In my book The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian I describe the problem of treating spiritual enlightenment as an aberration, an anomaly, a curiosity, a beautiful dream, an altered state of consciousness. It is almost inevitable that consensus reality is given ontological precedence over any other deviations from it, no matter how compelling. The peer pressure is enormous. Even the day after my mystical Satori experience of absolute certainty and penetrating insight into the unified, nondual nature of reality, I had to consciously fight this tendency of the mind to betray itself in favour of the status quo. The more I remembered it as an extraordinary experience, the easier it was for my mind to file it away under the “non-ordinary” category of experiences and simply revert back to the ordinary world, with the slightest sleight of hand eliding the “ordinary” with the “real” world.

But one of the most shocking and revolutionary aspects of my mystical experience was that it was more real than anything I had ever experienced in my life. It was definitely more real than the “ordinary world”. I could say with absolute confidence, “though the rest of the world be on that side, on this side am I”. Even if it was billions to one, I knew that I was right about the true nature of the world. Tant pis for the other billions.

Over the years and decades since that parting of the veil, it has been difficult to maintain the force of that original conviction, although I still know it to be true. I have had to seek corroberation in the writings of mystics throughout the ages, who have had similar experiences and shared the same conviction that the ordinary way we experience the world is not right. When it comes to nondual experiences, you can’t beat the Mahayana Buddhists and Advaita Vedantists. But the writer who, to my mind, writes most eloquently about this is the seventeenth century Anglican poet and mystic Thomas Thraherne:

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.”

Yesterday I re-read C.S. Lewis’ preface to The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth by Douglas Harding. He begins with these momentous words: “This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy.” The philosophy that Harding is attempting to reverse is basically the philosophy of scientific materialism, which ultimately ends up in a nihilistic view of the world, the end point of a “process that has led us from the living universe where man meets the gods to the final void where almost-nobody discovers his mistakes about almost-nothing”.

Later that evening I had a conversation with my cousin in which I attempted to describe how the direct experience of our immediate surroundings radically change when we look at them through the lens of Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti. It is a shift in awareness analogous to Harding’s “headlessness”, where you stop inferring a “meatball head” with its “peep holes” on your shoulders mediating the world and instead experience the world directly, as thought the world was your head. It is a short-cut to a Berkeleian vision of phenomenological immaterialism. And it works. But it can easily be dismissed as little more than a fun thought experiment, as just another “altered state”.

But Berkeley was serious. Harding was serious. And – goddammit! – I’m serious. My cousin looked at me as if he thought I might be mad. In any case, we were meant to be talking about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, not weird mental tricks of perception. But I believe that precisely this, our most intimate, immediate and direct perception of reality, reveals the deep roots of the spiritual dis-ease and proliferating mental health crises of the modern world. Call it “the meaning crisis” or “the disenchantment of the world” or “cosmic pessimism” or what you will: the scientific worldview we have inherited from the Enlightenment philosophers is making people unhappy and unfulfilled because it is stopping them from enjoying the world aright.

When I read and write about the interminable debates between atheists and theists, it sometimes seems as though it were ultimately a case of temperament or personal preference. I am often tempted to throw up my hands in despair and say, “whatever!” Does it really matter? Some people believe in God and some people don’t. Get over it! But the issue goes far deeper than the abstract, theoretical argument you might find in a school debating club. It’s about the kind of world we live in. Either it is a divine world full of magic, purpose and meaning, or it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I know it is the former, but it seems that our society is so punch drunk on the latter, that it’s people like me that are considered the mad ones.

Ultimately, all the questions about materialism and spirituality boil down to one: is the world full of spirit, full of “the glory of God” or is it an intricate, interlocking system of mechanical forces devoid of anything beyond its own ceaseless and ultimately meaningless activity? Materialists will never tire of telling me that my spiritual visions and experiences of divine being, consciousness and bliss are illusions. They suppose that I may be suffering from some kind of poetic condition, but who’s to say they aren’t suffering from an un-poetic one? They think I am labouring under the illusion of a God-filled universe and I think they are suffering from the illusion of a Godless one. Stalemate.

There is, in the final analysis, no way of adjudicating between our conflicting worldviews, which are, after all, subjective. However, the sober materialist criticism of a religious person “filled with the holy spirit” on the grounds that they are clearly deluded seems to me as absurd as a miserable person pitying a cheerful person because misery tells them that there is no such thing as happiness.

Although atheism is dead (at least to me!) there are still plenty of atheists out there, and there probably always will be. One of my favourite atheists is the philosopher John Gray, who has written a smart little book called Seven Types of Atheism. There are undoubtedly more than seven. As with any complex phenomenon, you can always find ways to slice the pie as thinly as you like. In this post I will cut it into three big slices: muggle atheism, muppet atheism and mystical atheism.

My mate Paul is a muggle atheist. He doesn’t believe in God because God isn’t on his radar. He isn’t particularly interested in religion or spiritual matters. He’s more into music and football. You could say he’s “apatheist” (an apathetic atheist). Richard Dawkins is a muppet atheist. He doesn’t believe in God because he thinks God is a pernicious delusion. God is very much on his radar, but only as a piece of malicious malware, a “bad meme”. He is not apathetic about the question of God, but is actively opposed to it. He is really an “anti-theist”.

If you find the terms “muggle” and “muppet” confusing and/or insulting, you are probably unfamiliar with how I use these (admittedly childish) terms. They stand for two different states of consciousness represented in the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life, in the top left and top right segments of the diagram respectively. Muggles live in the “human realm”, getting on with their everyday lives, working, playing and making cups of tea. Muppets live in the “titan realm”, which is the realm of fighting spirits, whose life purpose is to fight against the “gods” in the Devaloka (the “deva realm”). They are always anti-something and have a fervent (even if unacknowledged) desire to destroy that thing. This fanatical drive usually leads to “ideological possession”, which is what makes them act like muppets.

