Conversions from atheism are often gradual and complex, no doubt. For many converts the road is slow and tedious, tiring and trying. But in the end unbelievers who find God can enjoy an inner peace that comes from a clear conscience in knowing they held to truth and followed the arguments faithfully.

Of course not all converts from atheism become Christian or even religious. Some converts only reach a deistic belief in God (an areligious position that God is “impersonal”) but the leap is still monumental; and it opens new, unforeseen horizons.

The factors that lead to faith are often diverse. It is clear that every former atheist has walked a unique path to God. Cardinal Ratzinger was once asked how many ways there are to God. He replied:

“As many ways as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one.”

Of course, the pope-to-be was not endorsing the view that “all religions are equal” but rather that there always seems to be a unique combination of factors—or steps—that move each convert towards belief in God. It also seems that some of these factors are more prominent across the board than others.

Here are eight common factors that lead atheists to change their minds about God:

1. Good literature and reasonable writing.

Reasonable atheists eventually become theists because they are reasonable; and furthermore, because they are honest. They are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads; and in many cases the evidence comes to the atheist most coherently and well-presented through the writings of believers in God.

Author Karen Edmisten admits on her blog:

“I once thought I’d be a lifelong atheist. Then I became desperately unhappy, read up on philosophy and various religions (while assiduously avoiding Christianity), and waited for something to make sense. I was initially  appalled when Christianity began to look  like the sensible thing, surprised when I wanted to be baptized, and stunned that I ended up a Catholic.”

Dr. Holly Ordway, author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms, describes the consequences of reading great, intelligent Christian writers:

“I found that my favorite authors were men and women of deep Christian faith. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien above all; and then the poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John Donne, and others. Their work was unsettling to my atheist convictions…”

Dr. Ordway mentions the eminent 20th century Oxford thinker, C.S. Lewis. Lewis is a prime example of a reasonable but unbelieving thinker who was willing to read from all angles and perspectives. As a result of his open inquiry, he became a believer in Christ and one of modern Christianity’s greatest apologists.

G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald were two of the most influential writers to effect Lewis’ conversion. He writes in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy:

“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for… A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

Author Dale Ahlquist writes matter-of-factly that “C.S. Lewis was an atheist until he read Chesterton’s book, The Everlasting Man, but he wasn’t afterwards…”

Ironically, it was C.S. Lewis’ influential defenses of Christianity that would eventually prompt countless conversions to Christianity—and his influence continues today unhindered. Among the Lewis-led converts from atheism is former feminist and professor of philosophy, Lorraine Murray, who recalls:

“In college I turned my back on Catholicism, my childhood faith, and became a radical, gender-bending feminist and a passionate atheist …. Reading Lewis, I found something that I must have been quietly hungering for all along, which was a reasoned approach to my childhood beliefs, which had centered almost entirely on emotion. As I turned the pages of this book, I could no longer ignore the Truth, nor turn my back on the Way and the Life. Little by little, and inch by inch, I found my way back to Jesus Christ and returned to the Catholic Church.”

For an in-depth account of Murray’s conversion, see her book: Confessions Of An Ex-Feminist.

2. "Experimentation" with prayer and the word of God.

The Word of God is living. It has power beyond human comprehension because it is “God-breathed.” God speaks to man in many ways; but especially through prayer and the reading of the inspired Scriptures. When curiosity (or even interest) of non-believers leads to experimentation with prayer or reading the Bible the results can be shocking, as many converts attest.

One former atheist who was profoundly affected by prayer and the Scriptures is author Devin Rose. On his blog, he describes the role that God’s Word played in his gradual conversion process from atheism to Christianity:

“I began praying, saying, “God, you know I do not believe in you, but I am in trouble and need help. If you are real, help me.” I started reading the Bible to learn about what Christianity said…”

Once Rose began to read the Scriptures and talk to God, even as a skeptic, he found himself overwhelmed by something very real:

“Still, I persevered. I kept reading the Bible, asking my roommate questions about what I was reading, and praying. Then, slowly, and amazingly, my faith grew and it eventually threatened to whelm my many doubts and unbelief.”

And the rest was history for the now rising Catholic apologist and author of The Protestant’s Dilemma.

Similarly, renowned sci-fi author John C. Wright distinctly recalls a prayer he said as an adamant atheist:

“I prayed. ‘Dear God, I know… that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me…If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.'”

Wright soon received the answer (and effect) he did not expect:

“Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me…I was altered down to the root of my being…It was like falling in love.”

Wright was welcomed into the Catholic Church at Easter in 2008.

3. Historical study of the Gospels.

Lee Strobel, the former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and author of the influential work, The Case For Christ, is a prime example of what happens when an honest atheist sets out to establish once and for all whether the claims of the Gospels are reliable or not.

Strobel writes at the end of his investigation in The Case For Christ:

“I’ll admit it:I was ambushed by the amount and quality of the evidence that Jesus is the unique Son of God… I shook my head in amazement. I had seen defendants carted off to the death chamber on much less convincing proof! The cumulative facts and data pointed unmistakably towards a conclusion that I wasn’t entirely comfortable in reaching.” (p. 264)

Modern historical scholars like Craig Blomberg and N.T. Wright have advanced the area of historical theology and the study of the claims of the Gospels to exciting new heights. The results of such ground-breaking studies are one of the greatest threats to modern day atheism.

Referring specifically to the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ in the Gospels (discussed below), former atheist and freelancer, Philip Vander Elst, writes:

“The more I thought about all these points, the more convinced I became that the internal evidence for the reliability of the Gospels and the New Testament as a whole was overwhelming."

4. Honest philosophical reasoning.

Philosophy means “love of truth.” Philosophy is meant to lead one to truth; and it certainly will, if the philosopher is willing to honestly consider the arguments from both sides and follow the best arguments wherever they may lead.

Psychologist Dr. Kevin Vost recalls his discovery of the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas:

“Pope Leo XIII had written in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris that for scientific types who follow only reason, after the grace of God, nothing is as likely to win them back to the faith as the wisdom of St. Thomas, and this was the case for me. He showed me how true Christian faith complements and perfects reason; it doesn’t contradict or belittle it. He solved all the logical dilemmas.”

Philosopher Dr. Ed Feser, in his article, The Road From Atheism, recounts the shocking effectof opening himself to the arguments for the existence of God:

“As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.”  Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”

Feser concludes:

“Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much.  When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back.  As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed.  But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.”

Two fantastic books from Edward Feser include The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism and Aquinas. Also recommended is Kevin Vost’s From Atheism to Catholicism: How Scientists and Philosophers Led Me to the Truth.

5. Reasonable believers.

It has been the obnoxious position of some (not all) atheists that in order to believe in God, one must have a significant lack of intelligence and/or reason. Most atheists believe that modern science has ruled out the possibility of the existence of God. For this reason, they tag believers with a lack of up-to-date knowledge and critical thinking skills. (Of course, the question of the existence of a God who is outside of the physical universe is fundamentally aphilosophical question—not a scientific question.)

Intelligent and reasonable believers in God, who can engage atheistic arguments with clarity and logic, become a great challenge to atheists who hold this shallow attitude towards the existence of God.

Theists especially make a statement when they are experts in any field of science. To list just a few examples: Galileo and Kepler (astronomy), Pascal (hydrostatics), Boyle (chemistry), Newton (calculus), Linnaeus (systematic biology), Faraday (electromagnetics), Cuvier (comparative anatomy), Kelvin (thermodynamics), Lister (antiseptic surgery), and Mendel (genetics).

An honest atheist might presume, upon encountering Christians (for example) who have reasonable explanations for their supernatural beliefs, that the existence of God is at least plausible. This encounter might then mark the beginning of the non-believer’s openness towards God as a reality.

Consider the notable conversion of former atheist blogger, Jennifer Fulwiler. Her journey from atheism to agnosticism and—eventually—to Catholicism, was slow and gradual with many different points of impact. But encountering intelligent believers in God was a key chink in her atheist armor.

In this video interview with Brandon Vogt, Jen explains how encountering intelligent, reasonable theists (especially her husband) impacted her in the journey towards her eventual conversion.

For the full account of Jen’s conversion process, get her must-read book, Something Other Than God. Her blog is conversiondiary.com.

And then there’s Leah Libresco—another atheist blogger turned Catholic. Leah recalls the challenging impact of reasonable Christians in her academic circle:

“I was in a philosophical debating group, so the strongest pitch I saw was probably the way my Catholic friends rooted their moral, philosophical, or aesthetic arguments in their theology. We covered a huge spread of topics so I got so see a lot of long and winding paths into the consequences of belief.”

Recalling her first encounter with this group of intelligent Christians, she writes on her blog:

“When I went to college…I met smart Christians for the first time, and it was a real shock.”

That initial “shock” stirred her curiosity and propelled her in the direction of Christianity. Leah is now an active Catholic.

Finally, there’s Edith Stein, a brilliant 20th century philosopher. As an atheist, Edith was shocked when she discovered the writings of Catholic philosopher, Max Scheler. As one account of her conversion recounts:

“Edith was enthralled by Scheler’s eloquence in expounding and defending Catholic spiritual ideals. Listening to his lectures on the phenomenology of religion, she became disposed to take religious ideas and attitudes seriously for the first time since her adolescence, when she had lost her faith and and given up prayer.”

Edith Stein would eventually convert to Catholicism and die a martyr. She is now known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

6. Modern advances and limitations in science.

Antony Flew was one of the world’s most famous atheists of the 20th century. He debated William Lane Craig and others on the existence of God. But eventually his recognition of the profound order and complexity of the universe, and its apparent fine-tuning, was a decisive reason for the renowned atheist to change his mind about God’s existence.

In a fascinating interview with Dr. Ben Wiker, Flew explains:

“There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe.”

He concluded that it was reasonable to believe that the organization of space, time, matter and energy throughout the universe is far from random.

As Dr. Peter Kreeft has pointed out, no person would see a hut on a beach and conclude that it must have randomly assembled itself by some random natural process, void of an intelligent designer. Its order necessitates a designer. Thus if this “beach hut analogy” is true, how much more should we believe in an Intelligent Designer behind the vastly more complex and ordered universe and the precise physical laws that govern it (click here for William Lane Craig’s argument for the fine-tuning of the universe).

Flew continues in his exposition on why he changed his mind about God:

“The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself—which is far more complex than the physical Universe—can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint . . . The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins’ comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a “lucky chance.” If that’s the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.”

Parents often describe their experience of procreation as “a miracle,” regardless of their religious background or philosophical worldview. Intuitively, they seem to accept that there is something deeply mysterious and transcendent at work in the bringing forth (and sustenance) of new human life. Flew also was able to realize (after a lifetime of study and reflection) that there could be no merely natural explanation for life in the universe.

For a more in-depth account of Flew’s change of mind on God’s existence, read There Is A God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

7. Evidence for the Resurrection.

Thanks to the phenomenal work of leading New Testament scholars, including Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and N.T. Wright, the case for Christ’s resurrection has become more airtight than ever.

Modern historical studies have left little doubt about what the best explanation is for the alleged postmortem appearances of the risen Jesus, the conversions of Paul and James, and the empty tomb: Jesus really was raised from the dead. Even most of today’s critical New Testament scholars accept these basic facts as historically certain (the appearances, conversions, empty tomb, etc); but they are left limping with second-rate alternative explanations in a last ditch effort to refute the true resurrection of Christ and “signature of God”, as scholar Richard Swinburne has tagged it.

The case for the resurrection of Jesus had a significant impact on the former atheist, now Christian apologist, Alister McGrath. He recalls in one of his articles:

“My early concern was to get straight what Christians believed, and why they believed it. How does the Resurrection fit into the web of Christian beliefs? How does it fit into the overall scheme of the Christian faith? After several years of wrestling with these issues, I came down firmly on the side of Christian orthodoxy. I became, and remain, a dedicated and convinced defender of traditional Christian theology. Having persuaded myself of its merits, I was more than happy to try to persuade others as well.”

For more on McGrath’s journey see his book, Surprised By Meaning.

8. Beauty.

The great theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, wrote:

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”

Father von Balthasar held strong to the notion that to lead non-believers to belief in God we must begin with the beautiful.

Dr. Peter Kreeft calls this the Argument from Aesthetic Experience. The Boston College philosopher testifies that he knows of several former atheists who came to a belief in God based on this argument (for more from Dr. Kreeft, see his Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God).

