Atheism is always moral and necessary

Here's an article I wrote for The Cornellian (I don't know if it's going to be published or not) about Percy Shelley and the necessity of atheism. It was initially written as a response to an offhand comment my professor made last block about how atheists are generally viewed as "opinionated" and "contrarians."
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You wouldn’t know it by the recent litany of books on the subject, but there was a time when writing something refuting the idea of a God, and specifically a Judeo-Christian God, could get you into a lot of trouble. Percy Bysshe Shelley found this out when he published a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism” in 1809, calling into question the idea that believing in a benevolent God was always a morally just viewpoint. Shelley published the pamphlet anonymously, but was still kicked out of University College, Oxford, when he refused to deny authorship. He would of course go on to become one of the best and best-known of the pure romantic poets, many of them, like Shelley, firm unbelievers.

Shelley was among the first prominent atheists to argue that much cannot be explained by rational science, but assigning certain phenomena to supernatural forces is neither morally nor scientifically sound. “God is an hypothesis,” he wrote, “and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.” You can’t claim to know something without proof, and if you don’t give me sufficient proof, why can’t I reject it? I myself, as an atheist (a term I don’t necessarily approve of, but I’ll get to that later), decided at a very early age that it is best to stick with what is observable, with the corollary that anything I observe could, of course, always be wrong. With that as my guiding force, I simply see no need to believe in God, and it seems more and more people are coming to the same conclusion every day.

Is there a change in the air? One would think so, based on the phenomenal success of a number of recent books, all dealing slightly differently with the problem of faith: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Sam Harris’ Letter To A Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and, most recently, John Allen Paulos’ Irreligion. All of these books, particularly Hitchens’, have made quite a mark on the New York Times bestseller list, suggesting that there is an audience for fiery anti-religious polemics even in a country where at least one of the top-tier presidential candidates denies the existence of evolution. Of course, with their success has come a healthy amount of criticism, not only from religious figures but also supposedly “liberal” sources such as Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic at The New York Times, who remarked that, “[a]t their worst, these books simply spewed invective against religion, helping to ratify believers’ accusations that atheists and agnostics lack respect for others’ convictions (something believers are frequently guilty of themselves).”

Well, no. It is quite possible to be a fundamentalist atheist incapable of being anything other than petty and mean-spirited, but I don’t think that any of these authors (save perhaps Paulos, whose book is the only one I haven’t read) fit that bill. Dawkins describes himself as a “cultural Christian” and celebrates certain religious events like Christmas. Hitchens has always professed a great deal of respect for other cultures and customs, going so far as to say, “I think that religious literacy is very important,” if only in that a lot of great literature is in some way indebted to The Bible, whether it be something like Milton’s Paradise Lost or the poems of William Blake. Dennett has similarly acknowledged that religion is a useful source of mythology. These are atheists who are contemptuous of religion, but one shouldn’t confuse that with being contemptuous of religious people. There are people who are openly hostile towards any individual professing religious views, but there are people like that on the other side of the debate as well.

The term “atheist” is problematic anyway because it encompasses such a broad range of cultural attitudes, political views, and states of mind. It is a term haphazardly defined by the absence of any particular point of view, and as a result, several prominent nonbelievers would like to see the word be abolished altogether, as it seems to suggest that there is a movement of like-minded individuals who gather in certain groups and think in certain ways. This is definitely not what is happening (although Dawkins happen to be the leader of a group of rationalists known as “brights,”—it’s not quite the same thing). Some, like the philosopher A.C. Grayling, have suggested that non-believers should instead go by the name “naturalists,” being linked by their rejection of any suggestion of supernatural governing agents. This seems to make sense to me, but a name is really nothing but a name, and in my quest to prove that there is no objective “truth” to anything, I’ll wear any tag you give me proudly.

I have no problem with people professing their religious freedom in whatever way they deem fit, as long as they aren’t hurting children or committing heinous crimes against unwilling participants. I would expect anyone else to encourage me to not do the same. I personally don’t care if anyone wants to pray in a public school, as long as they aren’t making my kids do it, and I think there are hundreds of more important problems than whether or not the Ten Commandments are on display in any particular courthouse, even if I think some of the individual commandments are pretty backwards and all of them could be successfully argued against. And if you decide to use your religion to justify bigoted, hateful, or stupid views, don’t expect me to sit back and act like I respect what you are saying. I will challenge anyone to debate me, and I will win, because I have science and rationality on my side.

I have several friends who consider themselves atheists, and none of them view non-belief as an absolute. I and several million other people merely believe that atheists, and American atheists in particular, act as a counterweight: we provide an important role in keeping our country from sliding into a religious police state governed by a book that is as contradictory as it is morally troubling, which is the exact opposite of what people like Mike Huckabee would want. Atheism is nothing more or less than necessary in a free society, and even if you don’t agree with it, don’t make the mistake of claiming that it subscribes to any sort of dogma other than, as Shelley says, “nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.”