This column by Aengus Woods on NPR's website engages the newest book by Alain de Botton, which I took up in a previous post. It is helpful as an atheist's critique of an atheist's project.
Mr. Woods's main points seem to be two: (a) it is hard to follow Mr. de Botton without also erecting some authoritative (he says "authoritarian") arbiter of what is the kernel of religion that is useful for secularists (sort of like the norming apparatus in religion that secularists wish to avoid); and (b) Mr. de Botton may be over-arguing his claim that to abandon religion completely is to abandon the beauty associated with its products (since secularists have historically never bypassed religious art, despite certain challenges to appreciating its profundity).
One point I had made was that a result of Mr. de Botton's a-religious project would ultimately be, in effect, religious practice. Mr. Woods seems to agree and specifies one operational religious practice, namely, that there may need to be some authority structure to determine what part of religion is kosher, as it were, for atheists beneficially to consume. This is on target in general, although it is not clear in this particular case that Mr. de Botton is calling for indoctrination and an end to the subjective, individualistic thinking that Mr. Woods fears will occur. This critique is perhaps more a reflection of Mr. Woods's epistemology than Mr. de Botton's book.
On the second point, however, Mr. Woods seems on firmer ground. As I mentioned in my previous post, there is an element of borrowing religious capital that has always prevailed among the non-religious. This may extend at times to worldview, but it certainly and more regularly involves culture, which includes expressions of art and beauty. Mr. Woods has also candidly recognized a limitation to atheist appreciation for, or full access to, religious art. This limitation is due to the atheist's lack of basic commitment to the truths that the artist seeks to portray. His point is well-taken, namely, that religious meaning is a non-neutral business. It may be understandable to all, but its richness is reserved for the faithful.
An atheistic docent, for instance, may be able to explain with admiration how the lighting and the lines in Rembrandt's faces of Jesus convey the depth of humanity and emotions in the subject. A committed Christian, however, may be able with the help of the docent to see these things and therefore, because of her vital faith, to access greater meaning. She may be able, that is, to make connections with profound personal significance, metaphysical implications, and empathetic reverberations. Religious art has greater meaning potential, as it were, for the religious.
This is not to deny that many secularists' readings of Christian texts and art, for instance, are better than that of Christians. They often are. The point is that epistemological and metaphysical differences, such as those between atheists and Christian theists, lead to different experiences of shared art and culture. And it is, it seems to me, precisely the (to stay with this example) Christian experience of Rembrandt's faces of Jesus that the atheist recognizes that she seems to miss out on -- and always will, absent vital Christian conviction.
Mr. Woods does not dispute this, an admission that strikes me as a real asset in his sympathetic critique of Mr. de Botton's project of secularists' selective appropriation of religion and its cultural offspring.
