Do Atheists Feel Guilty Not Believing?

Richard Dawkins, the atheist Oxford professor and author of The God Delusion, has suggested that David Cameron is "not really" a believer in God but a "believer in belief", one of those people who, though themselves non-believers, think that religious faith is "good for the common people" and helps to keep them in order. Dawkins can't of course know what Cameron really believes. The prime minister's own profession of a "fairly classic sort of Church of England faith" may suggest a lack of intensity in whatever it is, and his enthusiasm for gay marriage a certain moral relativism. But let's accept that Cameron is no atheist and that Dawkins has no grounds for saying that he is.

All the same, Dawkins's general point is a good one. There are an awful lot of people in politics and elsewhere who believe that any kind of religious faith is better than none, regardless of whether it is founded on truth or delusion. As guest editor of the New Statesman's Christmas issue, Dawkins wrote: "A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, having outgrown religious faith themselves, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow good for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals."