Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 17 June 2008

John Humphrys

John Humphrys explained his book In God We Doubt in the Sunday Times (online at Times Online). The rubric said:

He went looking for God and ended up an angry agnostic—unable to believe but enraged by the arrogance of militant atheists.

It’s a good summary of the book in one sentence. Humphrys is the righly highly respected BBC political interviewer and anchor of its Today programme on Radio 4. He is an ex-Christian, now an agnostic but not an atheist, and his sympathies, though he stands on the fence as agnostics do, is with the Christians. This book explains the problems Christianity offered him, but it is primarily a polemic against what he calls militant atheists like Ricard Dawkins.

Atheists, he says, make little effort to hide their disdain for believers, and “I don’t think that is either fair orreasonable”. He ought to read his own text. It is easy to be an atheist, he says elsewhere, because the case for God is full of holes, and you do not have to be clever to see them. Mostly you do not have to think at all, and fundamentalists do not. So, while rejecting the atheistic accusation that believers in God are stupid, he is saying the same thing since you do not have to be clever to see the faults in religious dogma. Plainly, you do not have to be stupid to believe, but it helps. He also says it is hard to see the purpose of the world, but tells the atheists not to blame its evils on religion. So religion is all right for the agnostic, it seems.

Humphrys was a working class Welsh kid brought up in Cardiff just after the War. His mother was religious but not his father, so he was made to attend church by his mother. He listened to the Anglican priest intoning the sentence that encapsulated Christian belief:

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life.

Christianity and Death

Christianity is that God sent His son to promise believers everlasting life. Fear of dying, and belief that God will save them via His son are the keys to it. Soon, though, young Humphrys would gaze at the night sky and wonder about infinity, and about the same time realized he would eventually die, and wondered what the point of life was. Believers always have difficulty with randomness. Humphrys quotes Blaise Pascal wondering…

…why I am set down here rather than elsewhere… why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and will come after me. On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more. All I know is that I must die soon, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape.

It really is not hard to understand death once you realize life cannot be permanent, and no healthy adult human being does not realize that life on earth is necessarily finite, whatever they imagine imaginary life to be! We pass life on to our children, and so we must die so that our children can live. Otherwise we all would eventually die from lack of the resources of life, primarily energy. Regretably, the religious insistance on the sanctity of birth and the devilishness of death is pushing us towards the crisis of unsustainability anyway. The time will come when we can no longer sustain huge populations of human beings and then the consequences for our descendants will be too awful to contemplate.

Scientifically, there is a tide of chaos measured as entropy that is swilling over us and carrying us away into oblivion, but energy temporarily can hold it back, and even build sand castles as it advances over the beach. Once the enrgy ceases, the sand castles are washed away into the chaos that preceded them as entropy asserts its flow into nothingness. We are the sand castles, and each of us must die to provide the materials and energy for the next generation of us. That, to an atheist is a perfectly noble and acceptable thought. We die proud to know we have made way for others. It is not altruism because we have no choice in the matter, but willingly accepting the fact of it as a necessity of reality makes our own demise understandable, and acceptable.

Humphrys tells us that even though he stopped attending church as a young man because he had better things to do, he did pray every single night without fail for half a century. But even the praying began to seem pointless to him. And so it must be to anyone who stops for a moment to think about it. If God has to answer prayers, he has to alter the world he made and so it was not perfect, and nor can He be. If he has to correct injustice, the world is not just. Most of all, though, if God is what the Christians take Him to be then He cannot answer prayers. To respond to them signifies that he is not omniscient, for an omniscient God has known your prayer from the beginning of time, and could therefore to have made it unnecessary. So far as God is concerned what you are praying for cannot be granted, or He would have already granted it. If God is omniscient even so, then He is refusing to answer prayers even though He already knew about them, so He is not good, or he is unable to answer them, so He is not omnipotent. None of this deters the believer, even though it deterred young Humphrys.

