Whatever your conclusions about the claims of classical theism, it is hard to deny that in the last two centuries traditional religion has lost its place at the heart of modern life. The natural sciences have offered a more convincing explanation of natural phenomena; the moral horrors of the twentieth century have rendered most theodicies inadequate; atheist philosophers and other thinkers now publicly articulate their non-belief; education has become a wholly secular enterprise; and our modern experience of living in the world hardly feels susceptible to a supernatural explanation.
Philosophers of religion have responded to this crisis in different ways. Some have turned their attention to the philosophical basis for atheism. Others have reinvented the concept of God or adapted religious doctrines accordingly.
Nietzsche’s famous declaration that ‘God is dead’ first appears in The Gay Science of 1882 (§108, 125 and 343) and the next year in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue 2). Its most famous expression is the parable of the madman:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this?... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!’ Here the madman fell silent... he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early’, he then said, ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.’ The Gay Science §125
Nietzsche’s philosophy is complex and radical, but the meaning of this passage is clear: humans have reached a point where the notion of God, as an external source of value and meaning, is defunct. We can no longer believe in a divine cosmic order or a system of absolute morality, and must face up to the fact that we are free to choose our own values. This is more a descriptive than a prescriptive statement: Nietzsche is recognising that in our scientific age the religious hypothesis has stopped being useful or even plausible. To borrow William James’ term, God is no longer a live proposition.
For Nietzsche, the death of God was both liberating and threatening. Threatening, because without God there are no grounds for an absolute, objective moral law. Humans must look to themselves to create new values and avoid a descent into nihilism (as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov says, in a world without God, everything is permitted). This is perhaps the most important philosophical aspect of the parable of the madman: the implications of living without God and the effect of the end of faith on our deepest spiritual and metaphysical beliefs.
The function of religion in society also interested Sigmund Freud and his analysis of the historical origins and psychological effects of religion was brutal:
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. Civilization and its Discontents
For Freud, religion belongs to a childish stage of human evolution: like Nietzsche, he believed that there was no place for religion in the modern world. His account of the psychological role of religion draws attention to feelings of guilt and helplessness and interprets God as a projection of the subconscious mind in response to these feelings. The structure of religious belief is paternalistic, and reflects perhaps early societies in which sons overthrew their father but were unable to emulate his authority. The idealised father-figure of classical theism is thus understood as wish-fulfilment, a reversion to childish patterns of thought. The concepts of religion, far from being factual accounts of the nature of the universe, are merely ideas inherited from a primitive stage of human development and should be treated as such.
This description of religion as childish or primitive has become common among contemporary sceptics. The same sentiment is forcibly expressed by Sam Harris who refers to:
... men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education. The End of Faith 25
In the last decade this aggressively atheistic viewpoint has gained popular recognition through works by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. The ‘four horsemen of atheism’ (as they have been styled) bring science and philosophy to bear on religious questions and argue powerfully for a rational and naturalistic world-view. Many of their arguments in fact date back to the Enlightenment, but they are reinforced by modern scientific understanding and seem to appeal to a specifically contemporary sense of being human.
When arguing their case, atheists tend to appeal to the role of reason and evidence in our other beliefs: generally speaking, the most reasonable conclusions are those which have the most evidential support. Failure to believe what is supported by evidence, or belief in something unsupported by evidence, are ordinarily considered irrational – and the same must hold true for religious claims. It is traditional to divide arguments for the non-existence of God into two types: deductive arguments which find a priori problems with the very concept of God; and inductive or evidential arguments which proceed from a posteriori evidence.
Like the ontological argument, deductive arguments for atheism begin with particular properties of God. However, rather than showing how these properties imply existence, the atheist seeks to show how properties that are essential to God are, in fact, logically contradictory. Examples include the omnipotence paradox; the problem of foreknowledge; the logical problem of evil stemming from God’s goodness; and various combinations of such properties that seem incompatible (see The nature of God for discussion of these questions). If these arguments are valid, then belief in God would be as irrational as belief in a square circle.
Some theists have addressed these problems by describing God in different, non-contradictory terms – but this leads to a host of other questions, not least whether a ‘partly omniscient’ or ‘partly good’ God is worthy of worship. Another common response is the claim that God is beyond description: any contradictions that arise are not problems for God, but for our descriptive powers. However, this raises its own problems. If God does defy comprehension, it is difficult to know what attitude to adopt towards such an inscrutable being, or what sort of reasons might justify our belief in its existence.
