Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XI

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, discussing how we make the mistake of paying attention to atheists, who refuse to accept the existence of the spiritual realm.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Why do we pay attention to atheists when they condescend to tell us the truth about God, which is that He does not exist? Or anything at all touching on matters of the spirit, when they make no provision for it in their system?

"When I hear the word culture," bristled Hermann Göring, "I reach for my revolver." Since he was, after Adolf Hitler, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, attention must be paid. And while he almost certainly lifted the line from a hack Nazi playwright named Hanns Johst, it would not have been wise back then to accuse Hitler’s Air Marshall of plagiarism. Take away his pistol and all his airplanes, however, and see how fast his standing as a culture critic goes down in flames—like so many of his fighter planes blown out of the skies by a belatedly aroused Europe.

The point is, we shouldn’t ask the very people who despise our culture, who are determined on its destruction, to instruct us on all that is noble and good—and therefore worth preserving—any more than a hospital patient suffering from rickets qualifies as an expert on matters of diet and health or a nihilist armed with a Ph.D. is qualified for a chair in philosophy at any university in the land.  

So, why do we pay attention to atheists when they condescend to tell us the truth about God, which is that He does not exist? Or anything at all touching on matters of the spirit, when they make no provision for it in their system? A system so claustrophobically closed that it leaves its victims gasping for air—for the very oxygen without which the soul cannot breathe—has less than zero to offer anyone. “Spiritual asphyxiation,” writes Jean Daniélou, “is the condition of man, left to himself, deprived of the energies of God.” The air of atheism is too toxic to allow the life of the spirit to thrive. s

Atheists, therefore, are the least competent of all when it comes to weighing the evidence for or against God. And they can no more eliminate God’s existence by their refusal to believe than a blind man can, by his inability to see, cancel the sun. Besides, how reliable can a judgment about God be coming from someone whose consuming ambition of life is the abolition of God? 

If I wish to know something about sanctity, does it make sense to talk to people who hate holiness? I might as well seek out a Satanist. No, in order to learn anything at all about the love of God, I shall simply go and ask a saint—or at least an honest sinner, who, despite repeated failures to become one, nevertheless soldiers on, fortified by the conviction that in the end the only sadness will be his not having become a saint.

It is perfectly natural, therefore, and totally normal, that we should be thinking about God, ruminating on the question of His existence and how we can shore up the most convincing case for it. He is, after all, as Maurice Blondel puts it in his great work L’Action, “at the center of what I think and of what I do. …To go from myself to myself, I pass through him constantly.” There can be no instance of human thought or action, in other words, in which God is ever absent.

And while it is certainly true, as Fr. John Courtney Murray has pointed out, that while “God’s essence does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, His existence does not.” Not to know that, he adds, “is to nullify oneself as a man, a creature of intelligence.”   

And why is that? Because belief in God is, quite simply, the bedrock truth upon which everything else depends. To dare to think otherwise, Murray insists, amounts to

a miserably flat denouement to the great intellectual drama in whose opening scene Plato appeared with the astonishing announcement that launched the high action of philosophy—his insight that there is an order of transcendent reality, higher than the order of human intelligence and the measure of it, to which access is available to the mind of man.

What other question is there, after all, to which there can be only one answer? Why does anything at all exist in the world, why is there rather not nothing? The answer can only be God, who, in speaking His Word, brought it all out of nothing. It is certainly not Atlas who holds up the world, inasmuch as there is nothing in Atlas to uphold him. So, perhaps all those pious old nuns who told us as young children about why we were made were not lying after all. That we really were put here on planet Earth in order to know and to love God and thus to be happy in Heaven with Him forever.

It cannot be the least bit unreasonable to ask such a question. Why else have we got a brain if we can’t exercise it before the ultimate mystery? How else are we to account for our existence? If the mind’s most basic need is to know all that we do not know, then the refusal even to ask the question amounts to a most wanton betrayal of the human intelligence. Indeed, to turn away from the question, abandoning the search for ultimate meaning, would be both irrational and inhuman.      

To quote the irrepressible Chesterton, “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” Unplug God from the world He made and there would be no world, much less one filled with busy little atheists endlessly arguing the point. There would be only nothing, an endless and everlasting expanse of nonbeing. One to which Pascal has given unforgettable expression in his unfinished masterpiece in defense of the Christian faith, the Pensées. “When I consider the brief span of my life,” he writes, putting his finger on the most fearful contingency of all, which is that of a world wholly without God,  

absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after—as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?

Not a question so different from the one poor Hamlet was forced to wrestle with on seeing the ghost of his murdered father. Or his friend Horatio, who, on seeing the same ghost, will cry out in the most abject terror: “It harrows me with fear and wonder.”

Of the two days of a man’s life that matter most, the first being the day you were born, the second when you find out why, there is nothing to be done about the former while everything impinges on the latter. And the great sadness, of course, is that many never do find out. Sandwiched between two eternities of before and after—swallowed up by spaces of which they know nothing and which know nothing of them—they remain clueless right to the end.

Why not just see your life as a gift, an astonishment even, that God had been planning to surprise you with from all eternity, thus conferring an imperishable importance that can never be taken away? So uniquely special are you that your absence would leave a gaping hole in the fabric of being, your life miraculously grounded in a God who, from moment to moment, sends tender mercies your way—of which the most precious and unrepeatable is the fact that you exist. Because He is, you are.

But you’ve got to choose, that’s the catch. Either you’re no better than a piece of toast, however thick the butter and jam; or you are a treasured child of your Father, destined to live amid the precincts of eternal felicity. Either we find ourselves at this moment and in this place mere accidents that happened to happen, possessed of no greater worth than a pork chop; or we get to shine like the sun, our being destined to bask in the light of Christ, who, as Pure Act, remains more present to us than we are to ourselves.

“Every creature is, in itself,” declares Henri de Lubac in The Discovery God, “a theophany. Everywhere we find traces, imprints, vestiges, enigmas; and the rays of the divinity pierce through everywhere. Everything is drenched in that unique Presence. Everything becomes transparent…”