by Peter Beolingus

Created on: July 03, 2007   Last Updated: November 15, 2007

I highly recommend the book, THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM by Prof. Aliaster McGrath of England. A former atheist, Dr.McGrath moves beyond the outdated assumption that atheism is the intellectual position of scientific research that has ultimately proved God does not exist. According to McGrath, atheism is a peculiar affectation of the allegedly rational West (yet scientists daily make "acts of faith" in hypotheses and theories not yet proved). Forget the abuses of organized religion; that no more discredits belief in God than sloppy mailmen invalidate the post office. As Soren Kierkegarrd proposed, religious faith is beyond rational thought-but that does not make it contrary to reason, as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out. McGrath outlines that atheism in its present form comes mostly from disaffected 19th century thinkers in Germany such as Feurbach, Marx, and Freud (Vienna), who attacked all religious experience based upon very limited perceptions of either other-worldly Lutheran Protestantism or sexually repressed Roman Catholicism. "If atheists think Christianity is a sitting duck", McGrath quips,"they are shooting at a moving target." The caricatures Feurbach, Marx, and Freud, and later Sartre attacked are just that-exaggerations. They do not represent the genuine nature of all religious experience.

What we call "beyond rational" does not mean "unscientific"-as if all human experience could be parboiled down to something neatly explained, testable, and provable. As the Eastern religions understand, including Eastern Orthodox Christianity, religious experience is a "mystery"-not, as in Sherlock Holmes or Jessica Fletcher, something we can solve, wrap up, put in a tupperware tub, stick a label on it and leave it on the shelf for later reference. THAT reflect the myopia of Western so-called "scientific" thinking. A mystery, properly understood, is "an inexhaustible topic"-we will never have said or thought all there is to say or think about it. That requires humility, something lacking in many atheists who assume that the intellectual argument is on THEIR side. Now that's something you cannot prove!

So, in one sense, the atheists ARE right-you cannot prove, quantify, explain, etc. God. If Solomon's Temple was not enough, "the highest heavens cannot contain Thee!", the atheists tupperware won't do the trick either. However, the atheists are not right in the idea that this means God does not exist-only that you cannot prove His/Her/Its existence. Of course, God cannot

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