My Path to Atheism

by Annie Besant

As the Supreme Love. We come here to the darkest problem of existence. Love, Ruler of the world permeated through and through with pain, and sorrow, and sin? Love, mainspring of a nature whose cruelty is sometimes appalling? Love? Think of the "martyrdom of man!" Love? Follow the History of the Church! Love? Study the annals of the slave-trade! Love? Walk the courts and alleys of our towns! It is of no use to try and explain away these things, or cover them up with a veil of silence; it is better to look them fairly in the face, and test our creeds by inexorable facts. It is foolish to keep a tender spot which may not be handled; for a spot which gives pain when it is touched implies the presence of disease: wiser far is it to press firmly against it, and, if danger lurk there, to use the probe or the knife. We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, "magnified" Man. We have no right to shut our eyes to the sad revers de la medaille, and leave out of our conceptions of the Creator the larger half of his creation. If we are to discover the Worker from his works we must not pick and choose amid those works; we must take them as they are, "good" and "bad." If we only want an ideal, let us by all means make one, and call it God, if thus we can reach it better, but if we want a true induction we must take all facts into account. If God is to be considered as the author of the universe, and we are to learn of him through his works, then we must make room in our conceptions of him for the avalanche and the earthquake, for the tiger's tooth and the serpent's fang, as well as for the tenderness of woman and the strength of man, the radiant glory of the sunshine on the golden harvest, and the gentle lapping of the summer waves on the gleaming shingled beach.*

* "I know it is usual for the orthodox when vindicating the
moral character of their God to say:—'All the Evil that
exists is of man; All that God has done is only good.' But
granting (which facts do not substantiate) that man is the
only author of the sorrow and the wrong that abound in the
world, it is difficult to see how the Creator can be free
from imputation. Did not God, according to orthodoxy, plan
all things with an infallible perception that the events
foreseen must occur? Was not this accurate prescience based
upon the inflexibility of God's Eternal purposes? As, then,
the purposes, in the order of nature, at least preceded the
prescience and formed the groundwork of it, man has become
extensively the instrument of doing mischief in the world
simply because the God of the Christian Church did not
choose to prevent man from being bad. In other words, man is
as he is by the ordained design of God, and, therefore, God
is responsible for all the suffering, shame, and error,
spread by human agency.—So that the Christian apology for
God in connection with the spectacle of evil falls to
pieces."—Note by the Editor.

The Nature of God, what is it? Infinite and Absolute, he evades our touch; without human will, without human intelligence, without human love, where can his faculties—the very word is a misnomer—find a meeting-place with ours? Is he everything or nothing? one or many? We know not. We know nothing. Such is the conclusion into which we are driven by orthodoxy, with its pretended faith, which is credulity, with its pretended proofs, which are presumptions. It defines and maps out the perfections of Deity, and they dissolve when we try to grasp them; nowhere do these ideas hold water for a moment; nowhere is this position defensible. Orthodoxy drives thinkers into atheism; weary of its contradictions they cry, "there is no God"; orthodoxy's leading thinker lands us himself in atheism. No logical, impartial mind can escape from unbelief through the trap-door opened by Dean Mansel: he has taught us reason, and we cannot suppress reason. The "serpent intellect"—as the Bishop of Peterborough calls it—has twined itself firmly round the tree of knowledge, and in that type we do not see, with the Hebrew, the face of death, but, with the older faiths, we reverence it as the symbol of life.