In classic Kreeftian fashion, he puts forward the argument in the following way:

“There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.

You either see this one or you don’t.”

I recently saw this on Twitter, and thought it worth discussing:

When people say atheism entails nihilism they're more than likely saying "I'll be really sad if I couldn't believe I'm immortal and will eventually live in paradise."

— Counter Apologist (@CounterApologis) January 13, 2019

I like Counter Apologist, but this is akin to saying “When people say ‘God doesn’t exist’ they’re more than likely saying ‘I don’t want to submit to God.'” Rather than engage in gratuitous armchair psychologizing, we should just take what folks say at face value.

So here’s the Nihilism Thesis:

(NT): Nihilism is false iff* theism is true.

Should we accept (NT) and if not, why not?

To grapple with this question, we should say something further about the two concepts, nihilism and theism. For the purposes of this discussion, these are my definitions:

Nihilism: The belief that there are no objectively true principles of moral value,  obligation, meaning, or purpose and thus life is objectively meaningless.

Theism: The belief that the ultimate necessary principle of all existence is a maximally great and perfectly good person who created and sustains all things and who is the objective ground of human meaning and purpose.

Based on those definitions, should we think that (NT) is true or false? Or should we be agnostic? And what about the definitions themselves? Are they adequate? If not, why not?

*In case you were wondering, iff is not a typo; rather, it is a nerd-abbreviation for “if and only if.”

NOTE: This autumn I will be presenting a qualified defense of apatheism at a conference. This is a draft of the paper I plan to deliver. It is in response to Jonathan Rauch’s important essay “Let it Be” in which he develops the concept of apatheism.

 
The link between 9/11 and the new atheism is well-established, but that terrible day also spurred another lesser known response to religious zeal. I speak of the apatheist celebrated by Jonathan Rauch in a pithy but very influential 2003 article in Atlantic Monthly simply titled “Let it Be.”¹Rauch begins this brief, 994-word essay in memorable fashion by recounting an occasion when he was asked to share his religious views:

“‘I used to call myself an atheist,’ I said, ‘and I still don’t believe in God, but the larger truth is that it has been years since I really cared one way or another. I’m’—that was when it hit me—‘an … apatheist!’”²

And thus was born “apatheism,” a portmanteau of apathy and theism. But what, precisely, does Rauch mean by apatheism? According to what I call the standard reading of this essay, Rauch’s apatheism reflects an ignoble attitude of intellectual laziness, of mere disinterest in matters of religious significance.

While I don’t dispute the fact that some people are becoming increasingly apathetic about religious commitment, in this essay I will focus my efforts on challenging the standard reading of Rauch’s concept of apatheism. Instead, I’ll argue for what I call the charitable reading according to which apatheism reflects an admirable attempt to chasten the human tendency toward fanaticism as expressed in anti-social behavior such as zealotry, bigotry, and affrontive expressions of proselytism and disputation. When viewed from that perspective, we can see that far from representing an ignoble fall into intellectual sloth, Rauch’s particular brand of apatheism reflects an admirable attempt to constrain public conduct. And for that, it should be respected, if not celebrated.

The Standard Reading

Let’s begin with the standard reading. Several Christian apologists and theologians have interpreted Rauch’s essay as conveying a deeply troubling intellectual apathy toward metaphysical and theological questions. For example, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Rauch’s apatheists “don’t care” whether God exists and that they are, in effect, practical atheists “because their ignorance and indifference amount to a practical rejection of God’s role in the world.”³

While D’Souza makes reference to apatheism only in passing, Douglas Groothuis offers a far more extensive treatment of Rauch’s essay in his book Christian Apologetics. For that reason, I will focus on Groothuis’ treatment to represent the standard reading.

Groothuis says that the apatheist of Rauch’s essay has a “relaxed attitude” toward religion, a “benign indifference” in which one refuses “to become passionate about one’s own beliefs or the beliefs of others.”⁴ Importantly, Groothuis recognizes that apatheism, like new atheism, is an intentional response to the danger of fanaticism. However, while the new atheists responded to religious fanaticism with their own secular version,⁵ Rauch’s apatheism targets all fanaticism, whether it be religious or secular. As Groothuis puts it, Rauch is seeking to provide a “tonic to incivility” that exudes the virtue of tolerance.

While Rauch’s apatheist seeks to avoid fanaticism, Groothuis insists that Rauch thereby places “tranquility above truth.” In short, Rauch’s misbegotten pursuit of civility is only secured at the cost of setting aside a swath of theological, metaphysical, and ethical questions. And this attitude, so Groothuis says, “is antithetical to the teaching of all religions and sound philosophy: that we should care about our convictions and put them into practice consistently.”⁶ In short, Groothuis charges Rauch with a toxic attitude which dissolves into a fundamentally anti-Christian intellectual sloth.⁷

The real cost of Rauch’s misguided response to dogmatic incivility is a failure to love either God or neighbor. Groothuis makes the point by quoting Rauch’s observation that his Christian friends “betray no sign of caring that I am an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual.” As Groothuis soberly observes, “For the serious Christian, however, an attitude of apathy over the eternal destiny of another human being is not an option.”⁸

Consequently, though apatheism may be borne out of a noble desire to avoid conflict, it sacrifices the pursuit of truth in the process and thereby becomes a textbook case of a cure that is worse than the disease.

The Charitable Reading

Now we turn to the charitable reading. This reading begins with the point that Groothuis himself makes: namely, that Rauch proposes apatheism as a way to avoid the dangers of fanaticism. It is also important to underscore the point that Rauch’s target is not religious fanaticism, per se. Rather, he targets fervent fanaticism generally, and it can be exemplified in atheistic or secular attitudes as surely as religious ones. As Rauch writes:

the hot-blooded atheist cares as much about religion as does the evangelical Christian, but in the opposite direction. “Secularism” can refer to a simple absence of devoutness, but it more accurately refers to an ACLU-style disapproval of any profession of religion in public life—a disapproval that seems puritanical and quaint to apatheists.⁹

Thus, Rauch has as little sympathy for the “hot-blooded atheist” as for the fire and brimstone street preacher. Both of these folk need to take an apatheistic chill pill.

At this point, it may help to illustrate the kind of behavior that Rauch is seeking to avoid. And to that end, I’ll briefly summarize two examples of fanaticism or dogmatic incivility, one religious, and the other secular.

We can begin with the religious example. When I was a teenager I was taught that we had to do street evangelism by going out and accosting people with this question: Do you know where you would go if you died tonight? I still remember two young women shaking off our religious invitation with a forceful riposte: “Leave us alone!” My companion, undeterred, followed them down the street calling out with increasing fervency, “But you have to believe!” As for me, I channeled my evangelistic fervor in another direction, by emptying a newspaper box holding copies of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! and tossing them in a dumpster. If we couldn’t win souls, at least we could prevent the JWs from damning them!¹⁰

That’s an example of the kind of behavior that Rauch would like us all to avoid, but as noted above, it is not limited to religious people. Just consider Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of growing up in a fervent secular household:

I was raised in a real strong Secular Humanist family—the kind of folks who’d ground you for a week just for thinking of dating a Unitarian, or worse. Not that they were hard-liners, though. We had over 70 Bibles lying around the house where anyone could browse through them—Gideons my dad had removed from the motel rooms he’d stayed in. And I remember how he gloried in every Gideon he lifted, thinking of all the traveling salesmen whose minds he’d probably saved from dry rot. Looking back, I guess you could say I never really had a choice, what with my parents always preaching, “Think for yourself! Think for yourself!”¹¹

Whether the issue is a Christian wannabe evangelist preaching repentance and destroying JW literature or a secular evangelist preaching freethought and stealing Gideon’s Bibles, the same fanaticism is on display.

We can identify the following disturbing traits in these cases. First, both teen Randal and Mr. Ehrenreich exhibited zealotry, the expression of excessive zeal in their beliefs. Second, this zeal expressed itself in bigotry, an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, particularly evident in the effort to censor alternative views (Awake! Magazine, the Gideon’s Bibles). And finally, both exhibited an affrontive style of proselytism and disputation whether it was teen Randal accosting people in the street with the threat of hell or Mr. Ehrenreich always preaching “Think for yourself!” (One can only imagine the fireworks if young Barbara had actually dared to think for herself by embracing religion.)

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the target of such fanatical behavior is not limited to members of an outgroup, for it can equally target in-group members. Indeed, sometimes the pursuit of group purity encourages an even more rigorous enforcement of group solidarity. Witness the irenic Philip Melanchthon who, late in life, sadly commented that he welcomed his impending death so that he might “escape ‘the rage of the theologians.’”¹²

Like Rauch, I applaud the move away from this kind of in-your-face fanaticism, whether it be religious or secular. And this brings me to the second point: Rauch’s apatheism is not simply a matter of becoming lazy about religious belief. Rather, it represents a determined commitment to chasten our own innate impulses toward fanatical zealotry, bigotry, and affrontive proselytism or disputation.

We’ve all heard the maxim “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company” and we all know why. Religion and politics are topics which are uniquely able to inflame passion and stoke division. And because human beings have a tendency toward conflict in these areas, this is precisely why Rauch proposes we determine to guard ourselves against a lapse into overly zealous, potentially intolerant, and excessively aggressive behavior. Rauch puts the point like this: “it is the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.”¹³ This is a crucial point: Rauch’s apatheism, this chastening of our radical tendencies, is not mere laziness or sloth: rather, it is an earnest discipline.

Consider an example from that other incendiary field: politics. A married couple, Steve and Darlene, are traveling to the house of Steve’s parents for Thanksgiving just after the 2016 presidential election. While both Steve and Darlene campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Steve’s dad voted for Trump. As they drive, Darlene coaches Steve not to get into an argument with his dad about the president-elect: “Don’t take the bait, Steve. I don’t care if your dad wears his MAGA hat all through dinner. I forbid you to talk politics. You need to control yourself!”

The same advice that Darlene gives to Steve to avoid an incendiary topic and with it the risk of lapsing into fanatical behavior could likewise be given to the religious devotee with similar inclinations. Insofar as you have a tendency toward dogmatic zeal, bigotry, or affrontive proselytism or disputation, you should simply avoid these topics. This is not laziness. It is, rather, a careful discipline.

Finally, let’s turn to consider what Rauch says about Christians who are apatheists. This is a particularly important point because while some of Rauch’s statements here might appear especially damning, when read with the appropriate nuance I propose that they actually reveal admirable exercises of wisdom fully congruent with love of God and neighbor.

Here’s how Rauch describes apatheistic Christians: “Most of these people believe in God …; they just don’t care much about him.”¹⁴ This lack of care apparently extends to one’s neighbor as well. Rauch continues:

“I have Christian friends who organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with God, but who betray no sign of caring that I am an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual. They are exponents, at least, of the second, more important part of apatheism: the part that doesn’t mind what other people think about God.”¹⁵

Even if what I’ve said thus far about Rauch’s apatheism is true – that is, even if it largely consists of an admirable determination to constrain the tendency toward fanaticism on incendiary topics – surely at least this attitude is problematic, is it not? After all, a Christian is called to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love their neighbor as themselves. But Rauch appears to describe quite the opposite attitude with Christians who don’t particularly care about God orother people.

However, it seems to me that a closer reading of Rauch can defend him against this charge. While Rauch says that apatheistic Christians “just don’t care much” about God, he immediately adds that he knows many apatheistic Christians who “organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with God”. This presents us with a puzzle: how can it be that they don’t care about God if they organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with him?

The answer, I would suggest, is that Rauch is using “care” in a very particular way with respect to public expressions of religious fanaticism. In other words, “care” is understood here to consist of visible displays of devotion and piety. But it should be clear to any Christian that such visible actions do not thereby constitute a truly devotional life; indeed, they may even run counter to it. For example, when Jesus instructs on the discipline on prayer he advises his listeners to pursue private devotion rather than grandiose, public displays (Mt 6:5-6). Thus, so-called publicly visible care has little to do with one’s fulsome love of God.

Fair enough, but what about the fact that Rauch says his own Christian friends “betray no sign of caring” that he is “an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual”? Once again, we need to keep in mind Rauch’s very particular understanding of “caring.” These Christians may not “care” in the sense of engaging in public and visible displays whereby they confront and condemn Rauch’s beliefs and actions. But that hardly entails that they do not truly care about their non-Christian brother. Indeed, for all we (or Rauch) know, they may pray for him for hours a day.

