Whether God exists—that is one question. Whether belief in his existence plays an important role in human life—that is another. “Religion’s power to console,” Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “doesn’t make it true.” Perhaps this is so, but only a man who has spent a good deal of time snoring on the down of plenty could be quite so indifferent to the consolations of religion, wherever and however they may be found. One wonders, in any case, why religion has the power to console and why it has had this power over the course of human history.
Writing about the arts and their degraded state, Camille Paglia begins by affirming that she is a “professed atheist.” She is nonetheless persuaded that “a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and selfabsorption and gradually goes slack.” The connection between what she sees (a good deal that is awful) and what she believes (There is no God) is not one that she is inclined to make. When faced with irreconcilable alternatives, she proposes to straddle the difference, a position as difficult in thought as it is uncomfortable in gymnastics. Her calls for the study of comparative religion at least afford the consumer the luxury of choice without the penalty of commitment. “I view each world religion,” she writes, “as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe.” I daresay that a telescope does a better job in revealing the size of the universe than any of the world religions, and if sublimity is wanted, it is hardly to be expected from a system of thought assumed to be false. There remains another possibility. There may in fact be a connection between the importance of religious belief in life and the existence of the Deity in reality.
[The Devils Delusion - Atheism And Its Scientific Pretensions]
