Suppose I say to you “I went into a bar and I got drunk”. You reply: “How many drinks did you have in the bar?” I say “None—I was drunk before I went in there”. You retort: “Then why did you say you got drunk in the bar?” I say “I never said that; I merely said that I went into a bar and I got drunk—I never said I got drunk in the bar”. This illustrates the distinction between what is strictly said in an utterance—what proposition is literally expressed by the words uttered—and what is conversationally implied by the utterance. Grice used this distinction to argue that “and” is always semantically a truth-functional connective, with the temporal element assigned to pragmatic factors. He argued that we can see this from the fact that the implication of temporal succession in the events reported can be canceled without contradiction, as by saying “I went into a bar and I got drunk, but I bought coffee at the bar having got drunk at a wedding previously”. A careful report of what I strictly said would limit itself to semantic content, but an audience might naturally assume that I meant I got drunk in the bar; maybe I did, but Grice’s point is that I never actually said that.

            Irony depends on this Gricean distinction—meaning the opposite of what you say. This is why reporting an ironic speech act can be tricky. Philosophers who know their Grice are constantly aware of this distinction and often exploit it to make clever remarks to other philosophers—gleefully canceling the “implicature” without contradiction. This is how we amuse ourselves on a Saturday night. Outsiders don’t get it, unless they have been schooled in Gricean philosophy of language. This can cause misunderstandings. Maybe Grice should be taught in high school, along with Darwin. 

Now I have to go and play myself.

My cultural heroes are: Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Larkin, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Peter Cook, John Lennon, and Larry David (among many others). What they all have in common is the quality captured by the French phrase “eparter les bourgeois”, which the OED defines as “shock people regarded as conventional or complacent”. We might paraphrase this in a number of ways: taunt the prudish and prim, ridicule the conventional and boring, outrage the pious and conformist. The cultural tradition that falls under this description sees itself as in favor of art, freedom, creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, life, and experience; it casts itself as standing against stifling social norms and dull conformity. It is given to provocation, controversy, and shock tactics. Accordingly, it is often pilloried and persecuted, and of course misunderstood. It does not see itself as against morality as such, but it does view conventional pieties with a beady and skeptical eye. It is on the lookout for hypocrisy, dogma, intolerance, suppression, and sheer dullness of spirit. These to me are admirable values that I try to bring into my own life. I am particularly fond of provocative irony, which has got me into trouble on more than one occasion (especially in irony-deficient America). I am often amazed that people fail to see the irony in this or that utterance of mine.

 I trust readers will see the relevance of these remarks to current events. 

I have been pleased (but not surprised) to receive a lot of support from women. They seem to grasp the whole situation with greater clarity than many men out there. Why? I suspect it is partly because they understand the varieties of human relationships better than men; they appreciate the subtleties and nuances of different kinds of affection between people. They have greater emotional and imaginative range than (many? most?) men. The male mind tends to be crude (in several senses) and dichotomous. Also, I get the sense that they think in less stereotyped ways about interactions between people. Hypothesis: women have a better “theory of mind” than men (speaking statistically). Then too, many men simply project their own attitudes and motivations onto others—this is what they would do in such-and-such a situation. Thus they suspect the worst, sans evidence. In any case, I have been impressed and moved by the good sense and decency of many of the women with whom I have been in contact.

I have never once reached for the phrase “complete fool” to describe a woman, but with respect to men I find myself using it quite frequently.

1. The rules of the university allow the President to overrule the findings of the Faculty Senate Committee that investigates cases of alleged misconduct, and I believed this was very likely in my case.

2. I had no desire to remain in a place I had come to hate.

3. I did not want to keep paying my lawyer at exorbitant rates for several more months.

4. I was concerned about the effects on my wife’s physical and mental wellbeing.

5. I wanted to spend more time with my son and grandchildren in England.

6. I have been a professor for forty years and wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life reading the books I want to and playing more tennis.

7. I didn’t know whether my old enthusiasm for teaching would survive my disenchantment with graduate students.

8. I was sick and tired of the whole thing and just wanted not to have think about it anymore or waste my time on it.

9. I had books to write that I wanted to get on with.

10. I felt insufficiently intellectually stimulated in Miami anyway.

The downside was that I wouldn’t “get my day in court”, but I made a point of writing a long refutation of the accusations against me and giving it to the university.