So the second type of atheist, “miltant atheists” if you will, represented by celebrity atheists such as Dawkins, Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, are motivated by a “rage against God”, a hatred of God and religion (“miso-theism”), although they can temper this hatred with a patronising tolerance of the ignorant masses who clearly can’t live without these comforting God-blanket illusions. Not everyone is blessed with “Brightness” (intellectual arrogance is also a feature of muppetry).

The third type of atheists are “mystical atheists”, represented for example by John Gray and the philosopher of mind Susan Blackmore. Gray has just written a book about cats and the meaning of life. He seems to be drawn to the Zen nature of cats, which we might all benefit from emulating. Blackmore (best known for her book The Meme Machine), is in fact a Zen practitioner and meditates regularly. She does not consider herself a Buddhist, since she refuses to follow any religious dogma, but rather follows a “secular spirituality”. Sam Harris is another example of a convinced and outspoken atheist who nevertheless values spiritual practices such as meditation (and psychedelics as it happens).

This type of atheism has a natural affinity to Zen. It is radically skeptical of all our mental fabrications and confections. It regards the usual workings of the human mind as ultimately illusory, and intuits that if we could banish this mental fog of beliefs, assumptions and projections, we would wake up to the immediacy of the real world. This is why Harris wrote a book called Waking Up and has a podcast of the same name. Mystical atheists take the materialist claim that only the material world is real very seriously. If that is true, then the only authentic way to exist in the real world is to somehow see through everything that is not material, in other words, to see through everything mental. Blackmore goes one step further in believing that not only thoughts and emotions, but consciousness itself, is an illusion. She is an eliminativist materialist, like Daniel Dennett.

On the face of it, this is very Zen. It makes logical sense. It has a certain pristine purity and simplicity about it. I call it mystical atheism because it shares with religious mysticism the apophatic “negative way” of dismissing all objects of awareness as mere illusion. In Vedanta this practice is summarised neatly as neti, neti: “not this, not that”. I like this description from H.H. Shantanand Saraswati:

“If you begin to be what you are, you will realise everything, but to begin to be what you are, you must come out of what you are not. You are not those thoughts which are turning, turning in your mind; you are not those changing feelings; you are not the different decisions you make and the different wills you have; you are not that separate ego. Well then, what are you? You will find when you have come out of what you are not, that the ripple on the water is whispering to you ‘I am That’, the birds in the trees are singing to you ‘I am That’, the moon and the stars are shining beacons to you ‘I am That’. You are in everything in the world and everything in the world is reflected in you, and at the same time you are That – everything.”

This is the essence of mysticism: ‘I am That’. It is a sense of unity, even of identity, with the whole world in a seamless vision of nonduality. There is no more self and other, no more ego pitted against world, no more limiting thoughts and feelings breaking the pristine experience of pure beingness. This is what Zennists call Satori or enlightenment. Mystical atheists aspire to this condition of spiritual unity and simplicity. The difference is that they conceptualise this as a liberation from the illusion of the mind and an entry into the real world of exclusively material processes. Enlightenment for them is conceived as “waking up” experientially not just theoretically, to the truth that only the material world is ultimately real.

This may seem like a very ascetic, puritan attitude, because it is. You can’t really get more ascetic, except that this particular brand of asceticism is in a sense a mirror image of the traditional religious asceticism which denies the material world in favour of the spiritual. In atheistic asceticism, you deny the spiritual world in favour of the material. Both types of asceticism can lead to an experience of nonduality. Both are effective. However, they both also have obvious drawbacks. Although Susan Blackmore describes herself as a humanist, this type of “illusionist” asceticism is in fact anti-humanist, because it denies those very things (inner subjective experiences, thoughts and feelings) that make us human.

Mystical atheism has the virtue of offering a powerfully simple vision of reality that can facilitate mystical experiences of inner quiet and emptiness (mu-shin or no-mind), leading potentially to unitive experiences of Satori. The problem is, what do you do when your thoughts, feelings, decisions, wills and ego inevitably come back again? They will have to be banished over and over again. Like a persistent toddler tugging at your sleeve in the supermarket, they will be an incessant nuisance, a thorn in the side of your peaceful samadhi. All mentation, all thoughts and feelings, are nothing but annoying crowds of makyo, nothing but illusions. The hope is that one day, they will give up and you will be free of them forever in perfect enlightenment, but for some reason, they just keep on coming.

There is therefore an element of self-hatred built into mystical atheism, as there is in all forms of asceticism. There is also an ideological barrier stiffly erected against the possibility of further spiritual development. How so? Compare my rough-and-ready model of psycho-spiritual development indirectly derived from the Tibetan Wheel of Life. It consists of six archetypes: Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. And these archetypes are associated with six transcendent values: peace, love, goodness, beauty, truth, consciousness. The idea is that when you have come out of what you are not (through some version of neti, neti), you inhabit a place of peacefulness and embody the Mystic archetype. But this is just the beginning, not the end, of the process.

Bodily sensations (Shaman), will (Warrior), feelings (Monk), thoughts (Philosopher) and consciousness (King) inevitably arise out of the peaceful emptiness of the Mystical state, but they are considered to be real, not illusory. They are welcomed back, purified and refined in the crucible of meditation, and not simply dismissed as the latest manifestations of yet more insufferable makyo. The point of spiritual practice in this view is not about destroying our inner lives, or rejecting them as illusory. Rather, it is about transforming them.