Further, keep in mind that Rauch knows these individuals have deeply devout Christian faith. Their religion is no secret to him. Furthermore, it would presumably be commonly understood between parties that if Rauch had any questions about their faith, he’d be more than welcome to ask. We can assume that the door is open for further conversation, should he be interested. With that in mind, this essay gives no hint at present that Rauch is interested. So it should not surprise us that his friends have opted not to broach the subject at this time. Rather, they are simply sharing life together with their non-Christian friend while being sure not to repel him with off-putting displays of zeal, bigotry, or affrontive proselytism or disputation.

To be sure, you may not agree with the behavior of these apatheistic Christians or with the reasoning I’ve imputed to them. You may instead prefer the Christian to adopt a more confrontational expression of care toward the non-Christian. Even so, it still seems to me that the behavior Rauch describes is fully consistent with love of God and neighbor.

Conclusion

In this paper, I’ve sought to argue that the standard reading of Rauch’s apatheism is incorrect. Far from advocating for an ignoble intellectual sloth, Rauch instead makes an important point about chastening our own tendency toward radicalism. Within that context, he also offers a more balanced conception of devotional commitment to God and neighbor, one which is centered on the interior life rather than external, visible displays of piety and devotion.

Having said all that, I do want to extend an important olive branch to the standard reading. While I admire Rauch’s proposed discipline of chastening fanatical impulses, it does seem to me that his own present disposition is not a matter of exercising a discipline but rather of simply not caring. Indeed, that’s precisely what he says: “it has been years since I really cared one way or another.”

In short, it appears to me that “Let it Be” begins with one definition of apatheism – the state of not caring about the truth of religious or metaphysical questions – before Rauch then segues to a second definition of apatheism, one which describes the discipline of chastening fanatical impulses.

Thus, it would appear that the standard reading gets Rauch’s own disposition correct. Where it goes awry is in failing to recognize that Rauch conflates his own disinterest in religious and metaphysical questions with the principled chastening of fanatical impulses that he focuses on for the bulk of the essay. Given that these are, in fact, very different topics, we should ask how we might best disambiguate this unfortunate conflation. In response, I propose that we continue to use the term “apatheism” to refer to the sense described by the standard reading and exemplified by Rauch’s own religious disinterest. Meanwhile, we could refer to the latter concept of self-control with the Greek term enkrateia, a word that philosophers like Plato used to refer to an internal wisdom and self-control over the exercise of one’s passions. But one thing is clear: it is deeply misleading to refer to the latter attitude as apatheism.

When skeptics, agnostics, and atheists oppose theists, Christians, and, specifically, Catholics, they frequently do so from the perspective of philosophical naturalism. This article will challenge the rational credibility of naturalism.

Naturalism has historical roots in early Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaxagoras. These thinkers are sometimes called “naïve materialists,” because they espouse a purely material world—without explicitly rejecting a spiritual one. Later, Leucippus and Democritus elaborated “atomism,” the claim that all reality is composed solely of atoms and the void. But a “detour” into dualistic worldviews then took place through thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists, the Scholastics (including St. Thomas Aquinas), and early modern philosophers, such as Descartes. Naturalism re-emerged by the time of Baron d’Holbach (eighteenth century) whose work has been called “the culmination of French materialism and atheism,” as epitomized in his book, The System of Nature.

Nineteenth century atheistic materialism has largely been replaced today by “metaphysical naturalism,” which affirms a purely natural world, largely based on natural science, while clearly rejecting God and other spiritual entities.

There is also “methodological naturalism,” which describes natural science’s default expectation that all events are the result of physical forces or entities. While methodological naturalism operates in much the same manner as metaphysical naturalism, it makes no ontological commitments as to whether physical reality is all that exists, or not.

Metaphysical Naturalism's Assumptions

Naturalism, a science-based take on reality, makes many related claims, including: (1) there is an objective extramental universe shared by all rational observers, (2) the universe is governed by uniform natural laws that make it orderly and comprehensible, (3) such orderly reality can be discovered through scientific observation and experimentation, (4) nature is in principle rationally intelligible, (5)  mental entities, such as theories, mathematics, ethical values, and so forth, reduce to, or emerge from, neural activities in the brain, (6) the universe itself is its own ultimate explanation of its existence and operations, (7) nature operates as a blind force acting according to fixed laws with no purpose, (8) complex things, such as minds and living organisms, are composed of simpler constituents that are reducible to ultimate particles obeying physical laws, (9) reason itself is the product of an undersigned process with no intrinsic relation to truth (yet, naturalism is claimed to be true), (10) all things are either physical in nature, or else, depend upon or emerge from physical entities. (Of course, emergentism violates the principle of causality by assuming that you can get being from non-being.)

While the first four of these claims are necessary premises of natural science, the remainder consists of ontological philosophical claims about the world, which—although they talk about the same physical entities that science deals with—do not, as purely philosophical assertions, derive any authority from natural science. Much more importantly, naturalism itself derives most of its seeming authority from natural science. The problem is that, while natural science need not justify its own assumed premises – since no science demonstrates its own starting points, any philosophy, such as naturalism, relying on natural science must itself justify those same scientific assumptions, or else, that philosophy itself relies on mere assumptions.

This means that all of the above claims are either mere assumption, or else, require philosophical demonstrations which are not directly attempted by naturalists. Rather, the last six of the above claims are simply ontological assertions hiding behind a façade of scientific verbiage. They rely on the philosophy of naturalism, which presents them as just-so stories that defy disproof, but for which naturalism itself offers no direct scientific demonstration that is independent of philosophical assumptions.

These just-so stories appear scientific, but hide their naturalistic assumptions. For example, claims of (1) abiogenesis (which assumes that life can arise unaided from non-life), (2) nature without purpose, (3) mental entities reducing to the brain, (4) complex structures arising from fundamental particles, (5) reason coming from an undersigned process, and (6) the universe explaining its own existence – all these claims rely on the blatantly philosophical assumptions that (1) everything is merely physical and (2) no non-material intellectual agent exists to produce these observable effects. Hence, naturalism argues, if these higher effects occur, blind material nature must have somehow produced them. Logical, if and only if, you beg the question by assuming that naturalism is true in the first place! So, too, is the assumption that all things are physical or physically dependent.

Of the first four claims, it is true that science presupposes them – and properly so, since that is simply the scientific method, which, as science, but not philosophy, is perfectly valid. Yet, the necessary scientific assumptions that (1) an extramental universe exists that (2) is governed by natural laws, which (3) can be discovered and understood by reason through (4) using observation and experimentation – while perfectly proper to natural science – are nonetheless clearly not facts that the scientific method itself can prove. Rather, these assertions are the undemonstrated intellectual foundations upon which the methodology of natural science rests. These are, in fact, philosophical assumptions.

Finally, while natural science necessarily operates on the principle that an extramental world really exists and we can directly observe it, this principle – when combined with naturalism’s physicalist assumption, plunges naturalism into an epistemological quagmire from which it cannot be rescued – as will be demonstrated now in detail.

Naturalism's Version of Extramental Realism

Naturalism assumes extramental realism, which is the philosophical claim that a real physical world exists independently of our consciousness of it. And yet, its own materialist account of sense perception logically implies the conclusion that all we really know are the internal states of our brains. Because the entire process of perception is assumed to entail exclusively material/physical components, this leads to the “causal theory of perception,” which means, for example, that sight entails light coming from an external object, hitting the retina in the eye, being conveyed as nerve impulses by the optic nerve to the occipital part of the brain, where, it is naturally assumed, vision actually takes place.

From this logical sequence follows the absurd, but necessary, inference that what is known is no longer the actual external object, but simply some “neural pattern” internal to the brain.

This latter inference would appear to make natural science merely a description of the internal rules that govern brain states, and yet, the existence of a real external world is presupposed in order to derive the very physical model whereby is inferred that all we really know is internal brain states!

Naturalism assumes a principle of causality, since no realist account of the extramental world can be given unless we presuppose, gratuitously, that external events somehow impact our sensory faculties so as to give an essentially accurate account of the external physical world. And yet, naturalists are inherently wary of metaphysical principles, especially causality.

Most importantly, to know that the external object somehow properly corresponds to the internal image we must know directly both the image and the external object itself – for purposes of comparison, which contradicts the inference that all we directly know is the internal image.

Naturalism must also presume the validity of extramental physical laws and mechanisms in order to derive the biological description of the way the senses physically function so as to infer that what we really know is changes inside the brain, instead of extramental objects directly themselves, such as the tree outside my window.

All this entails an ongoing ambivalent epistemology, wherein the naturalist cannot decide whether he really knows the tree outside his window, or merely an image of it inside his head. If he follows the physiological/optical pathway from the external tree to the inside of his brain, he must deny direct knowledge of the tree, and thus, of the whole external world. But if he does not directly know the external world, how then does he develop the scientific model that leads him to deny his immediate knowledge of the external world?

Implicit in the previous assumption is the problem of how does the naturalist even know that the external world exists at all – assuming we never actually have direct knowledge of it and all our scientific knowledge appears merely to be studying the relationships of neural patterns inside the brain?

If naturalism is actually based on so many assumptions, why do naturalists so firmly believe in its essential truth, or at least, that it is the only rational, sane way to approach reality – complete with immense confidence that nothing spiritual or metaphysical exists? The standard defense is that science has proven itself, and thus, indirectly, the value of a naturalistic perspective—because science works. It predicts experimental results which actually happen. And it makes phenomenal progress in understanding the extramental world. Conversely, they point out, religion and philosophy make no empirically verifiable predictions – at least none that skepticism cannot challenge.

Still, we don’t know if natural science actually works unless we can verify that the external world actually mirrors the claims of scientific progress. But naturalism merely assumes the existence of that world. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, naturalism’s inherently physicalist ontology necessarily leads to a subjectivist epistemology. Unless the naturalist assumes the world is extramental, all his “proofs for naturalism” cannot be known to apply to anything except the inner consistency of his own brain patterns – that “brain,” which he can only know to exist itself by assuming that  the external world exists.

This is circular reasoning in the extreme.

Is There a Better Alternative?

All truth claims require substantiating reasons. Proof requires evidence—some prior, more certain fact or facts from which a claim is deduced in valid logical form. If someone gives no reasons for his claims, no one will believe him – and rightly so.

Surprising to many, Aristotle defined the original meaning of “science.” He insisted that, if you really know what you are talking about, that means that you know something is true, you know why it is true, and you know why it cannot be otherwise.¹ This fulfills the Greek meaning of “epistêmê” as absolutely certain knowledge. In Latin derivation, we call it “science,” from the word, “scire,” meaning “to know.” From this comes “scientia”—in English, “science.” Not experimental science, but science as meaning objectively sure knowledge. Aristotle defined science as “certain knowledge through causes.” (Remember that experimental science itself ultimately turns out to be based on certain assumptions!)

The reasoning process through which one comes to a “scientific” Aristotelian conclusion is called the “scientific syllogism,” which epitomizes “certain knowledge through causes.” The “causes” are the premises, which are prior and better known than the conclusion, and from which, assuming a logically valid inference, the conclusion necessarily follows – since the knowledge of the premises, combined with a valid deduction, causes our certitude of the truth of the conclusion.²

But then, how do we know the truth of the prior premises? What if they need to be proven as well? Well, if they need proving, then we must prove them by the same logical process, that is, by finding certain prior premises from which these premises needing proof are validly derived.

The “Assumed vs. Proven Pseudo-Dilemma”

A seeming dilemma now appears. Either prior premises are themselves proven, or else, they are merely assumed. Could one regress to infinity in the taking of prior premises? Aristotle rightly says, “No.” In the practical order, since reasoning takes some time, if you had to go to infinity in establishing prior premises, the mind could never traverse the infinite time it would take to reach a conclusion!

Thus, we must come finally to premises that are not themselves proven – which, then, it would appear, “proves” they must be assumed. Does Aristotle thus wind up mired in assumptions—just like the naturalist?

Not at all. Rather, insists Aristotle, what this logic actually demonstrates is that, since one cannot go to infinity in the taking of prior premises, we must come to first premises which – though they are not proven—neither are they merely assumed. They must, somehow, be immediately evident—evident in themselves.

Now a truth can be made evident by prior premises, as shown above. But it can also be “evident in itself,” that is, if it is somehow immediately evident. There are two ways in which a statement can be evident in itself: (1) if it is immediately evident to the senses, or (2), if it is a self-evident, metaphysical universal first principle of being.

