Starmer and the illogic of atheistic socialism

Dan Hitchens discussed Sir Keir Starmer’s open atheism in The Spectator two months ago. It is a religious position of sorts, the non-existence of God being a matter of belief rather than established fact.

Let’s try logic.

To describe the cosmos we use the concepts of time, space, matter and energy. If God created the universe then He is not part of it (though according to some He may intervene) so there is no reason to think that God can be imagined by using any of these categories. He is literally inconceivable, yet he may be real.

How else can we explain where everything came from? How can there be a time before time? How can anything arise from absolutely nothing?

I have seen an attempt by mathematicians/cosmologists to get round this by defining nothing in a special way, saying there was a primordial nothing that had the capacity to become something; to me that is not ‘nothing.’ Others postulate a multiverse, unseeable worlds that somehow collided to produce this one; so where did they come from?

How about morality, goals, narrative? Hitchens quotes Clement Atlee:

‘Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo.’

Can this stand up? Here is Judaism summed up in two sentences by Jesus of Nazareth:

“ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

They are connected. For all the Abrahamic religions God is the Creator and also the Lawgiver. If He does not exist, what is the basis of law and morality? Are they anything more than what we like or fear, or what Kings and Presidents want to impose on us so they can enjoy their wealth and power in peace?

Peace for them, but war for us: remove service to God and replace it with some One Great Thing towards which we must progress, often through bloodshed. Mao could accept a nuclear war that would destroy a third of humanity, so long as it destroyed class distinction; for Islam only one true version will remain, out of seventy-two sects; When the Millennium finally arrives we shall all be happy, or at least those who have survived.

The Austrian corporal spoke of a Reich that would last a thousand years; but at the end of Year One Thousand, what?

Time washes away all things. There is a long list of ways in which humanity and even all life on Earth may end. Long after we are gone, if current scientific thinking is right, in an unimaginably far future everything will decay until all that remains is a universe full of photons, but it will be absolutely dark because they have nothing to collide with.

All things must pass, said the Buddha. All we have is this moment.

‘Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.’

If there is meaning, it cannot be contained in some objective hanging ahead of us like a carrot tied to a stick. Instead it is sort of at right angles to reality; what we do matters in some non-time way; eternity is not a setting on the clock.

So Project People such as socialists, imperialists, millenarians have a hole in their thinking; even if achieved, their glorious instant will fly past.

I do wonder whether reaching after God is related to our mental development in the area of social instincts, which may explain why high-functioning autistic people are

‘much more likely… to identify as atheist or agnostic, and, if religious… more likely to construct their own religious belief system.’

Maybe this is where Starmer’s Trotskyism comes from.