Apropos the recent debate on the existence of God between Javed Akhtar and Mufti Shamail Nadwi, a healthy philosophical and political interest has been generated among the public.The question of the existence of God naturally wandered into related themes. One key moment in the debate was the idea proposed by the Mufti that God puts us to a test which Akhtar sought to challenge or even dismiss. Akhtar thought of God as the provider for some kind of infinite good in the world.The problem with Akhtar’s stance was that he seemed to presuppose, and possibly subscribed to, a framework which holds that once you are born into this world, you are automatically entitled to the right to well-being, the right to the bounty of nature and a good life. Akhtar reasoned that if there is indeed any omnipotent and omnipresent God, then such a God should have facilitated and ensured such a good life. Such a good life does not exist, as humans face untold miseries. Hence now Akhtar would infer from this that God does not exist.Akhtar wanted to think of humans in their routine business of life as already entitled to God’s boundless grace. If this was not forthcoming, he would, like a petulant child, deny the existence of God.The Mufti, on the other hand, explained that God puts you through a test before you could get access to the good and the noble.Akhtar eloquently highlights the horror of children killed in Gaza and asks why God is not intervening to stop this. Akhtar here sounds very humanistic and sensitive while the Mufti’s perspective seems rather harsh and demanding. Does the Mufti’s position amount to an exoneration of Israel – that the horrors in Gaza were God’s punishment rather than the fallout of deliberate policies by an unjust power? But we should not rush into judgement here.Now, Akhtar’s perspective is definitely an atheistic perspective. It does not however take much to see that it is in fact an impoverished attitude to argue that humans have automatic entitlement or direct access to this world and to a good life.If you look at most societies, we find that they all function with what can be called a rite of passage. This is the idea that once humans are born into this world, there is nothing in this world that they can directly have a right or claim over. Everything has to be earned. You must deserve them. And really this scheme of things has nothing to do with the commandments of organised religion or even with God as such.Before eating your meal, you give thanks. To whom? Or to no one? Or you just feel blessed, privileged and happy. You might thank your own good fortune. Or maybe you will thank a God or spirit. There is nothing that cooked up, or artificial, superstitious or oppressive about it. It might instead signal something important and very understandable. Among the ancient Aztecs, there was a practice of paying homage to the Sun. How can you just enjoy the sun all day, all your entire life? So they thought that they must sacrifice something which they consider most valuable as a kind of recognition of the Sun’s bounty. When the Dongria Kondh adivasis in Orissa say that they must ask their mountain deity before they access the fruits of the forest or the hill, it only means that there is a rite of passage. Asking the deity means that there is no direct access or entitlement.And indeed these practices started being treated as tradition, ritual or customs much later, for initially they must have arisen in the course of the human interaction with nature and the world. What then entered into our practice or memory got preserved as God or some such figure. God is an after-effect, a memory of our staggered entry to this world. In course of time we get a reified, ossified problematic notion of God — the one which all kinds of vested interests invoke for ulterior motives and which Akhtar is rightly critiquing. But Akhtar’s framework brooks no mediation of any kind, as he imagines direct access to this world and God as a mere facilitator. His viewpoint, is actually just a kind of a liberal consumerist attitude. Atheism today goes well with the ideology of immediate gratification, consumerism on steroids, viral culture and algorithmic reasoning. Liberalism, democracy, human rights and social justice are steeped in a spiral of paganistic gratification bordering on narcissistic individualism, which is another scourge today. Highlighting the killing of innocent children in Gaza from this perspective looks very fine, till you realise that it, at the same time, leaves you unable to understand the struggle and resistance of the Palestinians.Also read: How Bhagat Singh and Narendra Dabholkar Argued for the Valuelessness of ReligionIndeed, for people in Gaza today, to blame God for not coming to their help, would be utterly suicidal and invite more misery and suffering. Assuming God is on their side, provides them enormous moral and spiritual resources to fight on. For that matter, the communist Bolsheviks during the October Revolution in Russia imagined that the Laws of History were on their side.Palestinians would end up rancorous and far less disposed to struggle and fight on if they were to behave entitled to a good life. With Akhtar’s way of thinking, they would not just blame God and the rest of the world for not providing for them but in the process would be dependent on the good graces of both God and the world. They would lose their inner moral fibre and resolve to resist and stand up another day. That ultimately they will win because God is on their side – this God, and not the God which has abandoned them – such is “belief” of the Palestinian resistance. And such should indeed be the case if they do not want to live a life of ignominy and shame. Ultimately, it is not just about being relieved from the military attacks