But, didn’t Descartes prove that the starting point of all knowledge is just ideas or images in the mind? Isn’t that all we first know in sensation? Descartes did say just that when he posited his “Cogito.” Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. For Descartes, “thought,” as an internal, subjective experience, is the first object of cognition. But what he missed is that extramental reality is just as immediately evident as thought itself. In fact, it is logically prior to thought, since the thought or idea or image is but a secondary reflection of the object as externally encountered.³

If I open my door and see a man-eating tiger about to pounce upon me, I have no doubt about its given immediacy as an extramental object. It is only when I close the door and then recall an image of the tiger that I can doubt the reality of the tiger itself. But, curiously, I cannot doubt having an image or idea of the tiger when I am actually experiencing it as an intramental object. Should I reopen the door, the tiger’s extramental reality would again be undeniably evident.⁴

The perfectly licit and proper methodology of natural science begins by admitting that extramentally observed things are real. But while science observes solely physical reality, it does not logically follow from this that only physical things can exist – as naturalism gratuitously claims.

A correct description of cognition shows that we have the immediate knowledge of external reality that both natural science and philosophy require. Doubtless, this is the basis for the naturalist’s instinctive certitude that an external universe of physical objects is real.

The naturalist’s problem is that his own gratuitously-assumed physicalism leads him to the absurd inference that all he really knows are images inside his brain – a conclusion that contradicts his own initial direct experience!

Metaphysical First Principles of Being

But, what about metaphysical first principles of being? How do we know that they are true, self-evident, and universally applicable?

From the first time the human intellect encounters any reality whatever in sensation, it forms a concept of being.⁵ This concept is universal since it applies to all being, not just some restricted form of it. The mind immediately predicates being of itself and forms the self-evident principle of identity: being is being. Equally immediately self-evident is the negation: non-being is not being. From these, with equal certitude, is formed the principle of non-contradiction: being cannot both be and not be (at the same time and in the same respect).

The principle of non-contradiction is so evident that no one can ever deny it without rendering his own utterance or thought utterly incoherent. While there are other self-evident first principles, it suffices to focus solely on this most evident universal first principle, since all naturalists must use it in every thought and every statement, but none can adequately explain where it comes from within the schema of naturalism.

Some naturalists may claim that the non-contradiction principle is merely a rule of logic. But, even the mere positing of a logical rule presupposes the principle itself, since the intelligibility of any rule would be vitiated if its contradictory could simultaneously be affirmed. The principle is simply “there,” and every honest intellect is forced to affirm it in the very act of understanding it. Naturalism lacks the epistemic tools to defend the principle; Thomism discovers it comfortably within its metaphysics of being, as I have shown elsewhere.

Moreover, unlike other universals, the concept of being applies to all possible beings, since while there can be beings that are not, say, trees, there can never be an actual tree that is not a being. Thus, while our knowledge of chickens holds good for all possible chickens, there might be a being that is not a chicken – resulting in our knowledge of chicken-ness not applying to it. But there can never be a being that is not a being, and thus, our concept of being applies to all possible beings. Hence, the principle of being, known as “non-contradiction,” applies to all possible beings and is truly transcendental.

The philosophy of naturalism rests ultimately on certain gratuitous assumptions, whereas, Aristotelian-Thomistic sciences are grounded on premises which are known with immediate certitude, by being either (1) immediately-given knowledge of extramental objects, or (2) self-evident first principles of existential metaphysics.

Given its evident epistemological inconsistency and ungrounded assumptions, does not naturalism itself merit skepticism?

The existence of God is a topic that tends to elicit strong passions. People have their beliefs about whether God exists or not, but they also have their hopes. Many people hope God does exist, but some prominent voices express a hope quite to the contrary.

This idea that one might hope God doesn’t exist appears deeply perplexing from a Christian perspective, so it is perhaps understandable why a Christian might be inclined to assume such a hope is automatically indicative of sinful rebellion. But is that necessarily the case? Or might there be other reasons why a person might hope God doesn’t exist?

Before going any further, we should take a moment to define the topic under debate. As the saying goes, tell me about the god you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in that god either. The same point applies to hope: if you hope God doesn’t exist, there is a good chance that I  also hope God (as defined) doesn’t exist. So it is critically important that we start by defining God so as not to talk past one another.

With that in mind, we can define God as a necessary being who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good and who created everything other than God. If that is what we mean by God, is it possible that a person might reasonably hope God doesn’t exist?

You might think that the place to begin is with the new atheists, for they have surely been among the most vocal in expressing their opposition to the very idea of God. But I will turn instead to a much-discussed passage from Thomas Nagel’s 1997 book The Last Word. Nagel’s testimony is particularly relevant here because while the new atheists are populists with an iconoclastic ax to grind, Nagel is a deeply respected and sober philosopher, a professor at New York University and the author of such critically acclaimed books as The View From Nowhere and Mortal Questions. What is more, while the new atheists are unabashedly partisan in their critiques of God and religion, Nagel is measured and very fair. One can find evidence of Nagel’s objectivity in the fact that he has occasionally angered many in the broader atheist community, and endured substantial derision as a result, by endorsing positions or making arguments at odds with majority atheist opinion.¹

With that in mind, Nagel’s candid observations about atheism in The Last Word have attracted a lot of attention from theists. He wrote:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
 
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”²

It’s not surprising that this quote should have caught the attention of Christians committed to the Rebellion Thesis. After all, as already noted, Nagel is a leading philosopher and an independent thinker so his testimony immediately carries far more weight than your typical new atheist polemicist, Nagel speaks the truth as he sees it without lens-distorting party-line commitments. Moreover, after beginning with a reflection on his own state of unbelief, he then opines that many atheists share the same “cosmic authority problem.” Now that’s starting to sound promising. In the accompanying footnote, Nagel refuses to speculate on which sources, Oedipal or otherwise, might explain the genesis of this aversion. This, in turn, leaves it open for the Christian to attribute that opposition to sin, just as the Rebellion Thesis supposes.

Given the aura of this quote, it shouldn’t surprise us that several Christians have appealed to it as support for the Rebellion Thesis. Steven Cowan and James S. Spiegel draw attention to the passage in their book The Love of Wisdom: “Nagel, like others, has a problem with ‘cosmic authority.’ He doesn’t want there to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good deity to hold him accountable.”³ Even more significant, in his commentary on the quote, Douglas Groothuis opines that Nagel’s words harken back to Paul’s description of cosmic rebellion: “Nagel’s visceral disclosure resembles the apostle Paul’s description of those who, in opposition to the divine knowledge of which they have access, suppress the truth of God’s existence, fail to give God thanks, and thus become darkened in their understanding (see Rom 1:18-21).”⁴

Perhaps Cowan, Spiegel and Groothuis are on to something. It is true that the Rebellion Thesis doesn’t look quite as outrageous after considering Nagel’s quote. Add to this the self-described antitheist Hitchens as he gripes about “the prospect of serfdom” under God and you just might see a pattern emerging. So could it be that Nagel is demonstrating that this cosmic authority problem really does bring us to the heart of atheism? To put it another way, did Nagel inadvertently produce his own “47 percent” quote, one which lays bare the intransigent spirit of atheism?

As we consider whether Nagel’s quote supports the Rebellion Thesis, let’s start by noting that Nagel himself nowhere suggests that all atheism can be attributed to a “cosmic authority problem.” He merely speculates that many instances could be. He also suggests that there is nobody neutral about the existence of God.⁵ But one simply can’t support the Rebellion Thesis based on those comparatively meager results.

What is more, a careful reading of The Last Word suggests that Nagel provides at least one explanation for this aversion toward God which is not, in fact, driven by antitheistic hostility. In the following passage, Nagel offers a fascinating speculation on the ultimate source of this aversion and this source is not tied to any problem with cosmic authority per se:

“there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one. However, this may not be comforting enough, because the feeling that I have called the fear of religion may extend far beyond the existence of a personal god, to include any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and nonaccidental part. I suspect that there is a deep-seated aversion in the modern ‘disenchanted’ Weltanschauung to any ultimate principles that are not dead—that is, devoid of any reference to the possibility of life or consciousness.”⁶

Note that in this passage Nagel suggests that the aversion to God may, in fact, be sourced in a more fundamental aversion to, or even fear of, ultimate explanatory principles that are personal in nature. If Nagel is right about this then his problem, and that of other atheists like him, may not be that they are against God but rather that they have an aversion to unknowable or mysterious personal explanations.

Perhaps you’re not exactly clear about what Nagel is referring to here, so let me try an illustration to unpack his speculation a bit further. Imagine that there is an indigenous tribe living beside some sweeping sand dunes. Day after day there is a low, mysterious hum emitting from the sand dunes and the indigenous people attribute that hum to a supernatural cause, i.e., mysterious spirits that live in the dunes. Many western visitors to this community would not only be inclined to think there is a natural explanation, but they also might prefer there to be a natural explanation. Why? This could be for at least two reasons. To begin with, the westerners would prefer the parsimony (that is, the simplicity) and familiarity of a picture of the world in which novel phenomena can ultimately be attributable to natural causes. In addition, those westerners might simply find the notion of spiritual agencies wandering the dunes to be unsettling.

And why exactly is this unsettling? Well, consider another illustration closer to home. Indeed, it could be in your home. When I hear a strange bump in the night, I could attribute it to a ghost, but I’d certainly prefer to think it was the dog! The prospect of unknown (and perhaps unknowable) nonphysical personal agencies interacting in our world is indeed unsettling. It isn’t that the westerners are necessarily hostile to spirit beings humming in the dunes. But they hope such beings don’t exist just the same. In a very interesting passage in The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis locates this fear, this aversion with respect to Rudolf Otto’s conception of the numinous:

“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room,’ and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked.’ This feeling may be described as awe and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”⁷

As Lewis points out, the fear of the ghost is quite different from the fear of the tiger. It is a fear that appears to overlap significantly with Nagel’s aversion to “ultimate principles that are not dead.” The key to recognize is that this aversion (which, in its purest form, Otto referred to as the mysterium tremendum) is not necessarily indicative of hatred or hostility. Instead, it is closer to that uncanny fear of the unknown, like Lewis’ ghost in the next room, or mysterious entities wandering the sand dunes.⁸

Speaking of those entities in the sand dunes, let’s return to that illustration for a moment. The indigenous people in the illustration represent a perspective that we can call the “enchanters” while the westerners represent the “disenchanters” position. Enchanters tend to be drawn to magic and mystery and mental agencies. Consequently, they seem to find ultimate personal explanations and the numinous to be appealing. By contrast, the disenchanters prefer natural and scientific explanations that appeal to matter, energy and forces. In their sociological study of atheism in America, sociologists Williamson and Yancey effectively contrast the two perspectives:

“For many believers [i.e., enchanters], this may seem a dismal thought — that there is no mystery, that there is no ‘other,’ and that there is no eternal father to protect and comfort them. For many nonbelievers [i.e., disenchanters], though, the idea is liberating: no fear of death and no fear of judgment, just a marvelous universe to experience and explore — empirically.”⁹

To be sure, the disenchanter’s perspective is consistent with some degree of active rebellion against God. The desire to avoid divine judgment, for example, could reinforce a predisposition to the disenchanter’s position. But the key for us is that we simply don’t know to what extent Nagel’s aversion toward God is generated by antitheistic impulses versus a more general aversion to the Uncanny side of life. It could be that Nagel maintains a preference for a simpler, predictable and familiar world which is reducible to certain fundamental material principles. And thus it is for that reason that he hopes atheism is true. Consequently, we simply don’t have enough information to count Nagel’s comment as evidence for the Rebellion Thesis.

Nagel gives us a bit more on what I’m calling the disenchanter position elsewhere in The Last Word when he ties this drive for disenchantment to the laudable desire to have explanations that we can understand. As he puts it, “the idea of God serves as a placeholder for an explanation where something seems to demand explanation and none is available . . . .”¹⁰ Further, he adds, “I have never been able to understand the idea of God well enough to see such a theory as truly explanatory: It seems rather to stand for a still unspecified purposiveness that itself remains unexplained.”¹¹ From this perspective Nagel’s aversion to God is an aversion to giving up the quest for further understanding. Once again, we see that we need not attribute his words to any divine rebellion.

