Our modern, practical atheism, can be understood if we see it as the end of a long line of theological, philosophical, and social development. The debate between actual atheism and theism has, for the time being, ended in a stalemate. Society does not feel that the God question has any relevance. While people may believe in God, that belief hardly changes the way they live or act. Others don’t believe in God, but that also seems to make little difference in how they act. There are good and bad people, heroes and villains, in both camps. That has made it seem that the question of God just does not matter. Christians, of course, are partly to blame for this, because they have failed to live out the Gospel and its dictates of love. They have failed to let God live in and through them. But this is not the whole picture. Actual atheism has held significant sway on the world, and it has often taken a warlike stand against all kinds of religion, theistic or non-theistic alike (thus, communism in Russia attacked Christians while communism in China attacked the Buddhists). Militant atheism has provided a significant hermeneutical lens by which many not so militant in their atheism live out their life. It reaches down, to be sure, to the practical atheists, even if they are nominal theists. This lens, as we shall see, comes as the end product of a theological construct, found both in Protestantism and in Catholicism, which established a two-tier cosmology, separating the natural world from the supernatural, allowing a complete divorce between the two.[1] Philosophical atheism is the logical end of this construct, while practical atheism can only be seen as its typical result.
To be sure, there has always been an atheistic element in society since the beginning of time. The Psalms could not say, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none that does good,” (Ps. 14:1) if no one questioned the existence of God until modern times.[2] But there is something significant in modern atheism which makes it quite different in quality from all previous forms of atheism. For the Christian, the explanation is simple: it is because God has revealed himself to us as man, giving to us the ability for an absolute affirmation or absolute denial of God. “Only after God has uttered his absolute Yes to man can man utter his absolute No to God: genuine atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.“[3] But this cannot be used to explain all kinds of atheism; not even all kinds of post-Christian atheism are actually absolute, hate-filled denials of God. Only in its most extreme form is this true.
There seems to be three major streams of thought, connected to one another to be sure, from which we can find most kinds of actual atheism emerging in individuals. The first comes from the fact that our notions of God are, ultimately, unsound. This allows for someone to come around, challenge our idea of God, and confound us when we have no answer to them. Instead of seeing how this could help us purify our ideas about God and grasp God better, many of us end up denying God once our thoughts about God are shown to be faulty.[4] This can explain why so many deists became atheists.[5] A second reason many people use to abandon God is because of the evil done in God’s name. We should all agree with them that such a corruption of religion needs purification. The sad fact, however, is that such corruption often goes unnoticed and is too ingrained to be rooted out easily. But even when this is the case, people should not give up faith in God. It’s ultimately an ad hominem. Truth is truth, whether the followers of truth do evil or not. But doubters, following this line of thought, should see it for what it is: another reason to question humanity, not God.[6] Indeed, it is ironically saying that, because people have done evil, I can’t believe in God, so I will believe in myself (despite the fact that I am also human). Finally, even when God’s followers are not actively promoting evil, that does not mean evil itself has been dealt with. The existence of evil in itself is the third, and probably most significant, challenge to the world and to any believer, as Walter Kasper points out, “From an existential point of view wickedness and evil are far more decisive for many people than are theoretical and ideological denials of God.“[7] Yet even here, a partial solution can be found (beyond the sleight of hand which reminds us that, properly speaking, evil does not exist). It goes back to the fact that our notions of God need purification. We try to create a God who is not God. We want God to be some sort of magic trick who will save the day for us whenever we desire him to do so. We don’t really want to see God as having free will and engaging us with our free will. Moreover, we don’t really want to see God as imposing himself upon us. Yet, God commands things for us for our own good. When we fail to follow his dictates, it is clear something bad will happen, not because God causes the bad, but because it is the direct result of what has been done. The law of karma, to that extent, is a universal law which no one should deny.[8] Suffering in the world, evil in the world, is the result of our failing to follow God’s guidance. It is not because God fails to follow ours.
Footnotes
[1] We shall explore this in Part III
[2] The kinds of questions put to the divinity reflect the cultural situations in which the questions come from. Greek atheism denied the Homeric gods, but often allowed for a first principle, such as “the One” of Neo-Platonism, which is why Christianity was often confused with atheism by the Romans. Yet, there is much truth in what Alexander Men would suggest, that is, atheism in any form is a symptom of a greater problem, of a spiritual crisis that had been left unattended and let to fester. “Apologists of atheism attempt to represent their ideology as the result of intellectual progress, as the most ‘modern’ of ideologies. In reality, atheism existed long before the emergence of the major world religions and has always been a symptom of spiritual crisis, impoverishment and decay,” Alexander Men. Christianity For the Twenty First Century. Ed. Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman (New York: Continuum, 1996), 59.
[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar. Theo-Drama II: Dramatis Personae: Man in God. Trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 123
[4] It is quite easy to misconstrue our concepts for God as for God himself. At best they must be seen as imperfect pointers to the truth of God. They must never be seen as statements of absolute truth in themselves; they are merely about absolute truth. While they provide a way for us to understand something about that truth, they are never going to comprehend that truth. When that is forgotten, it is easy to see how many people try to reject God, not from what God is, but from false concepts of God which they can easily refute. To refute God in this way is not to refute God, but something which is not God. It’s a rejection of an abstraction, not a concrete reality. “Every concept involves those who think and what is thought, subject and object. But God is neither of those who think nor of what is thought for he is beyond them. Otherwise he would be limited if as a thinker he stood in need of the relationship to what was thought or as an object of thought he would naturally lapse to the level of the subject thinking through a relationship. Thus there remains only the rejoinder that God can neither conceive nor be conceived but is beyond conception and being conceived. To conceive and be conceived pertain by nature to those things which are secondary to him,” St. Maximus the Confessor. Selected Writings. Trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 148 (Chapters on Knowledge II-2). In this way, Paul Evdokimov reminds us that the big problem with atheism is that it must define God in order to reject him, but in doing so, it creates a God which is not God, and so they are not refuting God despite their attempts to do so. “How does atheism define the complex ‘God’ before denying him? The whole question lies here. At most it is the negation of a certain type of theology, of an anthropomorphic and human conception of God. This in no way goes beyond the human and in no way does it touch God in himself,” Paul Evdokimov. Ages of the Spiritual Life. Trans. Sister Gertrude. Revised by Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 24.
[5] “We have witnessed, during the last few centuries, ‘the rationalistic evaporation of God.’ But it was the rationalist God. A single puff will disperse the vapor. We shall not be disturbed. We shall even breathe more comfortably. The true God, the God we continue to adore, is elsewhere. He is everywhere you think to find him. He is everywhere, even when you do not find him,” Henry de Lubac. The Discovery of God. Trans. Alexander Dru (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1996), 179.
[6] “To reject God because man has corrupted the idea of God, and religion because of the abuse of it, is the effect of a sort of clear-sightedness which is yet blind. For surely the holiest things are inevitably destined to be the victims of the worst abuses. Religion, which is its own source and origin, must continue to purify itself. Moreover, under one form or another man always turns back to adoration. It is not merely his first duty but his deepest need. It is something he cannot extirpate; he can only corrupt it. God is the plow that draws him, and even those who deny him in spite of feeling that attraction, bear witness to him,” ibid., 154.
[7] Walter Kasper. The God of Jesus Christ. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 19.
[8] Of course, how one interprets that law is significant. It must be a relative, not an absolute, norm, because God is capable of transcending it.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In