The fundamental difference then between my brand of (traditional) mysticism and atheistic mysticism is that, while atheists like Blackmore are necessarily illusionists about mental experiences (in her case even about consciousness itself), I am a realist. In other words, I believe that our mental experiences are real and are directed towards real things. I am a moral realist, for example. I don’t think that morality is just a subjective elaboration of personal dispositions and preferences or a social construct or the product of a long process of evolution ultimately in the service of survival. I believe that there is such a thing as real goodness and its contrary, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I am similarly a realist about love, beauty, truth and consciousness. But since we can only ever move closer to the horizon of these transcendent ideals, and never seem to possess them completely, there is always wiggle-room, room for improvement, room for growth.

Our physical sensations, wills, feelings, thoughts and consciousness are not just illusory figments of our imagination. They are as real as the ripple of the water or the singing of the birds. But they can become polluted and corrupted, twisted and disfigured in all sorts of ways. So suspending their spontaneous activity temporarily in meditation (either sober or with the aid of psychedelics) is essential if we want to “cleanse the doors of perception” and purify our human-all-too-human faculties. How? By reconnecting them to their source in the bottomless mystery of the divine fountainhead of being, consciousness and bliss some people call God.

In case you hadn’t already guessed from the title, this is a provocative post. Which is not to say I don’t think the statement is true. I’m just aware that it will offend some sensitive atheists, especially those who were under the impression that, as Nietzsche’s madman insisted in the late nineteenth century, “God is dead!”

Nietzsche still has his share of loyal fans, as do Marx, Freud and Darwin. These four are probably the most famous modern critics of religion, towering figures in the intellectual atheist pantheon of God’s undertakers. They are not alone, of course. Read God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization by A.N. Wilson, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister MCGrath and Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray if you want to get a sense of how pervasive atheism has been in the intellectual life of Modernity.

At the high watermark of atheism in the West, around the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that the arguments against religion of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud were practically unassailable. As Nietzsche had it, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”. But the anti-religious ideas of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche (outside their fan base) are now largely discredited. And the classical Darwinian account of evolution as random mutation plus natural selection is now under serious strain. It just doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.

I recently re-read Thomas Nagel’s elegant little book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. It probably won’t convince committed materialists, but it does clearly illustrate how rickety the whole great scientific materialist cathedral really is. It seems to be still standing only by virtue of the dogged determination of its adherents to keep the faith and to ignore the writing on the wall pasted there by the demolition men.

It reminds me of the story of the Chinese Executioner (originally told by Claud Cockburn):

“There was once, in old China, an executioner of such immense skill and delicacy that he was famed throughout the land and called upon from afar to behead condemned miscreants so that witnesses could marvel at his handiwork.

One condemned man, a thief and murderer , was told that he must wait for the arrival of this executioner, because the local authorities had decided they wanted to see this master at work. The appointed day came, the criminal was seated , bound, on a stool in front of a carefully-invited audience, all agog.

The executioner, smiling gently, advanced towards him, delicately holding an exquisitely-crafted and softly gleaming sword. Playfully, the executioner made a few passes in the air in front of the murderer. He kept up this performance for perhaps two minutes until the malefactor, irritated, cried out ‘I really don’t know what all the fuss is about. What’s so special about you? Can’t you just get on with it, and get it over with?’

The executioner bowed, smiled again and said softly ‘ Kindly nod, please’.”

This is the state of atheism in 2021. It is dead but doesn’t know it. Scientific materialism cannot account for the existence of the universe, life, consciousness, reason or value. Reductive materialism is absurd, emergent materialism is pure magic and eliminative materialism is insane. There are no more legs to stand on. But the scientific consensus continues to be materialist, because the alternative is too appalling to contemplate: it shakes the very foundations of the atheist creed. As Richard Lewontin put it:

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Two of the more extravagant and costly claims materialists have been forced into, simply to keep their worldview logically and probabilistically credible, are the existence of infinite universes and the illusoriness of all conscious experiences. Anything to keep out the Divine Foot. The logical contortions are beginning to strain the credulity of even those sympathetic to the atheist cause, and the die-hards are becoming ever fewer and ever shriller in their desperation to keep control. Which explains the slide into the dogmatic fundamentalism of the New Atheists.

The New Atheists cast derision and scorn in all directions at anyone who dares deviate from the materialist creed that, as Richard Dawkins famously wrote, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” But the New Atheist swagger and bluster is a bluff. They have neither the arguments nor the evidence to back up the cosmic pessimism of their ultimately nihilistic materialist metaphysics. They are running on the anti-religious fumes of Enlightenment secular humanism and on the continued good will of their supporters to go along with their “Darwin of the gaps”.

Atheism of dead. It is only a matter of time before the head actually nods off.

Proposition 1: Science applied to humanity is pseudo science.

Examples: Phrenology, social Darwinism, eugenics, evolutionary psychology, Utilitarianism, behaviourism, logical positivism, biological determinism, genetic reductionism, scientific materialism, eliminativism, transhumanism.

Proposition 2: Socio-Political theories claiming scientific legitimacy are pseudo-scientific theories.

Examples: Secular humanism, fascism, Nazism, Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Neo-Liberalism.

Proposition 3: Cultural theories claiming scientific legitimacy are pseudo-scientific theories.

Examples: Postmodernism, Critical Theories (Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, etc.)

Proposition 4: Modernity is characterised by the colonisation of the humanities and liberal arts by pseudo-scientific theories.

Proposition 5: The great works of the human imagination in philosophy, art and literature are being progressively marginalised in academia and in the wider culture, and the self-knowledge and wisdom they represent is being progressively jettisoned in favour of pseudo-scientific theories.

Proposition 6: This development is welcomed by techno-utopians who envisage a future human society run according to purely scientific and technological principles.

Proposition 7: This pseudo-scientific vision of hyper-Modernity is the epitome of a “Babyon system” of totalitarian social control of deracinated individuals.

Proposition 8: A plausible (though speculative) hypothesis is that we are experiencing a collective drift towards left hemisphere dominance of the brain, which accounts for the desire for objective systems and control and dissociation from subjective, lived experience.