I have not been fired from the university.

I have never been charged by the university with sexual harassment; nor did the student accuse me of that. The lack of such charges can be attributed to the simple fact that I have not been guilty of sexual harassment (which I deplore).

There are no findings of any kind against me by the university.

The only charge the university considered that involved a (putative) violation of university rules was that of failing to report a consensual (though nonsexual) relationship.

The student’s accusation was made many months after the alleged offenses (as much as seven months).

The student’s complaint occurred soon after a dispute between her and me over research work she was supposed to do over the summer (for which she was paid $4000) that she failed to do.

The student (hereafter NN) and I were engaged on what we called “the Genius Project”. The purpose of the genius project was to make NN into a truly original and outstanding young philosopher (one who could expect to find an attractive job later). Part of this project involved techniques for encouraging unconventional thinking, and the concept of “taboo-busting” was deemed helpful towards this end. We had developed a very open and candid style of communication, and were in contact extremely frequently. (She came to my house several times to play tennis and go paddle boarding, as well as talk about the work we were doing.) The understanding was that we could say anything to each other, in a spirit of mutual trust (she would often use the phrase “cluster fuck” to me). Humor and playfulness were much in evidence. We also liked each other very much. The relationship was close, reciprocal, and much valued by both parties. She sent me many affectionate and exuberant emails, often of a very personal nature.

In this spirit I sent NN two short email messages, spaced over three months, which contained some (mild) sexual content, which was related to the seminar of mine NN had attended and which was relevant to work we were doing together. This content pertained to the hand in relation to human evolution and human life (including sexual life), and referred back to material discussed in the seminar I gave and which NN enthusiastically attended. These emails were received in the spirit in which they were intended (certainly no complaint was voiced about them), and they gave rise to some mild amusement between us over the months. They were quite banal. Many other personal and professional matters were discussed in our email correspondence, as well as our very frequent meetings; these two were exceptional and designed to achieve a specific pedagogical end. In no sense were they intended (or interpreted) as attempts to elicit anything from the recipient (except perhaps a chuckle).

            To impose disciplinary action on the writer of these two emails would be a clear infringement of academic freedom and freedom of speech. I judged that these emails were in line with the project on which NN and I were (consensually) engaged, and I think they served their purpose (taboo-busting—though they described rather mundane matters). Most of the genius project took a more conventional form, but it is within this context that they should be interpreted. They were not just gratuitous snippets of risque prose, sent out of the blue. I believe that had the genius project continued it would have borne significant fruit; and indeed a colleague has remarked to me that NN’s philosophical abilities went from “good” to “superb” following the several months during which I was attempting to make her into a “genius”.

            It is very important to view these emails in context, which includes both their pedagogical history and the verbal responses from NN that followed and preceded them. It is also important to avoid stereotypical thinking. It should also be noted that it was explicitly agreed between us that if anything in our relationship was felt to be unacceptable it could be stopped simply by saying so.

            I am sorry to have to air these personal matters in a public setting, but recent events have forced me to it. What should have been entirely private has become a matter of (prurient) public speculation.

Colin McGinn

What kind of hand job leaves you cleaner than before? A manicure, of course. Why does this joke work? Because of the tension between the conventional idiomatic sense of “hand job” (a certain type of sex act) and its semantic or compositional meaning (in which it is synonymous with “job done by or to the hand”). When you think about it virtually all jobs are “hand jobs” in the second semantic sense: for all human work is manual work—not just carpentry and brick laying but also cookery and calligraphy. Indeed, without the hand human culture and human economies would not exist. So really “hand jobs” are very respectable and vital to human flourishing. We are a “hand job” species. (Are you now becoming desensitized to the specifically sexual meaning of “hand job”? Remember that heart surgeons are giving you a “hand job” when they operate on you; similarly for masseurs and even tax accountants.)

I have in fact written a whole book about the hand, Prehension, in which its ubiquity is noted and celebrated. I even have a cult centering on the hand, described in this blog. I have given a semester-long seminar discussing the hand and locutions related to it. I now tend to use “hand job” in the capacious sense just outlined, sometimes with humorous intent.