So, aided by his experiences as a reporter of such awful tragedies as Aberfan, when a whole school of innocent primary and infant children were killed by a mountain of pit spoil rolling down a Welsh hillside to engulf them, Humphrys ceased being a Christian. The sight of starving African children, and the mutilation of young people for reasons of religion and war confirmed his loss of faith. Most cynical of all perhaps were soldiers who easily justified the hypocritical killing of enemy women and children, though they would have been naturally outraged if it had happened to their own. He began to wonder “Where is God?”.

Atheism, Belief and Skepticism

Every atheist must agree with him wholeheartedly. Every atheist has come to this same question. They answer “Nowhere!”. All of these enormities are among the reasons why atheists conclude there is no God. But not Humphrys. He lost his Christianity but wants to retain his belief! He decides to kill the messenger.

Atheists are militant, quite unlike most Christians, albeit not fundamentalists, whom he dislikes just as much as atheists. Militant means aggressive, bellicose, violent, extreme, fierce, zealous, fanatical! Humphrys, do not forget is an award winning journalist. He might not be an expert on theology but he is an expert with words, and his use of militant with atheist shows his utterly distorted view, his basic hatred of them, indeed, a hatred he does not hide. Yet, though personally finding unanswerable faults with Christianity, he remains benignly disposed to the Christians. He manages it by discounting all but anecdotal evidence, and citing carefully selected sympathetic anecdotes about Christian experiences.

But to seem fair, he is keen to depict himself as a doubter—an agnostic, and, like Christians themselves, finds comfort that he is “far from alone”. The response of listeners to his series on the Today programme that was the basis of this book was overwhelming.

It felt a bit like putting my fingers on the religious pulse of the nation, and the pulse is still strong. However empty the pews may be there are plenty of people with a sincere and passionate belief.

There are also plenty of people who think it’s all a load of nonsense, he feels obliged to add. Many considered themselves “doubters”, and, towards the end of his book, he becomes clear that a doubter is a believer though not a believer in the impossible myths of Christianity, but a believer in “something out there”. And like him, they are all sincere, these doubters. They are devout sceptics!

One might have thought the devout skeptics (I prefer the “k” of the original Greek to ensure it is not confused with “septic”) were the militant atheists, but no, they are the restrained or apathetic majority—the agnostics. They feel beleagered because the pious Christians have no doubts, and he finds the atheists, all militant of course, also have no doubts. Humphrys has doubts, and so he calls himself a “failed atheist”.

Now Humphrys is an extemely competent journalist and writer, and this book is well worth a read by anyone, not least because it is an easy read, from Humphrys’ easy style of writing and his deliberate avoidance of technicalities. His profession means he has to have a reasonable grasp of many things, and science is among them. Yet, as a skeptical man but a self styled “failed atheist”, he seems not to appreciate that the scientific outlook is precisely one of skepticism, and skepticism means that one does not believe anything unless there is adequate proof to compel belief. He does not understand therefore that atheists do not have to assert they know without question there is no God. They have merely to accept the skeptical position that there is insufficient proof to compel belief in God, and, when there is insufficient proof, no one should believe anything!

Humphrys will be familiar with the philosophical truth that it is impossible to prove a negative. John Humphrys cannot prove that I am not accompanied everywhere I go by a man sized talking rabbit called Harvey, and I cannot prove that Christians are not accompanied everywhere they go with a condensed infinity that they call Jarvey, or even His son Jesus. The skeptical view is that, without compelling proof, there is neither Harvey nor Jarvey, nor indeed Jesus! Moreover, it is not hard to show that Jesus, at least as presented by the Christians, is a deliberate distortion, and that the Jewish religion is even more grossly false, both of them on the balance of evidence considered objectively and not with the background of Christian and Jewish indoctrination, often from childhood.

We have to conclude that millions of Jews and Christians, and even doubters like Humphrys have been misled throughout history, and the reason is also evident. They are scams to make people rich and powerful, and then to keep them rich and powerful. Believers might get comfort out of being defrauded, but atheists think fraud is a crime that is worse for taking advantage of people’s distress.

