Bolshevism reaches The Daily Mail

I think it was either Chesterton or C.S Lewis who lamented the sharply declining level of public atheists.

In the past, he wrote, we were blessed with David Hume, whereas today we are cursed with… I don’t actually remember which names were offered as an exemplar of intellectual degradation.

Stripping Hume’s argument down to its bare bones, he wrote that, if God knowingly allows evil to exist, he isn’t good. If he doesn’t know about it, he isn’t omniscient. And if he knows but can’t stop it, he isn’t omnipotent.

That argument can be defeated, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand. It’s an invitation to engage one’s philosophical apparatus and apply it to theodicy, ‘defence of God’, a term coined by Leibnitz in 1710.

But the very fact that one would have to delve deep into philosophy and theology to counter Hume’s argument makes him a worthy opponent. Compared to him, modern public atheists like Dawkins, Wolpert or Dennett look like blithering pygmies.

However, even they seem intellectual giants compared to Annabel Fenwick Elliot’s turgid musings in yesterday’s Mail.

She starts out well, by agreeing with what I wrote the other day (osmotically, that is – I’m sure she doesn’t read me): “I don’t believe the assertion that Prince William has a ‘quiet’ faith in God. It looks very much to me like he has no belief whatsoever…’

Since it looks very much the same to me, I read the whole piece, expecting to see pearls of wisdom strewn for the delectation of Mail readers. What I got instead was unmitigated drivel, of a kind that would make even Dawkins wince.

I don’t automatically regard atheists as ipso facto stupid. Perhaps they are at a slight disadvantage in the rarefied upper reaches of the philosophical stratosphere, but, as long as they eschew doing an Icarus, they can be intelligent. In fact, one or two atheists among my friends are among the brightest men I’ve ever known.

The gift of faith is like any other, and no one would accuse a chap for not having a gift for music or mathematics. Nor can one praise him for possessing such a gift. It’s what he does with it that may be praiseworthy.

An intelligent atheist says, “I don’t believe in God” and leaves it at that. The statement is perfectly unobjectionable. You don’t, I do, and that’s all there is to say on the subject. So which team do you fancy in the Cup Final?

It’s only when an atheist starts arguing against religious doctrine that he begins to sound stupid. And he, in this case she, sounds downright moronic when trying to co-opt science to the case of godlessness. I’ve seen no exceptions to this observation – and it applies even to people who start that downward slide from a much higher level than Fenwick Elliott.

She did all those ill-advised things, achieving exactly that effect. The phrase that followed my ellipsis in the quotation above said: “…  – and for this I commend him.” I don’t commend anyone for believing in God, but she happily commends William for his atheism.

From there, the only direction for travel is down:

“I do not for one moment believe in the stories of the Bible. I don’t think Jesus had magical powers. I reject the notion that we get judged by a supernatural entity for the things we do when we’re alive, so as to be sorted into the heaven-or-hell bin when we die.”

That’s saying in 51 words what can be succinctly said in five: I don’t believe in God. And then: “Honestly, I cannot take anyone seriously who does believe these things”.

No comment is necessary here. It would even be tedious to provide a long list of history’s greatest minds whom Miss Fenwick Elliott can’t take seriously because they believed in God. I’ve already mentioned Leibnitz and could easily add hundreds of similarly illustrious names.

Then that old chestnut: “You might say that… Christians in the modern Western world don’t routinely round up and murder anyone who doesn’t believe in their storybook. But they did, until quite recently, and they still do in some remote parts of Africa.” In those parts, Christians are even more sinned against than sinning.

But true enough: belief in Christ doesn’t turn humans into angels. Fenwick Elliott adds that she doesn’t think “we must have religion to be a good person.” Neither do I. However, I’d venture a guess that a man who thinks that everything he does in this life will be judged in eternity may behave better than he otherwise would.

Annabel then vindicates Euripides, who wrote that: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”. For her subsequent statements make me doubt her sanity, not just her reason.

She describes herself as a “cultural Christian”, meaning that she likes pretty churches. As a travel writer by trade, she must have seen lots of them, and many appeal to her aesthetic sense. No harm in that. But then:

“I very much resent the fact that in England, if I want to get married in a pretty church, I’d have to – as many of my friends have – pretend to believe in God for a bit in order to get permission. Why can’t we love history and appreciate the architecture of a chapel without having to convince the vicar”?

We can love history and even appreciate the architecture of a chapel, but we can’t appreciate it fully if we treat it as just a pretty building.

Thousands of people had to sacrifice their time, money, health, often life to erect the churches Annabel likes so much. They weren’t inspired exclusively by aesthetics, and no one can appreciate the architecture as deeply as it ought to be appreciated while ignoring the inspiration behind it.

As for an atheist feeling deprived by being unable to marry in church, this is cloud cuckoo land. Christian marriage, dear, isn’t just a licence to shack up and share community property. In apostolic confessions, it’s a sacrament.

An atheist can no more marry in church than he can have his children baptised or go to Communion. But I have an idea for Annabel. Before going to the Register Office to get married, she could stop at a Gothic church, ask the taxi driver to wait, go in and admire the vaulted ceiling. That way she wouldn’t have to gatecrash a performance without first getting a ticket.

Nor is it just church marriage: “I don’t want to have to tell bare-faced lies about what I believe in order for my children to get a good education [at an Anglican or Catholic school]”.

If I were her, I’d ask myself why such schools offer better education than your regular comprehensive. But again I have a suggestion: we have plenty of secular public schools for Annabel’s children to be properly educated. No need to tell bare-faced lies there. Tuition fees may be quite steep, but that’s a small price to pay for honesty.

But thank God for small favours: “I am not suggesting we ban Catholics or dissolve the Church of England… ”. It’s even okay to go to church on Sunday, but “purely because [people] value the community and like singing, rather than because they believe it possible – against reams of scientific evidence – for a man to part oceans and rise from the dead.”

Such is the level of atheist propaganda these days. Similar intellectual heights were scaled in Russia immediately after the Bolsheviks took over. They created The League of the Militant Godless, which embarked on an orgy of anti-religious persecution putting the French revolutionaries to shame.

Eventually the League grew to 3.5 million members, most of them semi-literate and hence responsive to the crudest of arguments, with many based on “reams of scientific evidence”. Since The Mail saw fit to publish the same harebrained hogwash, one could legitimately wonder about its readers – and editors.