THE CITY

The City
Atheism and
Its Impossible
Imagination
how literary imagination
insists on theist morality
Corey Latta
Let me begin boldly: no atheist fiction writer, living or
dead, has successfully created a world in the image of
his non-belief. The possibility for such a non-believing
world vanishes the moment an atheist author exercises
imagination to create conscientious characters in a
fictive society. As soon as the atheist author creates a fictive world,
he populates that world with living characters. These characters must
have a semblance of will, intent, emotion, civility, and they must
live by the laws, both natural and moral, of their world. It is in the
secondary world, in the tropes of character and identity, in themes of
truth or doubt, in those questions of moral meaning and belief, that
imagination both resists and ultimately redresses atheistic creativity.
I do not mean that atheist novelists have not created closed worlds
populated by characters neglectful of morality or refusing of faith.
Many have done that. Look no further than works like Ernest
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable,
or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy for fictive
worlds of wanton morality written from an atheistic worldview.
These, some of the most critically acclaimed and popular texts of the
twentieth century, are only a few examples of unbelieving attempts
to submerge, disturb, or undo theistic assumptions about life and
morality. What I am saying is that as products of the imagination,
the self-enclosed communities of Hemingway’s characters, Burgess’s
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