Sir, – Michael Nugent says he rejects gods because they are “ideas invented by humans” (Rite Reason, Opinion, October 4th). But by the same logic his statement should also be rejected because that too is invented by a human.
He says most atheists are agnostics. This is untrue. Dictionaries of Philosophy define atheism as the belief that God does not exist; while agnostics don’t deny or affirm God’s existence: they just don’t know if God exists. Mr Nugent also confuses the words superstition and magic when referring to the virgin birth and turning bread and wine into Jesus’s own body and blood, which are supernatural events.
He also says “values such as love and goodness are part of our experiences as human beings”. Wrong again, unless, as an atheist, he meant “subjective” values. In a Godless universe there are no objective moral values. In such a universe “goodness” would be the evolutionary, socio-biological spin-off of herd mentality to keep homo sapiens in line; and “love” would be an illusion caused by electro-chemical reactions in the material brain.
I believe Mr Nugent is a decent fellow, but hope in his upcoming articles on atheism that he doesn’t caricature Christianity in the same uneducated, vulgar way that New Atheists do, as well as unsophisticated religious zealots who Bible-thump and distort real Christianity to get their message across. – Yours, etc,