Atheistic Attitudes

Anyway, Humphrys comes to itemizing together with his answers, what are the attitudes of the militant atheists who “hold believers in contempt” By way of an obvious apology for a ludicrous list, he says “I make no apology if I have oversimplified their views: it’s what they do to believers all the time.” If it were true, Humphrys says he subscribes to the “two wrongs make a right school of Christian apologetic”, demolishing any high ground he was trying to claim:

1. Believers are mostly naive or stupid. Or, at least, they’re not as clever as atheists.
   This is so clearly untrue it’s barely worth bothering with. Richard Dawkins, in his bestselling The God Delusion, was reduced to producing a “study” by Mensa that purported to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief. He also claimed that only a very few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god. So what? Some believers are undoubtedly stupid (witness the creationists) but I’ve met one or two atheists I wouldn’t trust to change a lightbulb.
   Humphrys claims to be familiar with statistics, but here he dismisses statistical evidence that does not suit him with a sweep of the pen reference to one or two atheists he has met. He confirmed the essential stupidly of Christians himself.
2. The few clever ones are pathetic because they need a crutch to get them through life.
   Don’t we all? Some use booze rather than the Bible. It doesn’t prove anything about either.
   Is Humphrys approving booze as a crutch to get through life. I will guess that he is not, so why should another type of crutch be any more acceptable. We should be teaching people how to get through life free of crutches.
3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.
   Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.
   It doesn’t mean they are wrong if you refuse to accept plain evidence, and that is what Humphrys is doing along with the believers. It suggest that he is one of the atheists who has suddenly realized he is in a foxhole, and he’s trying to furtively back out of his atheism. Even so, the foxhole slur is no more than that. Atheists accept death as final, not least because eternal life must be hell.
4. They have been brainwashed into believing. There is no such thing as a “Christian child”, for instance—just a child whose parents have had her baptised.
   True, and many children reject it when they get older. But many others stay with it.
   Dear me, this really is pathetic. A bland acceptance of brainwashing young minds into false beliefs, defended by a poor poltroon who cannot get past his own indoctrination.
5. They have been bullied into believing.
   This is also true in many cases but you can’t actually bully someone into believing—just into pretending to believe.
   Children can easily be bullied into belief. Their minds are still plastic and unformed. This is again pathetic self justification from Humphrys.
6. If we don’t wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.
   Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we’ve survived monotheist religion for 4,000 years or so, and I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.
   The supposed atheistic assertion is another of Humphrys’ straw men. It is rather the belief of plenty of US Christians that civilization is under threat from atheists. We are now in a situation where Bush, or some other Christian lunatic, could decide God told him it was time for Armageddon. It is still on the cards, and that is the atheists’ worry.
7. Trust me: I’m an atheist.
   Why?
   Because it is safer than trusting someone who says, “Trust me, I’m a Christian!”

At this point Humphrys admits he is still a believer, explaining the whole pitiable exercise:

Doubters are left in the deeply unsatisfactory position of finding the existence of God unprovable and implausible, and the comfort of faith unachievable. But at the same time we find the reality of belief undeniable.

Failed Atheism

Humphrys knows and admires another self styled failed atheist called Giles Fraser, but one who failed more spectacularly—he is an Anglican vicar. Humprhys is proper working class but admires this man, Fraser, who, from his description, is a typical upper crust twit who decided to slum it and play revolution in the 1980s for a bit of fun, and so joined the Trotskyites, passing along the usual channels of the modern neocon crypto fascist. It does not mean Fraser is one, of course, but it leaves any political as well as religious skeptic suspicious. Anyone who can begin in one belief, political or religious, and end up on the opposite wing is mentally unstable, an unprincipled charlatan, a buffoon or a combination of them!

