A chara, – John Waters’s article (Opinion, July 17th) raises some interesting and challenging questions for the Irish atheist. Before taking up his challenge to speak on the topic without reference to the Catholic church, some preliminary comments are necessary.
As Mr Waters notes himself, the rejection of Catholicism is a necessary step on the path towards consciously adopting the position of atheism in this country.
We live in a state where Catholicism is the vernacular of spiritual articulation, any attempt to break away from this requires the (non)believer to engage in a “hermeneutics of suspicion”. That is to adopt the Habermasian rather than Gadamerian approach to interpreting the past, to ask awkward questions about the relationship of truth to power, the legitimacy of those in authority and ultimately the question of what foundations such claims are based upon.
Unfortunately, as Mr Waters rightly notes, many atheists appear to get stuck in this stage – a state of arrested development if you will. The recent spate of “new atheism” sits in this category as does, at least from Mr Waters’ reportage, Atheist Ireland. Essentially what this “new atheism” amounts to is the unruly rebellion of teenagers poking at an authority, the church, they both deride and fear.
Perhaps the desire to create organisations reflects the inherent allure of the sacral, the tradition, the ritual that organised religion thrives upon.
Uncomfortable with the vacuum they find themselves in, the new atheist seeks refuge with like-minded souls.
The challenge, however, is for the atheist to move beyond this puerile religion-baiting and engage with the questions of existence, creation and human nature at a deeper level. This is where we can move to what the underlying challenge of being an atheist actually consists. That is to engage with Mr Waters’ physicist friend on the concept of nothingness or his Spanish friend on human desire.
To actually consider the nature of eternity, the infinite scope of existence and still to assert the non-existence of a creator, a God.
Ultimately, these speculations can never lead to a definitive answer. The non-existence of God cannot be proven. Therefore the decision to not believe is a decision based on something approximating faith.
This is, perhaps, why many atheists of youth are the agnostics of old age. Indeed this is an appealing solution to this paradox of non-belief, to acknowledge the possibility of God but to defer the moment of casting your lot for one side or the other indefinitely.
My atheism is based on my willingness to cast my lot now, to accept that the human mind is limited in its ability to comprehend the nature of being, that an understanding of the infinite, of nothingness, and the shift that brings one from the other, is possibly beyond the scope of our consciousness but to resist the allure of the closure that belief in a creator God gives to this conundrum.
At the heart of my atheism, then, is a willingness to embrace the mystery of being without a safety net, to leap into the abyss of infinity that is existence without a bungee cord, to live with the existential anxiety of being a mere speck of matter in an infinite universe but to be no less human for that. – Is mise,