Being an atheist doesn’t mean that life isn’t important. It means that we get to create our own sense of importance. The human scale is where we live. It’s what we have. And if we decide that that’s the most important scale for us, there’s nobody out there to tell us otherwise.
If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
Book: Mere Christianity
Atheism is not a philosophy. It is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious.
Book: Letter to a Christian Nation
So who is the bigger idiot: the person who believes that God created the world and who wonders at the same time whether any given scientific theory can really fully account for that, or the person who believes that having a high degree of confidence in a particular empirical hypothesis can give certainty (or even a very high degree of probability) about the falsity of a metaphysical thesis?
In today’s anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature.
Article: The Atheist Delusion
Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into is mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole … [He too] remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be… . Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.
Of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational.
Book: The Language of God
Dawkins is a master of setting up a straw man, and then dismantling it with great relish. In fact, it is hard to escape the conclusion that such repeated mischaracterizations of faith betray a vitriolic personal agenda, rather than a reliance on the rational arguments that Dawkins so cherishes in the scientific realm.
Book: The Language of God
If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my view DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things than make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates.
Book: The Language of God
Critics of theism were not, as they liked to think, disposing of it from a position of unchallengeable neutrality, but proposing an alternative metaphysics of some kind or other which it was incumbent upon them to acknowledge and defend.
Book: “War and Friendship”, from James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe
Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.
To be flotsam and jetsam with alternating moments of delight and misery, to feel the passage of time and have no charge of it, no power save to say good-bye to part of oneself swept away with it, to be covered over with the scurvy of contemporary fashion and vice, this is the malaise of our day, the aftermath of unbelief.
Book: Death and Life
We are living to-day in…a period which it was fashionable to disbelieve in miracles and anathema to disbelieve in evolution. Mental snobbery might be defined as the uncritical acceptance of beliefs merely because they are modish, and it is undeniable that for every man whose belief in evolution is the outcome of examining the evidence, there are a hundred whose views on these questions are determined by the mental fashions of the age in which they live.
Book: Within That City
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. But apart altogether from that particular disturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed against the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly “in the know.” To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant.
Book: All Things Considered
The fruits of scepticism are not at all what amiable sceptics in the universities expect. Scepticism does not produce a gentle dilettante society in which every body moves softly and hesitantly, full of unresolved doubt about the value of what they do and careful not to molest anybody else. What happens is the opposite. The professorial scepticism flows out from the academies as a dissolvent of human rights.
quoted in Arnold Lunn, Within That City
For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.
Book: The Superstition of Divorce
We are supposed to live in a skeptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. The “death of God,” or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church—from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of “The Da Vinci Code”.
Either truth is our highest epistemic goal and there is a state of the person called “believing truly”, or else we have no epistemic goal and we can engage in various cognitive projects without being held to an absolute standard by which those projects can be judged.
Book: C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason
The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man’s higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.
Book: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 60.
Toleration is the virtue of those who believe in nothing.
With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can…
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can…
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Book: “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, Chapter I: “The Anaesthetic of Familiarity”
I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly.
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.