These types are mainly joiners, people who have no fundamental principles, and so join different clubs, societies and sects until they find one that they can exploit best. Fraser, a privileged public schoolboy (rich private schoolboy to Americans) called himself a Marxist, joined one of the several Trotskyist groups who were mincing about at that time, no doubt supported by the CIA, then found his faith in Marxism collapsed, and instead he decided to study Nietzsche and do theology as a hobby, suddenly finding a faith in Christianity had impressed itself upon him. He claimed to be genuinely puzzled by it!

Now, despite Humphrys being angry at the scorn shown by militant atheists towards stupid Christians, this man Fraser, an Anglican priest, he admires, though Fraser admits that he, and “many like him in the Anglican Church”, share his scorn—“if not contempt”—for traditional “stupid” Christians, who think they know more about the nature of the universe than clever atheists like Dawkins. Fraser believes in God as a Christian vicar, but “cheerfully” admits that he cannot prove He exists, saying frankly that the “so called proofs of God’s existence are all rubbish”, and nor can he prove the resurrection of Jesus Christ! And Evangelicals?…

Evangelicals have misunderstood the Bible. They turn it into some bloody Ikea manual.

And atheists?…

Atheists have the best arguments, which makes belief such a precarious thing.

But the failed atheist remains unconvinced by the superiority of atheism. For Fraser, faith is not a belief that certain propositions about the world are true, nor is it grounded in rational argument, nor is there any good line of reasoning that can persuade someone to believe. So what is it? …

Fraser and most Christians, Humphrys tells us, “believe because they believe”. Amazing!

Humphrys assures us it is not about intellect or learning, it is a comfort blanket for immature humans. It is what religion offers at its most simple. Atheists commonly say people believe because of the way they were brought up. Children are credulous and accept what they are told. As they grow older they get rid of their comfort blankets and often the beliefs with which they were inculcated. But not everyone does that and some who do are “born again” later.

Love

Believers unlike atheists are not content with the wonders of Nature they see around them, and can freely indulge in and enjoy with no attached feelings of guilt. Great music and art does not impress them, and atheists, who argue it ought to, are missing the point, according to Humphrys, who evidently has suddenly found what the point is. Believers might enjoy all that but they want more! What Humphrys has discovered is that they want love!

Well, don’t we all, but the point of Christian belief, Humphrys and Christians seem to have missed, is that they are required to give love, not to want it. They are supposed to love others even when they themselves are suffering, and what annoys atheists above all is that they simply do not love others in general despite their self righteousness and boasting. Most people are quite capable of loving close relatives and friends, but to love others is all together harder, and few Christians do it. They spout on about it but do not do it themselves. Quite the opposite, they often do awful undescribable things, and there is no time when it has been clearer than the present when meretricious Christians like Bush, Blair and Brown have misruled two of the main countries of the western world.

Of course, Humphrys, despite pretending to be in the middle of the argument, now implies that militant atheists have no idea what love is.

Couldn’t Dawkins make a case for love being a fiction, a function of biology and selfish genes? There is something deeply mistaken about thinking love is simply reducible to the chemistry of the brain.

I have no doubt that such a case can be made and is indeed what love is. Love is the natural affection that advanced vertebrates, like human beings, feel for their closest of kin, and, when they are social animals, like human beings, even for other humans that are not close kin. The extension from kin to others in the social group is necessary to bond the group together, and the group needs to bond together for security, not just from attack from rogue groups but also of food supply and help.

Exactly why is this love, the real love that we all experience out of necessity, different from some fictionaized “spiritual” version of it. Like all things natural, the believer, and evidently the doubter, can only appreciate an imaginary version of it, the supernatural version. It is a sign of immaturity, the infantile belief in spirits rather than reality. The comfort blanket is right. It is the thumb sucking child in us all, that some of us cast off to see what is real about us, but others never can do. That is why atheists call believers stupid and simple. They refuse to grow up, and it seems more than a coincidence that Christianity from the begiining frankly encouraged believers to be children and foolish. These are matters that Humphrys does not address.

