Reply #8: Op Ed Response: Atheists don't have voids they ache to fill [View All]

Tuesday, 13 May 2008

When I heard that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor had called for greater understanding and dialogue between believers and non-believers, I felt my knees jerk with an atheistic reflex. If you really want some kind of concordat between us, I thought, how about this: "When you stop talking about God, we will too".

And curiously, when I actually read the full text of the Cardinal's lecture, that wasn't a million miles away from what he was saying. Enough miles to form an unbridgeable gap, I would have thought, but not a million – since one of the central themes of the Cardinal's address was that the way in which Christians talk about God influences the way in which atheists do.

His point, crudely summarised, was that 18th- and 19th-century attempts to construct a rational and provable God had simply encouraged atheists – because of their serial failures to stem the tide of disbelief. And it's not just that this was a bad chess move, which the player regrets as he sees checkmate looming, but that it ignored doubts which the Cardinal argues should be central to any Christian's faith.

.. .

And it's at this point that it seems to me Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor stubs his foot on an immovable obstacle without even recognising that he might have broken his toe. What he doesn't seem to register is that very few atheists think of themselves as non-believers, carrying around with them a vacancy that they ache to fill. Atheists are believers already – in a cosmology that has no space for a supernatural actor of unbounded benevolence and knowledge.

. . .

The Cardinal concludes by arguing that a life that excludes God is a life without meaning or hope – a line that, addressed to believers in church, no doubt found a receptive audience. Outside church, addressed to me, it sounded like an insult – precisely the kind of reductive clarity that he was notionally arguing against. He's right that Christians and atheists can have more things in common than is sometimes acknowledged, but God – however vaguely or dubiously described – is never going to be one of them.