Proposition 9: Psychedelics are a powerful way to disrupt this process, although they too are vulnerable to colonisation and control by both science and pseudo-science.

Proposition 10: The responsible use of psychedelics in the context of the liberal arts and religion represent our best chance of reversing the tide of dehumanisation sweeping across the human world.

Theosis, or deification, is the mysterious process whereby human beings become God, or at least participate as fully as is humanly possible in His divine nature. In the Christian tradition, this is made possible by the incarnation: “God became man that we might be gods”.

So how do we become God? First, we must empty ourselves of our ego. This is called kenosis, or “self-emptying” in Christian mysticism. Easier said than done of course, but with practice it becomes second nature. You must abandon all memories, thoughts and feeling in a “cloud of forgetting” and enter a “cloud of unknowing”. A Zen Buddhist will know what I mean. It is a state of mu-shin, or no-mind.

This state is one of stillness and quiet. However, it is not a complete nothingness, since nature abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later, something will enter your field of awareness, whether that be a sensation, a thought or a feeling. The difference is that it will manifest itself with a certain pristine purity, with a mysterious force of truth and beauty, a revelation or epiphany out of the infinite blue. This is called gnosis, which is a direct apprehension of pure truth.

What do we do with this gift from beyond? Whether an intellectual insight or a physical rush of energy, where do we put it? We all receive these transcendental gifts all the time, though we rarely notice or value them enough to prevent them from evaporating as fast as they materialise. Easy come, easy go. However, in the attentive state of kenosis and gnosis, we can consciously absorb and integrate it so that it doesn’t just disappear. We do this be adjusting our existing Umwelt, or worldview, to accommodate the new piece of information, either mentally or somatically. In other words we learn something.

This process of integration and synthesis is called pistis, usually translated as “faith”. We don’t perfectly model reality, but rather approximate it as far as possible by continuously refining our understanding. This proceeds along with a deepening faith that we are moving ever closer to the truth of Being itself. However, this is not a purely abstract or theoretical matter. It’s not just a map of the territory. It involves countless cycles of kenosis, gnosis and pistis, of “purification”, “perception” and “dalliance”, and transforms us little by little and piece by piece, as though we were alchemically changing the constitution of a lump of lead one atom at a time into gold.

Faith is the substance of what we are. It is the accumulated substance of our ultimate deification. When atheists asks for proof for the existence of God, what they don’t understand is that faith is itself the proof. As we grow in faith to the point where pistis, kenosis and gnosis are one act of pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss, we find that we no longer need signs or wonders outside ourselves as evidence for God, because we ourselves are gods, or better said, children of God, partakers of the divine fullness of reality in all its wonder and glory.

For more on this process and its possible basis in neuroscience, see chapter 5 of the second part of my book, The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian, The Hermeneutics of Faith.

I was fortunate enough to have a relatively good education. As a child I was naturally inquisitive and a voracious reader. English was always my favourite subject at school and I ended up studying English Lit at Cambridge. After university, I enrolled in a philosophy course with The School of Economic Science, an extraordinary organisation committed primarily to the synthesis of the wisdom of East and West. It has roots in the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and his followers (the Fourth Way) and the Advaita Vedanta teachings of the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math. It is also very active in promoting music and the arts, holding a yearly festival at Waterperry House near Oxford called Art in Action. Although many different traditions are represented in the SES, they clearly have a penchant for the Renaissance, a central philosophical voice being that of Marcilio Ficino, the star of the Florentine Renaissance.

I stayed for several years, and learned a great deal, including their meditation practice (TM) and the value of the “second night duty” practice of service (usually in the kitchen). As someone once commented in passing, this was the closest you could get to the monastic life without retreating from the world. It was promoted as “the householder’s way”, after all. (I did actually also train in a Zen monastery in Northumberland, and even toyed with the idea of becoming a postulant, although I finally decided against it, so SES seemed a good compromise).

What I am interested in exploring here is the issue of education. At Cambridge there were modules focusing on particular historical periods. I had to study the Greek Tragedians, Medieval, Renaissance, Augustan, Romantic and Modern literature in poems, plays, essays and novels. Some of this was fairly familiar, some of it completely new to me. It opened whole words of thought and imagination, which I continued to explore after I left, partly in the context of the SES (I remember a particularly inspiring weekend course on Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra for example).

It is notoriously difficult to avoid the assumption that other people share the same assumptions we do. After a few weeks at a Zen monastery, it takes a while to adjust to “normal life”. The first stop at a motorway service station coming down from Northumberland is always a shock. I have to make a conscious effort not to gassho (bow) in gratitude. On their part, people seem thoughtless, ungrateful and strangely coarse and vulgar, as well as being mainly overweight and unhealthy looking.

There is an obvious elitism and snobbishness here. This is a charge often levelled at the SES, which is seen as some as irredeemably middle class. It goes without saying that Cambridge also suffers from (and enjoys) a reputation for elitism. The danger is that people withdraw into an ivory tower of “good company” and lose touch with “ordinary people”. This can happen if you live in a castle in Ireland, teach Classics at Oxbridge, or get involved in a hierarchical spiritual organisation like SES. There is inevitably the establishment of an in-group and an out-group, with the out-group being by definition uninitiated, unenlightened, ignorant and deluded. This is a problem.

While I was studying at Cambridge, there was a strong resistance to this in-built educational elitism, both within the English department and other subjects, especially SPS (Social and Political Science). There was excitement around new radical, cool approaches such as Post Colonialism, Deconstruction, Feminism and Queer Theory. In other words, there was Postmodernism. We read and attended lectures on Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. We were the “cool kids”, possibly the most snobbish out of everyone, looking down on all the “normies” (especially the public school rowers) who bought into all the Cambridge BS. We were so snobbish, even Cambridge itself seemed beneath us. We were the avante gard. We were the future.