When we draw all these points together we find that Nagel’s initial comment offers very little to support a robust Rebellion Thesis. It is true that Nagel speculates that many atheists may have a cosmic authority problem, but he never suggests that all do. Moreover, he also offers another plausible explanation for the desire that God not exist, one which is rooted not in an aversion to divine authority, but rather in the disenchanter’s drive for simplicity, predictability, and explanations that can be grasped by the human mind. And as Lewis illustrates, every one of us can sympathize with this impulse, at least to some degree. (I sure hope that thump in the next room wasn’t caused by a ghost.) To cap it off, Nagel also warns atheists about allowing preferences to color their reasoning. At one point he cautions, “it is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.”¹²

To sum up, while Nagel’s quote allows for the possibility that an indeterminate number of atheists may be in rebellion against God, it simply does not provide good evidence for the Rebellion Thesis. If I may be blunt, it seems to me that Christians who attempt to play isolated quotes like that of Nagel as a “47 percent trump card” to support of the Rebellion Thesis are engaged in little more than quote-mining. (And yes, quote-mining is as bad as it sounds.)

NOTE: This article is adapted from a section of my book titled Is the Atheist My Neighbor?: Rethinking Christian Attitudes toward Atheism.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Edward Feser just released a new book, titled Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017). You probably know Dr. Feser from his sharply reasoned posts here at Strange Notions, or from his popular blog, which mainly focuses on the philosophy of religion.

Dr. Feser has written several other excellent books, including:

• Neo-Scholastic Essays (St. Augustine's Press, 2015)
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions, 2014)
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine's Press, 2010)
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2009)
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2006)

He is a Thomistic philosopher, meaning he specializes in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and has written extensively on Aquinas' Five Ways (or five proofs) to God. But in his new book, he examines not just the Thomistic arguments for God, but several more. Here's a brief summary:

Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.
 
This book also offers a detailed treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
 
This book offers as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past—thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others—that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism which gives aid and comfort to atheism.

We recently invited Dr. Feser to do an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) here at Strange Notions, and after he accepted, the questions poured in from all of our commenters, both believer and skeptic alike. 

We chose several of the most popular questions to ask Dr. Feser below. Enjoy!

QUESTION (Jonathan): I read once on a blog post that the proofs for God were not intended as rhetorical or polemical proofs, in the sense of being intended to persuade unbelievers. They were more like edifying exercises for the faithful, but medieval theologians would not say that such philosophical arguments were sufficient to instill faith. Is this true?

DR. FESER: That is not true, and I suspect that the writers you read who said this misunderstand what “faith” means for a medieval theologian like Aquinas.  The proofs were indeed meant to be completely rationally convincing even to someone who is initially coming to the question as an atheist.  No faith is required at all.

The reason is that faith, as a thinker like Aquinas understands it, is a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God.  But before you can do that, you first have to establish that God really does exist in the first place and that he really has revealed something.  And that requires evidence and argumentation. 

Showing that God really does exist is where the proofs come in.  So far, faith doesn’t enter the picture.  Then we need to establish that God really has revealed something, and that involves showing that some purported divine revelation was associated with a miracle, because only a miracle – understood as a suspension of the natural order that only God could possibly bring about – could justify the claim that a revelation has really occurred.  That requires a mixture of philosophical and historical argumentation.  The traditional label in Catholic theology for these sorts of arguments for the authenticity of a revelation are “motives of credibility.” 

In traditional Catholic apologetics, it is only after all this argumentation is set out that one can know that something really has been revealed, and so it is only then that the question of faith really arises.  And when it does, what it means, again, is believing something because you have rationally come to know that God really did reveal it.  It is not a matter of believing something just because you want to, or working yourself up into an emotional state, or taking an irrational leap beyond the evidence, or anything like that.

It is true that faith is said to be a gift of God, but in no way does that entail any sort of irrational “will to believe” or any of the other caricatures or distortions of the concept of faith.  If someone says that his eyes are a gift from God, he isn’t saying that he is relying for his vision on a will to believe, or on an irrational leap beyond the visual evidence, or the like.  Similarly, to say that faith is a gift of God in no way implies that it is contrary to reason or involves an irrational leap beyond the evidence.

QUESTION (Bradley Robert Schneider): To what extent are the arguments in your book just different versions of, or different ways of looking at, the same (cosmological) argument? That is, can you rationally reject one of the proofs but accept another? Also, what are some of the other arguments you consider persuasive but did not include among these five?

DR. FESER: Of the five, only four of them – the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Thomistic proof, and the rationalist proof – might be considered variations on the cosmological argument.  However, the expression “cosmological argument” might be a little misleading, because it makes it sound as if the arguments start from some claim about the cosmos or universe as a whole.  And that is not the case.  As I argue in the book, one could in each case start with something much less grand than that.  For example, in the Thomistic proof, you could start with the fact that some particular stone exists here and now, and proceed from that to show that there must be a single eternal, immaterial, immutable, necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good uncaused cause of its existing here and now.  No fancy claim about the universe as a whole is needed as a premise.

The fifth argument, the Augustinian proof, is very different.  It is not a causal argument from the existence of some thing in the world to God as its cause, but rather an argument from mathematical and other necessary truths to an infinite divine intellect.

One could accept one of the proofs while rejecting one or more of the others.  For example, a reader might find the Aristotelian proof compelling but not be persuade by the Neo-Platonic proof, or might find the Augustinian proof powerful but not any of the causal proofs, or vice versa.

There are several other arguments I think are compelling but which I did not put into the book, because I judged that they required just too much in the way of controversial background metaphysical argumentation to be useful for the particular purposes of this book.  For example, I think that all of Aquinas’s Five Ways are sound arguments, and I have defended them all in various other writings.  But to defend the Fourth Way (for example) requires first defending so much in the way of background metaphysical theses well beyond what I already cover in the book that it just isn’t a suitable argument for the kind of audience I intend to address in the book.  In the Further Reading section of the book I direct readers to sources that defend the other arguments that I think are persuasive.

QUESTION (Doug Shaver): Regardless of one's worldview, any proof must, by logical necessity, rest on one or more assumptions, which are premises that are stipulated to be unprovable. Can Dr. Feser list some of the assumptions on which at least one of his proofs of God's existence depends?

DR. FESER: Depending on what you mean by “unprovable,” I don’t necessarily agree with the premise behind your question.  Take, for example, the principle of sufficient reason, which the rationalist proof appeals to as a premise.  Is it “unprovable”?  That depends on what you mean.  If by “provable” you mean “derivable by deductive inference from premises that are more certain or fundamental,” then no, it is not provable.  But if by “provable” you mean “defensible by arguments which any rational person ought to find compelling,” then I would say yes, it is provable.

The reason is this.  The principle of sufficient reason, correctly understood – and as I argue in the book, lots of people don’t understand it correctly – is a “first principle.”  What that means is that it is more clearly correct than anything that could be said either for it or against it.  When we reach claims like this, we’ve hit bedrock.  They are so basic to rationality that they are presupposed by other arguments, but don’t in turn presuppose anything deeper than they are themselves.  Hence we can’t defend them by the same kind of reasoning by which we defend less fundamental claims.

But that does not by any means entail that we cannot say anything in defense of them, or that they rest on faith, or an act of will, or anything like that.  We can rationally defend them in an indirect way.  We can show, for example, that objections to them are mistaken in various ways.  More importantly, we can defend them by the method of retorsion, which involves showing that one cannot deny them on pain of self-contradiction or incoherence.

This method is sometimes misunderstood.  Some people think it merely involves showing that we can’t help thinking a certain way, but where this leaves it open that this way of thinking might nevertheless not correspond to reality. In other words, they think that retorsion arguments are essentially about human psychology.  That is not at all the case.  Rightly understood, such arguments are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument.  They involve defending a claim by showing that the denial of the claim entails a contradiction, and thus cannot as a matter of objective fact (and not merely as a contingent matter of human psychology) be correct. 

QUESTION (Surroundx): When you speak about proofs of God, what epistemic status do you ascribe to the conclusion of each? Are they epistemically infallible, ontically infallible, or something else?

DR. FESER: The word “proof” has, historically, been used in different senses.  Naturally, I don’t mean that the arguments are proofs in exactly the same sense in which a mathematical proof is a “proof.”  They are mostly not a priori arguments, for one thing.  But I used the word deliberately, and I certainly claim a high degree of certainty for the claim that God exists.  For example, I would claim that it is as certain that God exists as it is that the world external to our minds is real and not an illusion foisted upon us by a Cartesian demon or the Matrix.

How can I say that?  Well, the point of the book to show this.  The arguments are “proofs” in that, first of all, the conclusion is claimed to follow deductively from the premises.  They are not mere probabilistic inferences, arguments to the best explanation, or “God of the gaps” arguments.  (I hate “God of the gaps” arguments.)  The claim is that the arguments show, not merely that God is the most likely explanation of the facts asserted in the premises of the arguments, but rather that God is the only possible explanation in principle of those facts. 

Second, the premises are knowable with certainty.  The premises include both empirical premises (for example, the premise that change occurs) and philosophical premises (for example, the premise that everything has an explanation or is intelligible).  The premises in turn can be defended in various ways that show them to be beyond reasonable doubt.  For example, some of them can be defended via retorsion arguments (which, again, are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument).  That is to say, such arguments try to show that anyone who denies such-and-such a claim is implicitly contradicting himself.

So in arguments of the sort I am defending, the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises, and the premises are claimed to be knowable beyond any reasonable doubt.  That sort of argument fits one traditional use of the word “proof.”

Naturally, I am aware that some people will nevertheless challenge the arguments or remain doubtful about one or more of them.  But that’s true of every single argument one could give for any conclusion, even mathematical proofs.  A determined and clever enough skeptic will always be able to come up with some grounds for doubt, even if the grounds are bizarre or far-fetched.  That doesn’t mean that the grounds are, all things considered, going to be reasonable ones. 

Anyway, my calling something a “proof” doesn’t entail that I think every reader, even every fair-minded reader, is immediately going to be convinced.  What it is meant to indicate is the nature of the connection between the facts described in the premises and the fact described in the conclusion.  It is a metaphysical claim, not a sociological claim.  Too many people mix these things up. They think that as long as a significant number of people are likely not to agree with some argument, you can’t call it a “proof.”  That just misunderstands the way the term is being used.

QUESTION (Ryan Beren): Is God definable at all? If he is, is the definition one that can be known by humans, or only by God himself? If he is not, then how else can the truth (or falsehood) of the statement "God exists" be guaranteed?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  For Thomists (i.e. thinkers in the school of thought originating with Thomas Aquinas) to define something, in the strict sense of the term “define,” is always to locate it in a species of thing.  That in turn requires identifying the genus the species falls under and what differentiates it from other species in the same genus.  (Here I am using the terms “species” and “genus” in the broad sense in which they are historically used in logic, not the narrower sense that they later came to have in biology.)

So, take human beings, for example.  The traditional Aristotelian definition of human beings is that they are rational animals.  “Human being” is the species of thing we are defining, “animal” is the genus or more general class to which this species belongs, and “rationality” is what distinguishes them from other species in the same genus.  (Whether this definition is correct, and what exactly it is claiming, are irrelevant to the present point.  It’s just an illustration.  Pick a different example if you like.)

Now, to define something in this way entails attributing metaphysical parts to it.  For example, in defining human beings as rational animals, we are attributing both animality and rationality to human beings.  But anything with parts requires some cause or explanation outside itself to account for why it exists.  With human beings, there needs to be some explanation of how rationality and animality get together so that you have human beings.  These things are not of their nature necessarily co-occurring, after all.

Now, according to arguments of the sort I am defending, God is not like that.  He cannot have any parts at all, but must be simple or non-composite – that is to say, not composed of anything.  For if he were, then he would require a cause just like everything else does, in which case he would not be the primary or ultimate cause of things.

For that reason, there cannot be any distinction in God between some genus he belongs to and some differentiating feature that distinguishes him from other things in that genus.  Again, if there were, then God would have parts and thus require a cause of his own.  Hence, strictly speaking, God is not part of a species of things, he is not in a genus, and thus in the strict sense of the term he is not definable.  That is why the human mind inevitably finds God difficult to grasp.  Our normal mode of understanding things is to define them in terms of the genus they fall under and what differentiates them from other things in that genus, and this method cannot apply to God.

However, that does not mean that we cannot use the term “God” intelligibly, and it does not mean we cannot know anything about God.  We can say, for example, that by “God” we mean the primary or fundamental cause of there being anything at all; that when we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play such a role, it would have to have such-and-such attributes; we can note that those are precisely the sorts of attributes traditionally attributed to God; and so forth.