Then he extends this mysterious emotion of love into a metaphor for faith. Like all of Bishop Butler, it is a false anology, but Christians are particularly fond of everything that is false.

Love, like faith, is to make more of a commitment than one can prove.

And love, the love between a man and his wife, the Christians will enforce for life, even when the two grow to hate each other, and the children suffer consequently. As Humphrys points out, Moslems in their Sharia law will enforce the Moslem faith, on pain of death, even when someone choses to apostatize, just as Christianity did for most of its existence. Christians similarly murdered people who demurred, though rather more cruelly by burning them alive while they were tied to a stake and could not escape.

For the great doubter, Humphrys, that is all old hat that we need no longer address. It is not what atheists think. Patriarchal religions, as Humphrys knows, all have the same roots and similar fundamental beliefs. If, at present we are enlightened, it might easily just be a temporary phase, and atheists are anxious about that. Defenders of the faith might think they are getting kudos from God, but all atheists can see in history is kudos from the devil.

Who are Clever?

Militant atheists seem to have enormous difficulty in understanding why so many people—many of them just as clever as they are—manage to live by their beliefs.

That is true up to a point, or it is for me, I admit, but the point at which we yield is that we know the power of childhood indoctrination, and the psychological power of the fear of death. People who are intelligent are not necessarily intelligent enough to break away from the indoctrination of their infancy. But, contrary to Humphrys’ disdainful rejection of the evidence, the more intelligent people are the less inclined to believe they are. Very few of the topmost decile of intelligence are faithful. It stands to reason.

However, childhood indoctrination or fear of death can withstand the doubts of some people just a few rungs from the top of the intellectual community. These people might be as clever as John Humphrys or perhaps more so, but cleverness as expressed by ability to disdain death, is something that some people cannot abide. They recognize that there is something weak about fearing something as natural and as inevitable as death, and they might even secretly realize that their comfort blanket is merely that. Even so, they are too scared to let go, and the pressure from clergyumen encourages them not to. I wonder why?

Belief

Humphrys thinks that people do not want to be bothered thinking about such things. They just want to believe. But why?

In spite of the terrible things that have been done in the name of God over the millennia, religious belief brings immeasurable comfort.

When certain people, mainly Christians, say they do not like the threats to them posed by untermenschen (Jews and Gypsies in the wrong place) or Gooks (Vietnamese in the wrong place) or Al Qaeda (Arabs in the wrong place) or Taliban (Afghans in the wrong place) and mercilessly kill them, usually with vastly superior armaments, what is the relevance of the comfort allegedly brought by the same deluded beliefs that cause all this avoidable mayhem? Atheists say that the equalizing of these two supposed sides of Christianity is itself deluded and shows a selfish disregard for other people, a lack of love in fact! But that is to be expected from Christianity which is in truth an utterly selfish belief.

What is important to Christians is their own salvation, and the regard for others that is supposed to accompany it is quite forgotten by Christians other than a minority. It is this minority that is inevitably cited in amelioration of the appalling harm done by the bulk of the religion, together with the sentimental anecdotes that Humphrys appeals to several times in this book serving to apologize for everything bad in Christianity.

Belief in nothing for the sake of an imagined comfort justifies a host of disgusting behaviour otherwise, for that is what it boils down to. A Christian father and mother get comfort from an imagined word from God when their beloved daughters die in a cruel and avoidable accident. Yes, we sympathize with them, and they were indeed comforted, but many people without God to appeal to get through the experience without the delusion. And these parents forgave the killer of their daughters, but Bush and Blair, also Christian parents had no or little compunction when they connived in the deaths of myriads of innovcent Arabs.

Humphrys seems to be as appalled by this as we atheists are. He says he rejects the myths of Christianity like the birth narratives, the rsurrection and the ascent, but he defends it for the comfort it brings, and essentially ignores that even seemingly moderate Chriostians like Bush and Blair end up acting like madmen. Atheists bluntly say it is indefensible hypocrisy, and, worse, it is endemic in Christian belief.