            Suppose now a professor P, well conversant in the above points, slyly remarks to his graduate student, who is also thus conversant: “I had a hand job yesterday”. The astute student, suitably linguistically primed, responds after a moment by saying: “Ah, you had a manicure”. Professor P replies: “You are clearly a clever student—I can’t trick you. That is exactly the response I was looking for!” They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner. Academics like riddles and word games.

            But suppose a naïve eavesdropper, overhearing this witty conversation, jumps to the conclusion that “hand job” was being used in the narrow sexual sense. He then reports the speech act of Professor P as follows: “Professor P told his student that he masturbated yesterday”. He has failed to see the joke and has no knowledge of the linguistic and intellectual background of the speech act he is trying so ineptly to report. He clearly misreports what Professor P said (oratio obliqua), missing both the content and the humor. We might accurately paraphrase P’s remark as follows: “I had a job performed on my hand yesterday”. Perhaps the inept reporter’s mistake is understandable, but it is still a mistake. This might lead to some unfortunate consequences if he rashly goes around telling people what he thinks Professor P said, especially if he fails to repeat the very words used by the speaker and paraphrases him in the erroneous way described. Why would the speaker use the rather odd construction “I had a hand job” (which sounds like he paid for one) if he merely meant to say that he masturbated?

            Similarly, a professional glass blower might remark to his co-worker with a lopsided grin: “Will you do a blow job for me while I eat this sandwich?” The co-worker will interpret the speaker as indulging in crude glass blower’s humor and might reply: “Sure, but I’ll need you to do a blow job for me in return” (recall the SNL skit about “soaking the cork”). A naïve eavesdropper might report the speech act as follows: “He asked his co-worker to perform fellatio on him”—as if this were the serious intent of the utterance. But that would clearly be wrong; in the dialect of glass blowers a “blow job” is just what you do when professionally blowing glass—though these workers will no doubt be aware of the lay use of the term (hence the humor). Compare saying “Will you do me a hand job and pass the salt?” when using “hand job” in the arch manner described above: this speech act is not to be paraphrased as “Will you masturbate me and pass the salt at the same time?”

These reflections take care of certain false allegations that have been made about me recently (graduate students are not what they used to be). Lesson: reported speech is a bitch (a female dog—be careful how you paraphrase me!). One has to be very careful about getting it right. Lives can turn on it. One has a duty to take all aspects of the speech situation into account and not indulge in rash paraphrases. And one should also not underestimate the sophistication of the speaker.

Here ends this sermon in morality and the philosophy of language. (And yes, there will be a test.)

Colin McGinn

The Cult is for those who have been struck by the hand and see in it a proper object of wonder. 

(This document states the main tenets of the Cult of the Hand. All members of the cult are expected to conform to these principles. Formally, the cult is referred to as the Gripparian Order.)

We seek to promote greater hand consciousness

We advocate manual cultivation, arboreal therapy, and brachiation training

We believe in prehension science and are strict evolutionists

We preach hand reverence

We encourage hand intimacy, but not hand promiscuity

We are in the grip of the grip

We deplore hand neglect and hand repression

We thank nature for the gift of the hand

The thumb and forefinger are objects of special reverence

Our prophets are Charles Darwin, Charles Bell, and John Napier

We foster hand virtue

We think the hand is a thing of beauty

All hands are created equal

We contemplate the hand every day

We never take our hands for granted

We observe the hands of others

We prefer writing to speaking

We support an active hand life-style

All fingers are important

Hand communication is encouraged

We practice special secret hand greetings

We think the hand jive was cool

We leave casts of our hands after death

We worry about the decline of the hand in the modern world

We view tools as extensions of the hand

We classify species according to their prehensive profile

We regard the brain as secondary to the hand

We have intense hand discussions

We teach our children hand anatomy

We believe that pointing is profound

Hand exercise is mandatory

We do everything to avoid cold, numb hands

We believe that a flexible hand is a flexible mind

We regard the intellect as an extension of the hand

We tolerate pan-prehensionists but this is not official doctrine

We admire gibbons greatly

We sing praises to the hand

We favor eating with the hands

We esteem the feet because they are the platform of the hands

The muscles of the forearm are fascinating to us

We believe that anatomy is destiny

We regard the body as essentially prehensile

We regard speech as a fall from grace

We reserve a special compassion for those who have lost their hands

We are entranced by trees

We abhor “glad-handing”

