The reaction, especially in the United States, was immediate and furious. Enough to mention a few of the scores of titles to fix its character: The Case for God, There is a God, Why There Almost Certainly is a God, The Dawkins Delusion, The Atheist’s Delusion, and The Devil’s Delusion. The religious apologists accuse the atheists of theological ignorance, superficiality, illiberality, and ranting. These vices do abound in this war of words, and not only in the secularist camp.

The new turn has an irenic temper. Among the secularists are scholars who, in opinion pieces and recent titles, scold the new atheists for their insensitivity to the complex psychosocial needs served by religion. Moreover, they contend that if secularism is to provide an alternative to religion, it must demonstrate how it too can accommodate those fundamental needs. The new atheism demolishes; a humane secularism must construct. It must reveal how life can flourish without gods.

The Joy of Secularism, a collection of eleven essays by distinguished scholars in various fields, attempts this revelatory and constructive task. Its editor, literature professor George Levine, asked his contributors to ‘think about the possibility of “Secular Enchantment”’, about a ‘positive’ secularity that might satisfy these important feelings and spiritual needs.

In his upbeat Introduction, Levine’s own joy in his religionless world is amply manifest. He is rapt in nature, especially birds, so expressions of aesthetic awe and wonder predominate. Secularism is not a fall, he affirms. Or rather, it is a fall, but upward (in Amy Clampitt’s words) into the dazzling sun. Is life worth living in a (religiously) disenchanted world? ‘You bet!’ Levine answers emphatically.

Perhaps that is so, especially from a view over Central Park. But there is more to the notion of enchantment than enjoyment and aesthetic felicity, and Levine lightly introduces some of the other ingredients. Value, meaning, and morality, he asseverates, must be shown to be independent of religion. Secularism must be revealed not just as denial of religion, but also as a positive and ‘absolute condition’ of democracy. It must show itself capable of sustaining awe and wonder and the condition of ‘fullness’ – in which the world seems ‘good, whole, proper’ – described in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, a book whichlurks in the background in several contributions (and which I reviewed in the April 2008 issue of ABR). That is a complex agenda and, with few contributors staying on script, disunity reigns, a condition as taxing for the reviewer as for the editor.

A couple of ambitious essays, one looped between Hesiod and Kant, another on the phenomenology of moods, make only distant nods to the anthology’s theme and are so dense with learning that, like black holes, no light escapes from them. The other essays illuminate, though unevenly.

Max Weber diagnosed the modern world as disenchanted. Though this is unclear, he seems to have had the elimination of magic and increasing rationalisation foremost in mind. According to Taylor’s development of the theme in ‘Disenchantment – Reenchantment’ (and in his mammoth book), we once lived in a world surrounded by spirits, moral forces, and objective meanings. Religion was the medium in which the contest between benevolent and malevolent forces was decided. With the elimination of magical modes of experience, the loss of religion, and the ascendency of Galilean science, the world became disenchanted and a pervasive malaise of meaninglessness set in.

The (mostly religious) people who seek re-enchantment, Taylor suggests, bridle at the idea that the universe is totally devoid of objective meaning: that is, meaning other than that conferred by human projections and desire. He argues, unpersuasively I think, that certain ‘strong evaluations’ in morals and the ineliminable sense of religious wonder and awe ‘track some reality’. He concedes that the irreligious may experience awe, wonder, and even fullness without the transcendent. Irreligion per se is not disenchanting, but some reductive accounts of the world contradict our strong evaluations and are therefore false. A scientific account of how birds evolve, for example, does not threaten our strong evaluations, but an account of human action based on blind efficient causation does. ‘Our whole moral-evaluative lives’ rebel against such deterministic accounts. In the end, then, in a retreat from the big book, Taylor identifies scientific reductionism and not secularism as the disenchanting culprit.

One might suspect sleight of hand behind the slide from the demise of magic and religion to the malaise of meaninglessness – and, indeed, there is. It is unclear what this malaise of meaninglessness is; whether there is such a malaise novel to our time; and whether it really is a consequence of the recession of religion. Bruce Robbins, in his trenchant ‘Enchantment? No, Thank You!’, asks: ‘Are we sure that it is indeed enchantment, and not some other thing entirely, that we really need and want?’ He dissects Weber’s views, provides an acerbic appraisal of Taylor’s argument, and rightly questions the official story. Don’t we still live in a religious world? Are the spirits not still with us in disguise? But if religious enchantment has departed, Robbins concludes, we sure don’t need it back. ‘Progress,’ he states, ‘is not the cause of meaninglessness, but an attempt to cure it.’

