Facticity

The Necessity of Atheism

In 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a treatise called The Necessity of Atheism and sent it anonymously to various leaders at Oxford Colleges and Oxford University. In this treatise, Shelley described the impossibility of a rational mind accepting the existence of God. The leaders were shocked by this brazen attack on Christianity and Shelley was expelled for refusing to deny authorship. Thankfully, public atheism is no longer a cause for expulsion from most universities. Sadly, the United States is home to many large organizations (e.g. the Boy Scouts of America) that require a confession of belief in God to participate, and in many small towns and especially cultural backwaters of this country, being publicly atheist is considered far worse than being a convicted felon or adulterer. Nor is this intolerance for atheists reserved to the uneducated and blatantly ignorant masses. George H.W. Bush, Vice President at the time and later President, famously said, “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” So this tendency toward despising atheists is present in all social and economic levels in this country.

I arrived at atheism through a long and ultimately fruitless search for evidence proving or at least suggesting the existence of a god and like Shelley, I cannot see how the rational mind can believe in a god with anything like the properties of the god of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The properties attributed to this god by the various religions are internally contradictory and every piece of logical and physical evidence cries out against the existence of such a god.