People who have immersed themselves in the strange world of Postmodernism often display amazement when they come across people who have no idea what they are talking about. So it becomes incumbent on them to educate people. The same is true of those Socialist Workers immersed up to their eyeballs in Marxism, or of fanatical Freudians, Evangelical Christians or Militant Atheists. Each has special knowledge that puts them above the ignorant, unreflective and unthinking masses. This is a problem.

The funny thing about all this, which I soon realised, was that the more I looked into Postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler etc. or into Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or any of the other great Modern and Postmodern intellectual giants, the less I was reading the great works of literature I was supposed to be reading. It takes a lot of time and effort to read all that stuff. However, there was a lot of pressure to switch from the traditional canon to this exciting new postmodern lingua franca which seemed to draw a deep line in the sand between the old and the new. If you wanted to be on the right side of history, if you wanted to be progressive and modern, you had to join the club and read the scriptures.

I half joined. Although my best friends were completely sold on it, with all the swagger, intellectual brio and moral righteousness of it all, I reserved a love of literature and quiet beauty and wisdom. My original love was the poetry of Keats. I loved Shakespeare. I was moved by Beethoven and Wagner. Although I was challenged and excited by some of the Postmodern ideas, I knew there was something wrong. It also seemed strange that someone from a working class background who made it to Cambridge against the odds would be diverted away from studying the great works of Dante and Milton in favour of the interminable ramblings of barely hinged postmodern thinkers. Wasn’t their rightful place in great tradition of the studia humanitatis, the liberal arts, being stolen from them? Where they perhaps the victims of an elaborate con?

Are we all the victims of a con? The great con of Modernity? What if it turns out that all the heat and smoke, all the self-promotion, all the touted brilliance and revolutionary genius of Modernity and Postmodernity is a lie? Perhaps a century or two from now people will look back at the late twentieth and early twenty first century as a cultural and intellectual dark age. A whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I often forget that not everybody I meet has read Shakespeare and the Bible. I sometimes even assume that they have read or at least heard of Ficino. But not everybody has studied English Literature at university and not everybody has attended courses at the School of Philosophy. But how strange it is that a knowledge of our own rich cultural and spiritual tradition is reserved only for a few specialised elites! Shouldn’t it be our common heritage, regardless of class or background? Shouldn’t we be reading the great literary classics of the past for our edification and enjoyment as a matter of course, as the Victorians did?

Postmodernism has persuaded us that the past is anathema. Too much prejudice. Scientism has persuaded us that art, religion and culture are at best comforting illusions and at worst pernicious pre-modern cancers. The future is science and technology. Everything else is just bread and circuses, and should be treated as such by all self-respecting members of the intelligensia. These two strands of our modern landscape, Modernist and Postmodern, admittedly hate each other, but where they both agree is in their progressive obsession with the future and their almost obsessive compulsive desire to be rid of the moral and intellectual filth of the past. They both dream of wiping the slate clean, just as the great totalitarian regimes of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler did.

In my estimation, this Brave New World of relentless Modernity is a Babylon system. Whether in the form of mindless consumerism and entertainment or narcissistic self-righteousness, we are subjected to a permanent propaganda campaign, in order to keep us persuaded that, to borrow from the famous Coca Cola slogan, “Modernity is it!” No it isn’t. As both Samuel Beckett and Damon Albarn saw only too clearly, “modern life is rubbish”.

The only way out of the nightmare of Modernity is to stop thinking of ourselves as modern. The only way out is authentic humanist education, which is about the human condition in all times and places, not about more and more Modern and Postmodern self-congratulatory propaganda. Modernity has created several generations of uneducated and mis-educated people who as a consequence can be manipulated as easily as little Subbuteo figures. Who can stand up against the might of Modernist ideologies without any appeal to the authority of the Bible, or Plato, or Emerson, because they’ve never read them? The con is that we are taught that the best way to think for ourselves is to avoid the influence of the great minds of the past. This is precisely why we cannot think for ourselves, and why we cede our thinking to politically-correct, cultural and technocratic experts.

Modernity is Babylon. It’s high time we wake up and smell the coffee and educate ourselves.

“The [Babylonian] exile began with the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and its Temple and the ending of the Davidic monarchy in 586 BC. Following a failed rebellion by the kingdom of Judah against the Babylonian Empire, Nebuchadnezzar besieged the city of Jerusalem, and deported most of its inhabitants over the period 597-581 to Babylon. […] They would remain in exile until the fall of Babylon to Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BC.”

Alister McGrath, The Great Mystery

In the Christian tradition, Babylon has come to symbolise exile in an alien land where we don’t belong. We are “strangers in a strange land”. It also carries the suggestion of a corrupt world, a socio-political system of oppression and injustice. This is a central concept for Rastafarianism, for example. Some Jamaican immigrants to Britain after the Second World War felt this sense of exile keenly, and developed a negative view of their host country, which they experienced as a demonic web of petty, complicated bureaucracy and arbitrary laws, a “Babylon System”. This then became associated in the popular counter-cultural imagination with the capitalist system, represented primarily by the most powerful capitalist country in the world, the United States.

In the original meaning given it by Medieval Christians, however, Babylon represented exile from our true spiritual home. There was a sense that, even safe in their own country and in their own homes, Christians don’t really belong in this world. We are like pilgrims on Earth, temporary travellers en route to another, better world. This “other world” was variously called The New Jerusalem, The Promised Land, Zion, Paradise, Eden or The Kingdom of God. The longing for this true home, the deep spiritual home-sickness that it engendered was personal evidence that we really were in exile. As St Paul wrote, “here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14) And as C.S. Lewis famously put it in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”.

