There’s Garret of the Garret PI novels; he comes under “other forms of unbelief” I think. He starts out being an outright atheist. He technically “believes in gods” once some “gods” show up and grab him; what he (accurately) doesn’t believe is that they are anything but supernatural critters with the ability to feed off of worship. He doesn’t buy that they are superior beings or that they are benevolent in any way. Their backstories are lies; they didn’t create the world and aren’t in charge of it, they are refugees from some Lovecraftian dimension, and are Lovecraftian in their true appearance as well. I suppose one way to put it is that he believes that beings that beings that call themselves “gods” exist; he just doesn’t think they are divine. They are no more real gods than some human charlatan who sets himself up as one would be.
This post also applies to the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.
Is Garrett himself a sympathetic, heroic, or admirable character?
He’s the protagonist of the series, and generally the good guy in a pretty dark setting.
Koestler draws contrast between Chrisitianity, the communism of the party elite, and the communism of the lower level communist. It is the low level communist that come out being the most moral, although Christianinty does come out ahead of the brutal communism of the party elite.
Likewise, Harry Dresden of the Dresden Files is, um… unafilliated? Similar to HDM, the world he inhabits does contain beings of superior ability or supernatural aspect - we meet several “angels” and one old “Norse God” through the series so far, and while other characters are presented as believers, Dresden himself is notably not, despite continued attempts to convert him to one or another camp. Him refusing to do so is never looked at in a bad light, and even the characters attempting to convert him consider him to be a very good person.
Although, oddly enough, thinking about it, I think the OP is a better fit with Sanya, one of the Knights of the Cross in that same series. I’ll link to his bio here, but in a nutshell, he is either atheist or agnostic, because while the powers he uses are real, he explains that there’s no way to know if they are from powerful (but non-divine) beings, from unexplained natural phenomena, or are simply the result of him hallucinating them into his experience of reality. He’s a really fun character, and is very much a hero protagonist, although a secondary character.
I enjoyed the book “Godless”, a Young Adult novel by Pete Hautman. Short description - “Fed up with his parents’ boring old religion, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents a new god – the town’s water tower. He recruits an unlikely group of worshippers…”
There are intriguing themes, which might have been more fully developed had this been an adult novel. Still, the main character is an agnostic, presented mostly positively. His flaw is not his agnosticism, but his misunderstanding of his friend’s serious mental issues,
In That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, one of the characters who is part of Ransom’s household, and therefore a “good guy”, MacPhee, is an agnostic. He seems largely based on Lewis’ tutor Kirkpatrick, who was an atheist.
I suppose you could count Kirkpatrick himself as a positive, atheist character in literature. Lewis talks about how warmly he felt towards Kirkpatrick, and how much he influenced him.
Regards,
Shodan
I’d forgotten about that, but you’re right- MacPhee was a man of firm and unyielding principles, and he would no more bow down before Satan than he would to God.
He was the kind of man who, in a Lewis book, might well have wound up in Heaven against his will.
Not so much against his will as regardless of his mortal beliefs, I think. I don’tthink Lewis conceived of God as caring one way or the other whether people worshipped or believed in him; only what they did to others. Which makes more sense than the usual Christian notion of God requiring tithes and sacrifices. Giving ten percent of your income to Yahweh is sort of like offering diamonds to Superman; it betrays a certain confusion about who you’re dealing with. Certainly Aslan (admittedly, a different story) doesnt’ give a good goddamn if one ostensibly worships in his name or Tash’s.
That said, I’m not sure MacPhee counts, as he is still supposed to be ultimately wrong in his worldview.
Asimov wrote a story where an atheist scientist, much to his surprise, ends up in a reasonable approximation of Heaven, because his rationality qualified him to join God’s research team. God tells him that he doesn’t much care what topic of research he picks, because they all tend to bear interesting fruit somehow or other, eventually (and there’s a very large supply of “eventually” in the afterlife). The research topic the scientist chooses is how God Himself might be destroyed, so as to allow his own soul to pass into the oblivion he was expecting.
