Thomas Sutcliffe: Atheists don't have voids they ache to fill

When I heard that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor had called for greater understanding and dialogue between believers and non-believers, I felt my knees jerk with an atheistic reflex. If you really want some kind of concordat between us, I thought, how about this: "When you stop talking about God, we will too".

And curiously, when I actually read the full text of the Cardinal's lecture, that wasn't a million miles away from what he was saying. Enough miles to form an unbridgeable gap, I would have thought, but not a million – since one of the central themes of the Cardinal's address was that the way in which Christians talk about God influences the way in which atheists do.

His point, crudely summarised, was that 18th- and 19th-century attempts to construct a rational and provable God had simply encouraged atheists – because of their serial failures to stem the tide of disbelief. And it's not just that this was a bad chess move, which the player regrets as he sees checkmate looming, but that it ignored doubts which the Cardinal argues should be central to any Christian's faith.

By his lights the God which campaigning atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens assail is a caricature – but he fears it's a caricature devout Christians have helped to sketch.

What he proposes instead is a recognition that the atheist and the believer have more in common than they might think. "Believers need to recognise that they have something in common with those who do not believe," he says, "but it is no less true that unbelievers might benefit from recognising that there is something of the believer in every person."

And it's at this point that it seems to me Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor stubs his foot on an immovable obstacle without even recognising that he might have broken his toe. What he doesn't seem to register is that very few atheists think of themselves as non-believers, carrying around with them a vacancy that they ache to fill. Atheists are believers already – in a cosmology that has no space for a supernatural actor of unbounded benevolence and knowledge.

The Cardinal's use of St Paul's preaching in the Athenian Areopagus – as a model of a new kind of outreach – betrays this confusion. St Paul didn't fulminate against the pagan gods, the Cardinal points out, but took a monument to an unidentified god as the starting point for a conversation which engaged with Athenian culture. The suggestion, presumably, is that a similar softly-softly approach might coax atheists out of their self-imposed darkness.

But Paul was engaged in a quite different enterprise. He was, if you like, trying to convert the Athenians from coal gas to North Sea gas. The equipment of religious belief was in place... it was just a question of what got piped through it. Committed atheists won't have gas in the house on any account – because they dislike its asphyxiating potential. They have happily disconnected from the main.

The Cardinal concludes by arguing that a life that excludes God is a life without meaning or hope – a line that, addressed to believers in church, no doubt found a receptive audience. Outside church, addressed to me, it sounded like an insult – precisely the kind of reductive clarity that he was notionally arguing against. He's right that Christians and atheists can have more things in common than is sometimes acknowledged, but God – however vaguely or dubiously described – is never going to be one of them.

You've only got this half right

Ian Taylor, the Gloucester man who sawed his car in half in protest after it was clamped, seems to have rather missed the point in the heat of the moment.

One can quite understand his exasperation, but since he planned to scrap the car anyway it would have surely saved him a lot of trouble if he'd just ignored the tickets and let the clampers take it away to the crusher for him.

As it is, he presumably still has the fee to pay and now has two rather unwieldy bits of scrap to get to the dump, instead of one conveniently mounted on wheels.

One can only hope he isn't accidentally sent the wrong council tax bill, or Mrs Taylor may find a wrecker's ball crashing through her kitchen wall.

* "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle" runs the masthead quotation on Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish.

Orwell obviously didn't have blogs in mind when he wrote the line but you can't deny it fits the blogger's existence, endlessly treading water in a sea of opinion. Sullivan's last post on Sunday night, for instance, was filed at 11.14pm, after an evening in which he'd added something to his blog 11 times. His first post yesterday was timed at 7.35am, the start of a day which will typically see him adding stuff several times an hour, with some posts only minutes apart.

Which makes you wonder how long any sane person could keep this up – not to mention how he has time actually to read the stuff he then comments on.

As a suffering Obamamaniac, I find Andrew Sullivan's blog indispensable, but I can't help worrying about the health and safety implications of the "constant struggle".

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk

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