Theism or Atheism: The Great Alternative
1921
This is a fiercely argued case for atheism from one of early 20th century's most articulate freethinkers. Chapman Cohen doesn't merely argue against God's existence, he interrogates why humanity ever needed the concept, and whether modern minds can afford to retain it. Writing with the polemical fire of his era, Cohen dissects the traditional proofs for deity and finds them wanting, but his real target is softer: the assumption that religious belief, even if intellectually unnecessary, remains socially useful. He contests this vigorously, arguing that theistic frameworks have actively obstructed moral and intellectual progress. The book is most striking when it turns evolutionary theory against religious consolation, Cohen insists that if nature's cruelty proves anything, it proves indifference, not divine benevolence. This is period polemic, certainly, and sometimes dated in its assumptions about 'primitive' minds, but its central provocation remains: can ethics survive without God? For readers interested in the intellectual history of secularism, or anyone curious why the God debate refuses to die.
Editions
X-Ray
“It may also be noted in passing that both the theist and the Agnostic actually do deny the existence of particular gods without the least hesitation. No rational Agnostic would hesitate to deny the existence of Jupiter, Javeh, Allah, or Brahma. No Christian would hesitate to deny the existence of the gods of a tribe of savages.””
— Chapman Cohen
“Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards them.””
— Chapman Cohen
“All that we can say is that the belief in God is universal”
— Chapman Cohen
“The wide range of religious ideas and their existence at a very low culture stage, precludes the assumption that religious ideas are generated in the same conscious way as are scientific theories.””
— Chapman Cohen
“There is no exception to the fact that men have everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be quite false. The fact of a certain belief being universal only warrants the assumption that the belief itself has a cause, but it tells us nothing whatever concerning its truthfulness.””
— Chapman Cohen
“The relation demanded by religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to believe, and which modern science decisively rejects.””
— Chapman Cohen
“The deity they want, is, of course, finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and feelings limited and mutable in the process of time.... And for their purpose, what is not this is really nothing.””
— Chapman Cohen
“Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the preceding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth.””
— Chapman Cohen
“We who know both sides know that in giving up the belief in deity we have lost nothing of value, nothing that need cause us a single regret. And on that point we certainly can speak with authority; for we have been where the Theist is, he has not been where we are.””
— Chapman Cohen
