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Q. More and more people I know seem to be questioning God’s existence. There even seems to be a growth in the number of people who don’t even believe in God. Can you help me understand this and how I can respond?
This is an important question, as it addresses a real cultural trend, so we began to address it last month and will continue this month and for the next couple of months.
As mentioned last month, over the past 20 years, we’ve
seen the development of a cultural trend called The New Atheism (TNA). As also mentioned previously, TNA has a number of features that characterize it: first, unlike earlier varieties of atheism, TNA is less philosophical in nature; second, it’s very aggressive in tone and style. There is a final characteristic of TNA we’ll consider here before turning our attention to how to respond to it.
Like other forms of atheism, TNA has a tendency to almost deify science. Numerous commentators have observed that while atheists in general may not formally worship a god, empirical science almost acts as the god of atheism, including TNA. Even for those New Atheists who are not scientists (and most of them who write books are not), science—or their conception of it—is the club they wield against us “irrational” believers. In the TNA telling of the tale, religion subverts science in particular and even reason in general. For TNA, the scientist is almost the priest and prophet of their religion, in that the scientist—and the scientist alone—reveals to us the truths of the world in which we live. If any view or assertion is not based on the natural, empirical sciences, then it is questionable at best.
We’ll get into this more later, but for now I just want to point out that as Catholics, we have no problem with science or reason, and that’s frankly a major understatement: we wholeheartedly believe that we can learn the truth about reality by means of human reason in all its forms, including the empirical sciences. To preview what we’ll see in detail later, modern science was in fact born out of Christianity and the Christian way of understanding reality. In fact, it’s a matter of historical fact that without Christianity, there wouldn’t be modern science, and in addition, the great founders of modern science were almost all Christians. And with regard to reason more generally, today it is Christian scholars who stand almost alone in defense of reason’s ability to know the truth of reality. Consider that it was a pope (St. John Paul II) who wrote an encyclical—one of the highest levels of papal teaching—entitled Fides et Ratio, which is Latin for “Faith and Reason.”
These, then, are some of the characteristics of TNA. So, how can we respond to this form of atheism? There are a number of ways to reply to TNA, but in this series I’ll touch on just a few.
First, as noted earlier, TNA is not philosophically robust, which means with just a little philosophical knowledge, it’s relatively easy to refute the central claim of TNA, which is that it is absurd and irrational to have Catholic Christian faith.
But before getting into the philosophy in our next column, there is an important point worth making, in some sense more fundamental to replying to TNA: New Atheists don’t only not know what they’re talking about when they talk about religion, but they can’t decide what they are talking about. What do I mean?
Look again at what these writers are attacking: religion. But there’s a problem here: Which religion? The New Atheists often attack “religion” as if every individual religion holds the views or does the things they are attacking, which is obviously false. It goes without saying that the fact of Islamic terrorists is not a self-evident proof against belief in Catholicism or the God Catholics worship, yet TNAs act as if it were. No, what is necessary is to critique each religion, because a critique of “religion” will not necessarily address any religion in particular.
So when someone criticizes or attacks “religion,” don’t let them off the hook; make them be specific about which religion and/or religious doctrine they are critiquing.
Next month, we’ll look at some ways to respond to the specific claim that God does not exist.
