Apart from a few occurrences beforehand, it was mostly in this century that atheism arose and with it the belief that, as we have seen in the passage from animism to polytheism, science would dominate more and more realities until God and religion would be left without a leg to stand on.
Either because this has not happened or because it takes time to happen, or else as we believe, it will never happen, a third attitude concerning the existence of God known as agnosticism emerged.
Contrary to the pretension of some, that science and atheism or agnosticism are presumed and understood as synonyms, or that a scientist is supposed to be an atheist or an agnostic otherwise he is not a good scientist, here is a list of past and contemporary scientists who were believers without ceasing to be good or even the best in their field of science:
- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) – founder of the modern worldview which places the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) – astronomer, best known for his laws of planetary motion
- Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – founder of classical mechanics
- Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) – founder of modern taxonomy who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms
- Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) – discovered the basic notions of electricity
- Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836) – known as the father of electrodynamics, discovered the fundamental law of electric current
- Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) – distinguished mathematician who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics including calculus and algebra
- Carl-Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) – one of the most renowned German mathematicians
- Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) – founder of organic chemistry, made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry
- Julius von Mayer (1814-1878) – one of the founders of thermodynamics, best known for stating the Law of the Conservation of Energy or the first law of thermodynamics
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – best known for his theory of the evolution of species
- Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) – Augustinian monk and abbot, founder of the modern science of genetics
- Thomas Edison (1847-1931) – most prolific inventor, with 1200 patents
- Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) – inventor of wireless telegraphy, winner of 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) – theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, winner of 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics
- Max Planck (1858-1947) – founder of quantum physics, 1918 Nobel Prize winner
- Erwin Schrödinger (1887- 1961) – creator of wave mechanics, 1933 Nobel Prize winner
- Georges Lemaître (1894- 1966) – Catholic Jesuit priest, astronomer and physicist who proposed the Big Bang Theory to explain the origin of the universe
- Wernher Von Braun (1912- 1977) – leading figure in the development of space rocket technology in Germany and the United States
Before the emergence of atheism and agnosticism, the majority of the world’s population was theistic and after the emergence of atheism and agnosticism, most of the world’s population remains theistic, so we will treat theism as being what was before and will always remain after the storms of atheism and agnosticism have passed.
Atheism
In this chapter I will call attention to the fathers of modern atheism, those who devoted much of their lives and work denying the existence of God, denigrating the role of religion in society and the religious behaviour of individuals.
Ludwig Feuerbach – Religion as the projection of Man (1804-1872)
Homo homini Deus est - Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires. Lectures on the Essence of Religion
For Feuerbach, theology is pure anthropology, because it was not God who created Man in His image and likeness, but the contrary, it was Man who created God in his image and likeness. Everything that has been said about God has come from Man, so the images of God and all we know about Him is anthropomorphic. Man projects himself outward into an abstract being called God, all his aspirations, desires and ideals. According to Feuerbach, “God is nothing more than the human spirit projected into the infinity”.
“God was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last thought”. This brilliant philosopher began his career as a student of theology, but abandoned it later to become a disciple of Hegel. Feuerbach was the first great atheist of modern times. A real flaming fire is what his name means; in fact, I believe that all who came after him have said little or nothing truly new, they have just repeated his basic ideas using other words.
For this reason, Feuerbach is the great inspirer and the precursor of Karl Marx, in the sense that he is the first to proclaim and fight for the emancipation of man from the custody of religion which he believes weakens and deprives man of his own power. For Feuerbach “Morality that does not aim at happiness is a word deprived of meaning.” And he warns us that “Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”
As brilliant as it may seem, the assessment that Feuerbach makes of faith and religion is nothing more than sophistry. The projection of Man outside of himself says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God, who can exist independently with or without human projection.
Human projection, precisely because it is human, has more to do with the human nature than with the nature of God. This being so, human projection may explain why the thought of God has always existed in the minds of men of all times and has nothing to say about God’s real hypothetical existence.
On the other hand, this persistent thought of God in our minds, in itself is more a proof of His existence than of His nonexistence. If one is thirsty or has the desire to drink water, it is because there must be water somewhere to be found, but it is not the desire that creates the water. It is more logical to think that the water creates the desire than to think that it is the desire that creates the water. As a matter of fact, we know chronologically, in the history of the Universe that water existed long before man’s appearance; certainly the desire to drink the water pre-existed man. If there was no water I don’t think humans would ever feel thirst.
