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THE surprising thing about atheism, considering its supposedly rational basis, is the sheer zealotry of its supporters. As often as not, atheists are not that easy to distinguish from the Christian, Jewish or Muslim fundamentalists they so thoroughly detest: we find in both the same immovable conviction, the same dreary ardour. This can be amusing, or irritating, as in Michel Onfray's new book In Defence Of Atheism, which swings between half-baked semi-intellectual silliness and tedious carping about how badly behaved the great monotheistic religions have been throughout history (yes, Michel, we had noticed). It can also be rather sad: when someone like Richard Dawkins gets all hot and bothered about the 'god delusion', one begins to wonder just how sturdy our rational faculties are, when they go up against the dark and frighteningly uncontrollable forces of concealed emotion.

I would not argue with an atheist any more than I would argue with a Seventh Day Adventist or a Mormon, because argument is pretty futile in such cases. What I would ask is that atheists, in their public utterances at least, would refrain from appealing to the - I almost said divine - faculty of human reason to support their irrational position. To assert with any conviction that god does not exist is no more rational than to claim that he personally selected the Jews as his chosen people, or that animals, heathens and the unbaptised will not be admitted to the kingdom of heaven. For the truth is we cannot say whether god exists or not, a conclusion any rational person can easily reach before breakfast.

The only rational position is that of the agnostic, not because, or not just because, there can be no rational proof of god's presence or absence, but because that argument itself is a pointless distraction. Instead of getting all hot under the collar about whether 'god' exists or not, the agnostic asks whether the question is worth asking at all. (After all, isn't 'god' really just a nonsense word? The Tao Te Ching says it most succinctly: "The Tao [way, divine order] that can be named is not the eternal Tao." However, this, as any Zen Buddhist or Taoist will tell you, is not an anti-religious position. Indeed, it may be the most honest position that humans can reach, spiritually as well as intellectually.

French philosophical texts rarely translate well into English, but this doesn't altogether explain the sheer tedium of In Defence Of Atheism, whose central argument comes across as woolly, repetitive and rather callow. Sadly, it is a book that will do nothing to ameliorate a British suspicion that contemporary French philosophical writing is just so much precious, jargon-ridden, self-congratulatory scribbling. (One has only to read Baudrillard or Virilio to see that nothing could be further from the truth.) Sadly, however, it is not only in the quality of the writing that Onfray falls down: his thinking is undisciplined and self-indulgent in the manner of a clever schoolboy who has just discovered Nietzsche and is eagerly rushing around demolishing, to his own satisfaction at least, all the sacred cows and pointless taboos that the grown-ups have imposed upon him for so long. God is dead; well, yes, of course he is: now get on with your homework.

I am agnostic, not because I want to sit on the fence, but because it hasn't really occurred to me to debate the existence of god since late adolescence. As far as I can see, the whole god question is the basis for a deliberate, mostly fearful limitation of the possibilities that the world offers, a little like pondering whether to vote Labour or Conservative, or choosing between various brands of identical detergent. I was taught to believe in a capital-G God with a Texan governor's sense of due process, but I do not think about the world that way any more. Which is not to say I am an atheist, however. I was, for a while, and I was terribly keen to let people know it, but that phase passed around the time I started shaving. Now, I neither believe nor disbelieve, and I find that I am not bound for glory or, for that matter, hell. I am just a walking imagination, going about the business of taking it all in and celebrating what I can as well as I can: here, now, always.

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