We find hand holding extremely romantic

For us the hand has a halo around it

We view the mouth with some suspicion

We see nature as the Great Chain of Prehensive Being

We feel the foot is misunderstood

We collect hand trivia

We admire hand erudition

We disapprove of hand exhibitionism

Our central metaphor is the grip

At wedding ceremonies we say, “You may now hold the bride’s hand”

We have private hand gripping sessions

Shaking hands is taken very seriously

We feel a kinship with apes

Kissing the hand is permitted but not encouraged

Calling someone “handy” is a great compliment

We see no distinction of status between the power grip and the precision grip

We think philosophers have wrongly ignored the hand

In the beginning was the hand-deed

We despise the phrase “hand job”

We believe that capitalism has led to proletarian hand alienation

We think it is bad manners to grab things

We have long arguments about hand etiquette

We regard the hand as corruptible but not corrupt

We are ambivalent about gloves

We are a secular organization but we applaud hand worship in moderation

We support hand pride initiatives, but deplore hand vanity

We feel that musicians are basically good but at risk of hand abuse

We accept that man is nothing without his opposable thumb

We oppose hand oversimplification

We give out hand achievement prizes, especially to children

We invest in hand education

We believe the hand is more trustworthy than the tongue

We climb trees at weekends

We regard fingerprinting as an invasion of privacy

We are continually astonished by the hand

We do not permit hand plastic surgery, except for medical reasons

We are working to create a hand museum and university

One of our highest honors is to be designated a “Keeper of the Hand”

We wash our hands in a spirit of holiness

Violence with the hand leads to immediate expulsion from the Order

Anyone wishing to become a member must pass a simple test in pointing and gripping

We approve of prehensional meditation but it is not mandatory

We believe mind and body are united in the hand

We are a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving hand wellbeing globally

We do not favor one hand over the other

We believe that 10 is a special number

We are critical of thumb idolatry, though we understand it

We give our children names like Palm and Index and Grippa

We call Sunday Thumbday

We reject the term “pinkie”, preferring “precious”

We treat the back of the hand with the same respect as the front, though it has no name

We have an annual hand poetry prize

We repudiate all hand superstitions

We maintain that the hand is epistemologically fundamental

We love the words “squeeze” and “grasp”

We stage brachiation contests

“I grasp, therefore I am”

Some of us refrain from applause because it is a form of hand slapping

We are working on improving hand nomenclature

We engage in hand sensitivity training, sometimes involving animals

We are suspicious of conventional notions of hand beauty, such as slender fingers

We have convened a special commission to consider boxing and other martial arts

We envisage a hand utopia

We are ambivalent about card tricks

We feel that everyone should work on his or her power grip, no matter how elevated

We memorize hand figures of speech

We conduct remedial hand appreciation workshops for those who need them

Our official icon is a picture of the thumb-index circle

We dream of the platonic form of the hand

We are very careful with kitchen knives

We think Michelangelo was onto something in the Sistine Chapel

We are interested in hand anthropology but believe in hand universals

We have doctors dedicated only to hand ailments

We have special hand holidays and celebrations

We regard ourselves as the only sane cult in the world

We are impressed by the hand theme in the life of Jesus of Nazareth

For us divinity exists only at the tip of the arms

We esteem all forms of prehension but we reserve a special place for the manual kind

In the hand we glimpse the infinite

We believe we were created in the image of the hand

We reject the notion of an immaterial hand

Man is a manual animal, a res manipulans, a digital soul

But we also know that we must trim our nails

(Membership of the cult is open to all, as long as the above precepts are adhered to. No exceptions permitted. Good gripping!)

Astute readers will notice that I misspelled "lava" as "larva".

Last Sunday I saw on TV the best women's tennis match I've ever seen, between two Belgians, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin--goddesses both.

It would be quite wrong, then, to describe an atheist as a “non-believer”. He does not merely lack beliefs; he has many beliefs, among them that there is no God. It is not that the atheist is somehow shy of belief or afflicted with pathologically high standards for belief formation; he is not a skeptic, one who shuns belief. He is as much a believer as the theist; he just believes different things. It is not that there is a big hole in his belief system while the theist is bursting with robust beliefs; his beliefs are as numerous and sturdy as anyone’s—just different, that’s all. Indeed, the theist is as much a “non-believer’ as the atheist is, since the theist does not believe that there is no God, thus failing to possess a belief possessed by the atheist. And, of course, the atheist has many substantive beliefs that go along with his atheism, concerning the origin of the universe, life, the nature of morality, mortality, etc. Only from the point of the theist is he describable as a “non-believer”; from his own point of view, he believes in a great many things. From the atheist’s perspective, the theist is as much a non-believer as he is commonly taken to be, since the theist fails to hold many of his atheistic beliefs. The atheist is a red-blooded believer, indeed a confident (purported) knower.