Coming back to Feuerbach’s sequence of thoughts from God to Man, unfortunately, he did not stop at his triad of God – reason – man. After having demoted and degraded God to the category of pure human conjecture, he went on with his fourth thought which was sensation, with the fifth nature and the sixth matter, ending up foolishly affirming that “Man is what he eats”.
In other words, when God is degraded, the creature created by God in His image and likeness is also gradually degraded. According to the book of Genesis, God brought us out of matter (clay) into personhood, in His own image and likeness. If we deny the existence of God as a person, then we no longer exist as persons either since we owe our personhood to Him. If we are not people then we are back to what we were before God fashioned us, that is, matter. What Feuerbach does to the human being is a Darwinian involution…
Karl Marx – Religion as an alienating consolation (1818-1883)
Son of a Jew converted to Protestant Christianity, he was even married in the Church. From the very beginning he assumed that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Marx was a revolutionary. In his symbolic work “Capital”, he analysed the foulness of capitalism and found that religion was an obstacle to progress, that is, it stalled the evolution of capitalism toward socialism and communism.
Marx agreed fully with Feuerbach that God is a projection of man and therefore religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” In addition to this projection, religion is also a drug, an alienating behaviour which prevents us from being ourselves, from taking the reins of our own destinies, or the rudder of our ship, in other words, it constitutes a hindrance to progress.
Marx’s atheism, more than philosophical, is social and related to the economy. Marx had no interest whatsoever in the essence of religion be it Jewish or Christian; in fact, he was unaware of Christ and the social principles of Christianity. What interested him was the role it played in society. Marx’s atheism therefore may be due to the type of religion practiced at that time, which in itself could have little to do with Christ’s Christianity. As a matter of fact, the future communist society without the distinction of class may very well be the Promised Land of the Jews and the Kingdom of God of the Christians that Jesus of Nazareth came to bring.
What for Feuerbach was only a philosophical idea, for Marx it was a manifesto, an operative idea. However, it must be safeguarded that Marx firmly believed that both capitalism and religion would fall on their own without the help of any external forces like a fruit that ripens, becomes rotten and then falls from the tree on its own. However, followers of his ideas understood that it was necessary to give them a push and it was precisely this that Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung did with the militant atheism that murdered so many millions of people in the twentieth century. Poor Marx, having realized while still alive that there were so many types of Marxism, so many versions of his theories, that he even declared himself a non-Marxist.
Sigmund Freud – Religion as an obsessive neurosis (1856- 1939)
Like Marx’s father, Freud’s father was also a Christian converted from Judaism. In this respect, he went on to say that he had always considered himself German until the day the persecution of the Jews began. Already taking refuge in London, from that point onward he considered himself a Jew.
Freud saw religion as a repression of man’s basic instincts, especially the sexual one. This happens because religion perverts the natural instincts of human beings, labeling them as evil, impure, ugly, dirty and animal-like, and as such must be repressed. Religion is also a moral code that blames individuals for feeling and expressing their instincts. This idea will be taken up by Nietzsche when he compares the Judeo-Christian morality or the fake slave’s morality to its opponent, the morality of the lords, that is, natural ethics.
According to Freud, this repression leads inexorably to an obsessive neurosis: the body asks for something but the mind does not give in so it ends up shorting the circuit and blowing the fuse. As for Marx where socialism and communism would be the solution to the alienation of religion, for Freud psychoanalysis would solve the problem – by removing past traumas, the person reconciles with himself and with his true nature.
Also as with Marx, Freud knew very little about religion, only looking at its role in a repressive and puritanical society. His theory is nothing more than a reaction to this, as Marx’s was a reaction to the inhuman capitalism of his time. Up to this point, the only one who dealt with the religious issue from a theoretical point of view was Feuerbach in his work “The Essence of Religion”.
Friedrich Nietzsche – God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him (1844-1900)
Nietzsche criticizes Christianity, not so much from the theoretical point of view but in its praxis, especially in its moral. As we have already mentioned, he understood that the Christian morality, the morality of slaves, as he calls it, was used over the centuries as a means to dominate and control. Christian values are opposed to natural values and human nature itself. An example of this is sexuality. As Freud had already done, Nietzsche accuses Christianity of making it impure, dirty and ugly.