The indefensible hypocrisy is easily defended by Humphrys. They are “not stupid, let alone deluded, but human”. Is rape and pillage, murder and theft human? Of course it is, but there is no excuse for doing it in civilized society. People getting comfort from a false belief, is fine as long as it causes no one else any harm. That is the rule of law among social beings. Men want to have sex together, then let them, as long as they are consenting to it and doing it in private. The same with Christianity and other beliefs, but, in case you had not noticed, none of these Christians, or any other major religion, are content to keep it private. All of them want to tell other people who are not interested—especially those who are not interested—what they should think.

Their faith gives them a context into which they can fit their lives and a hope of better things to come—if not in this world, then the next. And if the next world turns out not to exist… well, they’ll never know, will they?

Well, you know, John Humphrys, that is just what atheists think, as long as the Christians will keep their absurd believes to themselves. They will not. They want to fit the ridiculous context into which they fit their lives on to me, and everyone else. That is what we object to, and we object because history shows us the consequences, and is showing us them right now.

Never mind that! Listen to another homely anesdote about a Mrs Buchanan, Humphrys used to know as a kid. Or better still, let us not bother. The church gave structure to the lives of this lonely old pair, and that discounts the centuries of people being roasted alive as a public entertainment or being incarcerated in rat infested dungeons while the princes of the Church robbed them of what they owned. Humphrys does not want to think too much about that, but about Mrs Buchanan instead.

What have the Buchanans and the millions like them to do with the militant atheists and their supercharged campaign against religion?… They will say that people like the Buchanans would be better off if only they could see religion and the church for the nonsense that it is. And they’d be wrong.

Thus spake Zarathustra Humphrys! They would not be wrong. If it were possible, it would be right. Humphrys, though a journalist, apparently cannot understand qualifying clauses. At one time in ancient Rome, there will have been Christians who said, “if these Pagans only believed in one God they would see Paganism for the nonsense that it is”. In a few centuries, Rome was Christian. Even then there probably never was a time when there were no Pagans or heretics or unbelievers of some kind, despite the best efforts of the believers to kill off all dissent.

Atheists recognize there will always be believers, if only because there is a normal distribution of intelligence, and not everyone will ever be able to live their lives without the wish for a supernatural father. What we would like, though, is a rational society in which people who need imaginary comforts kept their inanities to themselves. Atheists do not wish to force unbelief on to believers, it is the other way round, and all of this propaganda about militant atheists and their supercharged campaign is a manifest distortion of reality.

Humphrys gives every indication of having responded to reason and given up foolish beliefs, but of being still subject to the childhood fears of God he had been indoctrinated in. He hopes that God, being the reasonable chap he imagines Him to be, will see that, despite his doubt, he has done his best to defend him against the infidels. In short, he is not a noble doubter, but a secret believer trying to have his cake and eat it.

It is not uncommon for disbelievers to recant towards the ends of their lives. Humphrys is trying to make his peace with the “something” that he believes in, hoping it will be enough, if it turns out that there is “something” after he’s dead!

You cannot “reduce life to a set of provable realities”, we learn. Now earlier, he had spoken about the atheists setting up straw men to argue against, a huge laugh in view of the reality that it is what Christian apologists have to do to seem to have any arguments at all. In typical apologetic style, for Humphrys, it is the atheists who are guilty of it, not the habitual perpetrators of it. Atheists are not trying to reduce life to anything. Unlike believers in spirits and devils, atheists are trying to enhance life by encouraging people to see what is there, not what they think or even hope is there when it is not.

If humanity is too complex for that, as Humphrys says, then let the complex creatures who persist in their delusions have them, but as we have said, let them keep them confined to themselves. The majority of people do not need them, and can do without them as long as they are not misled by professional confidence tricksters given legal sanction to suck money like vampires out of people’s misery and personal tragedies.

A World Without Religion

In the end, it comes down to whether the world would be a better place without religion, and that is a matter of judgment, not certainty.

