Atheism and Agnosticism
Leaving Certificate Section A The Search for Meaning and Values
Part two The Response to the Quest
Topic 2.2 The tradition of response
Please note that the following article is background information only on this topic. It in no way
constitutes a sample or exemplary answer on this topic.
Atheism may be defined as ‘the conscious rejection of a theistic entity creating and
controlling human life and natural phenomena’1. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
in particular have seen a rise in atheism as a philosophical alternative Christianity and
other religious traditions. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationalism and the
primacy of the scientific understanding of reality, witnessed the emergence of atheism as
an alternative discourse as the influence of Christianity began to weaken. Atheism is not
just a rejection of the tenets of Christianity but of Islam and other religious traditions
also. Contemporary Islam, for example, is now discovering a discourse towards atheism
which distinguishes Muslims who no longer practise their religion from those who
express disbelief in the central truths of Islam2. In some Muslim societies it may be both
dangerous and considered a criminal offence to be an atheist if the stance is linked to
apostasy (the deliberate disavowal of belief in the orthodox tenets of a religion).
Apostasy and punishment have been found in both Christianity and Islam. The
Inquisition in Christianity and the fact that apostasy is punishable by death in the Qur’an,
are two notorious examples of large scale reactions to people’s declaration of non-belief.
In Islam, apostasy is usually applicable to people who leave the faith and join another3.
Agnosticism may be defined as ‘the suspension or putting aside of acceptance and
rejection of religious belief4. Agnostics in general are undecided or unsure whether or
not to believe in God. The question of God’s existence remains open.
During a two-day conference in Dublin in 1997 on the changing situation of religion in
Irish education, Michael Paul Gallagher delivered a speech on the topic ‘New Forms of
Cultural Unbelief’. He spoke of a ‘paradigm shift’ in culture in Ireland in recent years
(meaning ‘a whole way of seeing and making sense of things, a cluster of beliefs and
values shared by members of a community’5). He claims that contemporary cultural
change involves a paradigm shift in people’s perception of their lives. ‘Their horizons
expand or contract, and hence subtle movements occur within their self-images and in
1
Greaves, R: Key Words in Religious Studies, The Continuum International Publishing Group, London,
2006, p7
2
Ibid; p7
3
Ibid; p7
4
Ibid; p2
5
Gallagher, M.P, ‘New Forms of Cultural Unbelief’, in Hogan, P. and Williams, K. ‘The Future of
Religion in Irish Education’, Veritas, Dublin 1997 pp19-20
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their relationships’6. We all possess subtle tools of interpretation, ways of responding to
existence, and these ‘lenses of seeing’ are at the heart of cultural change. Unbelief
would appear to be a by-product of cultural change. Contemporary atheism in Western
societies has evolved from outright militant rejection of God to ‘a more vague distance
from religious faith’7. If ‘modern’ society was linked to a rational view of the world, an
emphasis on the use of reason and logic, control and technology, then our ‘post-modern’
era is a time of scepticism about humanist claims and ‘a mood of unease over any
meanings and values’8. If atheism suggests a conscious decision to deny God’s existence
or a deliberate stance that involves the rejection of the notion of God, then the term
‘unbelief’ suggests less clarity, more confusion and more doubt. It would seem that there
are fewer people who are giving an outright rejection to the notion of God, but increasing
numbers of people who could be called ‘unbelievers’, not necessarily negating religious
faith but sensing it to be unreal. Thus the most common form of unbelief in the West
suggested by Gallagher is religious indifference or non-dogmatic agnosticism.
‘Agnosticism can express itself as a more vehement allergy against Church presence in
education and public life, and because of the perceived power of the Church, some
unbelievers in the fields of communications and education feel called to crusade of total
opposition or at least of overt despising of the religious dimension of life’9. This more
hostile tone may be more common among the over thirties than among the younger
generation. The Spanish commentator, Josef Vives says of the younger generation:
At ‘the present moment the question of God remains something irrelevant, or
even non-existent for the great majority of people. God is missing but is not
missed. This is a genuinely new situation, which never existed before in the
world’10
This type of unbelief gives rise to an inherited confusion and a sheer puzzlement at
religious beliefs and practices with their associated languages and symbolisms. This
cultural unbelief is described by Gallagher as ‘an un-dramatic limbo of disinterest and
non-belonging’11. This religious vacuum is part of a larger picture in Western society, a
picture depicting a lack of certainty about values, about institutions and the possibility of
finding meaning to our lives. Therefore this unbelief is more passive than chosen, ‘more
drifting than militant, and the unbeliever is more a victim of an impoverished or
confusing culture than a deliberate rejecter of anything12.