In my thinking about our place in the world over the past few years, I have made extensive use of the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life, which seems to me such a powerful depiction of the different ways in which we become spiritually lost. It consists of six realms, which can be understood as six different ego states: the Heavenly Realm (Devaloka), the Hell Realm (Narakaloka), and four other realms, the Human, Titan, Hungry Ghost and the Animal Realms. We might say that during our brief sojourn on Earth, we find ourselves exiled in any one of these realms, populated respectively by Divas, Demons, Muggles, Muppets, Addicts and Victims. As a whole, the Tibetan Wheel of Life might be characterised as The Wheel of Babylon.

Things can seem hopeless, even bleak, as we survey the world around us with a critical eye. Babylon is strong. Sometimes it feels so strong that there seems to be no way out, as if it were the very fabric of existence, the creation of a malevolent demiurge perhaps, forming an underlying matrix from which it is impossible to escape. But as in the film The Matrix, could there be a red pill that can pull us out of the Wheel of Babylon?

When I think of mainstream Western culture and its formative ideas and influences, I cannot help agreeing with Iain McGilchrist’s pessimistic diagnosis in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Everything seems to point to the increasing disenchantment, mechanisation and dehumanisation you would expect from chronic left hemisphere dominance. The totalitarianisms of the twentienth century, the wars and genocides, the shallow consumerism of late capitalism, the Utopian myths of progress, the mass hypnosis of the media, the existential meaninglessness of materialism, all point to the tightening of the grip of Babylon on people’s hearts and minds.

But there is cause for hope. Starting in the the fourteenth century in Italy, the European Renaissance uncovered the treasures of the antiquity, which had lain almost completely forgotten for centuries. The humanities were born, invigorating Western culture through a rich education in the arts, rhetoric and philosophy. Plato and Aristotle, Pindar, Homer, Cicero, and a whole pantheon of classical authors were studied and used as a springboard for new insights into life and the human condition. Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino and others spearheaded the great cultural and spiritual movement that came to be known as Renaissance Humanism. The word “humanism” is derived from the Latin phrase studia humanitatis, which basically means “humane studies” or “liberal arts”. It actually had nothing to do with “secular humanism”, an invention of the twentieth century, which defines itself in opposition to religion. The original humanists had a much broader and more liberal view of humanity, including religion and spirituality as central components of the human experience. The Renaissance humanists were almost exclusively Christians.

There is a lot of talk and excitement recently about a Psychedelic Renaissance, a rediscovery of the beneficial therapeutic and transformative effects of these miraculous compounds, which for decades have been demonised and criminalised as part of a wider war on drugs. The original pioneers, Albert Hofmann, Alexander Shulgin, Aldous Huxley, were actually initiating the rediscovery of a much more ancient tradition of the spiritual use of psychedelics (or entheogens) in the West, reaching right back to the Eleusinian Mysteries and earlier, in Egypt for example, as well as the shamanic traditions of Siberia, Africa and the Americas.

Since the end of the nineteenth century and picking up speed in the 1960’s, there has also been an enormous rise in interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and other Eastern religions in the West. This has fed into developments in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, the Human Potential Movement and the New Age. Although under the surface of mainstream culture, and in some senses associated with the counter-culture, this blossoming of Eastern wisdom and practices such as meditation, yoga and martial arts, can itself be considered a significant renaissance of its own. We might call it the Eastern Renaissance.

Since the end of the eighteenth century and reaching its apotheosis in the middle of the nineteenth, there has also been another renaissance, associated with poetic sensibility and a deep human connection with the natural world, known as Romanticism. An associated trend was a renewed appreciation of Medieval chivalric culture, which represented for certain romantics a more authentic mode of being than the limited view of humanity peddled by the Enlightenment architects of the Age of Reason.

Babylon can appear all-powerful. It seems to almost completely control public discourse, and to strictly determine what we can and can’t say, think and do. But beneath the implacable surface of the “Babylon System”, there is the vital, spiritual dynamite of a germinating Spiritual Renaissance, at the same time Christian, Humanist, Romantic, Eastern and Psychedelic, which holds out the promise that we may yet chant down Babylon and enter the Kingdom of God.

There are muggle stories and there are muppet stories. Muggle stories are the ones we constantly tell ourselves about our lives. They tend to be rather mundane and parochial and although of great interest to us, are usually boring for other people, much like our dreams. These are the stories we pay psychotherapists to listen to and that our nearest and dearest have to constantly put up with. They are our personal soap operas.

Muppet stories go beyond our personal dramas in an attempt to make sense of the world. They are metanarratives which impose a single interpretive frame on the world, giving us a sense of reliable meaning and control. Ultimately, they are all examples of reductionism, reducing all complexity to one simple master narrative or theory of everything. They are totalising, veering towards totalitarian, dogmatic, ideological, fundamentalist, often characterised by passionate zealotry and activism. Current examples are militant atheism, rationalism, reified postmodernism, Marxism, fascism and religious fundamentalism. These examples derive their metanarratives from science (scientific materialism/ neo-Darwinism), philosophy (analytical philosophy and critical theory), politics and religion.

In the upper half of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, there are muggles (the human realm), muppets (the titan realm) and divas (the deva realm). So what about the diva/ devas? What about the stories of the gods? Well, the motto of the diva is; “neither a muggle nor a muppet be”. They see the limitations of our little, personal stories and their reflections in popular culture. They see the limitations of our fundamentalist stories and the way they inevitable embroil us in culture wars. They understand that we are meaning-seeking animals and story-telling creatures and that the best way to approach our lives and the world around us is through a rich tapestry of stories, not through the narrow lens of our own personal story (our “life script” as Eric Berne would say) or a single totalising grand narrative. Instead, they have multiple maps of meaning. They read old books, go to art galleries, theatres and concert halls, even occasionally to church. They are well educated, erudite, witty, sophisticated, cultured, refined. They resist simplistic and reductive visions of reality. They know how stories work. However, they cannot avoid being somewhat elitist and even snobbish, which is what gives them their veneer of diva-ness.

