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 this summer and will continue this month and for the next couple of months.
As mentioned previously, over the past 20 years we’ve seen the development of a cultural trend called The New Atheism (TNA). This month we’ll look at their arguments against faith, beginning with the question of God’s existence.
When you review the TNA literature on the specific question of how they know by philosophical argument that God doesn’t exist, the content is exceedingly thin. The New Atheists by and large aren’t philosophers, and their lack of familiarity with philosophical arguments in favor of God’s existence is apparent to those who have that training. The (now deceased) journalist Christopher Hitchens didn’t even attempt to engage the most philosophical arguments for God’s existence.
The biologist Richard Dawkins focuses most of his energy on the same, but he does make an attempt to refute the more rigorous arguments of the Christian tradition, specifically the “Five Ways,” which St. Thomas Aquinas famously presented in his masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. Unfortunately, Dawkins’ presentation of Thomas’ arguments bears little similarity to the actual arguments, and hence his refutations are completely off-base. It doesn’t appear that he does so intentionally, but rather it looks like he simply doesn’t understand what Thomas means, nor does he seem to care.
Interestingly, of the leading members of TNA, only one of them, Daniel Dennett, was actually a trained philosopher, and in his book “Breaking the Spell,” he doesn’t even engage the philosophical arguments of believers, but rather he seeks to explain why people believe, i.e., why religion exists. This is a common tactic among TNA: rather than address a believer’s philosophical arguments in defense of God’s existence, they’d rather ignore the arguments and focus on why the believer “really” believes. For a group that claims to be interested in reason, they seem more interested in psychoanalyzing.
As minimal as The New Atheists’ philosophical arguments against God may be, they have devoted considerable attention to a different argument: that the world would simply be better off without religion, and of course, that certainly includes Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. The fact of the matter, though, is that the vast majority of things people (including The New Atheists) value about Western civilization ultimately owe their existence to Christianity, in many cases Catholicism.
Take the “god” of TNA: the natural sciences. The truth is modern science was born out of Catholic-Christian culture. And it wasn’t just the foundation for science that Catholic Christianity laid, it was modern science itself. Many of the “fathers of astronomy,” for instance, were Jesuit priests! The father of modern genetics was Gregor Mendel, a priest. The first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory was Georges Lemaitre, a priest. Copernicus was a cleric. Even Galileo was a faithful Catholic! The list goes on.
Yet it isn’t just the natural sciences that owe their origins to Christianity. One of the truths of history that has made its way into the popular consciousness is how “the Irish saved civilization,” that is, how European monasteries—many of them originally founded by Irish monks—saved texts and manuscripts from the ancient world and faithfully copied and preserved them through the Dark Ages (a term, by the way, historians do not employ, precisely because, contrary to conventional wisdom, the medieval era was not one of superstition and ignorance).
In fact, it wasn’t just the monasteries that contributed to what would become modern civilization. Numerous scholars have been publishing books over the last several years or even decades detailing the Christian and often Catholic origins of modern economic theory, national and international law, and education. The university system, for instance, was the explicit product of the medieval Catholic Church: most of the first universities had been cathedral schools or monastic schools! If TNAs had their wish and there was no Christianity, our world would be a much different place.
In fact, lately The New Atheists seem to be recognizing these facts. Most interestingly, Richard Dawkins—perhaps the most well-known and vocal of the group—has lately talked about the value of Christianity, even describing himself as a “cultural Christian.”
Next month we’ll look at some of the other things The New Atheists take for granted, yet owe their existence to Catholic Christianity.
