How To Be An Agnostic
However, Baggini is striking because he admits uncertainty.
Many atheists who put their thoughts on paper are quite sure
about the God they do not believe in. It is for this reason that
the effect religion has on them is nothing short of emetic.
The journalist Martin Krasnik, who secured a rare interview
with the novelist Philip Roth, made the mistake of asking him
whether he was religious? ‘I’m exactly the opposite of religious,’
Roth erupted. ‘I’m anti-religious. I fi nd religious people hideous.
I hate the religious lies. It’s all a big lie.’
Polly Toynbee, a leading British newspaper columnist, rou-
tinely rounds on religion as a cause of evil. After the bombs in
London on 7 July 2005 she wrote: ‘All religions are prone to it,
given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the
absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not
be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians
and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent
on wiping out heathens.’
The polymath Jonathan Miller felt so strongly about it that
he made a television series on the history of disbelief. He repre-
sents those for whom religion’s supposed supernaturalism and
belief in life after death is offensive. ‘The notion is infantile. I’m
amazed that people who can fi nd their way to the toilet without
advice can entertain such logically incoherent ideas,’ he said in
an interview with the London Times.
These champions of the Enlightenment are often far from
rational in the way they bludgeon belief. Could someone who
has sifted even a little of the evidence available still say with ease
that religion is simply a lie, or that Christianity will inevitably
spawn suicide bombers, or that the theology which has engaged
various intellectual giants is logically incoherent? Maybe the
assertions are made only for the sake of their rhetoric force. But,
if so, that only pushes the irrationality back a step for it raises
the question why faith requires such overblown refutation. One
is tempted to call into question the atheist’s faith in reason.
There is also, I suspect, a deeper reason for their frustration
and for God’s irritating refusal to die. It is paradoxical. Like