Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part IX

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, discussing why, if atheists don't believe in God, why do they seem to talk about Him so much?

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD 

The 'God question' grips every person inescapably, for none so much, ironically, as the proclaimed atheist.

The trouble with atheists, to quote a punch line I once heard, is that they are constantly talking about God. Perhaps it’s the occupational hazard that comes with the job. And, yet, to endlessly obsess about Him, one might almost think that they actually do believe in God. I mean, if one were perfectly convinced that there was no God, and that there had never been a God, why such an intensity of attention invested in the question? Do non-atheists behave like that?

What a frustration it must be for them! Chesterton, as always, has a great line on the subject, in which he identifies his “worst moment as when he is really thankful and has no one to thank.” In fact, so powerless is he that he cannot even say thanks when someone passes him the mustard with which to dress his hot dog. “We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers,” recalls Chesterton. “Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?” It is, after all, the most obvious expression of a grateful heart. But not for the atheist, it seems, who, in denying the existence of the Giver, leaves no room in his heart for giving thanks for the gift.

If gratitude, then, is the first obligation of the religious man, offered up to God for a gift he could never himself give, what can one do when moved to give thanks in a world without God? When the universe ceases to be, in the words of St. Bonaventure, “a ladder by which we ascend to God,” everything having been shorn of all possible reference to God, or sign of His mysterious presence, how then do we hear, much less speak, what my old friend and mentor Fritz Wilhelmsen used to call, “the poetry of the transcendent”? How impoverishing life becomes in the absence of Real Presence!

“I felt and feel,” writes Chesterton,

that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder. I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.

And if there is no God, where then do we locate the cosmos? Can it even be without a God to bring it into being?

This is not a question any of us are at liberty to escape. Not even atheists may dodge the question. In fact, it remains the single most fateful question facing all of us, a question that takes us, as Pascal famously says, “by the throat.” In a series of lectures titled, “The Problem of God,” delivered at Yale University back in 1962, the esteemed Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray reminds us that nothing and no one can claim exemption from the God Question.

“The whole man,” he tells us,

as intelligent and free, as a body, a psychic apparatus, and a soul—is profoundly engaged both in the position of the problem and its solution. In fact, he is in a real sense a datum of the problem itself, and his solution of it has personal consequences that touch every aspect of his conduct, character, and consciousness.

So there is no escaping the business, it being the net in which we are all caught. Notwithstanding the standard atheist insistence on having seized the intellectual high ground in the debate, however, what finally drives them is not an argument about God at all. What is most determinative of their position is not the result of an intelligence in good working order, cool and clinical in its capacity to look straight on at the problem, seeing it all in light of the evidence presented. Because it really hasn’t got much to do with what’s in their head at all, but rather, an act of the will that is already ferociously directed against God.

Only after having decided to kill God, as it were, daggering the deity to death, do they then set about finding reasons to justify His non-existence. Fr. Murray explains,

There are indeed philosophies that are atheist in the sense that they are incompatible with faith in God. But they are reached only by a will to atheism. This will, and the affirmation into which it is translated (“There is no God”), are the inspiration of these philosophies, not a conclusion from them.

And so one first decides that there is no God, no Author or Prime Mover of the universe. Only then does one set about constructing the discourse needed to defend the decision. A bit like despising the neighbor next door whom you haven’t even met, then going on to announce that, besides being despicable, he also doesn’t even exist. People who steal a base like that, it seems to me, need to be called out on the matter.

What are the weapons typically available to people like that? The handiest of all is the one that is perhaps the hoariest: namely, the assertion that because the world is so thoroughly wicked to begin with, if there were a God who made everything, holding it all over an abyss of nothingness, then He must be either too impotent to prevent such wickedness or too perverse to accept responsibility for it. Far better, therefore, not to believe in God than to be saddled with one steeped in impotence and/or iniquity.

Pretty neat, I’d say. It is the classical objection, of course, that has long been current in the circles of theodicy. C.S. Lewis gave voice to the same objection during his own atheist phase, noting that the burden of pain and sorrow in the world was so great that if indeed there was a God, a Mighty Spirit behind the universe, he must be either indifferent to good and evil or else, and this is surely worse, an evil spirit himself.

Nevertheless, argues Lewis, there was always one question that, in the face of so catastrophically awful a world, had never crossed his mind to ask.

If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute to it the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief.

So how does the atheist cope? A cosmos sunk in complete misery, its inhabitants condemned to suffer and die in this life, then consigned to everlasting extinction in the next? A no-brainer, right? And since God is responsible for this cosmic train wreck, it follows that only an idiot would believe in Him. Yet great numbers of non-idiots do believe. Many millions of people, in fact, who, despite the hideousness of so much human and historical experience, nevertheless persist in their belief in God.

How can this be? That despite all the evidence of evil, the numberless fires of deceit and injustice blazing forth across the globe, people continue to believe.

What’s wrong with these people? Shouldn’t they all be on medication? Getting therapy? But for what exactly? Mass delusional psychosis?

“Lay down this book,” Lewis challenges us in his book The Problem of Pain, “and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.”

Who needs five minutes? It should hardly take half that long to establish the fact that it was never the world itself, or the human record of its history, that gave birth to the idea of God. And since atheism cannot account for the origin of the idea, we need to look elsewhere and ask, as well, why such an idea would, right from the start, have lasted so long—indeed, with utter uninterrupted tenacity—in the teeth of so obvious an absence of anything to commend it?

The answer, of course, is that the idea of God has no particular source, none certainly that exact scholarship can document any more than one can point to the origin of the idea of geometry, or music, or speech—the lines and movements and rhythms of which are simply of a piece with being human, belonging therefore to the deepest operations of head and heart.

And because the idea of God remains both real and unique, abiding in mind and will from the beginning, there is nothing in science or history or ideology that could possibly have put it there. Secularism can no more generate this light than it can succeed in putting it out. It was there from the beginning and will always be simply there. Like a sudden flash point of eternity into time, whose unforeseen illuminations have come to light up the night sky of our lives with the absolute certainty of hope.

Only God can account for the idea of God. He is the source of that blazing incandescence to which we are drawn by dint of being formed in His image, in whose warmth we are meant to awaken from the first moment of our awareness to a world we did not create but in whose goodness we are free to rejoice.