Spreading the Message

I saw one of these on my recent trip to London.  At first I thought it was some stealth marketing campaign for a new beer or a mobile phone deal until I realised there was no brand, no product, just the pleasant impact of its message.

Conceived by Ariane Sherine and endorsed by professor  Richard Dawkins, this message will appear on 800 buses around the UK.  Good on them I say.  Religion of any number of persuasions gets significantly more airtime than nonbelievers.  Why can't non-believers voice their views?

The message in itself is not all that philosophically rigorous.  In many respects, it sounds like the flipside to Pascal's Wager.  Pascal (according to my first year philosophy lecturer) argued that since proving God's existence rationally is impossible we have more to gain and nothing to lose if we believe.  This campaign is saying God is unlikely, so we may as well not.

But the slogan is effective in its wording or rather in the choice of one word, 'probably', which Dawkins apparently wanted removed.  That one little word gives us secularism for what Farhad Manjoo calls a post-fact society.  That adverb sums up how most of us feel about any belief we have or action we'll take.  Whether it's what we'll do this weekend to what we think will happen at the end of this current economic crisis, we shrug, maybe purse our lips and probably stick a 'probably' in there...somewhere.  Which is what makes this such an effective campaign.

Any lit. major will tell you that we don't do 'grand ideas' anymore.  We can't swallow certainty. It has to be spiked with just a little doubt.  'Probably' lets us have our beliefs while admitting we could be wrong.  The campaign slogan would probably be dissected by even the clumsiest logician, but as a means of getting the message across that little uncertainty is perfect.

Of course the responses haven't all been this positive.  Overlooking the obvious religious backlash, two objections from non-believers recurred in the comments section of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/06/religion-atheism"title="Sherine's Guardian Article">Sherine's Guardian Article</a>.  The first was that the money could've been better spent on a charitable cause. The second was that Sherine was smug to do this in the first place.

The first argument sounds valid.  But don't other charitable organisations spend money on advertising? Don't they use their funds to raise awareness of their cause?  I'm sure one bill poster could buy a lot of food, perhaps feed a village. Besides, the point of this campaign wasn't that atheists or agnostics are better people.  The organisers were simply trying to counteract the dominance of religious messages.

As for the second, sure, athiests can be smug.  It comes from lacking piety and all that.  There is also the satisfaction, perhaps misguided but I doubt it, that comes from thinking you've worked it all out.  Smugness is just the burden you have to bear when you think you're right.  Just as righteousness is the curse of the believer.