To many observers the atheist as thus described is an arrogant and unreasonable figure. He takes himself to be entitled to various beliefs and attitudes to which he is simply not entitled. He does not know what he so confidently takes himself to know. He has overstepped the epistemic mark. He is a dogmatist, an atheistic fundamentalist, as unreasonable as the most unflinching religionist. He claims knowledge where none can be had. Agnosticism is the only reasonable position, if theism is to be rejected; atheism is intellectually irresponsible. How can anyone know that there is no God—any more than we can know that there is a God? These matters are simply beyond human knowledge, it will be said, areas of deep and irremediable ignorance.

I count myself an atheist in the strong sense outlined--so am I guilty of going out on an epistemic limb, of claiming to know what cannot be known? Am I being unreasonable? I don’t think I am, because there are many propositions affirming the nonexistence of things that most sensible people unhesitatingly accept. Take Santa Claus: what is your state of belief about him? Presumably you do not believe that he exists; but are you an agnostic about his existence? Do you think it is unreasonable—scandalous even--to believe that Santa Claus does not exist? I doubt it. You actively disbelieve in the existence of a tubby ageless pink-faced man with a white beard and red clothes who lives in the north pole making toys for children and who periodically mounts a sleigh to fly through the air powered by superfast reindeer in order to distribute these toys to children who have been good. If some epistemic stickler were to insist that only agnosticism is rational here, you would think him a bit nutty (“How can you be so certain there is no Santa Claus? Such certainty is beyond human epistemic powers!”). The reason is that you take yourself to have many good reasons to doubt that Santa exists: the story is made up to please gullible little children; searches of the north pole have not revealed the tubby philanthropist in question; it is preposterous to suppose that he could fly through the air with gravity-defying reindeer; he leaves no trace of his alleged journeys; parents have been known to purchase the gifts attributed to Santa’s generosity. These are all solid reasons to believe the negative existential: “Santa Claus does not exist”. Do they amount to cast-iron Cartesian certainty? No, but then nor do the vast majority of our beliefs; and this one seems no worse than, say, the belief that the earth orbits the sun or that Barack Obama exists. We are not certain in a skepticism-proof way of many things, but that doesn’t imply that we don’t have good reasons for our beliefs—including beliefs that certain things that some people think exist (in this case, little kids) do not. Quite simply, we know there is no such person as Santa Claus. Here is another example: I tell you that there is a dragon in the room next to you, eight feet tall and breathing fire, called “Draggy”. You express doubt, because you can’t see anything dragon-like in the vicinity. I tell you that it isn’t visible—or audible, touchable, or smellable. Draggy is a very special kind of dragon, completely undetectable by the human senses or any other device; yet he exists. I then challenge you to disprove my claim. I insist that if you won’t take my word for it then at least admit that you are agnostic on the question of Draggy’s existence—since you can’t prove he doesn’t exist. You might reply that I have defined Draggy in a very convenient way, so that no sensory evidence could possibly be given for or against his existence. The existential claim is totally unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Should you then be an agnostic about Draggy? That seems unduly cautious: it is more reasonable to suppose that I am playing a game with you, perhaps in order to scare you (I might go on to assert that when it thunders outside that is Draggy being petulant). You would be well within your rights to say to me: “Rubbish, you are making this sh** up; I totally disbelieve in the existence of your dubious Draggy or whatever you want to call it”. I might then go on to remind you of Descartes, dreams, brains in vats, the difficulty of obtaining absolute certainty; but you would rightly not be impressed by such flimflam. People cannot just go around positing peculiar entities and expect you either to believe that they exist or admit that you don’t know one way or the other.