In short, if you mean “Can we use language about God intelligibly, so that we can discuss the question whether God exists, what he would be like if he exists, etc.?” the answer is Yes.  If you mean “Can we have the kind of penetrating knowledge of God’s nature that we have when we are able to identify the genus a thing falls under and what differentiates it from other species in that genus?” then the answer is No.  Again, it depends on how you define “define.”

QUESTION (Alexander): Is it conceivable that God does not exist?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  If you mean “Can we coherently form the thought that there is no God?” then yes, we can do that.  To be sure, if we had a complete and penetrating grasp of God’s nature, we would understand that, given that nature, it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist.   In that case we would be contradicting ourselves if we said he did not exist.  We would see that it is inconceivable that he not exist.  However, we mere human beings do not in fact have such a complete and penetrating grasp of the divine nature.  Hence we are unable directly and immediately to see the inconceivability of God’s non-existence and thus cannot deduce God’s existence via an ontological argument.  We have to arrive at knowledge of God in another way.

Now, when we reason to the existence of an uncaused cause of things as we do in arguments like the kind I defend in the book (the Aristotelian proof, the Thomistic proof, and so forth), and then we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play that role, we find that it must be something that of its nature exists in an absolutely necessary way.  We can then deduce that it must be the kind of thing which, if we had a complete grasp of its nature, we would see directly that it could not possibly not exist.  But we had to get there by reasoning from the existence of things in the world to God as their cause.  We can’t skip this procedure and just cut to the chase via an ontological argument, as Anselm tries to do.

So, if you mean “Is God the sort of thing that exists of absolute necessity, so that it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist?” then the answer is Yes.  But if you mean “Can we reason to God’s existence just by carefully unpacking the content of the concept of God, as in Anselm’s ontological argument?” then the answer is No.

QUESTION (Steven Dillon): Monotheism asserts the proposition that "Only one God exists." In quantifying the amount of Gods that exist, this proposition treats of a plurality of "Gods." In denying existence of all but one in this plurality, monotheism separates Gods from "existence", and thus treats of a plurality of abstractions, or "essences" as Thomists may say. It would seem, therefore, that monotheism is committed to a view on which a God's essence is separable from his "existence." But, for Aquinas, the essence of God just is his existence. Was Aquinas thus not a monotheist? If not, what was he?

DR. FESER: Aquinas is a monotheist, and he argues – correctly in my view, as I argue in the book – that there could not even in principle be more than one God.  One of the reasons for this is indicated in the answer I gave above to the questioner who asked about whether we can define God.  As I noted there, given that God is absolutely simple or non-composite, he cannot be defined in terms of a genus and some differentiating feature that sets him apart from other species in the genus.  Now, whenever there is more than one instance of a kind of thing, there is some genus to which it belongs, and something that differentiates it from other things in that genus.  Since these notions don’t apply to God, it follows that there is no way for him to be merely one instance of a kind of thing.  There is no genus or general class to which he belongs.  He is of his nature unique.  We get the same result when we analyze the implications of something’s being purely actual, or its having an essence that is identical to its existence, as I show in the book.

Your question seems to suppose that because we can stick an “s” at the end of the word “God,” that suffices to show that there is a general class of things we call “Gods,” and then we can ask how many things are in that class.  But that is a fallacy.  Essentially, it confuses grammar with metaphysics.  To borrow an example from Chomsky, I can form the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”  But though the sentence is perfectly well-formed, it is still nonsense.  Ideas aren’t green or any other color, if they were then they wouldn’t be colorless, they don’t sleep, and it makes no sense to speak of sleep as something one could do furiously.  Mere grammatical possibilities don’t by themselves entail anything about reality.

Similarly, we can stick an “s” on the end of the word “God” and then go on to ask questions like “How many Gods are there?”  But that doesn’t entail that it really makes sense to think of “Gods” as a class of things that might in theory have more than one member.  Again, in fact that makes no sense when we unpack the implications of what it is to be absolutely simple or non-composite, to be purely actual, and to have an essence identical to one’s existence.  It seems otherwise only if we confuse grammar with reality.

QUESTION (Paul Brandon Rimmer): There has been a new movement in Christian apologetics arguing for idealism, the idea that all of reality is made of minds, and that ultimately there is no such thing as matter. Is this consistent with Thomism? Is this consistent with Catholic doctrine? In each case, if not, what would have to be changed about Thomism/Catholic doctrine, in order to make room for idealism?

DR. FESER: It is not consistent with Thomism.  One reason is Thomism’s Aristotelian conception of matter as what limits form to a particular individual time and place and thus individuates instances of a species of thing.  If you have two or more stones, for example, then you need, in addition to what they have in common – the form of being stone – something to differentiate them, and that’s what matter does.  Different bits of matter instantiate the same form.  For the Thomist, then, it makes no sense to say “There are two stones, and neither one is material.”  Berkeley can say that (given his different conception of matter), but Aquinas cannot.

Furthermore, to get rid of matter you’d really be reducing all of reality to a collection of angelic minds – that is to say, minds which are of their very essence divorced from matter.  That would mean identifying human minds with angelic minds of a sort.  You’d be saying that we are essentially really minds without matter, and what seems to be the material world is really just a collection of our perceptions.  But for the Thomist, that cannot be right, because our minds are simply not like angelic intellects, as Aquinas understands them.  For example, angelic intellects don’t have a stream of sensory experiences, as we do.  Sensation is, for the Thomist, essentially bodily, so that what lacks a body lacks sensation.  For that reason, angels don’t acquire knowledge the way we do, by learning things from a series of sensory perceptions.  Their knowledge is “built in.” 

Neither is idealism compatible with Catholicism, for reasons that might be evident from what has been said already, because Catholic doctrine is deeply committed to the reality of the material world.  That is, for example, what the doctrine of the Incarnation is all about.  The Second Person of the Trinity became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and if you say that the flesh was really just a collection of perceptions, it is hard to see how that avoids collapsing into Docetism. 

There is also the fact that modern idealism stems from general metaphysical and epistemological premises that Thomists regard as deeply mistaken.  Berkeley’s idealism is a byproduct of the modern empiricist reduction of concepts to mental images.  Leibniz’s idealism is a byproduct of his working within the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa.  But for the Thomist, these are just bad starting points, and in particular they get badly wrong both the nature of substance and the nature of our knowledge.

This is a large topic, and much more could be said.  Suffice it to say that the divergence between the views is so deep that there is no way to reconcile them, and for the Thomist there is no good reason to want to reconcile them, since idealism is (the Thomist would argue) riddled with philosophical and theological errors.

QUESTION (Camainc): How do you square divine simplicity with the personal God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures? Are the scriptural references to God changing his mind, getting angry, etc., just anthropomorphic?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  Take anger, for example.  If by anger you have in mind the way that we human beings go from a state of tranquility to a state of emotional agitation, then no, there is nothing like that in God.  The reason is that, for one thing, emotional states are bodily and God is immaterial.  For another thing, emotional fluctuations entail going from potential to actual, and there is no potentiality in God.  However, by anger you could mean the will to inflict a punishment on an evildoer.  And there is something like that in God. 

Here it is crucial to understand the differences between the univocal, metaphorical, and analogical uses of language, which I discuss in the book.  When we use terms univocally, we are using them in the same sense.  For Thomists and many other classical theists, theological language is not to be understood univocally.  Hence, when we say that Bob is angry and God is angry, we are not to be understood as attributing to God the exact same thing that Bob has. 

Are we speaking metaphorically or non-literally, then?  That depends.  If when saying “God is angry,” you mean that God feels highly agitated, then this cannot literally be true, and so at best could be a metaphor.

But if instead you mean “God intends to punish evildoers,” then this is not metaphorical, but literally true.  However, not all literal language is univocal.  Some of it is analogical.  For example, when I say that the cheeseburger I am eating is good and that the book I am reading is good, I am not using “good” in exactly the same sense – the goodness of a book and the goodness of food are very different – but I am not speaking metaphorically or non-literally either.  Rather, I am speaking analogically.  There is something in the goodness of a book that is analogous to the goodness of food, even if it is not the same thing.

Now, that, for the Thomist, is how to understand a claim like “God intends to punish evildoers.”  There is something in God that is analogous to what we call an intention to punish evildoers, even though in God it doesn’t involve the kind of thing that goes on when we have this intention.  (For example, we have fluctuating emotional states, we weigh various considerations when deciding whether to punish – which involves going from one thought to another, and thus actualizing potentialities – and so on, and none of that exists in God.)

So, some of the anthropomorphic attributes that scripture attributes to God are to be understood metaphorically, but by no means all of them are.  Some of them are to be understood in an analogical sense, which is a kind of literal sense.  The rule of thumb would be: If scripture attributes some bodily characteristic or emotional state to God, that is to be understood merely metaphorically or non-literally.  But if scripture attributes to God something having to do with intellect or will, then that is to be understood literally, though in an analogical sense (which is one kind of literal sense) rather than in a univocal sense.

QUESTION (Brian Seets): I am an atheist. I choose to do what I see as good. That is, I do nothing that could have a negative impact on others. I do this because I want to live in a world where that is the standard behavior and so that (I hope) others will choose to not negatively impact my life. What makes my choice less worthy than a Christian's? Doesn't living well without hope of reward or fear of punishment make God irrelevant?

DR. FESER: Unlike some other theists, I don’t myself think it is quite correct to say that morality could have no foundation on an atheistic conception of reality.  It’s a little more complicated than that.  What I would say is that the possibility of morality presupposes the reality of what Aristotelians call formal and final causes.  We have to be able to say that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as the nature or essence of a human being, and also that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as a set of final causes or ends or goals inherent in human nature, the realization of which defines what is good for us.

Now, in theory someone could accept this much while at the same time denying the existence of God.  For example, Thomas Nagel at least flirts with something like this metaphysical position in his book Mind and Cosmos.  For the Aristotelian and the Thomist, morality is grounded in human nature, and human nature would still be what it is, and still be knowable, even if per impossibile there were no God.  Hence, just as you can do chemistry and thereby discover the facts about the causal properties of sulfur, phosphorus, etc. whether or not you affirm the existence of a divine first cause, so too can you, at least to a large extent, know what is good or bad for human beings just by studying human nature.  For morality is not about arbitrary divine commands, but is, again, grounded in human nature.

However, it is also true that this is an unstable position.  Just as, for the Thomist, causality is only ultimately intelligible if there is a divine uncaused cause (for reasons I set out in Five Proofs), so too, final causality ultimately makes sense only if there is a divine intellect which directs things toward their natural ends or goals (for reasons set out in Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which I have defended at length in a couple of places, though it’s not an argument that is covered in Five Proofs).  Still, the issues can be distinguished.  The question “Is there final causality in nature?” is one thing, and the question “Does all final causality presuppose the existence of God?” is another.  If you could defend a Yes answer to the first question while at the same time defending a No answer to the second – and some people have, historically, tried to do this (even if, in my view, such a project at the end of the day won’t work) – then you could have a foundation for morality while avoiding theism.

But very few atheists are willing to do this.  Most of them reject the whole idea of formal and final causality, along with theism.  That is part of the general package of modern philosophical naturalism, even if in theory one could adopt some alternative atheist metaphysics.  And if you reject the whole idea of final causality or teleology, then I think you will not be able to give any rational foundation for morality.  This isn’t a topic I get into in Five Proofs, though I have addressed it elsewhere.  (See my book Neo-Scholastic Essays for treatment of some of the issues I’ve been referring to, such as the foundations of morality and Aquinas’s Fifth Way.)

Now, does that mean that someone who is both an atheist and rejects the whole idea of final causes or purposes in human nature will in fact be without any moral virtue?  Of course not.  Many atheists have many admirable character traits.  But that is not the point.  The question is not whether atheists will in fact sometimes do the right thing – of course they will – but rather whether they can give a rational philosophical justification of morality in the context of a naturalistic metaphysics.  And that, I would argue, is not possible.

Metaphysical naturalism, usually identified with scientific materialism, is not to be confused with methodological naturalism, which maintains, at least in principle, that the scientific method confines itself to natural explanations without any philosophical bias against the supernatural. Metaphysical or philosophical naturalism insists that only entities empirically verifiable by natural science exist, which excludes all supernatural beings, especially God. The truth value of all scientific statements depends strictly upon empirical verification. Since God is not empirically verifiable, He does not exist.