Gallagher classifies unbelief into four groupings:
1. Religious anaemia
2. Secularist marginalisation
3. Anchorless spirituality
4. Cultural desolation
6
Ibid; p20
Ibid; p20
8
Ibid; p20
9
Ibid; p21
10
Vives, J, ‘Dios en el crepusculo del siglo XX’, Razon y Fe, Mayo 1991, p468
11
Gallagher, M.P, ‘New Forms of Cultural Unbelief’, in Hogan, P. and Williams, K. ‘The Future of
Religion in Irish Education’, Veritas, Dublin 1997 p21
12
Ibid; p21
7
2
By ‘religious anaemia’ he means a distancing from traditional Christian roots due to the
lack of pastoral imagination in the Church. This causes a credibility gap of language
whereby the message of the Church can be experienced as a foreign tongue. Alienation
can also happen when religion is equated with moralisms, producing guilt, where the unevangelised are sacramentalised. This, of course, results in superficial ritualism where
religious observances may occur but their meaning and reason are not known or relevant
to the person. This religious anaemia is also linked to more recent expressions of anger
in response to Church scandals, particularly concerning sexual scandals and a general
impression of condescending non-listening to human realities. This pattern creates
distrust and distance. Therefore, religious anaemia is evident when ‘the receiver
encounters only the conventional or complacent externals of an institution, and when the
communicators of faith fail to imitate St. Paul in the Areopagus, entering initially and
respectfully into the culture of the receiver’13. It is suggested that many people in Ireland
who profess to be Christian never actually move beyond James Fowler’s ‘stage 3’ of faith
development, remaining fixated at the stage of institutional loyalty. This fragile
dependence on institution can easily be shaken by the pressures of the dominant culture.
With regard to ‘secular marginalisation’ Gallagher observes the modern tendency to
equate democracy with secular liberalism. In the world of academics and in the media in
general the secular culture is particularly strong whereas religion is often ignored of
viewed as unimportant. Unlike Italy, newspapers in Ireland lack serious consideration of
religion. In Italy, even ‘left-wing’ / ‘liberal’ newspapers regularly review theological
books, unlike the Irish situation where a religious book usually only gets media attention
if it is linked with controversy. The trend of secular marginalisation involves ‘an
arrogance of autonomy, a somewhat adolescent rebellion against what the middle-aged
once knew as religion’14. This type of unbelief manifests itself through silence and
shyness in the fields of reflection and communication.
‘Anchorless spirituality’ is linked to the post-modern so-called ‘return of the sacred’.
Many people today search for meaning in their lives but their search is without an anchor
or firm basis. They are ‘sated but unsatisfied’ by the old materialism. They are bored or
untouched by their experience of Church. They drift in their searching. The danger is
that they fill their spiritual hunger with ancient heresies like gnosticism and pelagianism.
Gallagher describes this condition in terms of ‘religious malnutrition’15. In what he refers
to as a ‘lonely spirituality’ he describes how it results in people being thrown back on
their own resources and express their ‘undernourished and suppressed religiousness’ in
different ways, which can range from the ‘New Age explorations to more fundamentalist
rigidities’16.
The fourth type of unbelief Gallagher speaks of is ‘cultural desolation’. He argues that
the pressures of the dominant culture can block people at the level of their disposition or
readiness for faith. The reason for this is that these cultural pressures ‘kidnap their
13
Ibid; p22
Ibid; p23
15
Ibid; p24
16
Ibid; p24
14
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imagination in trivial ways and therefore leave them un-free for Revelation’17. He would
like to see a ministry of disposition, an awakening of the deep hungers to which the truth
may eventually be seen as the answer. An interesting warning is made by William Barry
when he writes that:
the ‘influence of culture on us escapes our consciousness’
and that we need to find out
‘how any of us encultured human beings can become free enough from our
culture to be believers’18.
Gallagher suggests that education today is invited to become counter-cultural, helping
students to identify the de-humanising factors present in lifestyles and assumptions of
modern culture. He states that:
‘to survive as believers into the twenty-first century, young people will need to
develop skills of Christian critique and of seeing through the deceptions of trhe
surrounding culture’… and that being a Christian today means, in a sense, ‘opting
for a certain resistance movement, distancing oneself from the diminished life on
offer in the dominant images around’19.
Cardinal Newman was of the opinion that unbelief is not merely a matter of the intellect
but of the heart, and that the main battle ground for faith or unbelief is in the
imagination20. This is a sentiment echoed by T.S. Eliot when he writes:
‘The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things
about God which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God
and man as they did’21.
Thus education needs to promote a firm discernment of the surrounding culture. This
creates the foundation not necessarily of mature faith but of cultural agency.
‘Even coming to see that one has a way of seeing involves a shift in
consciousness’22.
Today we realise that human beings are both shapers and are shaped by the contexts of
our self-understanding. If we allow ourselves merely to be shaped by emerging cultural
contexts then we run the risk of becoming ‘passive members of a dominant culture’23.
This means that we assimilate values and disvalues in an unassuming way, and lacking in
discernment. If however we realise our potential to also be shapers of contexts of selfunderstanding, then we are empowered to become agents of culture with the power to
make decisions. To get to that destination we need to embrace the skills of critique and
discernment.
17
Ibid; p24
Barry, W. ‘U.S Culture and Contemporary Spirituality’, Review for Religious, Vol. 54, January –
February 1995, p7
19
Gallagher, M.P, ‘New Forms of Cultural Unbelief’, in Hogan, P. and Williams, K. ‘The Future of
Religion in Irish Education’, Veritas, Dublin 1997 p25
20
Newman, J.H. ‘Grammar of Assent’, Longman, London 1991, pp92-93
21
Eliot, T.S. ‘On Poetry and Poets’, Faber & Faber, London 1957, p25
22
Warren, M. ‘Communications and Cultural Analysis’, Bergin &Garvey, Westport, Connecticut 1992,
p108
23
Gallagher, M.P, ‘New Forms of Cultural Unbelief’, in Hogan, P. and Williams, K. ‘The Future of
Religion in Irish Education’, Veritas, Dublin 1997, p30
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