From the theoretical point of view on the existence of God, Nietzsche basically follows in the footsteps of his atheistic predecessors. For him, faith in God comes from a sense of helplessness that man feels in relation to the many realities that surround him.
Feuerbach was a theologian, Marx and Freud were sons of fathers converted to Christianity, and Marx’s and Nietzsche’s fathers were Protestants. It seems that atheism is the son of theism or an up side down theism, that is, it resembles the dialectic between matter and antimatter in the universe.
The atheist lives unsatisfied because he is restless, as he always has doubt and doubts his own thoughts and conclusions. For this reason he keeps searching for more proofs that will convince him fully that God does not exist and yet is never completely convinced.
A theist may also have doubts, but it is a methodical doubt that leads to a “cogito ergo sum”. The theist chose to believe and now lives installed in the faith that gives meaning to the universe, to the world and to his own existence, while the atheist installs himself in nothingness and emptiness, and since nature has a horror of emptiness, the emptiness of existence hurts, torments and ends up absorbing the individual. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche went mad. Others however choose to fill this emptiness with other realities to which they are religiously attached like the search for power, pleasure, beauty, money… Many atheists are in fact more polytheistic than atheistic.
Agnosticism
The term and the concept of agnosticism, as it is understood today, was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 who argued that the existence of God, the divine or supernatural, is neither known nor knowable. Huxley understood that to try to prove the existence of God is offensive to reason but worse still for the one who tries to deny it, because atheism has the pretense of being rational and scientific. Fundamentally, agnosticism defends that the human mind is unable to provide sufficient rational reasons to justify the belief that God exists or the belief that God doesn’t exist.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines agnosticism as an indifferentism, according to which nothing can be known of God…
Indifferentism – It is a comfortable position, it is the denial of commitment. Applied to the area of knowledge, it means laziness, denying progress, not investigating, not investing. Applied to personal relationships including a personal relationship with God, it means no commitment to anything or to anyone. And whoever lives without committing to someone or to a human cause risks reaching the end of life without ever having lived.
Nothing can be known about God – This is a radical position and therefore false. One cannot know everything, just as one cannot know everything about anyone, not even about oneself or any branch of science. Mystery not only revolves around God, but in everything that surrounds us, others and even ourselves – everything is a mystery.
In the case of God, if we believe in Him as the Creator of the Universe, we ought to understand and accept that our intellect is a tiny speck in comparison to His, inasmuch as the infinitesimal part cannot logically contain the whole, since knowing is in some way putting this whole in our mind. On the other hand, if we understand knowing to mean controlling, having power over the known matter, then clearly this type of knowing is not possible with God, for if we could know God fully, we would then indeed be gods. Therefore the created being cannot fully know nor dominate the Creator.
However, if it is possible to know enough about God to establish a loving relationship with Him, and when we take that leap of faith, we will see more and more evidence of His existence and presence in our lives, from within our reality and the reality surrounding us. The door to God is faith as a gift of self, as love; without faith there is no access to God. The key to this door is our choice; faith as the key to God is in itself God’s gift to all humans; the believers act upon this gift and use the key to open the door to God; the agnostics choose to throw away their key.
Faced with an existence of God that cannot unequivocally be either proven or denied, it is then up to us to decide, that is, to choose. Both theism and atheism are choices while with agnosticism the individual chooses not to choose. Several agnostics have come to me and said, “I cannot believe”. In psychotherapy when someone says, “I cannot”, the therapist translates this as “I don’t want to”. For example, suppose a patient says, “I cannot stop smoking”; the therapist asks, “Is it impossible to quit smoking?” to which the patient answers, “No, others have done it before,” then the therapist concludes, “You do not want to give up smoking because if you really wanted to, you would, therefore as the saying goes, to want is to be able.”
The same can be said of the agnostic or atheist who says, “I cannot believe”. To believe is not impossible: many believe, if you don’t believe then it is because you don’t want to believe or because this attitude is more convenient to you. I have met many agnostics who are such because it is fashionable and because they are full of prejudice against faith, religion, the Church and the followers of religion.
Theism
In this part of the article, we will present more philosophical arguments, as we did in the previous one; the cosmological arguments will be presented later when we discuss the triad of the Universe: time, matter/energy and space.
