Atheist: I hope there is no God?

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Fear of God

Then there’s the other fear: The fear that it might be true after all. I respect those atheists who’ve been honest about it. Thomas Nagel is an eminent professor (now emeritus) of law and philosophy at New York University. He famously wrote,

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. It is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.


Opting for Irrationality


The late Cornell biologist Richard Lewontin opted for irrationality, too:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. 
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.


“I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God.” And, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” This is the Party of Reason speaking. At least some of them are honest. I’ve tried to nudge others to the same honesty. It would be for them a step in the right direction.

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