Matthew Arnold, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, Iris Murdoch, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson, Pinkola Estes, Alister McGrath, to name a few, are some of the more insightful and well-known advocates of the “storied life”. They divide their time and effort between reaping the imaginative benefits of a deep and serious engagement with culture, with “the best that has been thought and said”, and criticising the short-comings of muggle and muppet story-telling (which is when they get pulled into culture wars – remember that the titans and the gods on the Wheel of Life are perpetually at war).

Christianity is interesting in this regard, because it is such a central story, if not the central story, of Western culture and consciousness. Some of the writers I listed above, such as Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers and Northrop Frye, saw Christianity as a kind of meta story or Ur text, a great archetypal blueprint, “the greatest story ever told” to which all other stories must ultimately refer. Frye called it “the great code”. Whether the story is literally true is besides the point. It appeals to the deep-seated mythos of human consciousness, which goes far deeper than logos. (Karen Armstrong makes this crucial distinction between mythos and logos in her seminal book, The Case for God). However, it is not really good enough to be a thorough-going mythicist when it comes to the Christian story, since the whole thing turns on the coincidence of myth and history, of archetype and person, of the ideal and the actual, the Word made flesh and God made man.

The deep appreciation of the nature of art, myth and story and of how they interpenetrate the real world, is the essence of the deva realm. In the Christian context, this is best characterised as “Renaissance Humanism”, “Christian Humanism” or in its more recent incarnation, “Romantic Christianity”. Representatives of this imaginative religiosity are the English Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the German Romantics, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Wagner. This type of creative, mythical, poetic sensibility gave rise in the twentieth century to works of imaginative fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia Chronicles. The fact that they appeal to children is not accidental (think of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience), since children have not yet had their innate mythos beaten out of them by the James Mills and Mr Gradgrinds of rationalist modernity.

So there we have it: there are muggle stories, muppet stories and diva stories. There is muggle Christianity, muppet Christianity and diva Christianity. However, true spiritual freedom is to be found beyond the Wheel altogether, where all our stories are transcended in a cloud of forgetting and a cloud of unknowing.

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 18: 20-21

“Observation” is what we do when our senses are turned outwards to the world. The world itself is, as Berkeley and Kant pointed out a couple of centuries ago, a phenomenal, mind-dependent world. In Schopenhauer’s terminology, it is a “representation” or “idea”:

§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good
for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring
it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does
this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes
clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an
earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth;
that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e.,
only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is
himself.

Therefore the world we experience is not the “real world” as it is in itself (the noumenon), but a subjective representation of it mediated by our mind and senses. We can discover many interesting and useful things by a dedicated and applied observation of the phenomenal world. This is what scientists do. But we will never see ultimate reality, or God, except in an indirect, oblique way, “through a glass darkly”. The essential nature of existence cannot be found through the use of our external senses or through the exercise of our rational minds, no matter how perceptive or clever we are. Neither will we say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, all I can ever know is the world as my idea.

This is why it is written in the Katha-Upanishad:

God made sense turn outward, man therefore looks outward, not into himself. Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.

The kingdom of God is within you. Return to the source of your outward senses and your outward mind and you will find your self, or rather, your Self. This is not the psychological ego, but the Atman, or in Western parlance, the soul, a centre of pure consciousness and will. In Kashmir Shaivism, this personal consciousness is called Shiva. Return to the source of mind and you will find Atman; return to the source of Atman and you will find Paramatman. Return to the source of the phenomenal world and you will find Shiva; return to the source of Shiva and you will find Parashiva. Paramatman and Parashiva refer to universal Self or universal Consciousness, in other words, to God.

But what is the point of returning to the source? The answer reveals itself in the return back again to the world of the senses and the mind. The mind and the senses are regenerated and refreshed, and the world appears renewed, as if it were the first day of creation, as if the whole universe were born again. Everything appears suffused with new life, with the immanent spirit of Shakti. It almost feels as if you were experiencing reality itself, instead of your projected idea of reality, as if it were presented to you directly, rather than re-presented.

“Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding” wrote Lao Tzu in chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching. We might say, Parashiva within Shiva, the gateway to all Shakti; or in a Western idiom, God within Soul, the gateway to Eternal Life. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“The new atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part. Seeing religion as a system of beliefs, they have attacked it as if it was no more than an obsolete scientific theory. Hence the ‘God debate’ – a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory – a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy of Positivism.”

John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

I recently found myself embroiled in this tedious debate on that great sinkhole of tedious debate, Twitter. The only thing that kept me going was a perverse fascination with the perverse human capacity for willful incomprehension. Added to this was the faintly surreal phenomenon of people brandishing their ignorance as if it were a virtue. Indeed the stupider they were, the cleverer they seemed to appear in their own eyes. This curious oddity can probably be put down to a kind of arrogant superiority complex: the belief that what is self-evidently nonsense (in this case, belief in the existence of God) deserves nothing but casual, dismissive ridicule and disdain with an absolute minimum of real argument (one doesn’t want to appear to be taking such nonsense seriously does one?) Richard Dawkins was explicit about this, when challenged on his casual dismissal of theology: “it is like someone saying they don’t believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven’t studied fairy-ology”.

