I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

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The atheism of notable people who claimed to be atheists has had the characteristic of tenuousness in regards to maintaining thoughts in accordance with atheism. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the leading propenents of atheism of the 20th Century. Yet Jean-Paul Sartre made this candid confession:

As for me, I don’t see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world but as a being that was expected, prefigured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a creating hand that created me refers me back to God. Naturally this is not a clear, exact idea that I set in motion every time I think of myself. It contradicts many of my other ideas; but it is there, floating vaguely. And when I think of myself I often think rather in this way, for want of being able to think otherwise.[1]

Charles Darwin wrote in his private notebooks that he was a materialist which is a type of atheist.[2][3] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following:

In 1885, the Duke of Argyll recounted a conversation he had had with Charles Darwin the year before Darwin's death:

In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of Mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin's answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,” and he shook his head vaguely, adding, “it seems to go away.”(Argyll 1885, 244] [4]

See Also

  • http://www.johnankerberg.org/Articles/apologetics/AP0702W4.htm
  • http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1877
  • American Scientist May 1977:323
  • http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/notes.html