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“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”1
In the Western philosophical tradition, God is a being that is necessary (cannot fail to exist), eternal (not bound by time), immaterial (not bound by space), all-powerful, and all-knowing. Finally, most Western theologians and philosophers claim that God is all-good, or he is the perfect embodiment of the virtues of love, justice, and every other good we know.
Catechism of the Catholic Church: God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.5
Deists believe that one God created the universe, but unlike theists, they believe this God no longer interacts with the world he created. Some Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, were deists: They rejected Christianity, but they did not reject what they called “nature’s God.”6
Pantheists, on the other hand, believe God exists but he (or she, or even it) is identical to the universe itself.
Secular humanist Tom Flynn wrote: The triumph of Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens was to take arguments against religion that were long familiar to insiders, brilliantly repackage them, and expose them to millions who would never otherwise pick up an atheist book. Let me say that again in bolder type. There’s nothing new about the New Atheism.
Although we live in a culture that equates faith with “blindly accepting something as true,” it may be more helpful to think of faith instead as a kind of “trust” that is based on good reasons.
Both atheists and theists have “faith” in the sense that they believe statements that cannot be proven with certainty.
For example, almost everyone believes that the world is not a computer simulation like the Matrix, or that the laws of nature that operate today will operate the same way tomorrow. We don’t carefully reason our way to these truths. They are merely assumptions we think are true because they just appear to be true. But calling belief in these basic truths “faith” would stretch the meaning of the word beyond recognition. Theists have religious faith while atheists have confidence in truths that cannot be absolutely proven.
“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
In any case, the real question we should ask is not why individual atheists would be moral, but why objective moral truths exist if God does not (more
In any case, the real question we should ask is not why individual atheists would be moral, but why objective moral truths exist if God does not
But sometimes atheists don’t want to know if your religion is reasonable. Sometimes they just want to know if you are reasonable.
Catholic scientists like Fr. Georges Lemaitre (who discovered the Big Bang) and the friar Gregor Mendel (who discovered genetic inheritance), followed the medieval motto fides quaerens intellectum, or “faith seeking understanding,” and were among those who contributed to the flourishing of modern science. Belief in a God who carefully made the world and watches over it is one of the reasons Christians have desired to explore how the world works through the natural sciences.
The Catholic Church teaches that the first chapters of the book of Genesis are primarily concerned with expressing theological truths, like that God created the world and man’s immortal soul, and not scientific truths about the earth’s physical history. 46 As Cardinal Caesar Baronius is reported to have said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Bad Atheistic Attitude #2: “Religion
However, atheists should not presume that “gaps” are the only evidence a theist can muster. The philosophical arguments from necessity, first cause, design, and morality don’t start from what we don’t know and say, “God must have done it.” Instead, they start from what we do know and conclude that God is the best explanation for certain features of the universe we observe.
Since it is restricted to explaining the natural world, science can’t answer every claim about reality. If there is a supernatural world, it is beyond the means of science to explore it. But if supernatural proofs for God are always dismissed in this way, then no evidence could falsify atheism, and atheism would be as unprovable as the religious beliefs it wants to criticize.
If something as basic as the existence of free will can be confirmed via philosophical debate, then why not take the same approach with the existence of God?
including the kalām cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from objective moral values, the argument from personal experience, and the argument from the Resurrection of Christ.
As C. S. Lewis put it, “We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect; whatever he does will be used in evidence against him.”56
Richard Swinburne writes: The agnosticism of the agnostic also makes possible a great good for the religious believer. It allows the believer to have the awesome choice of helping or not helping the agnostic to understand who is the source of his existence and of his ultimate well-being (helping the agnostic not merely by verbal preaching but by an example of what living a religious life is like).
What is the lesson to be learned? Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Just because there is no evidence for the existence of X, it doesn’t follow that X does not exist.
Another problem with this argument is its reasoning, “Some of X are bad, therefore all of X are bad.” Imagine an anarchist saying that since everyone rejects some forms of government, whether it is communism, feudal monarchy, or direct democracy, therefore “All of us
anarchists. I just reject one more form of government than you do.” No, the anarchist must prove that no governments should exist at all, not simply that most forms of government are no longer used today.
