Now, I'm a pretty avowed atheist, but yet I think atheism - the absence of belief in any god - is pretty hard to justify in DA, or indeed any other setting inspired by pre-modern European societies, for much the same reason as it was hard to justify in said societies: the lack of an alternative explanation.
Because fundamentally, that's what a god, or gods, provides, an explanation. What created the world? What created life? etc. These days, we have alternative explanations, and indeed have demonstrated than religious explanations, at least if taken literally, are wrong. But go back, say, two centuries, and there were no other explantions. There were a range of explanations (i.e. different religions), but they all came down to the same principle, that a deity or deities created the world. And there was nothing that contradicted this prinicple. There was no evidence that it was wrong, and there was certainly no alternative. If you look at the knowledge available to people during that time, belief in some form of deity was the rational choice. For someone living in medieval Europe, there was evidence that the world had been created - the Bible for staters. It might not be evidence that someone raised in the modern world would find conclusive, but it is still evidence. On the other hand, there was no evidence of the opposite position - that there is not a god (technically, the same might be true today, but at least we have evidence that a creator is unnecesary).
Atheists, as we would describe them, were extremely uncommon (indeed, in the West, the term was generally used as an insult implying someone who acted in an "unChristian" manner rather than someone who genuinely rejected the existence of God). Even in the Enlightenment, while many prominent thinkers rejected Christianity (along with other religions), they almost all still held to the belief that some form of god created the universe, he just didn't interfere with it - they were Deists, not atheists.
And Thedas is much the same, at least so far as we know. To the people of Ferelden, Orlais and so on - not to a someone living in the modern world maybe, but to someone living there - there is evidence that the Maker is real, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Thus the rational thing to do is to believe in Him. Maybe not take everything the Chantry says literally, but the core belief in the Maker is the most reasonable position to hold. I would consider it possible, although unlikely, for someone raised an Andrastean, to reject that religion completely - rejections of aspects of the religion, especially regards the organised side of it i.e. the Chantry, is reasonable, complete rejection is just about OK in my book, but should be rare - but to actually go as far as to believe in the absence of anything that would be descibed as a God is, to me, not really plausible given what we know about the level of knowledge in the setting.
So, overall: Rejecting religion? Fine, albeit rare. Deism? Likewise. Outright Atheism? Nope.
Retour en haut
