The Blind Faith of Atheism
by Carl E. Olson.
Envoy magazine. Volume 3.4. 1999.
HIGHLIGHT THIS ARTICLE AND TURN IN WITH ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS AT THE END!
"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion" - Karl Marx, still unhappy
Up until a century ago atheism was largely the exclusive philosophical obsession of ideologues, revolutionaries and the rich. Ordinary people weren’t atheists, or at least would never consider saying as much. Times have dramatically changed. While a majority of Americans still consider themselves “believers” of some sort, who have “faith” of some type, it is increasingly uncertain exactly what they believe or who they have faith in. In fact, more and more people are letting it be known what they don’t believe in and who they don’t have faith in. As mainline Protestant churches wilt in indecision and uncertainty in the face of abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, many of their members are leaving. And while some will join more conservative churches, a significant number are turning their backs on Christianity and God, through either outright rejection or quiet indifference. Many Catholics, poorly catechized and questioning the relevance of the Church, are doing the same. Becoming an atheist, or living as though one were, isn’t just for the intelligentsia anymore - it has entered the mainstream. What are some of the key features of this growing worldview? How can Catholics make a coherent and firm defense for the Christian Faith? Why do we need to take atheism so seriously?
As Many Atheisms as Atheists
“An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now - here on earth.” - Madalyn Murray O’Hair, infamous and missing atheist
In his landmark work The Gods of Atheism, Fr. Vincent P. Miceli wrote that atheism is “perhaps the most serious spiritual affliction of modern man. (Vincent P. Miceli, SJ, The Gods of Atheism [Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books, 1971] 9). The severity of this affliction was recognized by the Second Vatican Council. In Gaudium et Spes (GS), the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the Council Fathers stated that “atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age, and is deserving of closer examination” (GS 19). In three compact, but rich paragraphs (GS 19-21), the Council made a number of observations about atheism which are helpful for all Catholics, including those active in apologetics and evangelization. The Fathers recognized that atheism is complex and multifaceted, embracing numerous perspectives loosely bound around a core disbelief or denial of God. To unthinkingly stereotype atheists as simply immoral unbelievers guarantees frustration and failure in dealing with them. Gaudium et Spes describes some of the varieties of unbelievers, including those who deny God outright, ambivalent agnostics, wary skeptics, calculating rationalists, doubtful philosophers, sensual materialists and virulent anti-Christians. And then there are those who “never get to the point of raising questions about God, since they seem to experience no religious stirrings nor do they see why they should trouble themselves about religion” (GS 19). No doubt this describes many of our neighbors, co-workers and even family members.
At the heart of atheism is an unbalanced desire for human independence which excludes the reality of God. Man becomes the end of all things and the “sole artisan and creator of his own history” (GS 20). John Paul II recently made remarks in a similar vein, saying that “Being an atheist . . . means not knowing the true nature of created reality but absolutizing it, and therefore ‘idolizing’ it, instead of considering it a mark of the Creator and the path that leads to him.” (John Paul II, “Christian Response to Atheism,” April 14, 1999 at the General Audience). Along with this exclusive focus on humanity, modern atheism strongly emphasizes technology, science and certain political philosophies. These are held up as evidence of man’s autonomy and his ability to achieve a earthly utopia. Fr. Miceli writes that the atheistic mentality and attitude “involves a flight from the invisible toward the visible, from the transcendent towards the immanent, from the spiritual toward the material in such a way that not only are the invisible, transcendent and spiritual rejected as dimensions of reality, but they are denied existence itself. . . . For atheism receives its true, full meaning from the reality it rejects - God. It represents a choice the creature makes of himself and his universe in preference to his Creator.” (Miceli, 2).
Atheists disagree widely among themselves about what it means to be an atheist. Ignace Lepp, a convert to Catholicism from Marxism, observed “It would not be at all false to say that there are as many atheisms as atheists.” (Ignace Lepp, Atheism In Our Time [New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1963] 12). This presents a formidable challenge to the Catholic apologist. It means being aware of how diverse are the viewpoints within the world of atheism. In a way it is similar to hearing someone say they are “Christian.” That person could be Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Baptist or a member of several thousand different denominations or sects (such as Mormons), each with different beliefs. Similarly, there are many different types of atheism, including weak atheism (lacking a belief in a God), strong atheism (believing God cannot exist), disproof atheism (believing most evidence points to God’s nonexistence), methodological atheism (claiming theists fail to give sufficient proof for God’s existence), mystical atheism (based on a private, subjective experience), and faith atheism (believing in nonexistence of God based on “faith”). Forms of atheisms range from political ideologies (Marxism) to scientific perspectives (Darwinian evolution) to existential viewpoints (nihilism).
Michael Martin, a noted atheist apologist, gives a helpful definition from the atheist perspective: “If you look up ‘atheism’ in the dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly, many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek ‘a’ means ‘without’ or ‘not’ and ‘theos’ means ‘god.’ From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God.” (Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification [Temple University Press, 1990) 463). Some atheists prefer to be called freethinkers, rationalists, humanists or agnostic. Often the differences appear to be little more than semantics. But agnostics, who traditionally are ambivalent about man’s ability to know whether God exists or not, are often scorned by staunch atheists, such as the infamous Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who once sneered that “the agnostic is gutless and prefers to keep one safe foot in the god camp.” (Madalyn Murray O’Hair, from www.infidels.org). With allies like that, one might be tempted to start searching for God again!