The five ways of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
In the first part of his “Summa Theologica”, in the second and the third chapter, Saint Thomas Aquinas presents the five proofs which he calls the “ways that show that God exists”:
The First Way from Motion – We know through our senses that everything that moves in this world does not contain within itself the cause of this movement, but is moved by another, and this other by yet another and so on. An infinite series of causes is impossible, therefore there has to be a first unmoved mover, that is, not moved by another; this first mover is God.
The Second Way from Efficient Cause – In the world we find nothing that is a cause of itself, otherwise in order to be, each thing would have to be prior to itself, which is impossible. Everything in the world is ordered in a sequence of cause and effect; but this series cannot be taken to infinity, since it would be a negation of the cause and effect principle. Someone had to have started it all off, that is, the first efficient cause without a cause is God.
The Third Way from Contingency and Necessity – We observe that there are contingent beings that exist, but could have not existed because they do not have within themselves, in their essence, the reason for their existence. From the possibility of not existing, there is a need of another being who causes it to exist. If we go back to infinity, we will reach the necessary being, which has in itself the absolute reason for its existence. Containing in its very essence its own existence, it would be absurd not to exist. In this way, it is necessary to affirm the existence of a being that exists out of its own necessity, and who is the cause and the necessity of all others: God.
The Fourth Way from Degrees of Perfection – Our perception tells us that there exists a degree of perfection in all things. These degrees are present from the most common objects to the most obscure or noble feelings. We judge upon such degrees of this or that thing, in comparison or having as reference something of maximum degree. If for every existing thing there is a maximum degree, then there must exist a Being that contains all the attributes and possible things in their degrees of maximum perfection and that would be the generator of all things in degree of lesser perfection. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that “one finds among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum”. This Being is God.
The Fifth Way from the Governing of Things/from Finality of Being – If we consider the order existing in the universe, from the smallest microscopic component to the largest gigantic star of the firmament, the harmony, the activity and the relationship between them, we easily arrive at the following conclusion: there was a brainpower that created and ordered all this; otherwise, it would be absurd to say that all this was the result of pure chance. This intelligent Being is God.
If God does not exist, then human life lacks meaning
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile (…) Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 1Corinthians 15:17-19
The enigma of human existence is intimately linked to the existence of God. If God does not exist, man in some way also does not exist as a human person and his existence lacks meaning. It was these same philosophers who succeeded to the idea of the death of God – Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Soren Kierkegaard – who declared that without the existence of a superior being, life is absurd. For life to have meaning, it is necessary to have the criteria to live by that are not of human origin – principles of which we are not the source and that somehow have authority over us.
“Hell is other people”, says Sartre – like the soldiers of the high priests, God was taken prisoner by Feuerbach, judged by Marx and Freud who, ironically, just like Annas and Caiaphas were also Jews, and condemned to death and executed by Nietzsche, a reincarnated Pilate. The irony of fate is that with the death of God, man also died because life ceased to have meaning. Hence, the philosophers who came after Nietzsche are philosophers of absurdity and nausea (Sartre) born out of Man’s corpse and not of God’s corpse as He does not have one.
But after clarifying that the existence of Man is united to the existence of God, and although God pre-exists and exists independently of man, Man is the creature for whom God exists. Only a creature conscious of himself can come to the awareness of God’s existence. As we have said in speaking of animism, it was the realization of death of our physical body that gave rise to our spiritual self; it was the realization of death as a termination of existence that configured our existence as a being. Existence is temporal, being is eternal – the desire for eternity, as opposed to the reality of our temporality, has given us the belief that God exists, Creator of everything and everyone, and of our thirst to know Him.
The new irony of fate: now the other, my peer, as Sartre affirms with whom he lives in harmony in society, has become a hell to me, and I can only get out of this hell by eliminating him.
The most absurd of all is that these thinkers came to deny human nature, which is trinitarian. A human being does not exist alone, but coexists with at least two others – a father and a mother: either there are three or there is none. How can others be hell to me? It is the love of neighbour as myself that is the guarantor of equality, the fundamental principle of society and of human being, as a social being and member of society. Without the love of neighbor life in society would not be possible and if social life does not exist individual life also ceases to exist. If every person were to think like Sartre, this world would indeed be hell.