There is another fact, an historical one, still on the destructive side, which appears to me to be of the gravest importance, and that is the gradual attenuation of the idea of God before the growing light of true knowledge. To the savage everything is divine; he hears one God's voice in the clap of the thunder, another's in the roar of the earthquake, he sees a divinity in the trees, a deity smiles at him from the clear depths of the river and the lake; every natural phenomenon is the abode of a god; every event is controlled by a god; divine volition is at the root of every incident. To him the rule of the gods is a stern reality; if he offends them they turn the forces of nature against him; the flood, the famine, the pestilence, are the ministers of the avenging anger of the gods. As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king. Physical phenomena are still his agents, working his will among the children of men; he rains great hailstones out of heaven on his enemies, he slays their flocks and desolates their lands, but his chosen ure safe under his protection, even although danger hem them in on every side; "thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day. A thousand shall fall besides thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.... He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers." (Ps. xci., Prayer-Book.) Experience contradicted this theory rather roughly, and it gave way slowly before the logic of facts; it is, however, still more or less prevalent among ourselves, as we see when the siege of Paris is proclaimed as a judgment on Parisian irreligion, and when the whole nation falls on its knees to acknowledge the cattle-plague as the deserved punishment of its sins! The next step forward was to separate the physical from the moral, and to allow that physical suffering came independently of moral guilt or righteousness: the men crushed under the fallen tower of Siloam were not thereby proved to be more sinful than their countrymen. The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power-. The theory of God as a miracle worker was dissipated; henceforth if God ruled at all it must be as in nature and not from outside of nature; he no longer imposed laws on something exterior to himself, the laws could only be the necessary expression of his own being. Laws were, further, found to be immutable in their working, changing not in accordance with prayer, but ever true to a hair's breadth in their action. Slowly, but surely, prayer to God for the alteration of physical phenomena is being found to be simply a well-meant superstition; nature swerves not for our pleading, nor falters in her path for our most passionate supplication. The "reign of law" in physical matters is becoming acknowledged even by theologians. As step by step the knowledge of the natural advances, so step by step does the belief in the supernatural recede; as the kingdom of science extends, so the kingdom of miraculous interference gradually disappears. The effects which of old were thought to be caused by the direct action of God are now seen to be caused by the uniform and calculable working of certain laws—laws which, when discovered, it is the part of wisdom implicitly to obey. Things which we used to pray for, we now work and wait for, and if we fail we do not ask God to add his strength to ours, but we sit down and lay our plans more carefully. How is this to end? Is the future to be like the past, and is science finally to obliterate the conception of a personal God? It is a question which ought to be pondered in the light of history. Hitherto the supernatural has always been the makeweight of human ignorance; is it, in truth, this and nothing else?

I am forced, with some reluctance, to apply the whole of the above reasoning to every school of thought, whether nominally Christian or non-Christian, which regards God as a "magnified man." The same stern logic cuts every way and destroys alike the Trinitarian and the Unitarian hypothesis, wherever the idea of God is that of a Creator, standing, as it were, outside his creation. The liberal thinker, whatever his present position, seems driven infallibly to the above conclusions, as soon as he sets himself to realise his idea of his God. The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of which all things are evolved under the uncreated conditions and eternal laws of the universe; he must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat oddly puts it, "the materiality of matter, as well as the spirituality of spirit;" i e., these must both be products of this one substance: a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature, and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with nature, co-extensive with the universe; but the God of the orthodox no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality which divides him from the rest of the universe. I say that I use these arguments "with some reluctance," because many who have fought and are fighting nobly and bravely in the army of freethought, and to whom all free-thinkers owe much honour, seem to cling to an idea of the Deity, which, however beautiful and poetical, is not logically defensible, and in striking at the orthodox notion of God, one necessarily strikes also at all idea of a "Personal" Deity. There are some Theists who have only cut out the Son and the Holy Ghost from the Triune Jehovah, and have concentrated the Deity in the Person of the Father; they have returned to the old Hebrew idea of God, the Creator, the Sustainer, only widening it into regarding God as the Friend and Father of all his creatures, and not of the Jewish nation only. There is much that is noble and attractive in this idea, and it will possibly serve as a religion of transition to break the shock of the change from the supernatural to the natural. It is reached entirely by a process of giving up; Christian notions are dropped one after another, and the God who is believed in is the residuum. This Theistic school has not gained its idea of God from any general survey of nature or from any philosophical induction from facts; it has gained it only by stripping off from an idea already in the mind everything which is degrading and revolting in the dogmas of Trinitarianism. It starts, as I have noticed elsewhere, from a very noble axiom: "If there be a God at all he must be at least as good as his highest creatures," and thus is instantly swept away the Augustinian idea of a God,—that monster invented by theological dialectics; but still the same axiom makes God in the image of man, and never succeeds in getting outside a human representation of the Divinity. It starts from this axiom, and the axiom is prefaced by an "if." It assumes God, and then argues fairly enough what his character must be. And this "if" is the very point on which the argument of this paper turns.

"If there be a God" all the rest follows, but is there a God at all in the sense in which the word is generally used? And thus I come to the second part of my problem; having seen that the orthodox "idea of God is unreasonable and absurd, is there any idea of God, worthy to be called an idea, which is attainable in the present state of our faculties?"

