Copyright 2001 by Jeffrey Stueber, all rights reserved
The book The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays is a small collection of the writings of Percy Shelly who lived in the years 1792 to 1822. I was able to convince myself to purchase this months ago for a small price because I felt I needed another book to critique. (Those who've read me before should know by now I don't invest much money in atheistic tracts.) The book was published by Prometheus Books (who else?) and contains essays against Christianity, refutations of deism, and arguments against the evidence for God's existence contained in his "the necessity of atheism" published in 1811 which resulted in his expulsion from Oxford. It is this essay I concern myself with here.
Shelly says, "When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief." Belief, he says, is a "passion" which varies in intensity in proportion to three "excitements," which include the senses, the decisions of the mind founded on reason, and the experiences of others which ranks the lowest among these three. Shelly is correct, so far, if not longwinded; he could have simply said that when a person is faced with a proposition, that person takes into account the experiences of the senses, use of reason, and the experiences of others when deciding to believe the proposition. Shelly, like many writers, is obviously in love with words and wields them like ninja weapons, but his verbiage is not the main issue here. Rather, it is his logic that engages me.
Shelly first tackles what might be normally called the argument from a first cause which claims that since the universe shows signs of design and cannot create itself, it must have an uncaused cause. Shelly sidesteps the issue in a roundabout way, arguing that "The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other." He then goes on to say "it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it." This sounds like an argument from incredulity for while it may be incomprehensible to believe in a deity that exists before time and space and outside our known universe, it may nevertheless be true. Of course some things may be impossible to believe but they are that way because of certain criteria. One cannot believe that I both exist and do not exist; this is logically impossible to believe. One could neither believe that I can walk on water; this is physically impossible for me. Shelly doesn't establish that a god existing outside our universe is physically and logically impossible. He takes it as a given while it may not be so and then appears to argue from incredulity which is never a good argument.
Then Shelly proceeds with his next argument which I quote here although it may be irritating to read.
It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity convinces the senses of men of his existence can only be admitted by us, if our mind considers it less probable that these men should have been deceived than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational; for he commanded that he should be believed, he proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions; belief is not an act of volition; the mind is even passive, or involuntarily active; from this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is insufficient to prove the being of a God.
His argument seems to go something like this: testimony cannot be contrary to reason; it is unreasonable for God to send to hell those who doubt him; belief in god is then not an act of choice; therefore no belief in god can be taken as evidence of god's existence. This is obviously a criticism of belief in the Judeo-Christian God and obviously is faulty in two ways. First, it assumes that one is going to believe in a god because of a fear of being sent to hell. If this method actually does work, I see no evidence of it in the lives of atheists who never believe out of fear. They don't fear "fear" and usually dismiss heaven or hell as an idea left over from pre-scientific fables. Second, Shelly seems to assume those who believed in God in the early church did so out of fear, something alien to the writings of the Gospels. It seems those in the early church believed because Jesus offered them something they valued: a future cause to be imbued by and a home in heaven someday. Of course, if the early disciples of Jesus were convinced by the reality of His existence and death on the cross and simply not forced into it by fear, as Shelly believes, then this argument for the necessity of atheism crumbles.
Shelly has recently been included in a voluminous selection of essays by atheists which I have noticed shelved at my local library. Shelly survives the years to appear in such a manner because his arguments continue to crop up among atheists. (Some things, like good furniture or overused arguments, never die out.) Surviving the test of time doesn't make the arguments right because often they're straw men which don't even correctly comment on the subject they're supposed to critique. Before we believe Shelly that atheism is necessary - via the title of his essay - we should expect a little more from him besides the meager offerings he brings.