\u2026who steals from theism in order to give his personal moral system the weight of transcendence that his philosophy denies can be there.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of atheists are inveterate moralists, even as they argue that the universe has no meaning, human life no purpose beyond what we subjectively fantasize, and so forth. They posit a universe of nothing but Is (time, space, matter and energy whirling mindlessly through their collisions and accidents) but are constantly haunted by commanding Oughts that are inexplicable apart from a Transcendent God and a human race made in his image and likeness. So you constantly get doubletalk about meaninglessness<\/a>, coupled with a lively sense of outraged morality <\/a>as soon as the atheist turns from the abstract to the concrete.<\/p>\n It is a fact remarked on by Benedict in Spes Salvi<\/a>:<\/p>\n In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer\u2019s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is\u2014in its origins and aims\u2014a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world\u2019s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power\u2014whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts\u2014will cease to dominate the world. This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a \u201clonging for the totally Other\u201d that remains inaccessible\u2014a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any \u201cimage\u201d of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this \u201cnegative\u201d dialectic and asserted that justice \u2014true justice\u2014would require a world \u201cwhere not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone\u201d[30<\/a>]. This, would mean, however\u2014to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols\u2014that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve \u201cthe resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit\u201d[31<\/a>].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My own, considerably less insightful, remarks on the curious intellectual muddle of the atheist moralist can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n