Sartr - Atheist Or...

"When we think of God as the creator,we are thinking of him,most of the time,as a supernal artisan.Whatever doctrine we may be considering,whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes,or of Leibniz himself,we always imply that the will follows,more or less,from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating.Thus,the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan:God makes man according to a procedure and a conception,exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife,following a definition and a formula.Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding.In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century,the notion of God is suppressed,but not,for all that,the idea that essence is prior to existence;something of that idea we still find everywhere,in Diderot,in Voltair and even in Kant.Man possesses a human nature;that "human nature",which is the conception of human being,is found in every man;which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception,the conception of Man.In Kant,this universality goes so far that the wild man of woods,man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities.Here again,the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.

Atheistic existentialism,of which I am a representative,declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it.That being is man or,as Heidegger has it,the human reality.What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence?We mean that man first of all exists,encounters himself,surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards.If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable,it is because to begin with he is nothing.He will be anything until later and then he will be what he makes of himself."
In this lecture/1946/Sartr declared himself as atheist.But,did he be real atheist?A story says that he went back every time when the black cat has crossed his way.Is the superstition a kind of faith?If If I respect my talisman I believ that it will bring me the happiness and will help me to escape the evil.Thus,I am the believer.James P Carse /retired prof./here/: "How could one deny the existence of God unless someone supplies a God that can be denied?...that one cannot be a believer without simultaneously being an unbeliever.Believing is an inherently self-contradictory act."