Famous atheists — but do they really exist?

ONCE upon a time and far, far away, there were these galaxies.

They were once the twinkle in the eye of the Creator. Before light, before time, before matter itself, He existed. Not that I can prove it, mind you. But today I have a different proposition to make.

Another question to ask. And it’s this: does Christopher Hitchens exist? Does Richard Dawkins? Or Sam Harris? Or any of the other paid-up members of Militant Atheism, Inc? Personally, I doubt it. And so should you.

Oh, I know, you see their spoors from time to time and hear their voices in the darkness. You even spy their little tell-tale droppings on YouTube or Vanity Fair. But don’t be fooled, dear reader. What you are witnessing is just the accidental accumulation of billions of colliding molecules, gathering momentum as they are propelled haphazardly through the debris of space, mere projected reflections of the stardust garnered from long extinct galaxies, jillions of light years from here. But, as persons, as distinct intelligible, intelligent human beings, they simply do not exist. Or they may be just figments of a hyperactive imagination. Undigested lumps of antimatter, knawing away at your insides like worms in the substrata of your soul. Or, another little joke played by God on wayward minds, imagining themselves the centre of an ephemeral universe from which critical belief has been banished.

But surely you can’t be serious if you imagine that belief in Hitchens and Dawkins, et al, is anything other than silly delusion. A biological aberration. An evolutionary freak. A child’s ghost story. The stuff and nonsense of atheism’s whistling past the graveyard on its way to the comforts of a nihilist’s heaven. You can believe in the toothfairy. Or Santa Claus. Or even in the evolutionary perfectibility of man. But in Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and their philosophical atheism? Please. Voodoo you think you’re fooling, my friends!

Richard Dowling

Patrick Street

Mountrath

Co Laois