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WHY AM I AN ATHEIST?
The short
answer is that I cannot accept any of the
alternatives. I simply don't find them believable. Oh,
yes -I once had an orthodox creed. I was brought up in a devout Roman
Catholic
family, and had an old-style convent education - and throughout my
childhood
and adolescence I was a steadfast believer. That was in the days
(before the
Second Vatican Council) when the Catholic Church was still Catholic and
the
pope was infallible - so I was given absolute certitude about God and
the universe
and my place in it. But in the end - and it took me a very long while -
I grew
up. Whenever
I mention my Catholic childhood, people tend to assume that the reason
I have
rejected religion so completely is that an extreme version of it was
drummed
into me as a child - but it wasn't like that at all. No one needed to
drum
religion into me: I lapped it up like a thirsty puppy. And by the time
the good
nuns got hold of me, at the age of four, I was hooked on the
supernatural. At
home I was regarded as the pious one of the family - which is saying a
great
deal - and the nuns at my first convent school seem to have cast me in
the role
of a future saint. Whenever there was any school entertainment, I was
given
some religious poem to recite, and once, when they put on a little play
in
which Jesus appeared, I was given that role, without any competition -
though,
admittedly, my auburn curls may have contributed to the choice. There
was a large sentimental painting on our classroom wall of a guardian
angel
hovering protectively over a child on the edge of a precipice - and I
accepted
it quite literally. I never got on a bus or a train without quickly
reminding
my guardian angel to keep an eye out for danger. At
home, as in most large families, we were always playing competitive
games among
ourselves-and Rule Number One, which became standard for any
competitive family
game, was "No praying." This was at the insistence of the others, who
thought that praying would give me an unfair advantage. On
one occasion, when our family, together with a number of aunts, uncles,
and
cousins, were spending Sunday afternoon at Grandma's, our uncle priest
offered
a shilling to the best behaved child at
the tea-table. When, after a tea-time of unusual restraint, the
children were
told they could leave the table, I was the only one who remained to say
my
grace - and that, of course, won me the shilling. The others protested
that
they too had remembered to say their grace after meals - but quietly,
with a
less ostentatious sign of the cross.
This, however, was apparently not believed. To this day, half-a-century
later,
some of my cousins still hold this shilling against me - maintaining
that I
cunningly planned the whole thing: but it is really not so. I would
simply
never have thought of eating even a biscuit without saying a grace both
before
and after. My
gullibility embraced not only the supernatural and miraculous, but also
the
magical.: Amazing though it may seem in these days of advanced
childhood
knowledge, I was actually ten years old by the time I realised that
Christmas
presents were not really left by an old red-coated gentleman coming
down the
chimney. When I upbraided my mother for having told me such lies, she
protested
that Santa Claus did, in a sense, exist, as the spirit of generosity
and
giving. But it was too late to give me a metaphorical explanation. I
had
accepted it literally for too long. Empathising
with younger children on whom the same confidence trick was being
imposed, I
embarked on a crusade around the neighbourhood, telling all the kids
that there
was no Santa Claus. This reached the ears of the father of a
neighbouring
family, who reproved me for spoiling it for the little ones. Spoiling
it! I could not understand what he meant.
To my
mind, they were being made fools of, and I was only saving them from
this
indignity. I
now see this as the beginning of both my loss of faith and of my
persistent
missionary zeal in proclaiming scientific truth - but it was many years
before
Jesus was to go the way of Santa Claus. At
my secondary school - also a convent - the other pupils laughingly
referred to
me as "the saint", but l was fortunate in that somehow my piety did
not make me unpopular. Eventually, however, even the nuns told me to
spend less
time in church and the convent chapel, and more time in study. By
the time I was fourteen, I had no wish to be anything but a nun - not
in a
teaching order, but in the Carmelite (enclosed) order. I was already
saving up
half my pocket-money towards my dowry and I would gladly have entered
at
fifteen, as St. Therese did. But my mother said I must wait until the
age of
nineteen, and then see if I felt the same. She said the same to one of
my
sisters who, similar to me in temperament, was nine years younger than
I - but
whereas the second world war started when I was sixteen, and I then
left school
and went out first into the world of work and then into the Women's
Royal Naval
Service, my sister, in the post-war years, remained at school until the
age of
nineteen, and then went straight from one convent as a pupil into
another as a
novice, with no time between to change her mind. She remained a nun for
life. In
my last year at school I was awarded the religious knowledge medal by
the
diocesan inspector because, when he unexpectedly departed from the set
catechism questions and asked for a proof of Christ's divinity, I was
the only
student ready with an answer. To me it was obvious that God would not
otherwise
have given Jesus the power to perform miracles, since this would
mislead people
as to his divine claims. It did not occur to me at the time that it was
an
unproved assumption that the gospel stories were true. And of course no
one
pointed this out. On
other occasions, I would ask the nuns quite probing theological
questions - but
my teenage naivety was no match for their comparatively sophisticated
replies,
and so, though generally of a questioning turn of mind, I accepted the
Catholic
creed in toto. Indeed, in those days of papal authority it had to be
all or
nothing; and I remember how amazed I was to hear of a Catholic who had
given up
practising and yet had remained a believer in Christianity. For me,
there was
never any possibility of a halfway house between the Catholic Church
and
atheism. At
the same time, I must already have begun to fear a loss of faith, for I
remember praying daily that this would never happen to me. It took ten
more
years to complete the process. At
the age of nineteen, when, at my naval training camp, I found that
there was no
provision for Catholics to hear Mass on January the 1st (the feast of
the
Circumcision) or January the 6th (the Epiphany), which were then
holidays of
obligation, I successfully requested special 6 a.m.. "liberty boats"
for that purpose. How my fellow Catholics must have hated me for
forcing them
to go out on dark, wet mornings, instead of having another two hours in
bed! A
year later I was in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where I served king and
country for
the next eighteen months. There I not only mixed with non-Catholic
Christians,
with some of whom I used to discuss moral theology, but I also visited
Hindu
temples and Buddhist shrines, and so widened my perspective on
religion.