and continue living. Rather it is about what kind of a life would they want to live. The choice is not just between life and death, but what kind of a life would it be. The choice is within life, where death is not the end of life, but one with which life is infused. Thus the death and sacrifice of the fighters in Palestine infuses the living with life.IIThis leads us to the reason why, with the advent of modernity, a religious Reformation took place in most religions. In Christianity this has been well studied by Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He refers to what is called “salvation by works”. This means that worldly activity, trade and commerce, too could be carried out in the name of God and faith. The mediation by God and faith was crucial for the expansion of commerce and trade, indeed the rise of the modern world.Talking about the Reformation, Karl Marx pointed out that Martin Luther “shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith”. Faith itself now became an instrument for capitalism. In the Bhakti movement in India, the teachings of say a saint like Dadu (1544–1603), opened the way for the salvation by works: samsara and bhakti can go hand in hand. Scholars like Tyler Williams and Divya Cherian have written about this convergence, what they call the “merchants of virtue”. The same applies to Sufi in Islam. What we find here is a perversion of the earlier logic of mediation as we find for example among the Aztecs. For now, the mediation in the salvation by works invariably leads to accumulation and profit-making as we find in capitalism today.The Mufti’s God which puts one to test, does look like the God which legitimises capitalist accumulation. Akhtar’s atheism as part of an easy consumerism, a direct access to well-being and material goods, is also part of this same system of market relations and commodity culture. The former from the supply side, the latter from the demand side, complementing each other.God and atheism work in tandem. Similarly, religion and science also work together. Fredrich Nietzsche was right: both science and religion are part of the ascetic ideal. The priest and the scientist can be bundled together. No wonder, the Mufti tried to justify God on the grounds of logic and science. Where is your faith, your faith in God, one could have asked the Mufti? At least someone like Soren Kierkegaard would have asked such a question.I am reminded of atheism as propounded by Charvaka, which is quite popular in India. This brand of atheism is also very problematic, as it too presupposes direct access to the world. That is the usual stuff you hear about them, that they not only renounced the existence of any parloka, other world, but also affirmed only that which can be empirically and sensorily experienced. So, so goes the teachings of the Charvaka, we must directly live off and enjoy this world rather than pine for something beyond us. This atheism is nothing but empiricism and solipsism. I had earlier shown the problems with Charvaka atheism. Bhagat Singh’s atheism, well known in certain circles, also urgently needs unpacking. There is no better critique of these forms of atheism than what we can infer from the views of Marx. Quite relevant here is Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach’s materialism in the Theses on Feuerbach. Now you know why I had earlier argued with regards to Kabir that we must go beyond both sagun and nirgun approaches — that in rejecting sagun orthodoxy, nirgun is not an option. Nirgun too, a bit like atheism, has taken many a toll of radicals. There is in fact a third option.IIIIn modern society constituted through salvation by works, both the God and no-God positions exist in symbiosis. One need not even go so far as arguing that religious fundamentalism and secular modernity are two sides of the same coin. In the South Asian context, both sagun and nirgun exist in internal symbiosis. The crucial point for Marx revolves on works, praxis, activity. Unlike the materialist and atheists of his time, Hegel the idealist believer posed this question in his own way, which greatly impressed Marx. Our modern condition is one where human activity and human communication are themselves valorized (re-enacted, restaged, simulated) in a way which leads to the accumulation of value, wealth and capitalism. Here is the double movement here: our activity and social life are for all practical purposes carried out in the name of God and yet they end up in capitalist accumulation. A kind of a ruse of reason (both Godly and unGodly) is at work behind our backs, unbeknownst to us, so that strictly speaking whether or not we believe in God has little to do with the processes that generate such a belief on our behalf. So long as we do what we are doing, things believe for us. Things, the commodity develop fetish, almost magical powers. This double-sided movement is what Marx brought to light in his theory of the value-form.The Mufti avoided this question of the spontaneous generation of a belief in God as he took refuge in logic. Akhtar avoided the question of how atheism is itself an internal moment as purely materialistic pursuits are now consistent with, and indeed, become a condition for, faith and religion.Finally, for Marx it is really all about time. For him, labour had to be understood as labour-time. Capital, in the limit case, wants time itself to generate value. Only when time is liberated from value would we have truly arrived at conditions where we can meaningfully talk about the question of sheer belief, including belief in God or atheism. Till then belief itself is as good as un-belief, thought is as good as the unthought, the conscious barely distinguishable from the unconscious.Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).