On the other hand, to love God above all things and people guarantees us freedom and this is the fundamental principle upon which the dignity of the human person is based. Without freedom there is no individual human life, there is no human person. We are only free of things and people when we give our hearts to God, when we accept only one Lord: God. When we do not pay homage to the one and only God who makes us free, we end up giving it to other human and worldly realities: power, pleasure, wealth, popularity, physical beauty etc., thus making ourselves slaves to these realities and therefore worshipers of idols.
If God does not exist, everything is permitted (Dostoyevsky)
Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain. Psalm 127:1
The nonbelievers live at ease at the expense of the believers. It is indeed God who keeps watch over the city, not the guards. If God did not exist, there wouldn’t be enough soldiers to guard the wealth of the rich. The nonbelievers are fortunate that most people in the world are believers. God is the ultimate guarantor of all that is good; without God, good and evil have no foundation.
Generally, the atheists and agnostics are often educated and even well-educated people and they think that others ought to be like them in regards to religion. If one day it was possible to prove scientifically or unequivocally that God does not exist, chaos, anarchy, an unprecedented pandemonium would seize the world. If all our hopes were pined to this life, this world could certainly not continue the way it is.
In today’s world where 1% of humanity possesses 54% of the world’s wealth and the remaining 99% hold only 46%, no police or military power could contain a worldwide rage. Therefore, it is God Himself who guards the city because if He wasn’t, in vain will the guards keep watch.
Someone has said that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented. If the just and the unjust come to the same final end, if two opposing things end up with the conclusion, then these two things are really equal to each other; if good and evil, justice and injustice have the same fate, then there is no difference between one and the other.
It is eternal life that gives meaning to this temporal life; it may seem too simple, but without Heaven for those who chose God and lived in love, and without Hell for those who did not choose God and lived in hatred and selfishness, this life would have no meaning. It is Heaven that represents human values and hell the opposing ones.
If God does not exist, the unjust has the last word. If he who commits crimes and escapes the justice of men with impunity not only he has an advantage over others, but also in the absence of a hypothetical divine justice, this impunity would lead him and others to commit further crimes.
If God does not exist, man is not above the rest of the living beings:
O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (…) When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea (…) Psalm 8:1, 3-8
As Karl Marx put it, human being is the moment when Nature gains awareness of itself. Of all the living beings, we are the only ones capable of thinking and who have some control over our destinies and our lives. It makes no sense that our destinies be the same as those of lice and fleas: nothingness. If this was so, I and many others like myself would prefer not to have been born, to share the same fate with the louse, the cockroach and the flea: nothingness.
Here lies the absurdity of atheism: it makes no sense that a universe that is ordered intelligently and having progressed to reach all the way to human life would end up sharing the same fate as the rest of the living beings. Why did we even get this far? So that we have greater awareness of our misery and suffer more than all living beings?
Precisely at the moment we became aware of ourselves, of our existence and the relative power we have over it, we also realized that one day we will die, that is, that we will one day cease to exist. At least the animals, which will also die, are spared the suffering of knowing it. They do not think, they do not know that they exist and they do not know that they will die. Why are we aware? So that we can experience this masochistic suffering, pain, anguish, anxiety before death, our miserable condition compared to other living beings?
Animals have no power over their own lives: Nature has placed in their system a chip, the instinct that automatically governs their lives. Humans aside, all other living beings live and behave as if they were on auto-pilot, they cannot make mistakes or commit errors, they are never either right or wrong, better or worse, but are always right and always carry out the vocation for which they were created. Unlike them, human beings have some power over their lives, they can turn it into a heaven or a hell by their choices. Wouldn’t it be better to live on the auto-pilot mode, if we all share in the same fate?
To the animals, Nature is a prodigal mother who gives them everything, even clothing them. On coming out of their mother's womb they already have everything they need to live. Human beings are born the most vulnerable and helpless of all living beings and take a long time to reach adulthood: years of education, school and university and later, to survive they have to work to earn money by the sweat of their brows, while their animal counterparts need only to eat, sleep and have fun. What is this all for? Wouldn’t the life of an animal be better, if everybody ends up in the same boat?
