The Necessity of Atheism

by David Marshall Brooks

It is often asserted that the alleged universality of the belief in God is an argument for its truth. But what of the fact that men had everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be false! In the discussion of witchcraft, it has been shown that a delusion may be as widespread as a truth. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Spanish Moors had recognized the sphericity of the earth and were teaching geography from globes in their common schools. Rome, during the same ages, was asserting in all its absurdity the flatness of the earth. It was not until almost five hundred years later that Rome was forced to see its absurdity and then only when the enlightened world mocked at its error.

In this twentieth century, certain enlightened men are teaching the absurdity and harmfulness of a belief in a deity. Must it take five hundred years for all mankind to come to a similar conclusion? May it not well be that in a few centuries our posterity will view belief in a deity in the same light that we in this age view the Church's insistence that the earth was flat?

The God idea has been one of the most divisive and anti-social notions cherished by mankind. In fact it has been asserted that the idea of God has been the enemy of man. It has driven multitudes of men and women into the unnatural asceticisms and wasted lives of the convent and abbey. It has taxed the economic resources of every nation. Every church, no matter of what creed, is a pathetic monument of God-ridden humanity which has been built by the pennies sweated by the poor, and wrested from them by fraudulent promises of reward, appeals to fear, and the pathetic human tendency to sacrifice.

The theologians have in their arguments resorted to philosophy. The consequence of this transference of the idea of God to the sphere of philosophy is the curious position that the god in which people believe is not the god whose existence is made the product of an experimental argument, and the god of the argument is not the god of belief.

"It is a nice question," remarks Walter Lippmann, "whether the use of God's name is not misleading when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men have worshipped. Plainly the modernist churchman does not believe in the God of Genesis who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called for Adam and his wife who had hidden themselves behind a tree; nor in the God of Exodus who appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of the Elders of Israel, standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it were a sapphire stone; nor even in the God of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah who in his compassion for the sheep who had gone astray, having turned everyone to his own way, laid on the Man of Sorrows the iniquity of us all." (Walter Lippmann: "A Preface to Morals.")

It is one kind of god that is being set up in argument, and it is really another god that is being depended upon and believed. The philosophical conception of a deity that may be in control of phenomena is an impersonal physical law, and has nothing to do with the conception of a personal deity to whom people pray for active intervention in their troubles. Religious belief is a monstrous apparition; the philosophy of atheism is a solid structure laboriously founded on solid rock.

The philosophy of atheism had temporarily failed in previous ages, since the knowledge of those ages did not furnish facts enough upon which to build. At the present, although our knowledge is far from complete and the surface has only been scratched, yet sufficient facts have been unearthed to reveal that there is no supernatural and the greatest hope of advancement lies in the philosophy of atheism. A philosophy that builds upon a foundation of purely secular thought, that leaves the idea of God completely discarded as a useless and false relic of bygone days, is the essence of atheism. "Atheism is more than the speculative philosophy of a few, that it is in sober truth the logical outcome of mental growth. So far as any phase of human life can be called inevitable, atheism may lay claim to being inescapable. All mental growth can be seen leading to it, just as we can see one stage of social development giving a logical starting point for another stage, and which could have been foretold had our knowledge of all the forces in operation been precise enough. Atheism is, so to speak, implicit in the growth of knowledge, its complete expression is the consummation of a process that began with the first questionings of religion. And the completion of the process means the death of supernaturalisms in all forms. Circumstances may obstruct its universal acceptance as a reasoned mental attitude, but that merely delays, it does not destroy the certainty of its final triumph." (C. Cohen.)

The philosophy of atheism leads man to a critical, analytical, and logical examination of his environment, and it is this that has lead to all of our advances. Religion creates a stunted standard of reasoning. The pathetic cry of St. Augustine, "But if I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me, where I pray thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I, thy servant innocent?" typifies the major concern of the narrow, egotistical mystic. From the time that the ideas of the later Greek philosophers had been forgotten until the present time, man has floundered in a sea of supernaturalism. It is high time that man faced his realities with fortitude in his own mentality, and when he does this, there will be produced a race of men who will seek for truth, for truth's sake, a race of supermen who will lead the world intellectually.

It is to Russia that all eyes will turn in the next few generations. At the present, she is going through the throes of childbirth. She is immature, and as a child she staggers. The abuse and ridicule heaped upon her now is but the repetition of that given by all frightened societies of past ages, when they contemplated new ideas which their immature minds could not fathom. But Russia will emerge in the not too distant future, and the infant will shortly reach maturity; and that maturity may set a standard for those timid and frightened societies that at present look with dilated eyes upon her daring.

The age is approaching when the god idea in its entirety will be classed with the gods of the Egyptians and Babylonians, when surplices and sacramental plate will be exhibited in museums; when nurses will relate to children the legends of the Christian mythology, as they now tell them fairy tales. The gods of monotheism will join the gods of polytheism and Yahveh and his associates will occupy in the minds of men the position now held by the gods of Olympus. To our ancestors Jupiter and Yahveh will have the same significance. "In a little time the cathedrals and churches will have taken upon themselves the proud, poetical glamour of abandoned temples. Men and women will enter them with reverent indulgence as they now in meditative mood visit the few remaining pantheons of the pagan worship." (Llewelyn Powys: "An Hour On Christianity.")