Three typological figures have traditionally stood against the spiritual background.
The religious man says he believes. The atheist says he doesn’t believe and can explain why. The agnostic says he doesn’t know one way or the other.
The difference between the last two types is marginal. Neither of them believes in God, but the atheist is prepared to support that position with arguments, invariably spurious ones. The agnostic shies away from the argument but not from the disbelief.
As the masses march through history, a typical progression one can glean is from faith to agnosticism and then to atheism, that is first to doubt and then to aggressive denial. By and large, it was the believer who dominated the first 15 centuries of Christianity, with only a trickle of agnosticism dripping into the mighty stream of religion, and but the odd drop of atheism.
Then, over the next few centuries, faith ran incrementally drier, and agnosticism itself became a mighty stream with a few atheist tributaries. In the 19th century atheism gathered strength, and in the 20th it broke banks to flood the social landscape.
None of these has disappeared: the atheist, agnostic and believer are still extant. But none of them dominates any longer. A new type has appeared to shove the old ones aside.
He doesn’t believe, disbelieve, nor even says he can’t make up his mind. He just doesn’t care one way or another: the subject of God isn’t one on which he expends any mental energy.
Whenever religion comes up at a party, apathy overcomes him. He yawns and moves towards another group, where discussion revolves around subjects that really matter: sports, investments, home decoration, TV shows, sex, sometimes politics. Real life in other words.
Since this type deserves his taxonomic slot, I’d call him an apathist. His whole being exists on one plane, religion on another, and the two planes never intersect even tangentially. He has more important things to worry about, and when he hears a reference to God he is neither indignant nor doubtful. He is apathetic.
I also find him excruciatingly boring. A man who never asks what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions” about first causes and last things really has no interest at all in matters of the spirit. Such questions force their way into the conscience of anyone who has ever read serious books, heard serious music or pondered anything of serious interest.
The apathist is several rungs below the vagrant in the O. Henry story The Cop and the Anthem. When cold weather comes, that man deliberately commits minor crimes just to spend the inclement months in the warmth of a gaol. And then he walks past a church, with the sound of an organ chorale heard out in the street. The vagrant is transfixed; he feels in touch with eternity and decides to make something worthwhile of his life (and at precisely that climactic point he has his collar felt).
Our apathist has never had such an experience. He may be more comfortable than O. Henry’s hero, he may be rich and even educated, after a fashion. But, to me, he is still a crushing bore. Someone not worth talking to or indeed about.
However, the apathist has one thing going for him. He may be vulgar and probably is, but at least he doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is continue to ignore that subject altogether. The agnostic and the atheist don’t have that option, at least not when they broach religion, as, unlike the apathist, they tend to do from time to time.
The agnostic’s vulgarity quotient is lower, and it comes into play only when he laments that the proof of God’s existence is lacking. That statement ought to be part of the dictionary definition of inanity.
A man can’t prove God’s existence by definition: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa. The greatest religious thinker of all time, Thomas Aquinas, knew that, which is why it’s a mistake to refer to his famous Five Ways as proofs of God’s existence.
St Thomas himself never called them that. He came up with five deep and impeccably logical arguments (from ‘first mover’, from universal causation, from contingency, from degree and from final cause), but he had the intelligence and humility not to call them proofs.
He ended each argument with the words “and that is what we call God” (not “that is what God is“), showing that this was the greatest height to which the human mind can aspire. After that an impassible partition comes down: thus far, but no further.
The same goes for the earlier ontological argument put forth by St Anselm of Canterbury. That was an exercise in philosophy, not forensic proof. Anselm defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Even someone who denies the existence of God, he argued, must have such a concept in his mind.
Conversely, someone who denies or even doubts God for lack of the kind of proof one expects in a lab forms a conclusion on the basis of ignorance and absence of any cogent thought. That’s neither grown-up nor clever. It’s intellectually vulgar.
At least, the agnostic doesn’t push his vulgarity to an unbearable level. He just shrugs, says he can’t be sure one way or the other and leaves it at that.
The atheist is much, much worse. He emblazons his vulgarity on a banner and waves it around for all to see every time he tries to prove that God doesn’t exist.
These days I can’t be bothered to join such verbal jousts, other than saying that he’s right. God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists, which is an oblique reference to both Anselm and Aquinas.
But the atheist seldom stops there. He has a bit between his teeth, and nothing can stop his gallop towards the far reaches of vulgarity.
He’ll commit the gross logical faux pas of mentioning natural science, not realising that he is crawling along a separate – and lower – epistemological level. He’ll talk about the continuing misery in the world, showing his ignorance of elementary theodicy. And he’ll do so with the passion of a zealous vulgarian proud of his vulgarity.
God looks down on those shenanigans and smites the atheist with the lightning of inanity. A miracle happens, one I’ve witnessed many times.
An otherwise intelligent, erudite and even subtle thinker immediately starts sounding like a blithering idiot, something he never does when any other subject comes up. I’ve heard people whose logic is forged of high-grade steel commit infantile logical errors that would put a secondary school pupil to shame (or would have done before the collapse of our education).
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, Romans used to say, repeating the thought first uttered in Greek by Euripides and Plato. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” They do, but gods don’t stop their punishment there. They also make such a person sound vulgar.