And someone has already mentioned Contact, but it’s a little misleading to describe the main character as atheist. On the last page of the book, she stumbles across incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God, and accepts it. She just had a very high standard of proof before that.
What was the incontrovertible proof?
The spoiler tags are pretty cool.
The Last Answer. Actually it was much darker than that.
The “god” in question was suicidal, and was grabbing people like the scientist in the probably forlorn hope that they would think of a way to kill God that God hadn’t though of. God just left them floating in a sensory deprivation void with nothing to do but think, he wouldn’t let them die or go insane; just exist, forever. And he actively wanted them to hate him, since it gave them motivation; he didn’t care in the slightest that he was essentially condemning these people to hell with no chance of escape but a task that as far as God knows is impossible.
It was:
a message from the creator of the universe encoded in mathematical form into the number pi, IIRC. Note that this is evidence for a creator for the universe, not a singular, supernatural capital-G God.
Der Trihs, I am confused. Above, you and others wrote:
[spoiler]Chronos:
she stumbles across incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God, and accepts it. She just had a very high standard of proof before that.
Naive Evian:
What was the incontrovertible proof?
Der Trihs:
It was a message from the creator of the universe encoded in mathematical form into the number pi, IIRC. Note that this is evidence for a creator for the universe, not a singular, supernatural capital-G God. [/spoiler]
Forgive me, but I don’t see how “creator of the universe” can be anything other than a supernatural God(s). Admittedly it might not be a singular deity, but if such an entity existed at any time, the name God would surely be the best descriptor. Why would you think otherwise? The only reason I can imagine is that the entity Ellie thinks she discovers in contact does not seem interested in worship or obvious displays of sovereignty, but perhaps you have another reason in mind.
Can you believe in angels and demons and be agnostic? I thought I remembered him directly referring to God as Michael’s boss like one would a being they actually believe exists, too.
The apparition of her father she saw when she went on her trip said something about the existence of the devine being encoded in the constants of creation. So she tasked a SETI computer to looking for messages in the digits of pi, much like it would look for messages in radio noise. It found a block of digits that could be rasterized into a picture of a circle.Numinous, indeed.
Angels & demons might be aliens, either extraterrestrial or extradimensional* in origin, possessing native abilities or hidden technology superior to what humans have, without being the servants of a sovereign creator.
- I hate, hate, hate using the word “dimension” to mean “universe.” Just thought I’d bitch.
Since the digits of pi are infinite (presumably) isn’t everything (from a picture of a circle to the works of Shakespeare) eventually in there someplace? The bitch is finding the information.
I’m reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the *Riverworld *series. It has many characters who were athiest or agnostic when they were first alive, and many others who were religious who are now non-believers in the time of the story.
Of course, since they all are dead humans from Earth, resurrected, and this afterlife doesn’t match any afterlife any religion promised, they have pretty good reason to think the various holy books weren’t the truth.
“extradimensional” actually would apply quite nicely in this particular situation, however, as there is an alternate space that lots of the supernatural elements are originally from.
As for being “agnostic” - there’s a difference between acknowledging that something exists and is powerful, and acknowledging that entity is a deity and deserving of worship, or that they are precisely who or what their adherents claim them to be.
Dresden maintains that there’s no way for a human to prove the claims of the various “deities” and that since many of those claims are mutually exclusive (remember, we’ve met in series several confirmed Valkyries, a presumptive Norse God, a couple of Christian Angels, some “fallen angels,” and what has the potential to be a Shinto or nature spirit, although that last hasn’t been directly confirmed yet), at least some of these entities are either deluded or lying. Either of those two answers precludes the possibility that there is one single entity who is the capital-G-god in the omnipotent omnipresent omnibenevolent vanilla Christian viewpoint, and likewise counteracts the claims of several of the other major religions. Therefore the original use of the term “unaffiliated” rather than atheist/agnostic earlier.