The Trinity In Which Even Atheists Believe

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From Thoughts from Home And Abroad

By Joseph Pearce

Dear friends,

Atheists claim that the Christian belief in the Trinity proves that Christians accept utter nonsense in the name of faith. How can anyone seriously believe that Three can really be One? Isn’t this arrant nonsense? Doesn’t it show the laughable and ridiculous gullibility of Christians?

The atheists, in contrast to the gullible Christians, insist that their position is the only logically sustainable one. In the words of Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited they believe only in three dimensions perceived by five senses. The problem is that their own reductionist creed contains its own mysterious trinity because the three dimensions of space are themselves a trinity. The very unity of space, the fundamental “stuff” of the cosmos, is only experienced in three. One dimension does not exist, except as part of the other two dimensions. It’s a natural trinity as real and as mysterious as the Holy Trinity.

And what is true of the trinity of space is equally true of the trinity of time. Time is experienced as past, present and future. Time, like space, is a trinity. That which was, and is, and is to come, is One!

None of this should surprise a Christian. We expect to see the fingerprints of the Trinity in the Trinitarian nature of reality. It does, however, provide a problem for the atheists. Christians accept mystery because we accept that there are supernatural realities beyond our ken; atheists, in their pride, refuse to accept such mysteries. Yet the time and space that they idolize are themselves transcendental mysteries! Their physical presumptions rest on metaphysical realities.

We could say much more about the presence of the trinity in nature. We could talk about the trinitarian nature of reason, which is rooted in the inseparability of the object, the subject and the act of perception. We could talk about the trinitarian nature of love, which requires a lover, a beloved and the sacrificing of the one for the other. We could discuss the trinitarian connection between the good, the true and the beautiful.

Much more could and should be said about the trinities which form the very fabric of reality. For the present, I leave you with a prayer to the Trinity that creates all trinities.

Loving God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, pour forth Thy grace into our hearts that we may grow in faith, hope and love into the image and likeness of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Amen.

God Bless,