Atheism Is Cool?

A lot of young people seem to be under the illusion that it's somehow cool to claim to be an atheist. Belief in God, they think, is a superstition whereas science has proven there is no God. Atheism is intellectually sophisticated whereas belief in God is for ignorant rubes.

This is nonsense, but a lot of people who haven't really thought about it have been persuaded by somebody on YouTube or Tik Tok that it's true.

So far from having proven that there is no God, science has amassed an enormous amount of evidence in the last three decades that there is very likely a Creator of the universe and of life, and as for being intellectually sophisticated, few people base unbelief on intellectual reasons any more.

In fact, many atheists admit that their unbelief is a matter of the heart not the head. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche was ahead of his time in the 19th century when he wrote in his book The Gay Science that "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

And contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel admits that,

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

In other words, like Nietzsche, Nagel's unbelief is a matter of his will and/or desires, not the result of a rational investigation of the evidence.

But where would a rational investigation lead? What are the existential consequences of atheism? I'd argue, and a lot of atheist philosophers would agree, that the consequences of atheism are philosophically, psychologically and emotionally depressing.

They're not cool at all. Understand that atheism entails materialism - the belief that everything in existence is, or reduces to, material substance - and materialism entails that everything is subject to the laws of physics.

Thus,

• There's no self (no soul). We're just material bodies. There’s no “you” who has a body. Your body constantly changes so who you are today is not who you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You have no real identity.

“Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality.” Philosopher Thomas Metzinger

• There's no free will. Our belief that we’re free to choose is an illusion. Our choices are produced by chemical reactions in our brains that are themselves the product of our genetic inheritance or environmental influences.

“A scientific account of mankind has no more place for free-will or the equal capacity of each individual to be good and act justly than it has for the soul.” Alisdair Palmer

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear ....There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." Evolutionary Biologist Will Provine

• There's no basis for human dignity or human rights. If there's no God where do dignity and rights come from? Our right to govern our bodies, our right to be treated equally under the law are simply arbitrary legal conventions given us by the state, but they have no objective basis or reality.

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking

"When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

• There's no basis for hope. There’s no explanation for evil. It’s just the way our genes have programmed us, but if that’s so then there’s no hope that we’ll ever change, and because we’re just physical beings, no hope of anything beyond our physical suffering and death.
• There's no ultimate justice. If physical death is the end of our existence, which it must be if we're just material bodies, then no one is ever held ultimately accountable for how he or she lives.
• There are no objective moral values or duties. If there's no moral standard beyond ourselves and we're just the product of physical forces, what makes our moral beliefs anything more than our subjective opinion? And, if all morality is subjective and arbitrary no one can say that anything or anyone is morally wrong. Every time an atheist says that something like racism, school-shootings or homophobia is morally wrong they’re acting as if there really is an objective right and wrong. They're free-loading on theism.

“There seems to me no doubt that our ethical judgments all claim objectivity but this claim, to my mind, makes them all false.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell

“There are no objective values.” Philosopher J.I. Mackie

In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. Biologist E.O. Wilson and Philosopher of Biology Michael Ruse

• There's no ultimate meaning to life. We're born, we suffer, we die and are extinguished. What's the point?

"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre

"The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Psychologist Sigmund Freud

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins

Each of the people quoted is, or was, an atheist. Their atheism, if it were followed to its logical conclusion, leads to nihilism, the view that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters. And that's anything but cool.