Wanted: more atheists

One of the perks of being a philosopher is that you get a quite a lot of contact with a creature who, as the last post suggests, is really quite rare in the United States: the (relatively) honest atheist. I haven't done my own survey, but I'm willing to bet that a very disproportionately high percentage of academic philosophers not only disbelieve in God but, even more unusually, don't even talk to Him.

CS Lewis sometimes draws a distinction between those who are close to God (or to union with God) by resemblance and those who are close by approach. The difference is fairly intuitive, but might be seen most clearly by imagining, say two pianists who both share a goal of learning to play the Moonlight Sonata. One does this by taking a year of piano lessons and then diving right into the piece, eventually producing something that is sloppy and filled with mistakes, but that is at least recognizable in places as an attempt at the Moonight Sonata. The second student devotes his time instead to building up his technical skills and precision, and takes up the piece only when he deems himself ready. His work with scales and arpeggios won't resemble the Moonight Sonata as much as the more impatient, lazier student's production. But he, more than the other, will actually be approaching the level where he can really play the piece well. So, one is closer to his goal by resemblance, and the other by approach. It may be, as the famous quote from Revelation suggests, that something similar applies to the dedicated atheist and the lukewarm believer.

Philosophers, poets and other ideologues have, in fact, been known to undergo serious intellectual conversions of a sort rarely seen among the less intellectually inclined. Consider TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or Alasdair MacIntyre. The truth is that atheism, as an intellectual position, is psychologically difficult to hold. I'm reminded of the first chapter of Pope Benedict's (very inappropriately named) Introduction to Christianity. Using the Little Flower as an example, he explains how even very dedicated Christians are still subject at times to attacks of doubt. But on the other side, he says, the atheist can never escape from the haunting worry that, after all, it might all be true. Ratzinger tells a story of a young Jewish atheist who, after proudly pressing his arguments against a number of Jewish faithful, goes to see a famous Rabbi. The Rabbi tells him (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, because I don't have the text in front of me), "I won't try to refute all your clever arguments. But you know, it just might after all be true." This simple challenge is too much for the young man, who soon afterwards becomes a believer.

But if being a true atheist is hard, being a lazy and negligent believer is easy. "I feel like I made a sort of deal with God when I was a little girl," one of my Peace Corps friends told me cheerfully. "I'll always believe in him, but he won't rush me to make up my mind about churches and stuff." Unsurprisingly, she didn't seem to have bothered to go to any church for years, nor did she take dishonesty or sexual promiscuity to be particularly problematic. Wonder what sort of documentation she has on that contract.

When life is going well for you, it's relatively easy to more or less forget about God, or to remember him only long enough to tell yourself what you want to hear ("God's a pretty nice guy... I'm sure he likes me just the way I am.") It's difficult to cut through that kind of poisonous complacency. Sometimes intense suffering is the only scalpel sharp enough to do it. Sometimes even that isn't enough.

It should be said that academic philosophers aren't necessarily all that honest in their views. Vanity and desire for professional advancement tend to play a big role in their deciding what they think about the world. But I sometimes think the world might be helped by having more honest-to-goodness atheists out there, arguing their position with force and even with vitriol (think Christopher Hitchens.) When people are forced to defend their belief in God against serious opposition, they may start to take heaven, hell, theism and atheism, damnation and salvation a little more seriously. But the bottom line is, one way or another, we've got to get Americans feeling less good about themselves.

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