Skepticism Beyond Belief

If there were an Atheists' Party, which there probably is somewhere, I'm not sure Dr. Jonathan Miller would be the ideal candidate to represent it in an election. Atheism, after all, used to be fun, glamorous, daring — didn't it? You inevitably think of Nietzsche, of Sartre and Camus, the hilarious clergy-baiting of Luis Buñuel, and all the other hip, transgressive artists on whom legions of students in black turtlenecks once modeled themselves.

Dr. Miller, whose 2003 BBC documentary, "A Brief History of Disbelief," will make its American premiere on WNET this Sunday (with parts 2 and 3 to follow on July 22, and July 29), is having none of that. Pale and gangly with gray hair, a wardrobe of tweedy jackets (with elbow patches), and a stethoscope dangling from his collar, his is a slightly funereal presence bringing us the news that God is dead, He's been dead a long time, and He's going to stay dead! — at least as far as the good doctor is concerned. Unlike the novelist Julian Barnes, who wrote, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," Dr. Miller claims to have never had "a religious belief or even feeling."

If this might make him a questionable candidate to tackle this particular subject, it doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else. Consider some of the titles currently cluttering bookstores: "God Is Not Great"; "The God Delusion"; "The Impossibility of God"; "The Non-Existence of God"; "God: The Failed Hypothesis"; "Atheism: The Case Against God"; etc. Nonetheless, as absorbing as his archaeological dig into the buried remains of atheistic thought often is, you may find yourself thinking that his puzzled incomprehension of religious faith, or even a yearning for it (he himself is from a Jewish background), amounts to a kind of minor genetic defect, like color-blindness.

Though there's no mistaking the anti-clerical bias peeking out from behind his polite, cautious presentation, Dr. Miller keeps his atheistic fervor in check. Unfortunately, he does the same with his sense of humor. This is not Christopher Hitchens laying into Mother Teresa or cheekily suggesting that the only worthwhile parable is the one about changing water into wine, because, after all, who could complain about that? Dr. Miller, a neurologist, documentary filmmaker, and theater director, first made his name in 1961 as a member of Britain's Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe, yet there's precious little laughter here.

"This series is about the disappearance of something — religious faith," he says at the outset of the program. "It's the story of what is often referred to as ‘atheism': The history of the growing conviction that God doesn't exist." He goes on to warn us that there will be no dramatic re-enactments, a practice he considers "vulgar," though he does make limited use of old movie clips, such as a silent-movie pratfall illustrating a "leap of faith."

Dr. Miller's preferred mode is oral rather than visual, and intellectual rather than emotional. He speaks in polished, complete sentences, and he likes to talk to other God-skeptics who are similarly articulate. (He doesn't talk to believers, however, a glaring omission in a film of this length.) Thus a cast of scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and writers — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Pascal Boyer, among others — are called on to poke and prod at the business of belief and how generally misguided it all is. The actor Bernard Hill occasionally stares into the camera and delivers atheistic bon mots, from Lucretius and Aristophanes to Tennessee Williams and Charlie Chaplin. If the intention is to provide atheists with a series of texts to counter the sacred ones, too often the effect is flip, even condescending. The fact that Mr. Hill delivers his lines with a sneer doesn't help.

A slight air of futility, or perhaps dutifulness, hangs over the documentary. Dr. Miller admits he normally doesn't give God or religion a second thought. Even referring to himself as an "atheist" seems misleading, since that would imply an effort to think about something he doesn't care to think about at all. The problem, believe it or not, is the attacks of September 11, 2001, and America's response to them. Religion may always have been here, but it dominates the news as never before, particularly Islamism and what Dr. Miller sees as George Bush's born-again war against it.

So like a number of intellectuals, he has decided to speak out, concluding that part of the West's defense against fanaticism should be to firmly define itself in secular, atheistic terms. We must, in other words, own up to the fact that we don't really believe in God and stop pretending we do. How this might prevent Muslim doctors from trying to blow up London nightclubs is anyone's guess, and I don't think "the honesty of my atheism" defense cuts it with the average suicide bomber.

"Disbelief" is not fun, but it is erudite, intelligent, and occasionally moving. Gazing at a depiction of the Crucifixion in the stained glass windows of King's College Chapel at Cambridge University, where he studied medicine in the 1950s, Dr. Miller admits that even if he doesn't "believe a word of it," his imaginative life would be impoverished had he not grown up with the Biblical interpretation of life humming quietly in the background, not to mention all those gorgeous buildings. "It would be a very thin form of life that didn't have these images," he concedes.

He is less forthcoming on the subject of the Soviet Union, the first country explicitly founded on atheistic principles. He duly notes that the atheists turned out to be far more murderous than the believers ever were, but his message is: Don't blame atheism! Since he's so ready to blame religion, however, this feels less like a lapse than a complete collapse into intellectual dishonesty that threatens to bring the entire program crashing down with it. It's no wonder he changes the subject fast.

Only at the very end of Part 3, when he visits a dying woman who doesn't believe in an afterlife, and so must pass away without that hope or consolation, does Dr. Miller finally score a bulls-eye. For if religion is at least partly about the drive to conquer death, then atheism must be about the urge to confront it squarely. He speculates that the technological apparatus of the modern state — its material comforts, its media, its hive-like security — insulates us against the cosmic awe and fear that made people turn to God in the first place. The catch is that, having lived prosperous and easy lives, we must now face our mortality without the benefit of faith commonly available to the destitute of the Third World.

It could be argued that a sincere atheist has nothing to fear from death per se, but there's no getting around the dread of life's end, whatever you believe, or of its tendency to drag itself painfully to thefinishline. At any rate, Dr. Miller wants us to face up to this cruel twist in the capitalist tail, accept it as a condition of our secular freedom, and move on. Yet he fails to persuade us that, terrible as life with organized religion often is, things might be better in its absence.

bbernhard@nysun.com