That is so, but rarely are the facts of the case put honestly, and when some of us try to put the facts of religion, we are accused of being militant. It is what Christians and their like have always tried to do. The Spanish Inquisition considered Jews and Moslems militant dangers to the faith of Christians. They solved the problem by forcing thousands of them to convert, them murdering them as apostate Christians—rather as the Sharia law that Humphrys does not like advocates—or evicting them, and in either case robbing them of their wealth.

Humphrys thinks this is awful, but does not want to talk too much about it because it is all in the past. You have to learn from history, unless you are a Christian or an agnostic apparently. Present day fanatics, he disapproves of—men like the Moslems who blow themselves up to kill a few innocent passers by, and presumably men like Bush and Blair who have far more efficient ways of doing it with no danger to their self righteous Christian selves. Maybe, but…

We should also fear a world in which the predominant values are materialism and consumerism, and the greatest aspiration of too many children is to become a “celebrity”. The existence of religion can offer some balance in a society obsessed with image, which turns vacuity into virtue.

Now, are we to suppose that “materialism”, “consumerism”, “celebrity” and “vacuity” are in some subtle way to be blamed on to Richard dawkins and his like? Atheism has turned out to be the main target of this polemic, so, if not, why have they been introduced here? The Christians brag that we live in a Christian society, one that has been so liberal that it led to science, the architect of its own demise, but this Christian society is the one that is materialistic and consumeristic, and now vacuous and subject to the cult of fake celebrity.

Or is Humphrys trying to say that all these problems are the fault of secularism. Christians and their doubting friends cannot have it both ways. Atheists believe in education because we have brains and creative instincts. They believe in society because we are social animals. They believe in preserving society in good order through laws, but not excessively repressive ones. They believe in encouraging compassion among humans because compassion is a necessity in a stable society in which citizens are to feel secure. Compassion is probably what Christians call love, though love is properly a sexual matter rather than a social one. Atheists are moral people, better in being moral without any false reasons for it. We are moral because we want society to work, not because some bogeyman will torture us forever if we are not.

A final sally is to cite Satre:

There is no purpose to existence, only nothingness.

“Sartre’s conclusion is too bleak for me,” Humphrys confesses, showing that he has the believer’s yearning for something, even if there is indeed nothing! And, earlier, a foundation of his argument had been Leibniz’s question:

Why is their something rather than nothing?

Humphrys says believers have the answer to the question. It is God. But atheists do not know. Does he realize that the believers’ answer is itself no answer? It is their unfounded assertion. It is like the claim that madness is demonic possession, or that the earth is flat. Evidently the fact that there is something rather than nothing enables even agnostics to join with Christians in believing in nothing, for that something, to them, must have been made by something else which was actually itself nothing. Now do you understand? No? Never mind! An assertion made with no convincing evidence—indeed with plenty of counter evidence—is not an answer, and a clever journalist used to answers given by mendacious politicians ought to know it.

In any case, a modern idea supported by science, as Humphrys knows because he mentions it, is the idea of the multiverse, and if this is true then there are universes that have nothing in them, and others that have something in them, so both something and nothing are true in different places in the multiverse, and, as in the Anthropic Principle, our universe necessarily has something in it for us to ask the question! That seems an all together more satisfying theory if it is essential we have one, true or not, as Humphrys seems to think.

Reality, the something we all experience lets us “sense a spiritual element”, and “the miracle of unselfish love and sacrifice [is] something beyond our conscious understanding”. Well, no it is not, unless you are determined to classify any attempt to understand it as militant atheism, and Humphrys tells us “we should not—we must not—be browbeaten by arrogant atheists and meekly accept their ‘deluded’ label”. Oh, go on! Try! It is not as mysterious as you think, once you accept that we are quite capable of making steps towards knowing the real world without first having to believe in nothingness.

