Conclusion

Abstract

Quentin Meillassoux points out that the end of metaphysics, by forbidding any claim to the absolute, has led to an exacerbated return of religion, and meant that the end of ideologies has led to ‘the unqualified victory of the religious’.¹ Yet, to the surprise of some, Meillassoux is not as antireligion as he might appear, and is currently writing what he calls a ‘divinology’, which he is working on in a large scale work entitled L’inexistence divine, parts of which form an appendix to Graham Harman’s book on Meillassoux. In short, Meillassoux suggests that though we can argue that God does not (currently) exist, if we accept the radical necessity of contingency we have no reason to believe that He could not exist in the future, and thus the idea of a God-to-come and of human immortality and the resurrection of the dead are philosophically plausible and that ‘another world is possible’.² He goes on to describe the ‘two catastrophic and constitutive illusions of contemporary history: the first being that God exists, the second being that one can do without Him’.³ Indeed, Meillassoux divides the possible attitudes towards God to four, starting with ‘not believing in God because he does not exist’, the atheist solution, followed by ‘believing in God because he does exist’, the religious attitude, then ‘not believing in God because he does exist’, the Luciferian position, and finally his preferred attitude, that of the philosopher, ‘believing in God because he does not exist’. ‘One must choose,’ he writes.⁴