Evidential arguments for atheism immediately face a problem, most commonly presented in the form: You can’t prove a negative. In one sense, this must be true: there is always the possibility of new evidence, and God might exist in some form that has been overlooked. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, such an objection is less relevant than it appears as it sets too high a standard of justification. Consider the reasonableness of not believing in unicorns: there is no ‘proof’ required for such a claim to be reasonable. There are, in fact, good reasons for believing that unicorns do not exist. You can’t prove a negative is not the point; you can’t prove much at all if you insist on absolute certainty beyond any doubt. On the other hand, it is evident from the sciences that the more attempts to prove a theory fail, the more unlikely that theory becomes (an example is cold fusion, the existence of which is unlikely given the number of attempts to replicate it). Perhaps, then, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Some philosophers argue that atheism should in fact be the default position for a rational enquirer. Just as a jury must presume innocence, and requires significant evidence to deliver a verdict of guilty, so the philosopher should be neutral (ie sceptical) about the existence of God. In other words, the burden of proof is on the believer. The classic statement of this position is Bertrand Russell’s teapot:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. Is There a God?
The celestial teapot is sufficiently absurd to justify reasonable sceptical doubts about the supernatural. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Some thinkers have objected to the teapot analogy, claiming that religious belief is too widespread to be absurd. Sceptics then point out the popularity of ancient beliefs (Zeus, Thor, Anubis) which are now considered foolish. Like analogies with Santa Claus or fairies, the teapot analogy can seem offensive to theists, but the philosophical challenge remains: to define exactly how and why the metaphysical claims of religion differ from Russell’s teapot.
A number of related arguments insist that a naturalistic account of the world provides better explanations than the existence of God. The French mathematician Laplace, in answer to Napoleon’s question about God in his account of the universe, famously replied—I had no need of that hypothesis. A similar sentiment underlies these inductive arguments. One example is the success of cosmology in accounting for the origins of the universe. Of course, before modern cosmology the existence of a creator may well have been the best explanation for the existence of the universe (see the cosmological argument); but scientific theories of the ‘Big Bang’ have now replaced it. Similarly, evolution by natural selection offers the best explanation for the appearance of biological adaptation, thus significantly undermining the argument from design. Perhaps the most persistent inductive argument against the existence of God is the evidential problem of evil which seeks to show that a benevolent God is an inadequate explanation for the existence of evil and suffering.
All arguments for the non-existence of God rely on assumptions about the nature and value of evidence and reason, assumptions that theists do not necessarily share. There is a curious asymmetry between theism and atheism in this respect: theists have offered faith as a justification of their belief, often as the supreme justification, but there is no equivalent for atheists. The competing claims of faith and reason must therefore be considered in their own right.
Rather than abandon religion completely, some theologians have sought to understand God in other ways. The term ‘post-theism’ is a loose one and has been applied to a wide variety of thinkers, but it invariably describes a theology that is radically different from classical theism. Existentialist christians tend to emphasise subjective choice, individual passion and the inadequacy of reason (taking their cue from Kierkegaard). Paul Tillich, for example, defines God not as an entity or being, but as ‘the ground of being’; other writers prefer phrases such as ‘a depth at the centre of life’ or ‘the object of ultimate concern’. Such ideas are often difficult and highly abstract but one thing is clear: a God who is ‘the ground of being’ presents a very different idea from the loving, powerful and omniscient God of traditional thought and therefore requires a very different philosophy to elaborate it.
As western societies become increasingly secular, people are seeking a new ‘theology’ – new answers to the old questions that were once satisfactorily addressed by established religions (how to behave, problems of evil and suffering, the ‘meaning’ of existence, and so on). Perhaps scientific atheism will become that new theology.
All of this, of course, must be set against the resurgence of religious fundamentalism across the globe. In this sense at least, God is far from dead. For millions of people their faith entails particular practices or actions – and these practical consequences raise new difficulties. How are we to respond to the conflicting claims of different religions in a multicultural society? What is the relationship between religious belief and the law? How tolerant can we be of beliefs that we consider mistaken? A satisfactory philosophical solution to these problems has yet to emerge.