When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything." - Commonly attributed to G. K. Chesteron

“When men…"
Richard John Neuhaus First Things USA December 7, 2005

“When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” Umberto Eco said that observation is commonly attributed to G.K. Chesterton, and I flatly asserted in response that it is attributed to him because he wrote it. I may have been wrong about that. A Chesterton scholar (there are such) says that, while it certainly reflects the great man’s view on the matter, the actual sentence cannot be found in his writings. On the other hand, a passionate GKC amateur insists that he did write it and promises to get back to me when he discovers exactly when and where. Stay tuned.

Heaven knows how we'll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must
Niall Ferguson Niall Ferguson Scotland July 31, 2005

Contrary to popular belief, it was not G K Chesterton who said: "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything." But he should have said it. Chesterton - who is nowadays best remembered, if at all, for his Father Brown stories - viewed atheism with the utmost suspicion. Those who disbelieve in God on supposedly rational grounds, he argued, merely become prey to pseudo-religions and superstitions. His neatest formulation was probably in The Miracle of Moon Crescent when he wrote: "You hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of belief - of belief in almost anything."

I am a hard-shelled materialist myself, I suppose. But I was reminded of Chesterton last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be Islamikaze bombers, Muktar Said-Ibrahim, and a former neighbour of his in Stanmore, the suburb of north London where he grew up. "He asked me," Sarah Scott recalled, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything, and he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to Heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."

Now it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (I personally can think of nothing more terrifying than 80 virgins; I can just picture the belles of St Trinian's running amok.) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all? ...