A new review of my Difficult Atheism has just been published in The Heythrop Journal 55:4 (2014): 755-756.
Here is the final paragraph, in which the reviewer (Dane Neufeld of Wycliffe College, Toronto) sums up both his commendation of, and reservation about, the book:
Difficult Atheism is a challenging read but the difficulty of the book is necessitated by the content which it engages. Watkin’s prose exhibits powerfully the struggle of contemporary French philosophy to think without God. Among other things, this book is a testament to the manner in which traditional western theology and philosophy, despite all of the recent disruptions and transformations, continues to sustain its reach into the western imagination. To this end, one feels that Watkin’s conclusion could have been longer. He leaves a question mark over the possibility of an atheism or post theological philosophy that is not parasitic in one manner or another. Perhaps he could have pursued the question: what would such a philosophy have to look like? What criteria would be required? And furthermore, what are the consequences for atheism, or philosophy after the death of God, if this goal proves unattainable? Nevertheless, Difficult Atheism is an important book that engages the topic of atheism with a level of insight and depth that is uncommon in many current discussions.
The question “what would such a philosophy have to look like?” is an interesting one, and Dane is right to ask it. It is, however, a lot harder to answer. The position I arrive at through the course of Difficult Atheism is that any philosophy that successfully avoids imitative or parasitic atheism seems inevitably to fall into ascetic atheism, and vice versa. I am questioning the premise of the project of “such a philosophy”, rather than opening an easy way to a new solution. In the new book I’m writing, The Human Remains, I do however adopt a more “constructive” tone, seeking to show how the human being, traditionally so intricated in the West with the notion of God on which it is parasitic, can be rethought without losing the benefits of the theological account. To the extent that this is what, in Difficult Atheism, I call a “theological integration”, my response to Dane’s question is “wait and see”.
