THE MAKING OF AN ATHEIST
By James S. Spiegel
Moody Publishers. 144 pages. £9.88
ISBN 978 0 802 476 111
This is by far the best book on atheism that I have ever read. The reason is that the author is far more interested in what makes a person self identify as atheist, than in their arguments as such.
Spiegel has listened carefully to what atheists say about theists, and Christians in particular. He finds that atheists’ most common gripe is that Christians too often ‘come across’ as being indifferent to the sheer awfulness of evil and suffering in the world and, more surprisingly, that we don’t take the truths we believe seriously.
Emotional intensity
Notwithstanding these stated perspectives, Spiegel is curious about the emotional intensity with which many atheists make their points and wonders whether there is more going on than just honest intellectual and moral outrage.
He refers to a study of the background of many leading atheists. In his book, Faith of the Fatherless, psychologist Paul C. Vitz finds that many either lost their fathers at a young age (Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre) or had abusive, distant or weak fathers (Hobbes, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Freud, H. G. Wells, Hitchens). He suggests that this may well be a factor causing atheists to do precisely what they often accuse their theist antagonists of doing: projecting their own deep hurts and fears out into the world.
Self-justification
Another strand of evidence on the motives for unbelief is found in the personal lives of some the world’s greatest moralisers such as Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway and, again, Russell and Sartre. Drawing on historian Paul Johnson’s work, Intellectuals, Spiegel comments that ‘the works of these intellectuals were often calculated to justify or minimise the shame of their own debauchery’. He quotes Aldous Huxley who admitted that atheists’ philosophy of mean-inglessness was a deliberate ploy to liberate them from (mostly sexual!) moral restraint.
Spiegel suggests that much atheistic thinking is ‘a scholarly veneer masking the real causes of their unbelief’, and that any truly rational atheistic reasoning ought to cease the minute that a formal cause for reality is disavowed. Subsequent argument just confirms the biblical testimony that persistent unbelief leads to weakening of cognitive function.
Awe, sensitivity, goodness
Given this understanding of the roots of atheism, how should Christians respond?
Spiegel’s advice is that we should resist the temptation to first win intellectual arguments and then pick up the pieces of whatever may be left of a relationship. We should cultivate greater sensitivity to the depths of human tragedies. We should show much greater awe at the incredible, revealed truths about God that we are expecting atheists to believe. Finally, we should model the goodness and patience of God, offering the empathy that may well have been missing in the other person’s own personal life.
And, yes, we should still be ready to give the best possible reasons for the great hope that we have in Jesus Christ.
