Just before before he died, the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre resisted feelings of despair by saying to himself: ‘I know I shall die in hope.’ Then in profound sadness, he would add: ‘But hope needs a foundation.’ His words remind me of another famous philosopher and atheist, George Bernard Shaw, who, in one of the last things he wrote said: ‘The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name, I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.’
The real test of someone’s philosophy is whether they still express it when they reach the end.