Themes From Thinkers Who Are Not Believers

If, as Socrates claimed, the unexamined life is not worth living, then the religious corollary may be equally true: The unexamined belief is not worth holding. As the candles of Hanukkah are about to be lighted, choirs practice their renditions of “O Holy Night,” manger scenes are erected on front lawns across the city and Ramadan proceeds, one is struck by this panoply of belief.

What is the elusive ingredient intrinsic to religious faith?

According to “Atheism: A Reader,” a collection of essays that spans the last three centuries to provide an atheistic critique of religion, belief may be simply a knee-jerk reaction to the existential horror of life, and religion itself little more than a sham designed to prey on human fear and superstition.

Included in the collection are essays from some of the West’s most learned thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche writes an angry commentary on religion’s correlation of scientific thought with sin, while Charles Darwin offers a touching personal essay on his slow conversion from belief to doubt. George Eliot gives a funny, ironic and stinging indictment of a preacher in her day, a narrative that will warm the heart of readers who have experienced similar frustrations with illogical and inconsistent arguments put forth by some of today’s sermonizers. Eliot points out that preachers have an immense advantage over other public speakers. “The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans,” she writes. “Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the defendant. . . . Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience slip quietly out one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: No one may hiss, no one may depart.”

Bertrand Russell forcefully disputes the idea of God’s existence based on the first-cause argument. According to Russell, the supposition that, because the world exists, a Creator must also exist is a flawed argument not unlike the story of the elephant and the tortoise: “[A] certain Hindu thinker believed the Earth rested on an elephant. When asked what the elephant rested on, he replied that it rested on a tortoise. When asked what the tortoise rested upon, he said, ‘I am tired of this. Suppose we change the subject.’ ” Russell equates believers’ inability to provide hard scientific proof of their faith with the same kind of subject-switching, using emotionalism and vague sentiment to replace facts.

Clarence Darrow, defense lawyer in the Scopes trial of 1925, writes a humorous and biting rebuttal to an argument put forth by the Lord’s Day Alliance, a group that promoted legislation prohibiting ballgames, museum visits and other enjoyments on Sundays. One of the ludicrous examples he details is the alliance’s assertion that, during a day’s work, a laborer expends more oxygen than he can inhale. “It follows, of course,” Darrow says of the argument he’s contesting, “that if he keeps on working six days a week, for the same amount of time each day, he will be out a considerable amount of oxygen, and the only way he can make it up is to take a day off on Sunday and go to church.”

To argue their points, the writers settle on a number of recurring themes, many of which deserve attention: that religion has perpetrated interminable harm in the name of God; that the capacity for moral behavior is not limited to believers; that if God exists and deserves credit for all that is virtuous, God is equally responsible for evil; that many religions, and specifically Christianity, have had a demeaning influence on the social status of women; that the belief in an afterlife is a case of unreasonable hope in the face of mortality; that there is no way to prove God’s existence apart from mawkish and unscientific terms; and finally, that all religious feeling is simply wishful thinking in powerful combination with human anxiety about those things we cannot define.

Reading well-argued and thoughtful essays on atheism, agnosticism and skepticism during the swell of holiday fever may not strike some as a spiritual activity; still, it seems a wholly worthwhile and important endeavor.

These essays--philosophically rigorous and often dense reading--may cause some to question tenets of their faith, which atheists and more than a few deists might argue is a good thing. By subjecting one’s beliefs to some of the world’s strongest arguments against faith, one risks the intellectual shake-up necessary to move on to a more authentic stage of belief--or to cross over to uncertainty.

Thought-provoking as the essays are, still it’s clear that the writers were not able to explain that elusive something that causes believers to believe.

The bottom line is this: God either is or God isn’t, and belief--that intangible, ineffable ingredient of faith--is something other than logic. Whether that imprecision is in its favor or not depends on which side of the atheism-deism fence you sit on. Clearly, though, the concept that belief either surpasses or undermines logic doesn’t make faith any less convincing to those who do believe.

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Bernadette Murphy is a fiction writer, currently completing “Venice Street,” a novel.