he British philosopher John Gray has been on the Left, and he has been on the Right. More recently, he has settled into the role of a brilliant, provocative, and contrarian curmudgeon, known for an aphoristic style rare in a discipline where opacity is often confused with erudition.
Naturally then in Seven Types of Atheism, Gray, an atheist, trains his heaviest fire, not on God (a target more filled with holes than poor Saint Sebastian), but on those atheisms that “repel” him, not least new atheism (“contains little that is novel or interesting”). Above all though, Gray is concerned with the atheist thinking and ideologies intended to fill the gap that a banished God has left behind.
And it is a God who haunts this particular feast. The bleak binary of monotheism (“a local cult”) preoccupies Gray and stalks the atheisms he describes, atheisms based on an absence of belief in a “creator-god,” a definition borrowed from classical times (it can also be found elsewhere). But this is an atheism that leaves open a door through which gods, ghosts, goblins, and the rest of the supernatural menagerie can pour, ancestral spirits of more sophisticated theologies to come: the road to Notre-Dame lies, if only circuitously, through the druids’ groves.
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