Bad Faithmany religious people, many atheists want certainty in a sphere
of existence in which certainty is not to be found. This means,
in turn, that they focus their attacks on a series of man-made
deities about which they can be certain because they have made
them. Of course, these ‘gods’ – of lies, killers or infantile fools –
are sometimes the same gods to which some religious people
are prone. However, a moment’s refl ection shows that they are
clearly false gods. The real challenge for the atheist, then, is
to establish a knock-out blow for a decent conception of God.
Even Julian Baggini, who resists the demonising way of attack-
ing religion, still insists that religion is at fault for refusing to be
judged by ‘the standards of proof and evidence that intelligent
discourse relies upon’. He would require a god he could believe
in to be less than God, namely, subject to human reason. Little
wonder that he remains an atheist.
The challenge for atheists has been articulated with great wit
by Denys Turner, now at Yale, but before Professor of Divinity
in the University of Cambridge. His inaugural lecture to the
Norris-Hulse chair was entitled ‘How to be an atheist’. He has
never met, he declared, an atheist who does not believe in a god
that would be worth believing in to start with.
As an example of what he means, consider the idea of God
implicit in Nicholas Fearn’s book, Philosophy: the Latest Answers
to the Oldest Questions. It is a good book in many ways, seeking
to take a general audience on a journey through what the great-
est living philosophers have to say about being human. Fearn,
who I presume to be an atheist, does not consider God a ques-
tion to address head-on. Like belief in fl ying saucers or the
power of crystals, I imagine he would say that to pay it serious
attention would only be to pay it respect. However, given that
God is one of the oldest questions humans have asked them-
selves, and that it is certainly a question plenty of philosophers
are still asking, theological matters inevitably make several
appearances in his book. This forces Fearn to get theological
on occasion, which in turn exposes the divinity that he objects
to as woefully reactionary and narrow-minded. His deity is an