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.