Table Of ContentProgressive
Atheism
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Progressive
Atheism
How Moral Evolution Changes
the God Debate
J. L. Schellenberg
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First published in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © J. L. Schellenberg, 2019
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Contents
Preface viii
1 Getting Oriented 1
2 An (A)Theological Dead End 17
3 Naturalism’s Shortcut 35
4 Unexplored Territory: Moral Evolution 59
5 Updating God 77
6 A Relationally Responsive God 97
7 A Kinder God 109
8 A Nonviolent God 123
9 Challenging the New Theism 137
10 Atheism’s Brave New World 155
Notes 177
Glossary 183
Acknowledgments 185
Index 186
Preface
People think of me as an atheist. I think of me as an atheist. That’s
because I’ve defended the view that there is no personal God
of the sort idealized in theistic religion. But I’m an atheist only in
the relatively narrow sense just specified—the sort of atheist more
commonly found in philosophy than elsewhere. In much of my
work, I’ve been moving on from the personal God idea and exploring
new religious domains, including new ways of being religious that
are compatible with atheism. Indeed, this is the larger part of what
I’ve done. Occasionally, however, I return to atheistic reasoning. I’m
returning to it again in this book. I return, in part, because people
won’t join me in thinking about other religious topics if they’re
still preoccupied with theism. And in part it’s because exciting new
results—like the approach to atheism we’ll be exploring—keep
emerging in that neighborhood.
* * *
It was 2011, and a copy of Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels
of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined landed with a thud at
my door. Reading it, I was struck by Pinker’s evidence that human
empathy has grown over the years. What we see here, he suggests,
is a form of moral progress opposed to violence. I remembered how
I had appealed to divine empathy in my version of the philosophical
Prefa ce ix
problem of evil a few years before, and began wondering whether this
sort of emphasis in the context of the God debate might get more of
a grip on us today because of moral progress like that emphasized
by Pinker. Was human moral progress making us think differently
about the nature of God—in particular about how a truly good God
would behave—and was this opening up new possibilities of atheistic
argumentation?
It occurred to me that the hiddenness argument for atheism I had
developed and defended, which was receiving a surprising amount of
attention in philosophy, also fit this pattern. The hiddenness argument
suggests that a common way of being undecided about the God issue
itself decides the issue. Many more of us would believe in God if there
were a God, since God would be supremely loving and thus open to
personal relationship with beings like us. And you can’t very well be
open to such a relationship with someone while preventing them from
believing in your existence. How inviting! The openness to relationship
receiving emphasis here was something that in another time might
have been shrugged off as entirely optional, especially for males and
fathers. And, of course, in earlier times it would have been easier to
think of God as both Male and Father. But it wasn’t being shrugged off
now. Today the hiddenness problem was a hot topic.
If there was a new pattern here, a new way of arguing atheistically,
so I thought to myself, it might be a better, more powerful way of
arguing than we’ve seen before. Perhaps it would generate new
arguments, all following the same pattern. Being so different from
popular atheistic approaches, which often focus on making God
look bad, it might furthermore show how atheism could have a more
positive and interesting role in our culture.
The seed had been planted. At various times since 2011 I’ve felt it
there, at the back of my mind. Now, in this book, I want to see what
may grow from it. What grows probably won’t reach its full height