The argument from design does not seem to me to be a satisfactory one; it either goes too far or not far enough. Why in arguing from the evidences of adaptation should we assume that they are planned by a mind? It is quite as easy to conceive of matter as self-existent, with inherent vital laws moulding it into varying phenomena, as to conceive of any intelligent mind directly modelling matter, so that the "heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handy-work." It is, I know, customary to sneer at the idea of beautiful forms existing without a conscious designer, to parallel the adaptations of this world to the adaptations in machinery, and then triumphantly to inquire, "if skill be inferred from the one, why ascribe the other to chance?" We do not believe in chance; the steady action of law is not chance; the exquisite crystals which form themselves under certain conditions are not a "fortuitous concourse of atoms:" the only question is whether the laws which we all allow to govern nature are immanent in nature, or the outcome of an intelligent mind. If there be a lawmaker, is he self-existent, or does he, in turn, as has been asked again and again by Positivist, Secularist, and Atheist, require a maker? If we think for a moment of the vast mind implied in the existence of a Creator of the universe, is it possible to believe that such a mind is the result of chance? If man's mind imply a master-mind, how much more that of God? Of course the question seems an absurd one, but it is quite as pertinent as the question about a world-maker. We must come to a stop somewhere, and it is quite as logical to stop at one point as at another. The argument from design would be valuable if we could prove, a priori, as Mr. Gillespie attempted to do,* the existence of a Deity; this being proved we might then fairly argue deductively to the various apparent signs of mind in the universe. Again, if we allow design we must ask, "how far does design extend?" If some phenomena are designed, why not all? And if not all, on what principle can we separate that which is designed from that which is not? If intellect and love reveal a design, what is revealed by brutality and hate? If the latter are not the result of design, how did they become introduced into the universe? I repeat that this argument implies either too much or too little.*

* "The Necessary Existence of Deity."

There is but one argument that appears to me to have any real weight, and that is the argument from instinct. Man has faculties which appear, at present, as though they were not born of the intellect, and it seems to me to be unphilosophical to exclude this class of facts from our survey of nature. The nature of man has in it certain sentiments and emotions which, reasonably or unreasonably, sway him powerfully and continually; they are, in fact, his strongest motive powers, overwhelming the reasoning faculties with resistless strength; true, they need discipline and controlling, but they do not need to be, and they cannot be, destroyed. The sentiments of love, of reverence, of worship, are not, as yet, reducible to logical processes; they are intuitions, spontaneous emotions, incomprehensible to the keen and cold intellect. They may be laughed at or denied, but they still exist in spite of all; they avenge themselves, when they are not taken into account, by ruining the best laid plans, and they are continually bursting the cords with which reason strives to tie them down. I do not for a moment pretend to deny that these intuitions will, as our knowledge of psychology increases, be reducible to strict laws; we call them instincts and intuitions simply because we are unable to trace them to their source, and this vague expression covers the vagueness of our ideas. Therefore, intuition is not to be accepted as a trustworthy guide, but it may suggest an hypothesis, and this hypothesis must then be submitted to the stern verification of observed facts. We are not as yet able to say to what the instinct in man to worship points, or what reality answers to his yearning. Increased knowledge will, we may hope, reveal to us* where there lies the true satisfaction of this instinct: so long as the yearning is only an "instinct" it cannot pretend to be logically defensible, or claim to lay down any rule of faith. But still I think it well to point out that this instinct exists in man, and exists most strongly in some of the noblest souls.

* "Is there in man any such Instinct? May not the general
tendency to worship a Deity, everywhere be the result of the
influence gained by Priests over the mind by the play of the
mysterious Unknown and Hereafter upon susceptible
imaginations? Besides, what are we to say of the immense
number of philosophical Buddhists and Brahmins, for whose
comfort or moral guidance the idea of a God or a hereafter
is felt to be quite unnecessary? They cannot comprehend it,
and consequently acts of worship to God would be deemed by
them fanatical. It is traditionalists who either do not
think at all, or think only within a narrow, creed-bound
circle, that are most devoted to worshipping Deity; and if
so, may not the whole history of worship have its origin in
superstition and priestcraft! In that case, the theory of an
instinct of worship falls to the ground."—Note by the
Editor.