Essays in Idleness

O ye of little faith, and much stupidity! … There are atheist assumptions in modern atheist science and philosophy. I cite a scientific and philosophical tautology. I include the self-proclaimed “agnostics,” who also study the world from behind blinders, blacking out or censoring evidence of the Creator, and the miraculous in everyday life (such as, that people get up in the morning). For the moment I pretend to be a “theist,” which is to say, the opposite of an atheist. By me, and the other theists, the evidence for God is received.

This does not mean it is quackishly insisted upon. Natural theology does not offer only “proofs” that God, or any other person, exists. It is instead quite comfortable with reality. It is a game we sometimes play, idly, with God.

Faith is not formally rejected in modern, high-tech-pagan investigations. Neutrality on belief systems is assumed, as if the investigator had no stake in his inquiries. He has the higher indifference to his fellow beings. But it is not complete indifference, for what makes him atheistical is that he expects, eventually, to be freed from all irritations, and not even to remember the divine. God will not be necessary for him to get up in the morning.

But meanwhile, he has, like the Marquis de Laplace, “no use for that hypothesis.”

The advance and proliferation of neuroscience and artificial intelligence gives the children of Laplace, and the rest of nature’s behaviourists, a fond hope. Christian and all other theistical beliefs are necessarily vague, as scientific statements, and logic can attack them with sharp precision. They may be used to throw the believer into doubt and confusion.

But they may also be used the other way.

As Auden observed: “Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.”