There is a distinction to be made here between two different types of atheist. The first is your common-or-garden atheist who doesn’t believe in God because their circle of friends and family don’t, or because they’ve never really given it much thought, or because they just don’t. They don’t believe, but they’re not bothered either way. This kind of default atheism has been wittily labelled “apatheism”. Apatheists don’t believe in God simply because they don’t find God interesting or in any way relevant to their everyday lives. This is part of the explanation for the deep-set ignorance of modern atheism. Terry Eagleton expresses some surprise at this cavalier ignorance, again in relation to Dawkins: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

But Dawkins is probably less ignorant than most, and has at least had some contact with religious ideas. He is not so much an “apatheist”, indifferent to the whole question, but an “anti-theist”, expending an enormous amount of time and energy (and indeed making a lot of money) attacking religion. He seems to honestly believe that humanity is being held back from its great rational and scientifically enlightened destiny only by the anachronistic shackles of superstitious religion. This belief is itself an article of faith of course, perhaps the foundational faith of this science-based creed: only when the last vestiges of religion are destroyed and buried deep underground will humanity be freed from the curse of its phantom God.

It’s not all that surprising then that casual observers have noted the evangelical and even cultish nature of much of the New Atheism. A fervent hatred of God (miso-theism) and antipathy to religion (anti-theism) gives people a sense of purpose and mission which may be lacking in their otherwise apatheistic lives, spurring them on to an odd kind of nonchalant activism, always trying their best to disguise their raw God-hatred behind a patina of enlightened indifference. (Peter Hitchens makes an interesting connection in this regard between the political (Trotskyism) and “the rage against God” he observed in his brother, Christopher).

In my somewhat idiosyncratic psycho-spiritual system based on the Tibetan Wheel of Life, I describe six different ego states, the three higher states represented by the Muggle, Muppet and Diva archetypes. When it comes to atheism, we can helpfully distinguish between apatheist muggles, who have no experience or understanding of spiritual matters, and are not really interested in it at all, and anti-theist muppets, who are ideologically committed to a scientistic worldview (science can explain everything) and feel that religion is not only wrong, but perniciously wrong, and are interested in it only in a negative sense, just enough to pull it down. The third type, the pantheist divas, can be spiritually proficient and knowledgeable about metaphysics and theology, but because they generally either underplay or fail to recognise the transcendent aspect of God, holding instead to a purely immanent, naturalistic view of reality, tend to fall prey to spiritual narcissism, secretly (or not so secretly) considering themselves to be the pinnacle of creation in an ecstasy of New Age enlightenment.

Clearly the best fit for my Twitter antagonists is the “anti-theist muppet” category. The persistent refrain, which continues unabated, no matter my response, is “there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God”. It matters not a jot that I completely agree with them. They continue to demand proof, repeating their demand like an incantation, or like someone with a severe case of Tourettes syndrome. There is no clearer expression of the inability to see beyond the great unwashed and unwarranted assumption of scientific materialism or “scientism” than this incessant demand for scientific proof, namely, that science is the only valid source of knowledge.

Of course I can’t scientifically prove that God exists, but equally, they can’t prove that He doesn’t. Or to put it another way (to avoid the predictable retort that they can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist either), they can’t prove that the universe is self-created and self-sustaining. Believing in a Godless world has metaphysical implications which also need to be rationally defended. If the only way a naturalist conception of existence can work is to posit infinite universes and the magical emergence of something out of nothing (the universe out of a quantum void (but where did the quantum void come from if it’s not pure nothingness?), organic life out of inanimate matter and consciousness out of mindless physical processes), prove THAT if you please before badgering me about proving God.

The corollary of this demand for evidence is the demand for proof “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Applying this strict level of proof, appropriate in the context of clinical trials, and somewhat less stringently, to a court of law, when applied to the question of the existence or non-existence of God is obviously inappropriate, unreasonable and unrealistic. This is not the type of inquiry that could possibly pass such a high bar, either for or against. Which leads us to the question of “the burden of proof”. The constant, tedious, demand that theists “prove it”, is an aggressive move that automatically puts them in the dock. But if, as Mircea Eliade argued, we are best described as homo religiosus, and have always believed in God in one form or another, is the burden of proof not equally, if not more, on the atheist?

Belief in God is about faith, not proof. If we could prove it rationally and empirically, there would be no point in religion, which is about communion with God through faith. We don’t need (and can’t have) certain knowledge, or proof beyond reasonable doubt. In order to be able to believe at all, we don’t need 100% certainty, or even 90% certainty. All we need is more that 50%, in other words, a conviction that God is more likely to exist than not. We’re in the realm of plausibility here, not certainty, and should avoid that “irritable reaching after fact and reason” characteristic of incorrigible skeptics. The arguments in favour of theism (cosmological, ontological, etc.) are far stronger than the atheist arguments and counter-arguments, which seem to rely to an almost farcical degree on misunderstanding and caricature, and in my estimation, almost all the theist arguments remain unanswered, whereas almost all the atheist arguments have been successfully dealt with. Conversely, if atheists can’t honestly be more than 50% certain that purely natural, physical processes can explain everything about the universe, including how and why it exists at all, then they have no basis for faith in their materialist metaphysics.

If, however, our rational mind can be persuaded that materialist neo-Darwinism is “almost certainly false” (Nagel) or that “there is almost certainly a God” (Ward), then our intuitive mind can get on with the business of the actual, direct, spiritual experience of God. We need the green light of rational assent from our left hemisphere in order to take the leap of faith with our right hemisphere. The mystery is why some people need only a 50/50 possibility, whereas others need so much more. As the adage has it, “for those who refuse to believe, no proof is possible; but for those who believe, no proof is necessary”. Or consider the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16: 19-31 and the haunting words of Abraham to the rich man in hell, who begs him to send Lazarus down from heaven to warn his brothers to behave themselves: “And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead”.

Further reading: The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong; The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart; Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel; The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and it’s Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski; The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens; Can Science Explain Everything? by John Lennox; The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning by Jonathan Sacks; The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister McGrath; Why There Almost Certainly is a God by Keith Ward; Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray; The Waning of Materialism by Robert Koons; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett; God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by Victor Stenger.