Humphrys ends up again praising the ordinary apathetic believer, quite ignoring tha fact that the people who have changed the world are not ordinary and certainly not apathetic. Those who are extraordinary, and willing to try to do something, are fanatics, it seems. It is not surprising that he favours the I-Speak-Your-Weight professor of faddy twaddle, John Gray, and even mentions his book The Black Mass that attempts to blame apocalypticism on to liberals and progressives, and absolve those really responsible, Christian madmen.

Many expressions are used against atheists nowadays and it is interesting that most of them have a religious origin. Humphrys calls atheists fanatics, bracketing us with the real fanatics, the religious lunatics, for fanatic is from the Latin word for a temple and means someone considered to be possossed by a god or a demon. It was a religious maniac. Words that belong to the insanity of belief like “fanatic” and ‘dogmatic’ are liberally applied by religionists—and evidently agnostics hoping to find secret favour with the god they fear have offended—as part of their psychological compulsion to project their own failings on to their opponents. Christians have always donme this, and now agnostics seem to be joining in, though I suspect that any true agnostic, that is, one not hoping to find surreptious favour with a god, would prefer the atheist to the believer any day.

Finally we have:

It is too easy to blame the evils of the world on belief in God. In the end, if we make a mess of things, we shall have ourselves to blame—not religion and not God. After all, he doesn’t exist. Does he?

It is pathetic but true that Christians often pretend that atheists are blaming evil in the world on to God, a being that they do not believe in. It is a ploy for some, the cleverer ones, and ignorance in the majority case. Humphrys, we assume is among the clever ones, so is using it as a dishonest ploy. Ignoring that, atheists must be blaming the evils of the world on to religion. All of them? It is another straw man, the ploy that Humphrys insisted was used by militant atheists like Dawkins, yet here he is using it over and over again in typical Christian apologetic fashion.

Atheists do not blame all of the evils in the world on to religion. Evil is, in fact, another religious word that an atheist would rather not use, but is usually obliged to, by believers. Much of the wrongs that have been perpetrated in human society since it began around 6000 years ago are attributable to religions. It seems to me to be indisputable. But they are not all the wrongs that ever happened, though they are many of them, and some of the worst ones.

Are we to pretend they never happened out of respect for the delicate feelings of the people who support the religions that caused these atrocities? It is like refusing to accept malaria is spread by mosquitoes. Without the mosquitoes there could be no malaria. There would still be other diseases, but one source of disease would have been removed. Without religion there could be no religious strife. There would be strife over something else, but one source of strife would have been removed.

Harking Back to the Past

Humphrys has been faced by evangelical types who admit that they would not reject God even if they had incontrovertible proof he did not exist. They would reject the proof instead. That was what faith was! It shows it is deeply irrational this faith, and anything so badly irrational is seriously dangerous. Men like that will not be convinced that burning people to death is a grievous crime, because they will say it was essential to defend their faith, and they did! That is what defenders of the Inquisition still believe today.

Humphrys counters that atheists cannot “hark back to the brutality of earlier centuries”. Why is Christianity absolved from its awful history? Atheists contend that some slight comfort from hurt feelings, hurts that others get over without having to believe in fairies, is not worth the enormity of religious horror, not least Christian, we can see in history. I suggest that if any Christian has the imagination to think of themselves being burnt to death while tied to a stake, they would never ever be a Christian.

What then is the alternative to irrational belief. Humphrys tells us atheists have no alternative. It must be because he cannot comprehend the idea of rational belief. He says religion used to encompass science, and so it did because the only science anyone had at that time was religion. By science in this context I mean a world outlook that lets us integrate our experiences of the world and make satisfactory sense of them. Religion arose as a way of explaining things that were inexplicable. The explanation was no explanation then any more than it is today, but it satisfied people who were mentally children, and had no means of testing their hypotheses. Today we have better explanations, and, because we can test them adequately, they exclude the old explanations of religion. So what is so hard about accepting modern explanations instead of ancient and utterly wrong ancient ones? Adelphiasophism is one such system. Maybe he should try it, but it is no good to anyone who yearns for the supernatural nonentity that exists only in their heads.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History