How To Be An Agnostic

Bad Faith

The problem for the medieval ‘proofs’ of God is that, in the
present day, it is easy to lose sight of the religious milieu in
which their authors expected them to be pondered. The cloister
has been replaced by the classroom; fl ickering candles by fl uores-
cent lights; the prie-dieu by the projector. With these changes,
the meditation comes to be taken as a strict argument – for the
existence of God. If you are a believer, as Anselm was, then this
is the start of a refl ection on the nature of God’s existence –
since existence is the greatest attribute God can have. Certainly
this is a refl ection that would take the believer beyond reason,
which is to say that it will throw up all kinds of rational conun-
drums. But then that is the whole point: if someone’s thoughts
on God seem logical, reasonable and clear, then only one thing
can be said for sure; the meditation is not on God but on some
reduced concept of divinity, an idol.

After atheism

I can remember being similarly irritated by the insistence of
theologians that to read the proofs about God in a literal way
was to misread them. Logic is logic, I thought; bad logic is bad
logic. By implication I also believed that reason was supreme,
and human reason had replaced God. For a while, I concluded
that if God’s unknowability meant that anything that may be
said about God is also a reason for not saying it at all, then that
itself was good reason to be an atheist.
However, in time, atheism ceased to be, for me, such a desir-
able thing to assert, though not because of any proofs. After
all, proofs tend to confi rm minds not change them. Rather, the
complex of irrational and psychological ire that had fi red my
revulsion of God abated, and then died – for equally elusive and
poorly understood reasons as it fi rst arose. Having said that, at
least one thought did stand out in my mind during this time
that is perhaps worth remarking upon. Part of the reason that
atheism lost its appeal was because I became increasingly con-
scious that to be an atheist seemed to entail denying more than