Instead, we can ask whether belief in the God of the philosophers is as silly as belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The fact that the world doesn’t have to exist implies that the world exists because of something that has to exist.
The fact that there is an objective moral law implies there is an objective moral lawgiver. Theists don’t start with God and then manufacture evidence that has nothing to do with his existence but instead follow the evidence in the natural world that points to a being that exists beyond it.
For example, let’s say I go outside in the morning to find my car, which was previously dusty, is now clean. I might ask, What explains my car being
clean? In this case, a scientific explanation is that water dissolves dust and has certain physical properties that cause it to evaporate off my car, leaving the car clean. The other explanation is that someone washed my car. Both explanations validly answer the question “Why is my car clean?” Even if we lack the complete causal or scientific explanation of an event, that doesn’t mean the explanation is invalid (especially if we have a compelling personal explanation).
We can know what God is not, for example: God exists beyond space, so he is not made of matter (the stuff that occupies space). God is morally perfect, so he does not sin. God is beyond time, so he has no beginning or end. We can understand God in
If the concept of a human being with free will is coherent, then a person can’t merely be chemical reactions in a brain. If he were, then he could not freely choose a course of action any more than a rock at the mercy of gravity and friction can choose which way to roll down a hill. If humans are free, then they must have an “immaterial mind” that is the source of their free will that allows them to act without being completely determined by
their biological functions.96 2. Our minds are able to think about things, but a clump of matter can’t be “about” anything. For example, if our brains were just lumps of matter, then how could anything about frozen Antarctica be inside my brain cells, which have never been there? Atheistic philosopher Alex Rosenberg writes: Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process . . . it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything . . . the clumps of matter
Since God is omniscient, he doesn’t have to think, reason, or change his mind. He doesn’t “react,” because he already knows everything. God’s capacities as a rational and moral being simply exist in one timeless, perfect “moment” that does not progress into anything else.
God doesn’t satisfy some list of virtues; rather, the morally good behavior we recognize in the world flows from God’s perfect nature.
If God is the
perfection of virtues, including love and selflessness, then his creation is a logical result of his superabundant love and self-giving. He created the universe not for his good but for ours.100 So, being the creator of the universe does not contradict God’s perfection but in fact flows from it. Because God is perfect love, he gives being and life to his creation.
Why does God allow his creation to undergo such intense suffering? Why does God allow serial killers, terrorists, disease, starving children? Doesn’t that contradict his goodness or power? Philosophers and theologians call this the problem of evil.
Finally, one could
Jimmy Akin. He says, “It is a mystery why God allows us to suffer, but there are reasons for our suffering that can help us endure it.”
Let’s return to my example of inviting you over
God may allow some evils to exist because by doing so he is preventing even greater evils from coming about in the future. Or, by allowing some evils to exist, God is able to allow some goods to exist that
would not exist otherwise.
It seems that the world is a better place because humans exist who have the freedom to
love, be compassionate, be courageous, seek justice, and engage in morally good behaviors. Of course, humans can also misuse that freedom, which creates many of the evils we see in the world.114 A defective
St. Augustine recognized that a world with free will is better than one without it in the same way that a world of thriving animals is better than a world of lifeless rocks. He writes, “For a runaway horse is better than a stone that stays in the right place only because it has no movement or perception of its own; and in the same way, a creature that sins by free will is more excellent than one that does not sin only because it has no free will.”
Abraham did, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?”
In order to show God does not exist, it is the atheist who has the burden of proof to show that God would have no good reasons to permit evil. And given the limitations of human knowledge of the universe, this means that such a burden of proof simply can’t be met. Since we can imagine some good reasons God may have to allow evil, and we recognize that we can’t fully understand the goods that can emerge in other times and places as a result of allowing evil to exist, the theist is not in a position where he must give up belief in God in the face of evil. Of course, the problem of reconciling
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goodness, and beauty in the world?
