"The Necessity of Atheism"

[rug]

March 16, 2017
by DEREK BERES

Upon learning of the drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1822, the London Courier took a shot at the deceased poet’s atheism by writing, “now he knows whether there is a God or no.” Shelley’s wife, Mary, who had published Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus only four years prior, probably didn’t enjoy the jab at her late husband, victim of a sudden storm in the Gulf of Spezia.

Percy Shelley never achieved widespread fame during his lifetime. After death his writing spread—The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas became classics. Along the way the poet penned essays and journal entires describing his transition from mystical pantheism to atheism. In 1811 he published “The Necessity of Atheism,” for which he received flack from the religiously-inclined. Two years later, while writing his poem, Queen Mab, he expanded and revised the essay.

Shelley was living during England’s golden age of scientific discovery. As a student at Oxford he fell in love with the new technology of ballooning. He equated the epic flights of silk balloons, which would soon carry humans, with liberation, himself once securing a revolutionary pamphlet on a number of balloons that he launched from a Lynmouth beach.

Shelley’s poetry was filled with scientific wonder. He studied under James Lind, the Scottish physician most famous for conducting the first experimental method by treating sailors with citrus to cure scurvy. While many of Shelley’s contemporaries were searching for metaphysical explanations of the growing fields of biology and chemistry, Shelley recognized poetry in the processes of nature.

http://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/the-necessity-of-atheism

http://symbiosiscollege.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/THE-NECESSITY-OF-ATHEISM.pdf

[guillaumeb]

1. Alternatively, the necessity of intellectual curiosity.

Recommended.

[rug]

2. Well, I have to say Shelley was more than curious on the subject.

He was downright adamant.

His argument is pretty familiar two hundred years later.

Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason; reason is founded on the evidence of our senses.

[guillaumeb]

3. If reason is founded on the evidence of our senses,

can reason be aware of that which we cannot sense with our limited human senses?

[rug]

4. That form of epistemology works only for science.

It can establish only what can be detected, not whether something may or may not be.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Yes. That's what infra-red detectors are for; and radio telescopes, microphones that can detect

ultrasonic frequencies, Geiger counters, and much more. And mathematics to combine data to tell us about electrical fields, or dark matter. But Shelley didn't use the phrase 'limited human', or course, so he probably accepted things like that as "the evidence of our senses" (infrared radiation was discovered in 1800: http://practicalphysics.org/william-herschel-and-discovery-infra-red-radiation.html )

[guillaumeb]

6. A good answer.

And humans still interpret and analyze these things using their human capabilities.

[guillaumeb]

7. Part of what Shelley said:

Shelley made a number of claims in Necessity, including that one's beliefs are involuntary, and, therefore, that atheists do not choose to be so and should not be persecuted.

What of this apparent argument for predetermination? Or predestination?

[rug]

8. I'm not sure he was concluding we are captives of determinism.

But, he is palpably yearning for the predestination that certainty brings.

If, leaving for a moment the annoying idea that theology gives of a capricious God, whose partial and despotic decrees decide the fate of mankind, we wish to fix our eyes only on the pretended goodness, which all men, even trembling before this God, agree is ascribing to him, if we allow him the purpose that is lent him of having worked only for his own glory, of exacting the homage of intelligent beings; of seeking only in his works the well-being of mankind; how reconcile these views and these dispositions with the ignorance truly invincible in which this God, so glorious and so good, leaves the majority of mankind in regard to God himself? If God wishes to be known, cherished, thanked, why does he not show himself under his favorable features to all these intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and adored? Why not manifest himself to the whole earth in an unequivocal manner, much more capable of convincing us than these private revelations which seem to accuse the Divinity of an annoying partiality for some of his creatures? The all-powerful, should he not heave more convincing means by which to show man than these ridiculous metamorphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested by writers so little in agreement among themselves? In place of so many miracles, invented to prove the divine mission of so many legislators revered by the different people of the world, the Sovereign of these spirits, could he not convince the human mind in an instant of the things he wished to make known to it? Instead of hanging the sun in the vault of the firmament, instead of scattering stars without order, and the constellations which fill space, would it not have been more in conformity with the views of a God so jealous of his glory and so well-intentioned for mankind, to write, in a manner not subject to dispute, his name, his attributes, his permanent wishes in ineffaceable characters, equally understandable to all the inhabitants of the earth? No one would then be able to doubt the existence of God, of his clear will, of his visible intentions. Under the eyes of this so terrible God no one would have the audacity to violate his commands, no mortal would dare risk attracting his anger: finally, no man would have the effrontery to impose on his name or to interpret his will according to his own fancy.

Two hundred year old arguments, still raging as if anew.

[guillaumeb]

9. A 200 year old example of projection.

Shelley projecting his own arguments and theories about the essential nature of a Creator because these arguments are what Shelley would raise if he were that Creator.

[rug]

10. If one believes God is a human creation, that is to be expected.

[guillaumeb]

11. And this type of argument is sometimes employed by non-theists,

often in the "evil exists therefore God is evil" argument.

[rug]

12. If the argument is made by those who say humans created God,

the logical answer is evil came from those who created God.