Nielsen and Cooke: The Necessity of Thoroughgoing Atheism

Abstract

publication in 1770 of Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature marks the beginning of what David Berman refers to as a tradition of speculative atheism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people who behaved immorally were considered atheists, even if they professed belief. Such people were fre quently referred to as practical atheists. Speculative atheists, by contrast, for mally and systematically rejected the God-concept and a theological world view. nineteenth century witnessed remarkable developments in speculative athe ism, as seen in Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay on The Necessity of Atheism; Ludwig Feuerbach's and Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical analyses of the psychological and semantic production of meaning (including the construction of God and truth); and T. H. Huxley's and Leslie Stephen's post-God visions of science, politics, and community, just to name a few notable examples. By the twentieth century, writers like Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf took an atheistic orientation as an epistemological given, developing philosophies about the Entzauberung der Welt (Max Weber), the Entsinnlichung der Welt (Arnold Gehlen), or the de-divinization of the world (Richard Rorty). But what constitutes being an unconditional honest atheist (Nietzsche), a thorough atheist (Berman), or an absolute atheist (James Thrower)? Bill Cooke and Kai Nielsen have recently published books that seek to answer this question but also indicate how extremely difficult it is to shuffle off the mortal coils of religious belief. Nielsen's book is relentless, unforgiving, bulldoggish, but it works. Only someone with Nielsen's comprehensive grasp of intellectual history and subtle