More pedestrian is pioneering primatologist Frans B.M. de Waal’s account of his experiments and observations of chimpanzees and capuchins (the monkeys), which demonstrate a startling range of prosocial behaviours in our cousins. The capacity for empathy, consolation, reciprocity, and concern for fairness displayed by these creatures really is astonishing, and de Waal rightly concludes that the development of a recognisably moral order requires neither god nor religion. Evolution suffices: ‘Survival in groups requires a social life that promotes cooperation, protects the weak, and delivers benefits to all …’ The rudiments of morality are gained, but we remain a long way from secular joy.

In a typically insightful essay, Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, explores the relationships between helplessness, morality, and religion found in Freud’s thought. In a nutshell, helplessness is good because it leads to contact with reality, satisfaction, and morality: the infant screams, mother arrives, satisfaction, communication, and mutual concern follow. Helplessness unrelieved, however, leads to malign alternatives, the illusions of omnipotence, omniscience, and invulnerability. So disenchantment – the absence of illusion and so of religion – is the precondition for a serious engagement with morality. Phillips proposes the apparent paradox that ‘helplessness may be another word for disenchantment’. One can see how he gets there, but the argument is unsound, and the link between disenchantment construed as the infant’s surrendering its illusions and what was supposed to have happened when religion retreated and the world became disenchanted remains unclear.

The ambiguity of ‘enchantment’ ripples through the volume. Literature professor Rebecca Stott engagingly shows how poets Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt found a way of reclaiming the sublime, or secular enchantment, through a poetics of immersion inspired by Darwin, who refused transcendence and celebrated the lowly: ‘By looking at the skies for meaning and truth, we miss the miracle at our feet.’ In ‘Darwinian Enchantment’, historian of science Robert J. Richards argues that Darwinism does not disenchant the world, which he thinks is associated chiefly with its challenge to morality; indeed, Darwin established a universal moral grammar rather in the way Chomsky did for linguistics. That is a bold proposition, which I suppose provides some hope for secular life, if not exactly for joy and enchantment.

In ‘The Truth is Sacred’, biologist David Sloan Wilson asks: ‘What is worth wanting about religion, and can it be achieved by a belief system that fully respects factual reality?’  The project is not propitious. Wilson thinks that enchantment is like having a good time. Of a night chatting with Levine, he remarks: ‘I doubt that religious enchantment gets much better than that kind of joyous exploration of ideas.’ And if you can’t get Levine, you can experience enchantment from a DVD or a stage show called Rap Guide to Evolution, ‘a hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology’.

Beside this comic innocence, there is some good sense. Wilson acknowledges some socially positive aspects of religion, and, adopting the role of social engineer, begins to explore ways in which virtues associated with religion, such as humility, cooperation, and group belonging, may be preserved in a secular dispensation.

This objective is pursued much more rigorously in the outstanding essay in the volume, philosopher Philip Kitcher’s ‘Challenges for Secularism’. The secularist challenge to religion, he avers, has been made well enough – just in case, Kitcher provides marvellously succinct and powerful arguments against it – and what is required now is to address the challenges for secularism. Religions persist, Kitcher observes, not because they have insight into a supernatural realm, but because they respond to human anxieties and yearnings: they provide community, identity, meaning, support. The main challenge for secularism, then, is to substitute meaningfully for these ‘functional aspects’ of traditional religions: ‘Secularism needs to become secular humanism.’

Kitcher is dismissive of the Darwinian atheists who ‘neither offer the best arguments against belief in the supernatural’ nor seem aware of the important functions that religions serve. Their loud ridicule is counterproductive because assaulting a person’s religion can be experienced as profoundly threatening. So Kitcher’s approach is to explore the threats and articulate secularism as positive responses to them. Secular society must be developed so that it can respond to social and economic injustice and the need for collective action; it must provide support and a sense of purpose and connection. Kitcher outlines the ways in which many needs currently satisfied by religion can be accommodated: in a word, by clear thinking, a humane secular dispensation, and the deepening of links to the natural world.

This is an admirable program but profoundly deficient. Not all human needs are benign and susceptible to such secular therapy. It is a paradox of religion that it may accommodate and pacify but also nurture and unleash the pathologies of the human condition. It can satisfy narcissistic needs by teaching that one is indeed special, or accommodate obsessional needs by instituting rituals and systems of segregation. It can provide protective figures to idealise and worship and can help turn sadism upon the self. But we daily observe the mayhem when the containing structures crumble. Before secular joy can reign, we had better attend to human malignity, as well as to its beneficence.