Let me distinguish reasonable from excessive agnosticism. Reasonable agnosticism applies to cases where the evidence for and against a proposition is pretty evenly balanced. There are many such cases: Should we maintain a military presence in Afghanistan? Is there such a thing as dark matter? Was the moon ever part of the earth? Excessive agnosticism is the view that we should never commit ourselves as to the truth of a proposition. It is the natural response to various forms of extreme philosophical skepticism. What I am pointing out is that opponents of atheism practice selective excessive agnosticism: they insist on a skeptic’s standard of evidence when it comes to the proposition that God does not exist. They accept that other negative existentials can be known to be true—as that Santa and Draggy do not exist—but they deny that the atheist negative existential can be known to be true. My position is that both are in the same boat: that is, it is as reasonable to be an atheist as it is to be a disbeliever in Santa or Draggy. There is nothing inherently irrational in denying the existence of God, any more than it is inherently irrational to deny the existence of those other things. To suppose otherwise is to be what we might call a dogmatic agnostic—one who refuses on principle to disbelieve no matter how good the evidence for disbelief is.

And now the question becomes what the reasons actually are to deny that God exists. Here I shall be brief, because this is well-trodden ground. In the first place, I do not think there is any evidence in favor of God’s existence (by “God” I shall mean a supernatural being with some personal characteristics who created the universe and is interested in the fate of sentient beings such as ourselves). No observable fact about the universe points towards God as its most plausible explanation, e.g. the intricate design of organisms. There is no good evidence of miracles on the part of specially endowed human beings or emanating from Beyond. The idea of a disembodied being with infinite causal powers existing imperceptibly is contrary to reason. The traditional story of such a being is better explained by certain human needs and superstitions instead of by the actual existence of such a being. It is never reasonable to believe in the existence of something simply because of human testimony, when no other evidence has ever been forthcoming. The traditional so-called proofs of God’s existence—the first-cause argument, the ontological argument, the argument from design—do not hold water. In sum: there is simply nothing out there that amounts to a decent reason to assert that there is a God. As to arguments against, there is the standard problem of evil, as well as the more general problem of making sense of a being having all the qualities said to be possessed by God (e.g. how can God be truly omnipotent granted he is a necessary being—for couldn’t he act so as to extinguish himself, thereby showing his contingency?). There is really no more reason to believe in the God I have defined than in the Greek gods or other beings of myth and legend.

The theist may think I am being hasty and unfair. These are profound questions, she will say, not to be quickly decided. I agree that the considerations just adduced need to be thought through carefully (and I take myself to have done this work over the years), but the point that needs to be made here is that the theist is actually as hasty and unfair as she says I am. For every theist is also an atheist. That is, every believer in one god is a disbeliever in another. Believers in the Christian God disbelieve in the vengeful, jealous and capricious God of the Old Testament, as well as in the Hindu gods or the Greek gods or the nature gods of “primitive” tribes or any number of other “false gods”. People believe in the reality of their own God but they are not similarly credulous when it comes to other people’s gods—here their disbelief is patent and powerful. They do not preach agnosticism about those other gods; they reject them outright. I am with them on this point, but I extend it to their God too. My point is that they are as “dogmatic” as I am in their atheism; we are just atheists about different gods. I am an atheist about all gods; typical theists are atheists about the majority of gods believed in over the centuries by human beings of one tribe or another. I find their disbelief thoroughly sensible; I would merely urge them to push it one stage further. I favor total atheism; they favor selective atheism--none of that pusillanimous agnosticism for either of us. So please, theist, do not accuse me of epistemic irresponsibility in my atheism.

There used to be a big issue about monotheism and polytheism. Asserting the existence of only one god flew in the face of the beliefs of the polytheistic majority. No doubt the polytheists felt disrespected, and they wondered how the monotheists could be so sure that all those gods of old were mere fancy, poor non-existent beings, destined for the scrap heap of history. Some of the gods denied had ancient names, fervid followers, temples devoted to them, priests specializing in their doings—and the disbelieving monotheists wanted to abandon all of that in favor of their pinched unitary deity. The new monotheists were the atheists of their day, except that they retained a single divine being alone (hoping for a reductio the polytheists asked why, if they were ready to abandon nearly all the gods, they didn’t go the whole way). Perhaps the polytheists urged a more cautious agnosticism on the monotheists with regard to the spurned deities; they rejected the offer, preferring outright disbelief. My state of belief mirrors theirs, except that I affirm zero gods instead of one. (In fact, the idea of many gods has its advantages over the one-god theory: it comports with the complexity of the world and it promotes tolerance.) Yahweh, Baal, Hadad, and Yam: which of these ancient gods do you believe in and which do you think fictitious? I believe in none of them, nor in any others that might be mentioned; if you believe in one of them and disbelieve in the others, then you are just like me with respect to those others. Atheism is not confined to atheists, and the epistemology is the same no matter which gods you disbelieve in.