Scientific materialism agrees with Aristotle in saying that all knowledge begins in sensation. Yet, how do we know that we can trust our senses? Consider the case of the power of sight. Natural science tells us that light bounces off objects, passing through space, to enter the eye. Photons striking the retina are then converted into nerve impulses which pass through the optic nerve into the occipital lobe of the brain, where visual processing takes place. The question is what exactly do we experience in vision: (1) the external object as it is at some distance from the eye, (2) the external object as it is presented to the end organ in the eye, (3) changes in the end organ itself, or (4) changes inside the brain which appear to terminate the visual sequence?

Assuming that vision is a purely material process, this causal chain of events necessarily implies that what we know, in the last analysis, is not the external object, but rather changes in the occipital lobe deep inside the brain. The immanent logic of scientific materialism forces the conclusion that what we actually know by empirical verification is not the external world at all, but some sort of presumed image or neural representation of it inside our heads.

Empirical verification presupposes epistemological realism—meaning that through sensation we know directly the exterior physical world around us. Natural science proclaims that it discovers the nature of the real physical cosmos, external to our brains or subjective selves. Yet, when we trace the optics and physiology of the sense of sight, we find ourselves entrapped in epistemological idealism -- meaning that we do not know external reality, but rather merely some change within our brains that we hope to be an accurate representation of the external world.

Worse yet, naturalists tell us that modern science has discovered myriad ways in which the brain adjusts, fixes, completes, smooths, and modifies the incoming neural data so as to make the subjective sensation potentially quite different in content and meaning from that which the “raw data” of the external senses provide.

If we accept the foregoing depiction of visual sensation as correct, what does this imply for the “empirical verification” principle so dear to the hearts of naturalists? Specifically, how do we know that we have a head, a brain, an occipital lobe, light waves, or even an external physical world at all? The only way we have developed this scientific worldview of how sight works is by using our eyes to observe the component parts of the physiological/physical process entailed in vision. Someone had to use his eyes to view the brain of a cadaver and draw the pictures of a brain found in Gray’s Anatomy, or to verify that instrument readings are accurate. Yet, empirical observation using senses or instruments presupposes the validity of epistemological realism. Scientific findings about the visual chain of events, from external object to internal brain, drive the objective scientist into subjective idealism: we don’t directly sense the external world at all.

At this point, the naturalist likely resorts to defending epistemological realism by means of pragmatic verification: It works. Science has made massive progress through direct sense observation and repeatedly validates its theories through predictions that are empirically verified. Still, you simply cannot prove that the senses are reliable by using them in order to prove that they are reliable.

To verify scientific claims about the reliability of the senses, one must already trust them to apprehend external objects with sufficient accuracy so as to “empirically verify” the initial assumption that the senses apprehend external reality—the real physical world that natural science studies. Such circular reasoning proves nothing.

One naturalist defense is the distinction made between map and territory, between belief and reality – a distinction proposed by Alfred Korzybski, who insists that “the map is not the territory” in a book that claims to introduce “non-Aristotelian systems.”¹ Unfortunately for naturalism, the “map,” in this case, is its own invention, since the causal chain from external object to occipital lobe is a product of scientific materialism. This naturalistic “map” itself must be wrong, since it leads to a subjective idealism that contradicts its own starting point: epistemological realism.

The final defense of naturalism is to insist that, though paradoxical, there is simply no alternative to scientific materialism and its acceptance of the validity of sensation.

But there is.

Naturalism entails assuming the philosophy of materialism. Materialism not only denies all non-material entities, but today would include as “matter” both matter and energy and, indeed, anything describable in terms of quantum field theory. While it may not be the physically extended “stuff” of the nineteenth century atomic theory, even energy or quantum fields remain locatable in spacetime dimensions. That is the fatal flaw of the materialistic causal sequence of vision described above. While the external object and its effect on the end organ of sight are both locatable external to the knower, the change in the brain, the image, the representation, is not external, but locatable internal to the knower. Thus, in knowing, ultimately, only changes inside himself, the materialist is logically forced into an epistemological idealism that contradicts his assumed starting point, the observation of external things. All of this flows from his a priori philosophical commitment to materialism. The scientific method does not demand materialism. But, the naturalist’s philosophical bias does.

What alternative is there to scientific materialism and its naïve epistemology? First, we must notice that all knowers start in the exact same place – prior to any scientific methodology. We all start with the same direct experience of the world, known through the senses – naturalist and Aristotelian philosopher alike.

The naturalist is right in taking as given an external physical world that he knows directly through sensation. But, he is wrong in trying to meld this experience with his philosophical position of materialism.

The immediate experience of sentient beings is of an external world of real things. Human beings, possessing the spiritual power of intellect, know not only of their own act of sensing but also are reflexively aware of the personal self which is having this experience of external objects.

One need not assume materialism to be the sole reality principle. If the above analysis demonstrates that materialism necessarily entails a self-defeating epistemology, then materialism must be false and some form of dualism must be true.² That is, reality must include some non-material entities as well as material ones.

Aristotle maintains that co-principles (matter and form) compose physical substances. In living things, form is called the soul. In man alone, the soul is strictly immaterial  (spiritual). Contrary to atomism, wherein nothing is a single thing (substance) above the atomic (or subatomic) level, substantial form makes the living organism to be a single, unified being of a given nature.³ Since all sentient organisms sense through powers of the soul, and since the soul is not itself physically locatable or extended, an ontological basis for epistemological realism exists. More simply, this means that since the soul’s sensation is not extended in space, and thus, physically “locatable,” it is not “trapped” in the interior of the brain as would be the case with scientific materialism. Our immediate experience of external reality shows that the living soul enables the whole organism to do things that exceed the capacities of a purely physical nervous system alone.

Instinctively rushing to reject Aristotelian metaphysical dualism, the naturalist might object that sensation ends in the interior of the brain, making such direct knowledge of external reality impossible. But, such an objection exposes again the contradiction inherent in combining philosophical materialism with epistemological realism. That is, the naturalist claims to know an external physical cosmos billions of light years in extent, and yet, his materialism forces the conclusion that he cannot know the external physical world at all – only images or neural patterns inside his own brain.

Naturalism cannot escape its own epistemological nightmare—a nightmare directly caused, not by natural science itself, but by illicitly attempting to identify natural science with the false philosophy of materialism.

On February 1, comedian Ricky Gervais appeared on CBS’s The Late Show where he and host Stephen Colbert discussed God and atheism:

Regardless of how you feel about his theological views, Colbert is probably the most famous U.S. celebrity who stands up for the Catholic Faith. His interviews on The Colbert Report with Bart Ehrman and Philip Zimbardo display some of this wit in top form. But Gervais, as opposed to a straight-laced academic, is a fellow comedian whose quick wit made him a formidable opponent. Here are a few of the arguments he made:

The 'One Less God' Objection

Gervais:

"So you believe in one god, I assume. . . . But there are 3,000 to choose from . . . so basically, you believe in—you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."

The problem with this argument is that it’s like saying to a prosecutor of a murder trial:

"You believe John Smith killed this man? Well, I don’t think anybody killed this man; he died accidentally. I mean, think about it. There are 7 billion potential murderers out there, and you believe that 6,999,999,999 of them did not kill this man. I just believe in one less murderer than you do."

Of course, thoughtful atheists will say, “That’s a bad example! We know murderers exist, but we have no proof any gods exist.”

But that’s not the point.

In the murder example, we know the skeptic is wrong, because, contrary to what he asserts, the prosecutor doesn’t just arbitrarily pick one suspect out of billions, each of whom is equally gulty. Instead, she has good reasons for choosing this one suspect out of all the others. Just because there are thousands of false gods or billions of people who are innocent of a certain crime, it doesn’t follow that there is no true God or no single person who is guilty of a crime.

Christians believe in their God because they have philosophical evidence to show God must be an infinite, self-explained act of being (which disproves the finite gods of mythology). They also have historical evidence that this God uniquely revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. You can dispute that evidence, but you can’t just dismiss it by pointing to large numbers of claims that compete against it.

The 'Science Wins' Objection

Gervais:

"If we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result."

Gervais said this in response to a salient point Colbert made that Gervais’s explanation that the universe came from a tiny atom apart from God was based on Gervais’s faith in physicists like Stephen Hawking and was not something he could prove himself. Gervais seemed to sense he was in trouble, so he pivoted to the explanation that science has a built-in corrective mechanism and so it will eventually be able to prove itself true, whereas religion can do no such thing.

First, this does not answer Colbert’s original question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, since we can still ask, “Why was there a primeval atom instead of nothing at all?” It also doesn’t refute the argument that God created the universe, because—as I show in my book Answering Atheism—science and philosophy point to a beginning of the universe not from an eternal shrunken atom but from pure nothingness, which would require a transcendent cause.

Second, Gervais has created a false dilemma to allow science to claim victory over religion.

He is correct that fiction, which is something an author creates, is not a law or natural feature of the universe. If every copy of Shakespeare, along with every memory of his works, were destroyed, it is extremely unlikely the works of Shakespeare would come back (though similar stories may appear in their place).

Likewise, its true that if we erased the work of Isaac Newton, that wouldn’t erase Newton’s laws of motion. Hopefully they would be rediscovered and, if that happened, they would likely end up being called something else.

But here’s the false dilemma: either truth is scientific and can be proven in a laboratory or else it is unprovable fiction. Since Bible accounts can’t be confirmed by science, they must be fiction.

Imagine a thousand years from now I wanted to prove the statement, “Ricky Gervais was a well-known comedian in the twenty-first century.” If you destroyed every one of Gervais’s television appearances along with every review written about him and also purged him from people’s memories, then I couldn’t prove he existed. Of course, that wouldn’t prove Gervais was a fictional character.

The same is true of the Bible, which is not a scientific explanation of the world but rather a collection of historical testimonies about how God created the world and revealed himself to mankind. If the Bible and everyone who remembered it were destroyed, then, barring more divine revelation, its contents would be forever lost. But just because a statement can’t be demonstrated in a laboratory doesn’t mean it’s not an important truth about the world or humanity itself.

The 'Redefining Atheism' Gambit

Gervais:

"So, this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, 'There’s a god.' I say, 'You can prove that?' You say, 'No.' I say, 'I don’t believe you then.'"

Atheism is either the strong belief God does not exist or the weaker belief that there is no good reason to believe God exists. It’s convenient in Gervais’s example that the believer doesn’t say, “I can’t prove it mathematically, but I have evidence that God exists.” The atheist could still say, “I don’t believe your evidence,” but if he doesn’t give a reason as to why he finds the evidence unconvincing, then he has simply revealed his own pre-conceived notion that God doesn’t exist.

That’s why I like to ask atheists who say there are no good reasons to believe God exists, “What is the best reason someone has offered for believing in God, and what’s wrong with it?” This allows atheists the opportunity to carry their burden of proof and demonstrate that there are no good reasons to believe God exists.

For example, if I said, “There’s no good reason to believe in the Loch Ness Monster,” that would be my opinion. It wouldn’t become a statement about reality worth examining until I provided evidence for it, such as by explaining why the famous “Nessie” photographs are fakes.

Likewise, an atheist who says there’s no good reason to believe in God gives his opinion, but that’s it. If he picked even one strong argument for the existence of God and showed why it fails, then he’d have evidence to support his opinion and encourage others to adopt it. And that’s basically what Gervais did at the beginning of the interview.

When Colbert asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, Gervais waved away the question by saying the “how” is more important than the “why.” But as the late, world-renowned philosopher Derek Parfit once said, “It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space. When we imagine this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Why is there a universe?”

This shows the question deserves an answer, and that answer may include an ultimate, infinite, self-explained reality that philosophers have traditionally called God.

Claims from atheists like Ricky Gervais that “there is no evidence for God” or “science makes God unnecessary” are merely assertions. And, as the late atheist Christopher Hitchens once said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today we share a conversation between Randal Rauser and Justin Schieber. Randal is a Christian author, apologist, and professor of theology at Taylor Seminary (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Justin is the founder and host of Real Atheology, a popular atheist Youtube channel, and he's the former cohost of the Reasonable Doubts Radio Show and Podcast. Together, the two just released a book-length dialogue titled An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar: Talking about God, the Universe, and Everything (Prometheus Books, 2016). I've read the book and highly recommend it to the entire Strange Notions audience, theists and atheists alike. It's smart, funny, substantial, and covers many contentious issues in fair and interesting ways. So pick up your copy now! Today's post below captures the book's spirit and the kinds of arguments it contains.

