Atheism Explained

There are many books explaining atheism and arguing for it.
Most of them fall into one of two types . The first type takes for
granted a lot of technical language in philosophy of religion and
soon loses the ordinary reader. The second type is usually personal
in tone , seething with moral indignation against atrocities committed
in the name of God, unsystematic in approach, and occasionally
betraying ignorance of j ust what theists have believed.
Several books of both types are really excellent in their way, but
I'm trying something different. I explain atheism by giving an outline
of the strongest arguments for and against the existence of
God. My aim is to provide an accurate account of these argu
ments, on both sides, in plain English .
Following a Christian upbringing, I became an atheist by the
age of thirteen . For a few years, it seemed axiomatic that I ought
to do my bit to help convert the world to atheism. Then I became
more interested in social and political questions .

Over the years since then, the whole issue of atheism gradually
sank into comparative insignificance . It seemed clear to me, and
still seems obvious today, that there is no God. But it has also
gradually become apparent that this issue has less practical urgency
than I used to imagine .
Most people who say that they believe i n God live their lives
pretty much as they would if they did not believe in God. They are
nominal theists with secular outlooks and secular lifestyles . They
would judge it to be at best a lapse of taste if any mention of God
were to intrude into their everyday lives .
Whether or not a person believes in the existence of God seems
to have no bearing on what that person thinks about war, globalization,
welfare reform, or global warming ( there are of course statistical
correlations, but these seem to be due to mere fashion, not
to any logical necessity) . The social and political positions taken
up by Christian churches, for example, are merely a reflection of
ideological currents generated in the secular world. The landmark
papal encyclicals on social questions, of 1 8 9 1 and 1931, tried to
steer a middle course between socialism and free-market capitalism-
just one illustration of the fact that, since the eighteenth
century, secular social movements have made the ideological
running; the churches flail about trying to come up with soine
angle on socal questions that they can represent as distinctively
religious .
It's true that believers in God are usually gratified to discover
that the Almighty sees eye to eye with them on many practical
issues, but theists can be found on all sides of any policy question .
There is no distinctively 'theist view' or ' Christian view' on anything
of practical importance . Still less does belief or disbelief in
God have any relevance to whether a person is considerate , courageous,
kind, loving, tolerant, creative, responsible, or trustworthy.
In recent years I have spent a good portion of my energies on
combating the ideas of two atheists : Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud. This bears out my view that atheism is purely . negative, like
not believing in mermaids, and is in no way a creed to live by or
anything so grandiose . I view belief in God as like belief in the class
struggle or belief in repressed memories just a mistake . The issue
of theism or atheism is something to get out of the way early, so
that you can focus your attention on matters more difficult to
decide and more important .
Today my view of atheism is very different from what it was in
my teens . Then I thought that the existence of God was a vitally
urgent question . Now, I still believe there's no God, but I do not
think this is as consequential a matter as I used to suppose . I am
struck by three considerations .
First, the existence of God seems preposterous, but so do some
of the things quantum physics tells me, and I do accept quantum
physics . ( I do not accept quantum physics because it seems preposterous,
but because it tests out well; its predictions are borne out
by numerous experiments . ) While this does not make me directly
more disposed to believe in God, it does make me more acutely
aware of how complicated the world is and how little I know about
it. And this makes me entertain the possibility of some future shifts
in human knowledge that might conceivably make some kind of
God's existence a more promising hypothesis than it seems to be
right now. ( I say "some kind of God" because, as you'll see if you
keep reading, God as strictly defined by Christianity and Islam is an
incoherent notion which can be demonstrated not to correspond to
anything in reality. )
Second, I have come to recognize something that was once
unclear to me: that the bare existence of a God, if we accepted it,
would not take us even ten percent of the way toward accepting
the essentials of any traditional theistic system. For example, every
human would have to possess an immortal soul something that
might be true if there were no God, and might be false if there
were a God. God would have to decree a major difference to people
's lot in the afterlife according to whether those people believed
in his existence in this life . And usually, some uneven collection of
ancient documents, such as the Tanakh, the New Testament, or the
Quran, would have to be accorded a respect out of all proportion
to its literary or philosophical merit. Even if we were to accept the
bare existence of God, these additional elementary portions of traditional
theistic religion would remain as fantastically incredible as
ever. If I were to become convinced tomorrow of the existence of
God, I would be no more inclined to become a Christian or a
Muslim than I am now.
Third, so many horrible deeds have been done by Christians
and Muslims in the name of their religions that a young Christian
or Muslim who becomes an atheist often tends to assume that
there is some inherent connection between adherence to theism
and the proclivitY to commit atrocities . The history of the past one
hundred years shows us that atheistic ideologies can sanctify more
and bigger atrocities than Christianity or Islam ever did. The casualties
inflicted by Communism and National Socialism vastly
exceed many hundredfold the casualties inflicted by theocracies
. In some cases (Mexico in the 1930s, Soviet Russia, and the
People 's Republic of China) , there has been appalling persecution
of theistic belief by politically empowered atheists, exceeding any
historical atrocities against unbelievers and heretics.
I don't conclude that atheism is particularly prone to atrocities,
as the historical rise of secular social movements coincides with the
enhanced efficiency of the technological and administrative means
to commit atrocities . The mass murderer Torquemada would have
done as much harm as the mass murderer Mao, if only he'd had
the means at his disposal . (For those who doubt that extraordinary
brutality of a 'modern' sort could be perpetrated by devout theists,
I recommend a look at the activities of the Iron Guard in Romania
or the Franco regime in Spain. )
I d o conclude, sadly, that atheists are morally no better than
Christians or Muslims, and that the propensity of people to commit
atrocities at the behest of unreasonable ideologies is independent
of whether those ideologies include theism or atheism .
In light of all the above, why take any interest in the question
of the existence of God? The primary reason is intellectual curiosity:
as Aristotle said, we humans have an appe tite to find out the
truth about things. Just as I would like to know whether there are
advanced civilizations in other solar systems ( and whether they
have discovered Texas Hold'em), whether the universe is infinite,
and who really wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, so I
would like to know whether there is a God ( and in this case I think
I do know) .
I believe in confronting opposing points of view at their
strongest. Therefore I give more attention to Richard Swinburne
and William Lane Craig than to C.S. Lewis or Lee Strobel .
However my choice of topics to which to devote space is partly
determined by those issues which the ordinary non -academic
reader will encounter in considering whether or not God exists .
My general procedure is to begin with extreme positions, then
move on to more moderate positions, unless these have already
incidentally been refuted in considering the extreme positions .
Since this is an introductory survey with endnotes kept to a
minimum, mention of an idea without a citation does not imply
any claim to originality. The bibliography includes all the sources
cited and all those directly drawn upon in the writing of this book.
In quoting from the Quran and the Bible, I always compared
numerous different English translations. Biblical quotations always
follow the divisions by chapter and verse standard in Protestant
translations .
Open Court's Publisher, Andre Carus (whose great grandfather
Paul Carus famously styled himself "an atheist who loves God")
considered that American culture was ripe for a fresh restatement
of atheism and therefore encouraged me to knock off this little
pamphlet.
I hereby thank the following people for reading drafts of the
manuscript and giving their valuable comments, though I have not
followed their advice in every instance : David Gordon, Jan Lester,
David McDonagh, Victor J. Stenger, Martin Verhoeven, and Lisa
Zimmerman.

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