Martin Amis

Author

Amis writes "Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real." --from "Thinkability", an introductory essay in Einstein's Monsters, a collection of stories about a world where nuclear war is commonplace.

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Amis has been moved to the agnostics section based upon this sent in from a reader:

Daily Telegraph (London), 13 May 2000, page A8

Interview with Martin Amis, aged 50: "...says he has recently stopped thinking of himself as an atheist and has come to see the importance, as he gets older, of having a spiritual dimension to his life. 'Now I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development, the unknowability of the universe.'"

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From his essay, THE VOICE OF THE LONELY CROWD, in Harper's Magazine, August 2002 and the June 1, 2002 edition of The Guardian:

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion...

I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut...

Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic.