Category Archives: Atheism

Out of the mouth of…Christopher Hitchens

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Noted atheist (anti-theist, really) Christopher Hitchens was once interviewed by Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.

The following exchange was enlightening:-

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book [God Is Not Great] is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

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To atheism – and back again

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The writer A.N. Wilson has recently been writing about his return to faith.  Associated in his earlier life in turns with the Church of England and with Roman Catholicism, he describes his ‘Damascus Road conversion’ to atheism, which took place in the 1980s.

I’m not sure what flavour of Christian faith Wilson has returned to, but I was struck with one statement in particular in his piece in New Statesman:-

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.

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Bertrand Russell’s strange collocation

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Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a prominent British philosopher.  He was an outspoken agnostic, and his essay entitled Why I Am Not A Christian (based on a talk given in 1927) remains one of the most celebrated statements of unbelief.

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins.

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Darwin and a Godless universe

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If any one theory can be said to have converted the Western world to atheism, it is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.  The noted American sceptic Robert Ingersoll (1833-99) declared:-

This century will be called Darwin’s century.  He was one of the greatest men who ever touched the globe.  He has explained more of the phenomena of life that all of the religious teachers.  Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. …

Craig, Strobel, Wilson, Denison, and Hitchens debate God’s Existence

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You’ve got to hand it to Christopher Hitchens.  Such is his self-confidence, and perhaps his disdain for the ‘opposition’, that he is prepared to take on all-comers when it comes to debating religion.  Oh, and it must help his book to sell as well.

In March of this year Hitchens took on not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR Christian apologists at the same time.  Of course, he comes out fighting, and if he was feeling a little bruised by the end he is too wily a campaigner to let it show.…

Suffering and the existence of a God of love

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John Blanchard discusses this in his book Does God Believe in Atheists?  The argument against the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God may be summarised as follows:-

1. Evil and suffering exist
2. If God were all-loving, he would wish to prevent evil and suffering
3. If God were omnipotent, he would be able to prevent evil and suffering
4. Evil and suffering are not prevented. Therefore, there is no such thing as an all-loving, all-powerful God

It is not incumbent on the apologist to demonstrate why or how such a God allows evil and suffering to exist.…

Science: the last nail in God’s coffin?

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‘Humanity should accept that science has eliminated the justification for believing in cosmic purpose, and that any survival of purpose is inspired only by sentiment.’ (Peter Atkins, Oxford Chemistry Professor)

‘It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease and many others, but I think that a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. …

An Atheist Finds God

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What a relief it was to become an atheist.

I had become worn out and frustrated by my fruitless search for God.

I had studied holy writings from three different continents. No God there.

I had tried prayer and “positive thinking” as if they were the same thing.

I had wrestled with the problems of theodicy without even knowing that the word existed.

I felt that I had sought God everywhere – in the cosmos, in my neurones, in my bank account.

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Is Richard Dawkins still evolving?

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On 21st October 2008, a debate was held between Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr John Lennox in Oxford’s Natural History Museum.

An earlier debate between the two of them can be downloaded here, and a talk by Lennox can be downloaded here.

The subject of the recent debate was Has Science Buried God? – echoing the title of a recent book by Lennox.

Melanie Phillips has a piece in The Spectator in which she notes, among other things, that

Dawkins now concedes that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic God.’…