Anthony Grayling on Atheism

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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"[On agnosticism] The question at stake here is one about rationality. The intellectual respectability of the claim that there are Gods, the Gods of Olympus, or the Gods of Hinduism, or one God, the God of Christianity, seems to be to be exactly on par with the intellectual respectability of thinking that there are fairies in your garden. Belief in fairies was very very widespread and very well-attested right up until the late 19th century.

Indeed, people believed that fairies were much more present in their lives than God was, because things that went missing, like your shoelaces or a teaspoon or something, had been nicked by them. So the comparison here is not a jokey one.

And if you think that the reasons you have for thinking that there are fairies are very poor reasons. That it's irrational to think that there are such things, then belief in supernatural agencies in general is irrational... [Agnostics] fall foul of this picture...

[On "God moves in mysterious ways"] It's such an easy one, that one. You know, it really gets you out of all sorts of holes, that. And in fact that leads on to this rather interesting thought. That if you invoke the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal being. The sort of standard idea of God, absolutely anything whatever follows. So that nothing whatever counts as counter-evidence against the existence of a God.

And we're all familiar with Popper's dictum that if a theory, a claim explains everything, if everything is consistent with the truth of the claim, then it's empty. It doesn't explain anything at all.

[On the claim that Science purports to explain everything, or that it claims that it will be able to eventually] I don't think Science does claim that at all, in fact. Science at its normal best: it is a public, a testable, a challengeable project. Always having to maintain its own respectability by saying what would count as counter-evidence against it.

And when people put forward views in Science, they publish them so that other people can test them, review them, try to replicate results, and I think that is absolutely the model of how an epistemology should proceed. Out there in the open and inviting the very toughest kind of response from other people...

[On the claim that there is no morality without God] In classical antiquity, in the Classical Tradition, there are deep, rich, powerful thoughts about the nature of morality, the foundations of ethics. The nature of the good life, which make no appeal whatever to any divine command. Or any government via this sort of spirit monarch in disguise, who will reward you if you do what he or she requires, and punish you if you don't. All the very best and deepest thinking about ethics has come from non-religious traditions...

People whose morality comes in a box that they've taken off the supermarket shelf of ideas, marked Catholism or Islam or something, as opposed to those who've thought for themselves about these things, and realise that they've got to inspect their reasons for treating others as they do, or for living as they do, for the choices they make. And it seems to me that the latter, always: much much more honourable and admirable than the former...

Remember in the UK, the people who go every week to the mosque, or temple, or synagogue, or church, are somewhere between 7 and 8% of the population. And yet they get a huge amount of airtime in the BBC. They get public tax money for their faith-based schools. They've been arguing for exemptions from various laws. And these things are unacceptable.

And so there is a very very serious debate to be had here about the place of religion in the public domain, given that our culture is a functionally secular one. And secularism is something that the religions themselves should be embracing for their own survival. Because if any one religion were to become dominant in the public square, the inevitable effect would be that the other ones are silenced or marginalised.

So it does all of us good if we see a secularist dispensation persist. Having won it with such difficulty in the last few centuries"

(Philosophy Bites)