The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (79 page)

23
. Jacquette, op
.
cit., pp. 44–45.

24
. Martin Booth,
Cannabis: A History
, London: Doubleday, 2003, ch. 24, pp. 292ff.

25
. Frank Furedi,
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age
, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 5.

26
. Furedi, op
.
cit., p. 7.

27
. Ibid., p. 100.

28
. Ibid., p. 17.

29
. K. M. Sargeant,
Seeker Churches: Promoting Religion in a Nontraditional Way
, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 45.

30
. Furedi, op
.
cit., p. 31.

31
. Ibid., p. 33.

32
. Ibid., p. 73.

33
. Ibid., p. 91.

34
. Ibid., p. 155.

35
. Patrick Bracken,
Trauma: Culture, Meaning and Philosophy
,
London: Whurr Publishers, 2002, p. 14.

36
. Kenneth J. Gergen, “Therapeutic Professions and the Diffusion of Deficit,”
Journal of Mind and Behavior
, vol. 11, nos. 3–4, 1990, p. 356.

37
. Furedi, op
.
cit., p. 204.

CHAPTER 24: FAITH IN DETAIL

1
. Seamus Heaney,
The Government of the Tongue
, London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. xiii.

2
. Heaney, op
.
cit., p. xvi.

3
. Czesław Miłosz,
The Witness of Poetry
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 16.

4
. Miłosz, op
.
cit., p. 19.

5
. Ibid., p. 25.

6
. Ibid., p. 110.

7
. Ibid., p. 108.

8
. Iris Murdoch,
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
, London: Chatto & Windus, 1992, p. 181.

9
. Eva Hoffmann, review of Steiner’s
Real Presences
,
New York Times
, August 9, 1989.

10
. George Steiner,
Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 17.

11
. Steiner, op
.
cit., p. 53.

12
. Heaney, op
.
cit., pp. 93–94.

13
. Ibid., p. 124.

14
. Ibid., p. 168.

15
. Ibid., p. 16.

16
. For Heaney on later Auden see Arthur Kirsch,
Auden and Christianity
, London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 170.

17
. Heaney, op
.
cit., pp. 122–23.

18
. Michael Hamburger,
The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s
, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982, p. 267.

19
. Hamburger, op
.
cit., p. 215.

20
. Ibid., p. 118.

21
. Michael Hamburger (ed. and with an introduction by),
An Unofficial Rilke
, London: Anvil Poetry Press, 1981, p. 16.

22
. Miłosz, op
.
cit., pp. 56–57.

23
. Hamburger,
Truth of Poetry
, p. 39.

24
. Wallace Stevens,
Collected Poems and Prose
, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997, p. 104.

25
. Hamburger,
Truth of Poetry
, p. 131.

26
. James Wood,
The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, p.
225.

27
. Richard Rorty,
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 132.

28
. Rorty, op
.
cit., p. 136.

29
. Ibid.

CHAPTER 25: “OUR SPIRITUAL GOAL IS THE ENRICHMENT OF THE EVOLUTIONARY EPIC”

1
. Richard Dawkins,
Unweaving the Rainbow
, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. x.

2
. Dawkins, op
.
cit., p. xi.

3
. Ibid., p. 29.

4
. Ibid., pp. 312–13.

5
. Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 6.

6
. Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
, London: Black Swan, 2006, appendix.

7
. Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
, London: Allen Lane, 2006, p. 14.

8
. Dennett, op
.
cit., p. 14.

9
. Ibid., p. 101.

10
. Ibid., p. 232.

11
. For a possible explanation, see Olivier Roy,
Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways
, trans. Roy Schwartz, London: Hurst, 2010, passim
.

12
. Dennett, op
.
cit., p. 303.

13
. Ibid., p. 268.

14
. David Sloan Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

15
. Sam Harris,
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
, London: Bantam, 2010, p. 32.

16
. Matt Ridley,
The Origins of Virtue
, London: Viking, p. 264.

17
. Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
, New York: Viking, 2011. See also Steven Pinker, “Saturday Essay, Violence Vanquished,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 23, 2011.

18
. George Levine,
Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 44.

19
. E. O. Wilson,
On Human Nature
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1979, p. 6.

20
. Wilson, op
.
cit., p. 171.

21
. Ibid., p. 201.

22
. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson,
The Biophilia Hypothesis
, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993, p. 21.

23
. Kellert and Wilson, op
.
cit., p. 454.

24
. Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
, New York: Knopf, 1998, p. 12.

25
. Wilson,
Consilience
, p. 232.