If God does not exist, then human nature is fake:
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. (Saint Augustine)
Atheism is the result of intellectual conjectures, while agnosticism is from chronic intellectual laziness in a small minority of people who live lodged and refined in the consumerism of a society overflowing with abundance. The majority of the world’s population is religious and has been religious throughout its history and in all cultures. Atheism and agnosticism, which in practice are one and the same – have not been installed in any culture or civilization and, where attempts have been made to do so, they have failed. Why?
Anthropology, the science that studies human nature throughout history in all the cultures and civilizations, says that the human nature is naturally religious and that the conception of God can vary from time to time, from culture to culture.
In the evolution of the Universe and the species on this planet, Man appeared at the moment when matter sublimated into spirit. Consequently, it is logical to think that this mental power we have now, has existed long before. On the other hand, only human beings came to self-consciousness: other animals that are as or more ancient than us, never got there. The evolution of species resulted in a thinking human being who opposes or overlaps the rest of Creation, just like the thumb opposes and overlaps the remaining fingers in a hand. If this is so, it is because we have a destiny different from the rest of the living beings. The big toe does not oppose the rest of the toes and its function differs very little from the rest. However, in our hands, the function of the thumb is one of the characteristics that defines and distinguishes human being from the rest of the animals. Human being is the thumb of God’s Creation.
Man is the only being opened to infinity, longs for eternity, and thirsts for God. If there were no water to quench the thirst, our thirst would be misleading and absurd. Where there is thirst, there must be water. Every human being has implicit within himself the desire for God, the thirst for God, then God must exists to quench this thirst.
The Universe is made up of time, space and matter. The Creator of the Universe necessarily has to be timeless or eternal, in relation to time; be at the same time transcendent and imminent, in relation to space, that is, He is above and beyond everything and everyone, and at the same time is at the heart of everything that exists; lastly, in relation to matter, God is a spiritual and personal being.
Conclusion
In my opinion, in the face of the reasons to believe and not to believe, the decision to be theist, atheist or agnostic will depend on personal factors: childhood education, academic studies, significant lifelong personal experiences, etc. In my evangelizing work, having entered often dialectically in dialogue with atheists and agnostics, I have offered arguments that have silenced them and yet they continue not to believe, which proves that this is a far deeper beyond reason decision, and it has to do with the life that each has lived and lives.
Assuming that the existence of God as Creator and Father of humanity, who watches over each and every one of us, His children, here and now and after our death, cannot be proven nor denied scientifically or philosophically, then there will always be reasons to believe and reasons not to believe.
However much the scientists strive to peer into the mysteries of the Universe, in order to reach a greater understanding of how things work and thus reduce the field of religion, they have never found unequivocal proof that compels all human beings to believe or not to believe. Science studies the “how” not the “why”. Science has no method and no way of knowing the “why” or the “for what” the world exists. The answers to these questions have always belonged to the field of faith and religion.
Faced with this state of affairs, the three standpoints for the existence of God equate to three decisions or vital choices. The atheist finds his reasons for not believing and bases his choice on those reasons that satisfy his intellect.
The theist finds his reasons for believing and underlies his faith. Faith is defined by the First Vatican Council as a “reasonable gift”, that is, it is neither irrational nor rational, but plausible and humanly credible. However, since the reasons that make faith credible are not and can never be irrefutable, there is always in faith a part of the gift, something that the believer gives, something in which he places his trust and by which he makes a leap into the dark.
The atheist studies the question and finds reasons not to believe and decides not to believe; the theist studies the question and finds reasons to believe and decides or chooses to believe. As for the agnostics, there are several types with common and divergent points. The less serious ones do not study the question nor do they question themselves, they are installed in the material world. They are materialists in the sense that they only believe in what they see and accessible to the five senses.
The more serious agnostics study the question and find that the reasons to believe and not to believe are 50-50. For this reason, they do not decide, they are neither theists nor atheists, neither meat nor fish. In theory, they keep the question open, as if they were at a crossroad their entire life, without deciding to turn to the right or to the left, whether to go forward or reverse.
In practice, life decides for them and in fact, they live as if God does not exist just like the atheists. Agnostics are only called such if someone asks them whether or not they believe in God; as for the rest, in practice, they are as atheists as the real atheists. At the end of the day, believing in His existence, as well as believing in His nonexistence, or even being indifferent, your stand towards God defines your life.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC