The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays (Freethought Library) [Hardcover]

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Freethought Library | Publication Date: January 1993

A philosopher as well as a poet, Shelley argues that the divine attributes of God are merely projections of human powers; life everlasting cannot be empirically demonstrated, for it runs counter to all the evidence for mortality given by the natural world, which is the only world we know. During his brief life, Shelley affronted the armies of Christendom with a single-minded purpose. As Shelley observes in his dialogue "A Refutation of Deism", there can be no middle ground between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of a deity - another way of stating the necessity of atheism. In all, these essays provide an important statement of the poet and freethinker's enlightened views on skepticism, faith, and the corruption of organized Christianity.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (January 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879757744
• ISBN-13: 978-0879757748
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,305,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars bertrand russell is more accessable..., March 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays (Freethought Library) (Hardcover)

Frankly, I'm more impressed with Bertrand Russell's _Why I am not a Christian_ than with this book...Shelley's writing is couched in such period rhetoric (early 19th century / late 18th century style) as to be rather clumsy and turgid for the modern reader, and the assumtions and argumentation rely on premises that are often faulty or no longer seem valid in the contemporary world.

All that having been said, the short essay "On Life" was most impressive indeed and in many ways seems a foreshadowing of Postmodernism. Very startling to see that Urquelle in a text like this.

This book looks great on a bookshelf, but is a little dissapointing in the actual reading of it, save for "On Life". The title essay is especially disappointing. Oh well...

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shelley's thoughts on Life and God, March 26, 2000

By 

MARCOS DE C LUDWIG (Porto Alegre, Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays (Freethought Library) (Hardcover)

This book is an excellent introduction to Shelley's existencial thought, containing some impressing essays such as "The necessity of atheism" and "On Life". It also helps the reader to understand the marvellous personal "animus" that hiddened beneath Shelley's great poems.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, July 25, 2008

By 

Peter Payne - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays (Freethought Library) (Hardcover)

What Shelley tried to establish in the essays of this volume was the logical necessity of atheism, that is, from commonly accepted premises, atheism necessarily follows. Though I found in Shelley an unexpected kindred spirit, I must admit that he does not succeed. Shelley states that "the senses are the sources of all knowledge" (p. 32), and declares, "Locke has proved that ideas result from sensation" (p.86). However, Locke's tabula rasa is a model rather than a proof, and it is not indisputable. Since irrational numbers, for instance, cannot be sensed, how can this model account for the idea of them? (Yes, I know Hume's explanation; I just do not find it convincing). In another instance he writes, "In the language of reason, the words God and the Universe are synonymous" (p. 87). Though I agree with this, Shelley's premise for this conclusion was "that which is infinite necessarily includes that which is finite." This is not true; for example, the infinite set of odd integers does not include the even integers between 2 and 20.* Though many of Shelley's arguments are based on the premise of materialism, he emphasizes that his atheism only negates a creative Deity; "The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe remains unshaken" (p. 31), which certainly contradicts the doctrine of strict materialism. Shelley does not expound upon this Spirit, though he implies that Christ spoke for this Spirit, and that Christ's authentic wisdom was distorted by hypocritical dogma. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," does not mean that after death those who have faith that Christ died for their sins will stand before the Creator, but that whosoever "aspires to that which the divinity of his own nature shall consider and approve - he has already seen God" (p. 5). He declares that the doctrine of the pointlessly cruel eternal torture of Hell is necessarily at odds with Christ's exhortation to "Love your enemies, bless those that curse you." For Shelley, "God is a model through which the excellence of man is to be estimated, whilst the abstract perfection of the human character is the type of the actual perfection of the divine" (p. 14). Shelley was more like a Buddhist than an atheist.

A main point of Shelley's argument is that "Belief is not an act of volition, nor can it be regulated by the mind: it is manifestly incapable therefore of either merit or criminality" (p. 68). I became an atheist at the age of eleven, and I recall being especially impressed with the truth of the assertion that belief is not an act of free will. I had been indoctrinated into Christian mythology in conventional Sunday school classes, which means that the idea of questioning what I was taught never occurred to me, and certainly it was never suggested that I should. Yet when I first heard the arguments of an atheist, after no more than minute or so of defending my belief in God, I was shocked to realize that I no longer believed in Him. This was no free choice; I could not possibly have chosen to continue to believe. I have spent much time wondering why belief in God strikes me as ridiculous, and even repugnant, while it clearly has the opposite affect upon the majority of people. I am sure that Christians have no more control over their belief than I have over my disbelief. However, to say that belief or disbelief is incapable of merit is extreme. After all, most criminals justify themselves in their own minds. It negates any possibility of free will. It is commendable to at least try to regulate one's beliefs by weighing them against available evidence. What would be the point of Shelley's essays if this were not so? Such diverse thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Kurt Gödel, and Colin Wilson have observed that dogma acts as a mental virus. However, for the materialist, the memes constituting the virus are the mind; hence there can be no free will. Shelley's hypothesis of a "pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe" suggests that the mind transcends a mere haphazard conglomeration of memes and sensations. If consciousness exists in its own right, rather than as a mere epiphenomenon of physical processes, then free will is possible. But free will is not a gift; it can only be achieved with great effort.

The very fact that it is even possible to doubt God's existence is the best evidence that he does not. This was one of my first original thoughts as an atheist. What possible reason or justification could He have for hiding? Since God is omniscient, He had to have known that Satan would rebel, and in fact He had to have created Satan with a jealous, rebellious temperament that made Satan's fall inevitable. God created a set of rules that man was to follow, though He knew that He had created man with a temperament incapable of following those rules. So in order to avoid having to condemn all of mankind to eternal torture, a punishment we richly deserve for disobeying rules that we could not possibly obey, God sent His only begotten Son to die and go to Hell in man's place. All of mankind is condemned to die for a crime committed by our distant grandfather, and only innocent blood will redress our guilt for sins that we cannot prevent ourselves from committing no matter how hard we try. The only way we can avoid eternal torture is by having faith that Christ died for us, even though the ability to have such faith is a matter of God's grace, completely beyond our control. We learn to love God from boring sermons, from child-molesting clergymen, from a multitude of petty self-righteous sects that haughtily denounce each other as guilty of heresy, from a book that describes God commanding His minions to atrocious acts of massive slaughter and God Himself causing disasters "of Biblical proportions." The history of the powerful Christian nations has been just as rife with cruelty, rapaciousness, and genocide as it could possibly have been. This is the Christianity, visible for anyone with eyes to see, that I rejected while barely pubescent, and that Shelley rejected two hundred years ago. Yet Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism, and today's atheists have President Bush telling us that we have no right to be American citizens. I am way past the point of being polite. If Christians actually possessed the free will that they boast of they could not possibly believe this damned nonsense.

*My own argument: If God is "that which nothing greater can be imagined," as He is commonly defined, then a God that contains corporate reality is greater than one that does not. In HOW TO THINK ABOUT GOD, Mortimer Adler, who accepted this definition, insisted that God has necessary existence while corporate existence is merely contingent. The consequence of necessary existence is that all of God's actions are necessary, so He could have done nothing differently than He did. If this were true, then how could God's creation be any less necessary than Himself? This is not proof that the words God and the Universe are synonymous, but it does demonstrate that their existence as distinct entities involves a contradiction.