26
. Ibid., p. 248.

27
. Ibid., p. 265.

28
. Theodore Roszak,
Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society
, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, p. 63.

29
. Ibid., pp. 159, 162.

30
. Ibid., p. 159.

31
. Mary Midgley,
Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears
, London: Methuen, 1985, p. 13.

32
. Midgley, op
.
cit., p. 63.

33
. Ibid., p. 140.

34
. Mary Midgley,
Science as Salvation
, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 124.

35
. Mary Midgley,
The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene
, Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010, p. 92.

36
. Paul Davies,
The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning
, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 153.

37
. Davies, op
.
cit., pp. 204, 209, 214.

38
. David Deutsch,
The Fabric of Reality
, London: Penguin Books, 1997, pp. 352ff.

39
. Deutsch, op
.
cit., p. 358. See also Frank J. Tipler,
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead
, London: Macmillan, 1995.

CHAPTER 26: “THE GOOD LIFE IS THE LIFE SPENT SEEKING THE GOOD LIFE”

1
. T. S. Eliot,
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
, London: Faber and Faber, 1948, p. 19.

2
. Eliot, op
.
cit., p. 88.

3
. Ibid., p. 105.

4
. David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 53.

5
. Steven Connor (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernity
, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 171.

6
. Connor, op
.
cit., p. 172.

7
. Michael Cole et al.,
What Is New Age?
London: Hodder, 1990, p. 10.

8
. MacIntyre’s publications include
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
(1985),
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988),
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry
(1990) and
Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
(1999), all published by Duckworth, London. The discussion here relates mainly to
After Virtue
and
Dependent Rational Animals
, passim
.

9
. John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, passim
.

10
. Robert J. Dostall (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer
, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 149. See also Hans Georg Gadamer,
The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays
,
trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. and with an introduction by Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Hans Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method
, trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming, London: Sheed & Ward, 1975.

11
. Dostall,
op
.
cit., p. 163.

12
. Ibid.

13
. A. C. Grayling,
The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the Twenty-first Century
, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, p. 25.

14
. Terry Eagleton,
The Meaning of Life
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, passim.

15
. Thomas Nagel,
The View from Nowhere
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 8–11.

16
. Nagel,
op. cit.,
p. 108.

17
. Thomas Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 7.

18
. Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos
, p. 50.

19
. Ibid., p. 115.

20
. Nagel,
View from Nowhere
, p. 223.

21
. Richard Rorty,
Philosophy and Social Hope
, New York and London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. xxv.

22
. Rorty, op
.
cit., p. 150.

23
. Ibid., p. 158.

24
. Ibid.,
p. 86.

25
. Richard Rorty,
Philosophy as Cultural Politics
, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 108.

26
. Robert Nozick,
Invariances
, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 280.

27
. Nozick, op
.
cit., p. 300.

28
. Robert Nozick,
The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 12.

29
. Nozick,
Examined Life
, p. 264.

30
. Ibid., p. 302.

31
. Ronald Dworkin,
Justice for Hedgehogs
, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 13.

32
. Dworkin, op
.
cit., pp. 197–98.

33
. Ibid., p. 206.

34
. Ibid., p. 217.

35
. Ronald Dworkin, “Religion without God,”
New York Review of Books
, April 4, 2013. See also Dworkin’s three Einstein lectures delivered at the University of Bern, Switzerland, on December 12–14, 2011, at http://www.law.nyu.edu/news.Ronald Dworkin.

36
. Jürgen Habermas,
Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays
, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992, p. xv.

37
. Jürgen Habermas,
Between Naturalism and Religion
, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008, p. 29.

38
. Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophical Essays
, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. And
Postmetaphysical Thinking
.

39
. Jürgen Habermas,
An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age
, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010, p. 211.

40
. Habermas,
Awareness of What Is Missing
, p. 142.

41
. Ibid., pp. 139–40.

42
. Ibid., p. 37.

43
. Alain de Botton,
Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion
, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012, p. 44 and passim
.

CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL SANE ACTIVITY

1
. Salman Rushdie,
Joseph Anton
, London: Jonathan Cape, 2012, p. 476.

2
. Harold Bloom,
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
, New Haven and
London (2011). Robert Bellah et al.,
Habits of the Heart: Individual and Commitment in American Life
, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press (1985). Richard Sennett,
The Fall of Public Man
(2002),
Respect
(2003),
Craftsmanship
(2008) and
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
(2012), all London and New York: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. Alan Dershowitz,
Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights
, New York: Basic Books, 2004.