Consequently, by the time I returned home after the war, I was no
longer sure I
wanted to be a nun, though I was still a staunch believer. However, my
theological doubts now began to build up, and became more and more
insistent. In
confession, I was told that I was suffering from intellectual pride.
Who was I
to pit my puny intellect against the teaching of Holy Mother Church? I
saw the
force of this argument - especially as there were important Catholic
writers I
admired, such as G K Chesterton, who, though obviously far more
intelligent and
learned than I, apparently had no difficulty in accepting doctrines
that seemed
to me to be irrational and at odds with the world around us. Now, of
course, I
realise that many people of undoubted mental ability manage to cling to
their
supernatural beliefs by keeping them, as it were, in different mental
compartments from everyday knowledge, not subjecting them to the same
sort of
scientific scrutiny or rigorous evidence that they would demand for
anything
else. As
for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the
other foot.
Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty - it's the
believers who
know it all. At
school, we were taught that there is no such thing as an atheist, and
to some
extent I think the nuns were right in this, because they took the word
"atheist" to mean someone who categorically denies the existence of
any kind of god. Obviously, it must depend on the definition of the
word
"god," which can mean anything from the very human and immoral Old
Testament god, Jehovah, to some sort of abstract god, such as Bernard
Shaw's
Life Force, or even something as indisputable as the whole of
existence. The
only objection one can make to that last god-concept is to the
confusing use of
the word "god" as a synonym for everything. However,
the one junction that most gods seem to have in common is to give human
existence some ultimate purpose - and, while it is not possible to
disprove an ultimate
purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to
say, of
course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own
purposes
as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because
it is
not going to last for ever. For
most believers, however, the important thing is that death is not the
end,
either for themselves or for their relationship with close friends who
have
died. Most of us would find it comforting to believe that - but the
fact that a
belief is comforting does not make it true. And I suppose I just happen
to be
the sort of person who cannot derive comfort from a belief that has no
evidence
to support it. In
fact, all the evidence is against a personal survival of death: it just
doesn't
make sense. How could anything that survived the death of the body
still be the
same person? Just think, what makes you you? Isn't it the historical
continuity
of your body, from conception throughout life, and the genes you were
born
with, and the things that have happened to you, and your likes and
dislikes,
and funny little ways, and the memories in your brain? All these things
depend
on a living body. And how would you recognise a friend in another life
without
his body - without his face or his voice or anything you knew him by in
life?
Even the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, on the last day,
means
having to wait until the end of time before recognising one another.
And which
body are we supposed to get then? The body we had at birth, or as a
teenager,
or a fifty- year-old, or a ninety-year-old? If you are going to rise
again as a
child, so as to be recognised by your grandmother, you'll hardly be
recognisable by your grandchildren. As
for the idea that the universe was deliberately created, it fails to
explain
existence - for one is still left with the question "Who made God?"
It is less complicated to suppose that particles of matter and waves of
energy
have always existed than to suppose they were made out of nothing by a
being
who had always existed. Besides, if I did accept the idea of deliberate
creation, all the suffering there is in life - for so many people, and
also for
animals - would make it impossible for me to worship the creator. I
would have
to heap curses on him -or her -or it. But there is just one thing to be
said
for this creator-god, and that is his evident non-existence. If there
were a
creator, he could not possibly be both good and almighty - he could
either be
sadistic and almighty, or good and incompetent, but he could not
possibly be
both good and almighty. In
the late 1940s, remembering from school theology lessons that,
according to
Thomas Aquinas, it was possible to come to faith through reason, I
decided to
try giving my faith a boost through reason stimulated by a course of
reading.
So I read book after book - mainly books written by Catholic
apologists, but
also some by moral philosophers, including non-believers. And the more
I read,
the less I could believe. Finally,
one Saturday morning in November 1949, actually standing by the
philosophy
shelves of my local public library, I suddenly said to myself, with a
tremendous flood of relief, "I am no longer a Catholic". And that,
for me, meant I was no longer a Christian or a theist of any kind. After
so much mental turmoil, I did not imagine I had really come to the end
of it: I
expected to go on having doubts - doubts now about my disbelief. But in
fact
this never happened. I have never found any reason to suppose that my
decision
that morning so long ago was a mistake. That is not to say that I have not sometimes hankered after my old childhood beliefs - but it is no more possible for me to go back to believing in a god and a heaven than it is to go back to the belief that an old red-coated gentleman climbs down chimneys with presents on Christmas Eve. |