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The nuts and bolts of atheism: a sagacious scrutiny cum critique into its notoriety, oddity and nihility.

PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHEISTIC ENTERPRISE

DEMOCRITUS/EPICURUS: For Democritus the nature of things consists of an infinite number of particles called atoms each one being completely solid in itself. For these things take their origin in the motion of atoms therefore everything is the product of the collision of the collision of atoms moving in space. This theory denies any element of purpose or design and his materialistic reduction of all reality to atoms left no place for a creator or designer.

Epicurus espoused this in his pleasure principle. Building upon the Democritean physics or science, Epicurus concluded that everything that exists must be made up of eternal atoms. Outside these clusters of atoms nothing else exist even God and even if it exists, it must be material being. God is not the source of anything but himself is a product of purposeless random event. A person is composed of atoms and no other principle is needed to explain a person’s nature no God and therefore no life after.

FEUERBACH/MARX: Feuerbach was a 19th century great atheist who saw God only as a projection of man’s perfect state. It is as results of the shortcomings in life in the world humans unconsciously project a conceptual form of human nature into another world. According to him it was not God who created man for there was no such God. It was man who created God in man’s image.

Like Feuerbach Marx saw the belief in God as a work of fantasy, an escape from reality. For if humans improve their material and social conditions the idea of God will vanish. God must be killed for the people to be liberated. According to Feuerbach in reality God does not exist man is only worshipping himself and praying to himself.

SIGMUND FREUD/DARWIN: Darwin in his scientific development presented a theory of human evolution that challenged the Judeo –Christian idea of the creator –God.

Freud held that the belief in God constitutes a regression to a childlike state in which helpless man project upon nature the image of a comforting father figure. This father figure that man formed in his despair to assume his protection in his hostile world. This is led by the childhood neurosis of naturally turning to a father. But this is an illusion for such a father does not exist outside the human mind.” In fact is the childish acceptance of such things as God that is symptomatic of man’s intellectual regression such that whatever may be the reasonable or factual justification for such a belief in God, it is a psychological necessity for the infantile type of mind.

JEAN-PAUL SARTER/ABERT CAMUS: They continued with the view that man is alone in the world, free to determine his own values. As Sartre puts it human freedom entails the denial of God, for the existence of God is a threat to man’s freedom to make his own values via real ethical choice. For Sartre God is an obnoxious nihilism of primitive mentality. Modern man having reasserted his existential ego in his freedom from past bondage now lives dynamically without God. There is no rational justifiable basis whatever for the exploited man of the modern age to account the reality of God.

NIETZCHE FRIEDRICH/N. HARTMANN: According to Nietzsche God is dead. This means that though God existed he is no more. Man is the new God who climbs to the superpower status. Nietzsche tried justifying human formation of idea of God on holding that when the Hebrews were conquerors they possessed a strong warrior God but when they were captives in Rome and Assyria they developed a peace-loving and other-world God which gave birth to the Christian god of love.

Hartmann denies the existence of God because of the supposed danger coming from God to human or ethical values.

SANTAYAMA GEORGE: His question of whether the ENS- realissimum or the ultimate metaphysical reality deserves the name God is no, unlike Spinoza who said yes. The ‘ens relissimum’ for him is matter which is the origin or spirit not its product. He declared openly in his “magnum opus’ in metaphysics that my philosophy is atheistic for to avoid charge of atheism by worship of the ‘ens realissimum’ i.e. to call matter God and worship it inverts the natural order in which spirit with its awareness of the God arises out of nature and poetically and mortally projects an idea and calls it God. For him God is perfect being as a premise to the ontological argument is right but its conclusion is wrong for God does not exist in any sense other than as a creation of spirit.

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