Norman Geisler, the Evangelical scholar who studied at Loyola University, Chicago, reflects on Jean Paul Sartre’s atheism:

“It should be noted … that Sartre’s attempt to eliminate God is seriously flawed. First of all, he constructs a straw God by defining him as “self-caused.” Most theists do not believe God is a self-caused being; they hold God to be an uncaused being.

A self-caused being is impossible, as Sartre points out. But an uncaused being is not impossible, at least not on Sartrian grounds. For Sartre speaks of man as a “thrust” or “given”; man is simply “there” without cause, reason, or justification. But if man can be uncaused then certainly God could be as well.

Second, how can man be “given” without a Giver or “thrust” without a Thruster? As even the radical skeptic David Hume admitted, it is absurd to believe that things arise without a cause.

Surely the existential ‘pot’ is calling the theistic “kettle’ black when Sartre speaks of the Christian God as an incoherent concept! What is more incoherent than to believe that man comes to be without a cause?

Third, does freedom really eliminate God? Certainly absolute human freedom would be incompatible with the traditional notion of God. For absolute freedom would be God, since only God can have absolute freedom.

So if man is absolutely free– free to create any and all values –then God must go.

Sartre once said, “Since we ignore the commandments of God [concerning] all value prescribed as eternal, nothing remains but what is strictly voluntary.

But in reality it was, as we shall see, the other way around. That is, Sartre affirmed his own freedom in the face of the God who was there, and as a consequence God left him.

Fourth, Sartre’s atheism began in rebellion against God. As is the case with most atheists, Sartre once believed in God. In his auto-biography he tells how he became an atheist:

“I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt
His gaze inside my head and on my hands…. I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed… He never looked at me again. I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him [the Holy Ghost] in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head. I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.”

Sartre’s basic irrationalism reveals itself when he admits that he would reject “even a valid proof of the existence of God.” This is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s confession that “we deny God as God”.

If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.”

Fifth, Sartre has a basic inconsistency in his existentialism. He denies absolute value and truth and yet he affirms both. He speaks of human subjectivity and freedom as “the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. He adds, “There must be an absolute truth, and there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of one’s self.”

Likewise, in the realm of value Sartre speaks of an “absolute commitment’ and of ‘universal value.” At one point Sartre clearly oversteps his own self-imposed value of not making value judgments on another, admitting that “here one cannot avoid pronouncing a judgment of truth.” Sartre unconvincingly hedges his judgment:

“It is not for me to judge him morally, but I define his self-deception as an error”

But is not the judgment that one is wrong to engage in self- deception a moral judgment? There are two reasons that it does not help for Sartre to claim that he has made only a truth-judgment.

First, it is obviously Sartre’s view that one ought not reject the truth. But ‘ought’ here is a moral judgment.

Second, making an absolute truth-judgment about others is contrary to a system that rejects all absolutes beyond its own freedom. To be consistent Sartre should make no value or truth-judgments about others. But he does. And
therein lies a basic inconsistency in his form of humanism.

Finally: Sartre himself had second thoughts about his system. In the spring of 1980 (only weeks before his death) Sartre is reported to
have said,

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.

Sartre’s mistress complained, “How should one explain this senile act of a tumcoat? Simone de Beauvoir, reacted critically to Sartre’s apparent recantation of a turncoat?” She added, “All my friends, all are Sartrians, and the editorial team of Les Temps Modernes supported me in my consternation.”31

If true, well should his existentialist colleagues have reacted this way, or the apparent recantation is a condemnation of Sartrian humanism by Sartre himself.”

— excerpt from Is Man the Measure?, Norman Geisler, Baker Book House, 1983

~~~

See also The Drama of Atheist Humanism Ignatius Press

——

Select Notes

20. Ibid., pp. 54-55.
21. Sartre. Words (New York: George Braziller 1964), p. 253.
22. Sartre. Being and Nothingness, pp. 479. 556. 762. 766.

See David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1932), 1:187.
25. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 23-24.
26. Sartre, Words, pp. 102, 252-253.

27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 627.
28 Sartre. Existentialism and Humanism, p.44.
29 bid, pp. 46-47.
30. Ibid. p
p.51.

31. From a dialogue with a Marxist recorded in the Nouvel Observateur, as reported by Thomas Molnor, National Review, 11 June 1982, p. 677.

32. Alain Larrey and Michael Viguier, two young men living in Paris, confirmed in a letter to the author that two months before his death Sartre had admitted to his Catholic doctor that he “regretted the impact his writings had on youth” and that so many had “taken them so seriously.”