By Crispin Sartwell

I am indeed an atheist. But I am not a rationalist per se. I acknowledge that my own fundamental beliefs about the nature of the universe are not fully rationally defensible.

I have a great deal of respect for religious faith. Only it had better be of this kind: I believe in spite of the world, of my own senses, and of the rational arguments. The claim that any given religious belief system - Christianity, let us say - is rationally defensible is ludicrous.

In every belief system, miracles abound. You can't throw a fucking brick without hitting a miracle. The miracles in the gospels are no better or worse-attested than those of Zoroastrianism or voodoo, which raises people from the dead every weekend. The gospels provide no reason at all to believe Christianity over any other religion that writes its own story.

The familiar arguments for God's existence, such as the ontological argument, the argument from design, the argument from first cause, and so on, are fallacious in my view. In *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion*, Hume explodes the argument from design as thoroughly as any argument in the history of human thought has ever been exploded. And yet people keep coming back with it.

Even if first cause or the ontological argument were good, which they're not, they do not establish any particular monotheism, and the route from there to the gospels is a long one.

One argument I do take seriously derives from personal experience, as in "I talked to Jesus yesterday (and he talked back)." That's a hard one to argue against, though we might remark that the animists do just as well with rocks.

Finally, my atheism derives from my own inchoate sense of what the world is.

I cannot accept a dualistic picture in which the world consists of two different sort of thing - matter and spirit - and in which spirit is regarded as higher than matter. That point of view is absolutely world-hating and in my view arises from the pain we feel as animal bodies in a physical world.

And the world looks to me like it is perfectly morally indifferent: like it has no moral content or orientation whatever. Good and innocent people suffer horribly and die slowly while evil people prosper. And though this might all sort itself out cosmically, that does not make the horrible suffering or the undeserved pleasure any less real. I really do not see how one can look squarely at reality and see in it the hand of a perfectly good and all-powerful being.

I have spent much of my life studying Zen Buddhism and Taoism, and not for merely academic purposes. These belief systems are anything but rational: in fact they make fundamental use of paradox, as does Kierkegaard's Christianity. But they also manifest a deep respect for reality, and refusal of its transcendence. One might say that the transcendence they promise is achieved in total imminence.

classic sources for atheists:

David Hume, *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion*
One of the great tours de force in the history of argument, takes down all of the going arguments, especially the argument from design (the view that the universe is well-made or so beautiful that it must be the product of intelligent design).

Hume, "On Miracles"
Don't believe the hype.

Friedrich Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morals*
A devastating reconsideration of the history of Chistianity.

Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"
Tears all the arguments to shreds in a fifteen-minute read.
text