Good dose of atheism encourages healthy debate

WE should all be grateful to those atheists who have recently been contributing to your columns.

Ireland can only benefit from a good dose of atheism so as to challenge some of the unhelpful certainty that surrounds the Christian churches.

Here in Oxford there has been a very healthy continuing debate between those who believe in God and those that do not. I have found that the challenge of atheism has strengthened my beliefs. What is clear is that neither being an atheist nor a theist implies that you are very clever and rational. There are some very bright people on both sides of the current debate. It is quite reasonable to be a believer or a non-believer.

I grew up in Ireland where I got the distinct impression that to believe amounted to assenting to a set of propositions, most of which I never really understood. Our parish priest gave us some comfort when he confessed that even he who had spent four years in college could not understand what he referred to as “the mysteries of our faith”.

The objections of most atheists and the doubts expressed by many of our young people are directed against a god of their worst nightmares, a god who is prepared to torture people for eternity, a god who looks on at innocent children the world over crying out with the awful pain of an unfed stomach, a god who knew about the Nazi concentration camps and turned a blind eye to them. Rather than parade ill-formed certainty in answer to questions such as, “Why does God allow the innocent to suffer?”, it is more honest to say, “I do not know”. To believe is to live with the tension between knowing and not knowing.

Philip O’Neill

Edith Road

Oxford

England