Rejection of God, Worship of Man
“By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God” - Gloria Steinem, still hopeful feminist
Regardless of the varieties of atheism, most atheists we meet on the street, in the workplace or at a secular university share a common rejection of a god or gods, almost always the Christian God. Austin Cline, who hosts an atheist website, says Christians need to realize atheism is a rejection of all gods, not just the Christian God. He claims Christians “also tend to make the serious error of focusing only on the specific god in which they believe, failing to recognize the fact that atheists don’t focus on that god.” (Austin Cline, “What is Atheism?”, http://www.about.com, Agnosticism/Atheism homepage). Yet in reality this doesn’t appear to be the case. Most atheists are definitely anti-Christian and focus on the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. G.K. Chesterton, who regularly battled with atheists such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, defined atheism as a negative which relies upon the positive it rejects: “Atheism is the supreme example of a simple faith. The truth is that the atmosphere of excitement by which the atheist lives, is an atmosphere of thrilled and shuttering theism, and not of atheism at all; it is an atmosphere of defiance and not of denial. . . . If there were not God, there would be no atheists.” ( G.K. Chesterton, “Where All Roads Lead,” Collected Works, vol. 3 [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990] 37-38). This sort of rebellious spirit was summed up by Margaret Sanger, the American freethinker who pioneered “birth control rights” whose motto was “No gods, no masters.”
Clarence Darrow, of Scopes “Monkey Trial” fame, once said “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” This view of God as a myth and a childrens’ fairy tale - on the same level as Santa Claus and unicorns - is held by most atheists. Yet they don’t explain why it is that no sane adults believe in unicorns or Santa Claus, but hundreds of millions of sane adults do still believe in God . O’Hair, whose impact on American views of God can hardly be underestimated, wrote that the “Atheist position is that the traditionalist historical concepts of god [sic] are quite fallacious and that the notion of some ‘super power’ is not now susceptible of proof by existing scientific methods or by the accumulation of knowledge presently accessible to man. Therefore Atheists live as if there were no god, no efficacy in prayer, and no life after death. We are free from theism.” (O’Hare, ibid). Yes, free from, but where does that freedom ultimately lead? It leads to an elevation, even a worship, of man, as the Catechism states: “Atheistic humanism falsely considers man to be ‘an end to himself, and the sole maker, with supreme control, of his own history” (CCC 2124
There are a couple of popular arguments used by atheists in attacking God, sometimes used in unison. One is that the idea of an all-powerful and all-loving God is inherently contradictory, especially in light of rational reason and the existence of evil in the world. George Smith, a popular atheist leader, declared “You simply cannot intelligibly discuss, much less prove, the existence of an unknowable creature. It’s philosophically nonsense. The concept itself is meaningless (George Smith, “How to Defend Atheism,” www.infidels.org/). However, Smith’s remark is not accurate. We can prove the existence of an unknown, even if its inner nature remains a mystery to us. For example, in the natural realm no one has ever seen atoms, but we believe they exist. The existence of evil and suffering, according to apologists such as St. Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis, is the most difficult problem for the Christian to address. It requires understanding the nature of evil - it is not a thing, but a lack of good - and the reality of man’s free will.
Another argument against God is that He is violent and cruel. How else to describe a Being who has condemned so many to eternal torment even though they didn’t know He existed? Kevin, the founder and president of the “Freethinkers and Atheists’ Society” in the city I reside in, is especially adamant about God’s cruel nature. In a letter to me he wrote “It must be comforting thinking that you’re going to heaven where you can look down at the billions of souls screaming and writhing in pain as their eyes melt out of their sockets over and over again, their flesh constantly consumed by flame for all of eternity, but never dying; all this courtesy of your all-compassionate and loving friend Jesus [sic]. . . . Do you find this condemnation the act of a moral god? Eternal pain and torture for some simple transitory human foible, the capability for which he personally designed into you? If your god were real, I’d throw him in jail for the rest of eternity. What Hitler did is nothing compared to what your supposed god does every day. . . . This is a supposedly all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful being. Why would such a creature bother creating an entire system where the vast majority of his creation will spend all eternity burning in flames?” In my reply to Kevin, I noted that his intensely emotional description of God left me with little doubt about one thing: he apparently believes God exists! How else to explain his furious hatred? Can someone really hate a non-entity that much
Both of these arguments are based in flawed understandings of the Christian view of God, suffering, evil and hell. They are also rooted in the kind of condescending arrogance so common among atheist “intellectuals” such as the famous British mathematician Bertrand Russell, author of Why I Am Not A Christian. He claimed that “what really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.” (Quoted in “Why Bertrand Russell Was Not A Christian” by Rev. Ralph A. Smith, www.berith.com/English/BR0013.html). He added it might also be because of “the wish for safety, the sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you This sort of profundity is also exhibited in this common retort from atheists: “If God made everything, then who made God?” Well, if God is the First Cause, then no one could have made him, otherwise he wouldn’t have been first. Ironically, some people who ask this question are perfectly content to point to Darwinian evolution or the Big Bang to explain the material world without ever explaining who or what started those events.