J. M. E. McTaggart
From Philosopedia.org
M’Taggart, John M’Taggart Ellis (1866–1925)
“G. E. Moore, John Ellis McTaggart, and Bertrand Russell are the first three academic atheists of note,” writes Berman.
A student of Hegel, M’Taggart (Mc Taggart) believed that the ultimate reality is spiritual, and he denied the real existence of the material, of space, and of time. A determinist, he held that determinism is not incompatible with moral obligation. With Moore and Russell, McTaggart was a member of the Apostles, a Cambridge Society with a distinctively irreverent attitude toward God and religion. His own atheism is found in Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1918), and The Nature of Existence (1921 and 1927).
As for Hegel’s cosmology, McTaggart claimed that
- the Absolute is not God and in consequence there is no God.
In Some Dogmas of Religion, he saw “no reason to think that positive belief in immortality is true” or “to suppose that God exists.”
As for Christianity, McTaggart wrote,
- If one was a Christian one would have to worship Christ, and I don’t like him much. If you take what he said in the first three gospels (for St. John’s has no historical value I believe) it is a horribly one-sided and imperfect ideal. Would you like a man or a girl who really imitated Christ? I think most of the people I know are living far finer lives than anything you could get out of the gospels. The best thing about him was his pluck at the Crucifixion, and other people have shown as much.
Although Ducasse and McTaggart did not believe in God, both believed in reincarnation, according to Paul Edwards, whose Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996) humorously critiques such nonsense.
