I’ve discovered why atheists are the way they are.
The clue was in one of my favourite twentieth century English novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, where Julia is explaining to Charles the inadequacies of her husband, a crass American called Rex Mottram:
‘Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally,’ she said. ‘It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there.’
Rex had something missing that prevented him being a complete person. So do atheists.
Most people who believe in God don’t do so because they have been convinced by the cosmological – or any other – argument for his existence. They simply believe, using the same faculty of belief that allows them to believe in such things as the reality of the material world around them, the reality of the past, and the fact that minds exist other than their own. It is an a priori knowledge founded on evidence that is internal to the believer.
Descartes in his ‘Discourse on the Method’ knew that the second most certain thing to exist after himself was God and, although he used an ontological proof to verify this, it is clear that he simply knew that God exists.
That is the bit that is missing or deliberately suppressed in atheists: the ability to know God exists. It’s a shame, really.
Heh, you’re dead right.
We know in our ‘knower’. Try explaining that to an atheist!
Athiests very often demand some sort of scientific “proof” of God’s existance. But they forget that according to the scientific method nothing is ever proven. Theories are only supported until a new discovery disproves them. Any “good” scientist will always admit that the possibility of their theories being disproven always exists. Yet for all of the evidence that supports the existance of our God this is still not strong enough “proof” for the athiests.
I am reminded of the movie “Contact” based on the book of the same name by scientist (and I think an athiest) Carl Sagan. In one scene a scientist is explaining to a religous leader that she requires some sort of proof of God’s existance. The religous leader replies with the question “Did you love your Dad?” (who died earlier in the movie). The scientist responds “yes”, and the religous leader than says “prove it”.
Love for another is easily proven. The proof is in verbal communication of said feelings, the kind gestures afforded to those we love, and the affection shown in the way we speak of those we love.
You also forget that every scientific theory has actual scientific, and empirical data to back the claims of the theory, otherwise it never makes it to being an accepted theory. It isn’t just stated, then true until proven otherwise, that’s quite the ludicrous assertion, and the only assertion that can be made concerning the theory of a god.
Dustin,
Are you an atheist, perchance?