I say I am an atheist, and that is true. But the label is misleading in that it characterizes me from the perspective of a theist: I am a rejecter of theism (why can’t I describe theists as rejecters of atheism, thus privileging my own position?). This gives the impression that I go around rejecting theism, that I am preoccupied with that activity, that I wake up each day and celebrate my denial of God’s existence. According to this picture, I am an atheist in the same way I am a philosopher or a tennis player or hold certain moral views—these being traits of mine that define my “identity”. But really I am atheist in the same way typical monotheists are a-polytheist: it’s not something you think about, aside from the constant buzz of people asserting the opposite. Since there are no noisy polytheists left, monotheists don’t need to occupy themselves with combating polytheism; nor is this something they fret about and ponder on a daily basis. They are beyond polytheism. To be a theist who is labeled an a-polytheist would be an odd mode of description today--true but hardly central, significant. You could be an a-polytheist and scarcely have given the topic a moment’s thought; it is simply a logical implication of your assumed monotheism. For me to be called an atheist feels similarly weird, as if I am defined by one of disbeliefs (I’m also an a-scientologist, an a-Santa-ist, an a-werewolf-ist, etc). If theists were in the minority, and quieter, I doubt that the term “atheist” would be much used; and if that minority were very small, theists might be called “a-naturalists” or some such thing. I am defined as an atheist only in a certain social context. I used to be a serious engaged atheist, when I was thinking systematically and passionately about religion, some forty years ago—when I was in the heated process of rejecting religious claims. But since then my atheism has become merely reactive; where once the larva was hot, now it is cool. I used to believe in ghosts and goblins too, as well as Santa, but once the process of rejecting these entities was over my state of belief became one mainly of indifference. It would be odd, though literally true, to describe me as someone who disbelieves in ghosts, goblins and Santa—as if this were what my thought processes were all about. I am beyond these things—as I assume you are too. And that is my actual position with respect to God: I am post-theist—or I would be if I were not placed in a social context in which I need to defend my settled beliefs (hence this essay). I no longer debate the issue with myself or wonder whether I might be making a serious mistake (though I concede, as a good fallibilist, that it is logically possible that I am wrong—as it is about almost everything I believe). So my state of belief is not that of one continuously denying the existence of God, with an active belief that there is no such entity (though it is true that I am more often in this state than I would be the issue were not constantly debated around me). I am, dispositionally at any rate, in a state of implicit disbelief with respect to God—as I am in a state of implicit disbelief about ghosts, goblins and Santa. I simply take it for granted that there is no God, instead of constantly asserting it to myself. The state of mind I am in while composing this essay is not then my habitual state of mind, and even to be explicitly denying the existence of God strikes me as taking the issue a little too seriously—as it would be to write an essay making explicit my negative implicit beliefs about Santa Claus. So I am really as much post-atheist as post-theist, when it comes to my natural state of mind—just as I suppose most people are post-a-polytheist as well as post-polytheist. Polytheism, for most people, is simply a dead issue, not a subject of active concern. Theism for me is a dead issue, which is why it is misleading to call me an atheist--though it is of course strictly true that I am. It is misleading in just the way it is misleading to speak of a traditional Christian as an a-polytheist or a normal adult as an a-Santa-ist, since it suggests are far more active engagement with the issue than is the case. Many other difficult issues engage my mind and remain unresolved or at least open to serious question, but not my disbelief in God.

