WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

A nuanced philosophical investigation of belief and nonbelief.

Former Harper’s editor Beha here offers a long retort to Bertrand Russell, whose Why I Am Not a Christian fueled much discussion for its elemental thesis: People believe in gods and the afterlife because they are afraid of death. Acknowledging that motive, Beha takes a long tour through religious belief and its polar twin, scientific materialism, which Beha finds simply “unsatisfactory.” That materialism, “part of the much larger shift from the medieval Christian worldview to what we now understand as modernity,” Beha holds, is metaphysical, for all its claims to be rooted in the tangible. On the other hand, modern-day atheists, descendants of Descartes, hold that nothing exists that cannot be explained by the laws of physics. Taking a different tack, Beha ventures a variation on Blaise Pascal’s notion that it makes statistical sense to believe in God, since there’s no real downside to doing so while betting on the wrong horse can lead to the crackling fires of the inferno. As Beha puts it, with respect to divine law, “The only rational cause for obedience to it is the promise of reward and the threat of punishment.” Beha is no Bible thumper, and his tour through various philosophers—Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, and other usual suspects—is well informed, but in the end, he doesn’t really refute Kant’s notion that the reason we try to behave on the mortal plane is simply to exercise “prudential tools for getting along in life.” He’s a smart and fluent interpreter, yet his argument doesn’t quite escape Russell’s fear theory, as when he writes, “The hope of eternal life allows us to deny finitude rather than facing the possible impossibility of our own existence.”

A lucid, thought-provoking treatise, if one that likely won’t sway readers to change their views on what lies beyond.