Justin: Well, Randal, we’ve officially made it out alive.

It’s been an interesting year. 2016 saw the somber losses of some of the most beloved names in popular culture as well as the death of sensible political discourse culminating with the election of a buffoon to the White House.

Randal: At least we bucked the trend toward polarization that increasingly characterizes the public square by actually talking to each other.

Justin: And yet, even after all our conversations and the publication of an entire conversational book, your theism and my atheism are still alive and kicking.

Randal: Yeah, but it should hardly be surprising. People don’t change their perspectives overnight, especially about such weighty matters as religion … or politics.

Justin: Very true. Thankfully, we didn’t approach this book with the sole purpose of changing each other’s mind. We made a point to step out of the trenches of the atheist/theist battlefield for a chance to engage in some doxastic diplomacy.

Randal: Hard to believe that after a couple hundred pages we were only getting started. So how about we pursue the conversation a bit further now? Any ideas?

Justin: I’ve got one. So, theists believe that God is the terminus of all explanation - that God is seated causally and logically prior to everything we know and everything we don’t (with the possible exception of abstracta like universals or numbers). I think most would also agree that God didn’t need to create any of this. In other words, if he exists, any act of creation that followed was a free choice rather than an act of necessity.

Randal: Sure.

Justin: Moreover, God is, in every way, perfect. In that light, we can be confident that, if God exists, then prior to creating anything, all that existed was pure perfection. But at present, there exists a universe made up of finite constituents.

That fact is more surprising on theism than it is on a view which states that the natural world is an uncreated, causally-closed system. Why? Because nearly every reason that we might appeal to in order to explain why God has created such a universe would far better motivate God to either refrain from creation acts altogether or create something entirely different.

Randal: So you think that we should expect God to create an infinite universe? I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here.

Justin: Not quite. I think that if God is to have reasons to create at all, those reasons would lead him to create one or more of what philosopher Evan Fales calls perfect creatures. A perfect creature is a person just like God in every way but whereas God is uncreated, a perfect creature is created. A perfect creature is maximal in his power, his knowledge, and most importantly, his moral perfection.

Randal: Okay, so your claim is that if God existed, he would create only perfect creatures. Since non-perfect creatures exist, that counts as evidence against God. But why do you think God would be restricted to creating only those perfect creatures?

Justin: It’s not so much because non-perfect creatures exist, although that’s also true. It’s because finite things exist generally. If God is to be taken as the quality standard of all things moral and ontological, then creating perfect creatures is going to best scratch any creative itch God might have given that these creatures are infinite and perfect in every way like their creator, God, the ultimate standard.

Randal: So you say. But if I can identify a possible divine “itch” which could not be scratched by creating perfect creatures, then that would constitute a defeater to your argument. So here’s one: by creating imperfect creatures who grow into moral perfection (or what Christians call being sanctified), God actualizes particular goods not available by creatures that are perfect from the beginning. These goods include the sense of moral history, of personal growth, of dynamic discovery, of learning to love and serve the creator. There are a whole range of goods God can actualize only by creating non-perfect creatures who have the capacity to grow. So what basis do you have to think God wouldn’t desire to actualize this range of goods?

Justin: Great question. So, let’s focus on your first suggestion; God’s itch to create persons who can grow into moral perfection requires him to create imperfect creatures. First, I don’t think it’s possible for finite persons to grow into moral perfection. But, let’s assume this is possible. To see the problem with this general approach, let me ask you a simple question. What’s so good about moral growth?

Randal: What’s so good about acquiring moral virtue? That strikes me as a strange question. It’s like asking what’s the value of climbing a mountain when you can be dropped off at the top via a helicopter. There is intrinsic virtue in undertaking the journey up the mountain. And there is intrinsic value in acquiring moral virtue over time. Why would you think otherwise?

Justin: My point is simple. Reasons for valuing moral growth in imperfect creatures that already exist are not the same as reasons to create imperfect creatures in the first place. So, without imperfect creatures already existing, there is no reason to create them to be imperfect. Moreover, the introduction of imperfect creatures will bring with them failures of moral will and the evil that results.

Randal: So you just made two points. First you said that the reasons for creating imperfect creatures would not be the same as valuing imperfect creatures that were already created. But this isn’t correct: the same valuation could be operative in both cases. If God values courage, for example, that could lead him both to create beings who acquire courage and to value creatures that presently exist who have acquired courage.

On the second point, you’re correct to observe that creating imperfect creatures who grow brings with it some degree of moral failure. But so what? You haven’t shown that the degree of moral failure outweighs the value of having creatures with a moral history who acquire virtue over time. And that’s what you need to show if you’re to sustain an objection to God’s existence based on the existence of imperfect creatures.

Justin: You’ve argued God could value courage and yet, you’ve provided no good reason to think that God does indeed value courage. All the reasons you have provided were extracted from the fact that courage and moral growth are very good things to have if we already exist as finite, imperfect persons. Moreover, if things like courage and moral growth are such great things, then God utterly lacking in both of these abilities should be seen as a fault, rather than a feature.

I’m afraid that appealing merely to the possibility of reasons for creating such beings won’t cut it against my inference to the best explanation. Abductive inferences allow for these possibilities. At best, you’d be adding finite value to an already infinitely valuable state of affairs and at worst, as already discussed, you’d be introducing the plenitude of evils we see resulting from the choices of imperfect creatures. With the choice of worlds before an infinite God, it isn’t even close. This is a piece of evidence against theism.

Randal: No surprise, I disagree. In closing I’d like to make three points of rebuttal. First, you said I’ve given no reason to think God values virtues like courage. But unless and until you can defend a sweeping skepticism about our moral intuitions, I think we remain justified in thinking that God would value courage in his creatures.

You also suggested that if a virtue like courage is valuable then God ought to exemplify courage. That’s incorrect: God is by definition omniscient and omnipotent, and no being who is all-knowing and all-powerful can exhibit courage. Thus, God cannot exhibit courage.

I’ll close with the main point. Your argument rested on the claim that if God were to create, he would create perfect creatures. I provided a reason to reject that claim, namely the goods that arise from creating imperfect creatures who grow into perfection. This very real possibility is sufficient to undermine your claim that God would only create perfect creatures.

I grew up in a loving, comfortable atheist household of professional scientists. My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and my mom was a lapsed Lutheran. From the time that I could think rationally on the subject, I did not believe in God. God was an imaginary being for which there was no proof. At best, God was a fantasy for half-witted people to compensate their ignorance and make themselves feel better about their own mortality. At worst, God was a perverse delusion responsible for most of the atrocities committed by the human race.

What broke the ice? What made me consider God’s existence a real possibility? The Lord of the Rings. I was a young teenager when I first read the Tolkien tomes, and it immediately captivated me. The fantasy world of Middle-Earth oozes life and profundity. The cultures of the various peoples are organic, rooted in tradition while maintaining a fresh, living energy. Mountains and forests have personalities, and the relationship between people and earth is marked by stewardship and intimacy. Creation knowing creation. Tolkien describes these things with beautiful prose that reads like its half poetry and half medieval history. Everything seems “deep” in The Lord of the Rings. The combination of character archetypes and assertive “lifeness” in the novel touches on an element of fundamental humanity. Every Lord of the Rings fan knows exactly what I’m talking about.

In my narrow confines of scientism, I had no way of processing what made Tolkien’s masterpiece so profound. How could a made-up fantasy world reveal anything about the “truth”? But I knew it did, and this changed my way of thinking. Are good and evil merely social constructions, or are they real on a deeper level? Why am I relating to ridiculous things like talking trees and corrupted wraiths? Why was I so captivated by this story that made fighting evil against all odds so profound? Why did it instill in me a longing for an adventure of the arduous good? And how does the story make sacrifice so appealing? The Lord of the Rings showed me a world where things seemed more “real” than the world I lived in. Not in a literal way, obviously; in a metaphorical, beyond-the-surface way. The beautiful struggle and self-sacrificial glory permeating The Lord of the Rings struck a chord in my soul and filled me with longing that I couldn’t easily dismiss.

My attempts to explain these problems in my naturalistic, atheistic worldview fell flat. The idea that being, beauty, and morality were merely productive illusions imposed on us through biological hardwiring crafted through the random process of natural selection rang hollow. If things so fundamental to human existence as meaning and morality are nothing more than productive illusions, what else is untrustworthy? Our five senses? Logical process? Our whole minds? If our being is nothing more than a collection of atoms reacting with each other in enormous complexity through cause and effect chains stretching back to the beginning, then we are floating blindly through space and time: there’s no rhyme, reason, or purpose. And, if that’s the case, then so much of what we consider essentially human is tragic a joke. After all, the human race, the earth, and the universe will go extinct. With a long enough timeline, what’s the point? Even the idea of accomplishing something is finally an illusion. At this juncture, the fruits of atheism were inevitable: nihilism, despair, and, most ironically, confusion.

Though seriously questioning atheism, I still had many objections. If God were real, why isn’t there more evidence for his existence? If God were real, why are there so many religions? Wouldn’t God want to clearly direct humanity to the source of truth? My doubts about atheism, however, continued to haunt me. If the supernatural does not exist, how can there be genuine moral obligations? The classic atheist response is that evolution has created a sophisticated herd instinct in the human race that causes us to want to be good to each other. Those people who lacked a moral compass were simply outcompeted by those of us with a sense of morality – those who could work together for our collective benefit.

Deep down, though, I knew this was specious. Even if it could fully account for our moral sense, which I questioned, it did not explain genuine moral obligations. Supposing the classic evolutionary theory of morality is true, it only explains why we perceive moral obligations; not whether (or why) there are moral obligations. Instead of explaining morality, it explains it away. The thorough-going immoralist could always object on the basis that he has been freed from the restrictive, outdated biological hardwiring of merely perceived moral obligations. My atheist friends and family would inevitably respond with something like, “Well, the immoralist’s position has never been fully successful, while there is historical evidence that generally being a ‘good person’ leads to a better ability to succeed, pass on ‘good person’ genes, etc.” Only sort of true. Much of history teaches that violence, greed, and domination pay off handsomely in the worldly sense.

But, the responses miss the point. Just because being a thorough-going immoralist hasn’t seemed to work to date doesn’t mean it wouldn’t later. After all, the hallmark of natural selection is random genetic change granting certain creatures a better ability to survive in a given environment. In the end, all the atheist can say to the immoralist is, “I disagree that your course of action will help the human race succeed.” That kind of statement, which is merely an opinion, is simply not what we mean when we say an action is immoral. Furthermore, who pronounced from on high that the success of the human race was the ultimate good? That itself is an assumption that cannot be empirically proven. Going back to the original problem, does “good” even exist? I realized that within the purely naturalistic worldview, all morality is finally a matter of opinion. All the moralist can say to the immoralist is, “My opinion is different than yours.” No more productive than arguing whether red is better than blue. I should clarify here that I never doubted the theory of human evolution. Nothing about it contradicts God’s order of creation. I’m also not saying that atheists are immoral. They just can’t account for the existence of genuine moral obligations. They are, like I was, living in great tension.

At some point the tension was too much: either morality is a farce, everything is random with no meaning, and the human mind is mired in inescapable confusion or atheism is false. I chose the latter. That was the logical side. On the emotional side, so many joys in this world have nothing to do with self-preservation or successful reproduction: art, music, a beautiful sunset, etc. I think deep down we all recognize that those kinds of aesthetic experiences may be the most joyful in this life, and these joys serve no productive purpose. The richness of life, which is on full poetic display in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, made me recognize that supposedly rational atheism did not reveal the truth of things; instead, it removed their intrinsic wonder and worth.

Having abandoned atheism, I still faced several objections to organized religion that are beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that my critique of atheism gave me a natural monotheistic theology while The Lord of the Rings predisposed me to a sacramental spirituality. For now, however, let us remember the evangelistic power of beauty and narrative. Much like The Lord of the Rings, they are effective precisely because God is hidden and able to fly below the atheist radar that balks at anything overtly religious. In Middle Earth, the effects of a God-created universe are everywhere, but the source, God Himself, is hidden. No, it’s not that we believers understand The Lord of the Rings on some special level that the atheist does not. Just the opposite. The atheist who truly understands The Lord of the Rings is more of a believer than he thinks.