Atheism
Stephen Batchelor
I have never believed in God. My family was not religious and did not attend Church. I was exempted from “Scripture” classes at school. When I was about ten, I joined the school Prayer Society, probably out of curiosity about what was forbidden, but quit after one or two failed attempts to summon up sufficient fervour for the deity. I could not see what the vicars and priests I met gained from their faith or how it made them any different from anyone else. It may have been the time (the 1960’s), but they appeared either nervous and insincere, distracted and aloof, or just bumblingly good natured.
Despite not being brought up a Christian, I was raised in a Christian society, albeit of the disintegrating Anglican variety. Unlike, say, a young man raised in an exclusively Buddhist culture, the word “God” is not devoid of meaning for me. When the crucified Jesus cries out: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I do not find this an incomprehensible utterance. Even without a theological conception of God, I have a fair idea of what the man on the cross means. Or when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil…
I do not think he is speaking nonsense. I am moved by the plight of Christ just as my skin tingles on hearing the poet’s words. Yet “God” is not a word that springs to my lips except in moments of trivial blasphemy. I have the same difficulty with words like “holy,” “divine” or “sacred,” let alone new-fangled variants like “numinous.” I cannot shake off the suspicion that all such terms are devious attempts to smuggle in something extra and magical to adorn an experience that, deep down, is felt to be inadequate.
God is one of humanity’s great solutions to the problem of lack. In terms of filling that aching hole of meaninglessness or despair, God seems to be the best deal on offer. At one stroke, belief in God provides (a) an answer to the question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing? (b) a sense of deep fulfilment and meaning in one’s life, (c) an assurance that the Creator of the universe is intimately concerned with my own self, and (d) a promise that after death I will gain eternal life. Whether one’s God is of the Abrahamic or brahmanic variety, whether you are of a devotional or mystical temperament, the consolation achieved through believing in Him is essentially the same. Theologians of different traditions go to great lengths to point out how incommensurable are their respective conceptions of God, but in practice whether you surrender to Allah or seek union with brahman, you are placing your trust in a higher reality, a divine truth, that transcends this ephemeral, ambiguous and tragic world.
Theism is more than just an intellectual theory propounded by those who explicitly believe in God. Its roots lie in the human craving for permanence, certainty, absolute truth and the survival of the self after death. I define theism as
an intuitively compelling system of belief and consolation focused around conviction in the existence of privileged religious objects.
Such an object (no matter whether it be called God, the Absolute, the Non-dual, or Pure Consciousness) is believed somehow to transcend the world of everyday experience while at the same time providing a source, meaning, value, and purpose to that world. But this is impossible. For inside a contingent world, i.e. within a closed causal system, there is no place for anything non-contingent or transcendent. And as for what lies outside a contingent world, nothing intelligible can be said. Theists are obliged to present their privileged objects in the guise of the unprivileged objects of the mundane world. In the bad old days of patriarchy, God was presented as “Father” or “Lord” whereas in the self-centred culture of today the guise of choice is “Intelligence” or “Consciousness.” In both cases, a specific feature of the contingent world is raised to a privileged status and then endowed with religious significance.
The usefulness of the word “God” is thus limited to its role in certain ancestral language games. I reject any conception of God that implies some sort of super-personal or impersonal Reality, which lies beyond the natural and linguistic world, whether “out there” or deep “in here” somewhere. I agree with the theologian Don Cupitt that
there is no One Great Truth any more, and there never will be again. … The old metaphysics of God was destroyed by Hume and Kant and will not be revived. (After God, p. 83)
For post-modern thinkers like Cupitt, God language is only legitimate when used non-realistically. If someone still finds it morally useful to live her life as if she were in the constant sight of God, i.e. in the presence of a symbolic figure who embodies one’s truest values and aspirations, that need not be a problem. As long as one recognizes that “God” is just a figure of speech, a useful psycho-ethical strategy to help one lead a good life, there will be little danger of slipping back into the naïve realism of God as a benign, invisible Superperson who answers one’s prayers. Yet once God has been reduced to little more than a vestigial echo of an outdated view of the world to which one still happens to be attached, this augurs the end of theistic thinking. For why should the word “God” continue to be so favoured? Why not substitute “God” with “Truth,” “Goodness,” “Life,” or, for that matter, “Buddha”? Once stripped of its metaphysical underpinning, what does the word “God” say that the others can’t?
Having been brought up not believing in God, I have no particular axe to grind with Him. I just find the idea unintelligible and of little use. I feel no need to rail against the deity or condemn people who believe in Him as misguided and deluded. Some for whom atheism has become a quasi-religious creed strike me as being as much in thrall to God through their rejection of Him as are believers through their faith in Him. As hard as they try, such atheists cannot seem to get God out of their system. They appear either incapable or unwilling just to let Him go.
Nor does being an atheist imply that I lack any sense of the wonder or mystery of the universe. The faithful often seem genuinely appalled at how empty life must be for those who reject the Good Lord. On the contrary, by getting God out of the way, one can start to appreciate the mind-stopping fact of their being not just something rather than nothing, but brains, malachite sunbirds and icicles rather than nothing. By eliminating God, one removes the dumb certitude of belief, the pious arrogance of having all the answers, both of which cause the faculty of awe to wither. To be perplexed at the universe, to be surprised by each detail of life, requires the ability to drop all a priori opinions and views and be open to what arises and vanishes before our senses each moment.
The last refuge of those who can’t let go of God is called “pantheism,” the belief that God is everywhere and everything. Pantheists replace belief in a transcendent God, who is wholly other than His creation, with the belief that God and the universe are one and the same. This last ditched attempt to hold on to God might be comforting but it doesn’t make much sense. If God and the universe are identical, then what does the concept “God” add to the concept “universe”? What does the word “God” convey that the word “universe” fails to convey? To call the universe “God” seems to be just a coded way of saying that life itself, in all its abundance, beauty and diversity, is what one values more highly than anything else. Or in the language of the theologian Paul Tillich, it is that about which one is ultimately concerned.
Stephen’s most recent publication is Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (New York: Spiegel & Grau)