Why No One Is Truly an Atheist

Why No One Is Truly an Atheist

Today I haven’t yet gone out to doubt. I usually do it every day for a little while. Just enough to reaffirm myself in my doubts and keep walking. To make decisions without having all the data. Simple decisions, such as whether, after the exercise of doubting, I feel like having a calamari sandwich or one with cured sausage. Whether I should get off at this stop or the next. Others, of course, are far more complicated.

Going out to doubt is a magnificent exercise. I recommend it to anyone who feels depressed or excessively happy. One can doubt anything, even depression itself or a burst of mad joy. Moreover, there is no need to go anywhere in order to doubt. It can be done at home, which is undoubtedly a great advantage. Now that attendance at Mass has dropped drastically, we should at least once a week withdraw into our homes—or anywhere else—for a little while to doubt. The place matters little, but doubting sincerely should be one of the theological virtues of a humanist rationality.

It is of no use, of course, to go out and doubt whether this or that politician is honest. Nor to doubt whether we were given the correct change when we bought something at the neighborhood shop. These are another kind of doubts. More metaphysical. More vital. The kind that sometimes cross our minds and that we brush aside amid the frenzy of everyday events. We bury them under our pathological devotion to work, or under our ambition to gain something—anything—that day. We forget them, driven by the annoying feeling that we are running late to somewhere we do not even know. There is no definitive place to get to. It is better, sometimes, to stay and doubt in a good place.

Today, for example, I spent quite some time doubting that there is anyone in our world who is not a believer. I also doubted that there is anyone who is not an atheist. Catholics are atheists with regard to Allah; Muslims are atheists with regard to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. And so on. Even the Holy Father is a great atheist. The Supreme Pontiff of Rome does not believe in the god Ra, to give just one example. One is usually an atheist with respect to the gods worshipped by others, and a believer in the unknown gods that preside over our civilization, our behavior, and our own lives.

Atheists of a personal, creator God do not know what they are saying when they claim, “I do not believe in God.” What are they actually saying? One thing is not to believe in an old, male, bearded god with whom one can speak and to whom one can confess minor sins; another is to claim that one does not “believe in God”—a word that, in reality, means nothing concrete. Atheists often go too far in their skepticism and also say things like “nothing exists.” What do they mean? That they themselves do not exist? Or that something does not exist which no one knows what it is, no one knows how to define, and which is our origin and perhaps our destiny?

Here, after what we once believed to be as solid as matter has dissolved into an unknown universe of waves and elementary particles, not even God knows what we are. And yet we are all believers. “Every god” is a believer. Not because we believe in a being who listens to us, to whom we can ask for miracles (that is, to suspend for us the laws of the Universe, even while declaring that we do not deserve it), but because we are alive and must trust that the next day we will still be here. A pure belief, one that we all practice when we say goodbye by saying, “See you later.”