The Necessity of Atheism by Percy Shelley

Under Church Law, Death by Drowning CANNOT be Considered Suicide.

“ It is curious that The Necessity of Atheism is less atheistic than it is a challenge to theists to acknowledge that belief is a human passion, and as such cannot stand up to the test of being reasonable, thus the necessity or reasonableness of atheism. 

Atheism, in Shelley’s case, is an argument for human reason to be given preeminence over passions, which are always subjective, lacking reasonable proof, and therefore can not be enforced upon any free person. 

Newman Ivey White summarizes Shelley’s tract accurately, writing :

Except for the title and the signature to the advertisement (“through deficiency of proof, an Atheist.”) there was no atheism in it. 

In its seven pages of text it argued that belief can come only from three sources: physical experience, reason based on experience, and the experience of others, or testimony. 

None of these, it argued, establishes the existence of a deity, and belief, which is not subject to the will, is impossible until they do. 

Hence the existence of a God is not proved.

Shelley’s words were temperate, reasoned, and yet also revolutionary at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a century still reeling from the effects of the American War for Independence and the French Revolution: 

The mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God: it is also evident that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; and that they only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. 

Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.

It did not take long before Percy Bysshe Shelley was found out and brought before the Master of University College, Oxford, Rev. James Griffith. 

Shelley was questioned amidst much anger from the Master of the college concerning his part in writing the anonymous atheistic tract. Shelley’s response to Griffith was, 

If I can judge from your manner … you are resolved to punish me, if I should acknowledge that it is my work. 

If you can prove that it is, produce your evidence; it is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in such a case and for such a purpose. 

Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free country.

And with his patriotic appeal for evidence to be produced, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford. 

Before the University gates could slam behind him, Shelley had already sent the tract on atheism to all of the bishops, and apparently to many professors, heads of colleges, the Vice Chancellor, and at least one Cambridge professor.

Ironically, in the grand tradition of sanctifying sinners into saints — if such men or women achieve fame after their deaths — a monument now resides at University College, Oxford, to pay homage to the University’s most famous expelled atheist. 

For Shelley, however, still being quite alive in 1811 and not so saintly as death would later make him, this event only tempered his steel and focused his aim for future literary projects. 

He learned from this event that greater care must be taken to remain anonymous, to conceal his agenda, and to mislead those who were most likely to assume his part in such future affairs. 

Writing to his co-laborer in the infamous Necessity of Atheism tract, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley revealed his new design, a plan in which Shelley would suggest to the public that he had given up writing:

 …I give out therefore that I will publish no more; every one here, but the select few who enter into its schemes believed my assertion. 

Of course nothing was further from his mind than to abandon his vow to thrust his dagger deeply into the heart of the Christian faith. From this point forward Shelley would guard his “schemes” among the select few who could be trusted and he would learn even better how to apply the principles of a quiet revolution. 

He reasserted his vow to Hogg, exclaiming, “yet here I swear and if I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity.”