I have also reached the point (I reached it long ago) that the issue of God’s existence no longer strikes me as an interesting issue. I mean, when it comes up I tend to glaze over, because all the moves are so familiar and the debate seems so antiquated. I find it hard to get fired up about it. It just seems dull. No intellectual sparks fly off it. The question has important political and cultural significance, to be sure, but as an intellectual issue in its own right it lacks vitality. By contrast, my belief in ethical objectivism, or in natural mysteries, or in conceptual analysis, seems relevant and alive—as does my rejection of the contrary positions. My rejection of theism is more like my rejection of monarchy as a good political system—a bit of a yawn. When I was young I saw through both ideas and have found no reason over the decades to question my earlier conclusions, so the belief is like an old relative I take for granted rather than a lively new acquaintance (I am by no means in love with atheism, as I am with other intellectual ideas). The thrill of atheism has gone, along with fear of it; now it is just an uninteresting fact about me, hardly worth mentioning.

Do I then advocate abandoning all talk of God and his works? I think there is no such thing as God in reality, so do I also think that discourse about God has no useful role? It may shock some of my atheist comrades but I don’t advocate the abolition of God-talk. What I think is that God is (or can be or become) a useful fiction, so his name can play a role even though it has no existent bearer. For many people Satan has already gone that way: they don’t believe in his literal existence but they find it useful to retain the concept and its associated language and ideology. Satan is, or has become, a useful fiction, his name a fruitful source of ideas and emotions, especially when it comes to describing the deeply evil. Imagine a community of intelligent beings who have never believed in God or anything supernatural or even considered the question of whether such beings might exist; they are constitutionally secular. They do, however, enjoy works of fiction, so they are familiar with the notion of a fictional character; they are clear that such characters do not exist but are merely conjured up by creative writers. One day a writer publishes a novel with a radically new theme: a supernatural being who created the universe, cares about us, ensures our survival after death, rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked—called “Gud”. The book is offered as a work of pure fiction and is taken to be so by its eager readers. It becomes a bestseller, a publishing phenomenon. People speak constantly of Gud and his works, enjoying the fiction woven around this supernatural character. The story supplies something in their imaginative life hitherto missing (rather as some of Shakespeare’s characters seem to do so). No one, however, is tempted to think the story is factually true. They start saying Gud-related things to each other, like “Gud wouldn’t think much of that” or “It would take Gud to pull that off” or “By Gud, you’re beautiful”. They find such remarks amusing, maybe enlightening—though they are consciously interpreted as purely fictional (compare “Only Sherlock Holmes could have solved that crime”). In this way the God concept enters their thought and discourse, but never in such a way as to make a factual claim; it is all just harmless make-believe. I have no objection to any of this: our hypothetical community is a community of atheists who find talk of Gud useful and amusing. A fictional supernatural being plays a role in their imagination but is not taken to be a genuine constituent of reality. They are careful, say, to instruct their children that this is just a story not a piece of sober metaphysics or science. Well, I think God could play just such a role for us. We simply cease to take talk of God literally, consigning him to the category of useful fictions. He already plays that role for many of us, because atheists do not all abjure the word “God” (“I wish to God people didn’t believe in things like…God”). In fact it is plausible to conjecture that back in man’s prehistory, before the distinction between myth and fact has become clear, talk of the gods belonged to seamless mode of speech in which people were none too fussy about which parts they thought corresponded to objective reality and which parts were projections of the imagination. Then god talk became hardened into literal assertion and you had to decide whether you thought the gods were myth or reality; heretofore people were pleasantly hazy about that distinction. I don’t advocate a reversion to such haziness; I just think it was a mistake to put the gods on the reality side instead of the useful fiction side. Let us then put them clearly on the fictional side where they belong; we can then talk about them all we want, so long as we know what we are doing. Presumably churches and other forms of worship will then disappear, at least as we know them—though worship of known-to-be-fictional characters is not unprecedented. Religion as we have it will certainly not survive the reorientation I am suggesting, though a good deal of its conceptual core might (only now interpreted fictionally). People will no longer believe in God but they will make-believe in him. This strikes me as quite an attractive world to live in. Stories can, after all, be good—artistically, morally—without being true—factually. There is no God, but the story of him has its attractions as a work of art (at least some of it does; not all of the God fiction is that useful). Living in that world my state of belief with regard to God might include a good deal of make-believe in him, combined with adamant disbelief in his reality. My imaginative life already involves a lot of make-believe in relation to fictional characters, none of it confused with belief proper; I see no reason why I couldn’t extend this attitude towards God, at least once other people stopped literally believing in him. I might then extract what is good in the concept, while discarding the metaphysical baggage. Religious language would then be more of a fun fiction than a cruel hoax, a kind of game.