long as we do not abandon the search for understanding with final trump cards, whether religious or secular, we can still strive to make sense of a universe operated by blind necessity and apparent meaninglessness. Actually, the telling sign that we humans can still create meaning in the absence of anything fixed is nothing short of an existential revelation about ourselves, a reflection of “what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire” (Givens 5). Our itch to make meaning, in other words, is an incalculable part of our evolving selves.

Finding ourselves then in an evolving universe that, as Darwin stated, “tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country,” we are now presumably in a better position to ponder a series of profound secular questions teeming with theological significance, asked once by the renowned astrophysicist-agnostic Carl Sagan (256).

“If there is a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans? Why should there be an open-ended gap in the spectrum of beings? And isn’t it a little surprising that the gap would begin with us?” (103).

Given the limitations of our current wisdom, we probably are not in a perfect position to fully comprehend the “continuum” of our situation, if indeed we humans are meant to evolve beyond our mortal ken. And yet, as Tolstoy earnestly reflected, “why should I suppose it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther?”

Although many New Atheists hold gnostically strong to the view that humanity is nothing more than a temporary event, a fleeting race of beings without evidence to escape cosmic oblivion, their worldview should still be assessed as a continuation of the Enlightenment, even if we don’t agree with their conclusions. They point us to the reality that we are, indeed, Darwin’s evolving creatures. We are the “consequence of gradual, cumulative, step-by-step transformations” that led from humble cells to marvelously soul-sired bodies (Dawkins 22). The New Atheists tell us that we are growing up, becoming what Harris calls “the final judges” (226). “We are the governors of our own destinies,” reminds Stenger (244). The New Atheists believe that humans are capable of reason and compassion. They believe we are intelligent beings who can thoughtfully probe the universe. Examine its corners. Throw off superstition. And genuinely care about values, well-being, and moral flourishing.

To understand New Atheism in these terms is to understand how the ancient religious notion of theosis (also “divinity”) can be reborn, remythologized into a new secularized context. Because theosis minimally implies a transformative process brought about by small, cumulative changes in human understanding, as well as human living, the nature of this new secularized context, of course, will depend on how we define “divinity.” While the term may be given a variety of heavy-handed religious connotations, some more prematurely understood than others, it is being used here as a secular vanguard to tone down the amount of mystery surrounding its use. Simply put:

Divinity is, for better lack of a metaphor, intelligent nature waking up.

Divinity implies intelligent human beings as a work-in-progress, moving towards greater and greater understanding even as their future portends the seeds of glorious potentials. Divinity is an ongoing process that involves our evolving, transforming selves who, according to The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA), may very well one day “so radically exceed contemporary capacities that the term “human” may no longer adequately describe [us]” (27). Astrophysicist Joel Primack also construes divinity as a present-future unraveling of human nature that is “nothing less than the process of opening our personal lines of contact with the unknown potential of the universe” (277, italics added).

Biblically, this future has been taught in narrative form. Ancient testaments root human potential in the radically enhanced promise of 2Peter 1:4, wherein mankind becomes a “partaker of the divine nature.” Religious terms have anciently referred to such future beings as “angels,” “seraphim,” “gods,” and “demigods.” Secular terms have also been recently coined to describe our future state, most notably “transhumans,” “posthumans,” or “neohumans.”

With fair warning, the spirit of obscurantism will most likely present the biggest challenge for how counter-cultures might engage these terms in constructive, meaningful discourse. Human knowledge keeps growing, making it difficult to predict what new intimations and interpretations will emerge in the future. Or how the more “spiritual” aspects of our lives will “move — in our minds — across the line from supernatural to natural,” thereby making our existence something even more divinely human. One thing seems reasonable however. While descriptions of our future ontology will differ and accommodate many perspectives, we can use religious or secular language to describe the same kinds of concepts, dreams and aspirations shared across varying aesthetic boundaries. As the MTA explains: “What has been expressed in poetic ancient language by untechnical prophets in yesteryear often has a stunning visionary component that can be explained well in technical terms” (1).

Consider now some paradoxes that follow these ideas.

It is a paradox that the New Atheism could be considered “divine” to the extent that its vocabulary can help ground esoteric teachings and prophecies into newly redefined, rearticulated, lucid ways of imagining the future. Yet New Atheism can also be considered “divine” to the extent that it avoids the “assimilative embrace” of its surrounding religious culture that too often exults in mystery without evidence or understanding (Mauss 8). In other words, divinity in one case involves the reformulation of our language, myths and liturgies to intimately make sense of, and bring to pass, ancient, arcane dreams. In another case, divinity requires the boundary maintenance of our language to abandon religious concepts that leave us in the dark, or doctrines that inspire in us our worst instincts.

The New Atheists, from both poles, can be considered divine. Mormon doctrine actually anticipates and countenances this assumption (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Mormonism recognizes the wisdom found in New Atheism — and by extension, the scientific enterprise — as part of a metamorphic transition for becoming even more divine, more awake.

Notwithstanding its critics, the pattern of oscillation between these two poles is certainly a struggling compromise. It is the kind of tension found best in the culture wars that separate theists from atheists. Secular liberals from religious conservatives. Iron sharpening iron. These two poles — belief and disbelief — represent the yin and yang of our cultural diversity, each bearing seed of its needed reciprocal. They are the quasi-contraries that Timothy Leary says describes the role of science to “produce the ever-changing, improving answers to the haunting questions that religious wonder poses” (13). This is not an insult against religion; it is a handmaiden perspective on the narrative power of religion and its future fulfillment in humanity.

Such fulfillment culminates into the following hypothesis:

If religion continues to be construed as nothing more than mere “genuflection to the supernatural,” then religion indeed will continue to die (Cannon, Purpose of the Mormon Transhumanist Association). Its death will also symbolize the rise of a newer aesthetic grown mature, one controlled by our own secular hands, but will not overlook the function of what religion has meant to communicate to us about human potential. In fact, only a religion that could stress the “magnificence of the universe [and of ourselves] as revealed by modern science” would survive within the new aesthetic (Sagan 52). Whether such a religion will emerge, or has already emerged, still awaits vindication. Sagan seemed hopeful, however, believing that “sooner or later such a religion will emerge” (52).

If, to the contrary, in some distant future religion does become extinct, the New Atheism will have marshaled its goal and profoundly secularized the world as we know it. There would be no more need for faith in supernatural gods. Only faith in Ourselves to take control of our own evolution and engineer our own moral projection of post-humanity. In doing so, the New Atheism will have unconsciously goaded simultaneously (and ironically) those older magical discourses on theosis to gradually reawaken, resurrect, take on new ecumenical meaning. It would be those same discourses that modernity, believing itself to have surpassed, once figured as dark, irrational and superstitious (Rutsky 18). This is why David Hart Bentley has provocatively asked, “Might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become posthuman?” (215). Strangely, if we were to unravel our present mysteries of “self,” “universe” and “theosis” long enough (like Darwin once said, “Let this process go on for millions on millions of years”) we would arguably arrive at what can best be described as a monumental humor:

The New Atheism, driven by its passion for clarity and simplicity, bent completely on obliterating religion from the face of the earth, will have ironically helped humans articulate — and by extension, arguably become — what religions (especially Latter-day Saints) have pointed to since the beginning.