At the heart of atheism we do not find logical and scientific proofs that disprove the existence of God. Instead, we find the human attempt to answer the question of human existence apart from the existence of the divine. In some way or another these accounts try to make sense of man's place in the universe. What is it that would compel men to account for their existence apart from God? There are certainly many things motivating atheists to deny that God exists. However, I find it hard to believe that the majority of atheists have chosen that particular system of beliefs on account of the fact that they are convinced that God does not exist.
How can this be? What sense does it make to say that atheists are not what they are because they do not believe in God? Is that not equivalent to saying that Christians are not Christians because they believe in Christ? The reason that one becomes an atheist cannot be the knowledge that God does not exist, since no proofs with such a conclusion exist. The mind not being moved to assent by reason itself, there must be some other cause at work in the mind of the person who professes that God is not. This cause is the will, since the atheist must choose what he believes and it is the act of the will to choose.
This only pushes the question back you might say. "What is it that moves the will to reject the existence of God in the first place?" As we said above, concretely speaking, there are innumerable things that could lead to the belief that God does not exist. But they must all have one thing in common, namely this, they must all have something to do with goodness. Why? Because goodness is the object of the will. Which is to say that what we choose, we choose insofar as it is good, and what we do not choose, we do not choose because we do not see in it the good that we are looking for.
If God is by definition Goodness itself, then what would keep someone from choosing to accept his existence? Somewhere there must be a disconnect between the goodness of God and the person who is faced with the choice to believe in him or to deny his being. If a person accepted that "God" referred to goodness itself by definition, then for someone who understood what he was doing to deny that God existed, would require that such a person also deny that there was something good in itself. This does not mean that an atheist would never enjoy a sunset, or like reading books, etc., because he was incapable of seeing anything good in them; but it does mean that the atheist, by definition, would be incapable of seeing a real and lasting goodness in anything since the goodness that an atheist sees is merely a momentary product of his experience and not a participation in Goodness itself. Now I am at a loss as to exactly what makes something good if there is no real foundation of goodness for anything....
To be an athiest, is not to deny that God exists; it is to deny the existence of something good in itself! Since there is nothing good in itself, there can be no God, because to be God, is to be goodness itself. What is it that causes man to reject the existence of a real and true good? Can he deny his own experience of the goodness all around him so much so that the goodness all around him is nothing but an unfounded, soon-to-disappear, happenstance occurence? Is there nothing more to the experience of a vast blue sky with bright sun shining through its expanses than a momentary conglomeration of materials in a mechanical motion? Does not the fact that the entirety of that sky can be taken in to the person who stands beneath it point to something greater than mere mechanics? Can the fact of beauty be so outrightly denied that the relationship between the beautiful thing, e.g., the ocean, and the one who perceives its beauty, the person, is nothing but an illusion? And why do I say illusion? The reason is that beauty implies something more than just a material event. The sun can shine on the ocean, but the ocean will never be pleased by the hyalescence that the sun gives to it. The moon can shine mysteriously through a night sky, but the ape and the chimpanzee will never consider how pleasing the moonlight is to behold or wonder about what lies beyond that moon, why it shines as it does, or what mystery might lay behind its mysterious shimmer.
The experience of the beautiful, just like the experience of goodness, lifts man up, beyond the merely material existence of the world around him, and draws him into the transcendence of those values, the experience of which cannot be accounted for apart from the existence of a human spirit whose depths and heights allow for the material realities of this world to open up in their goodness and beauty and actually be perceived for what they are. For man to deny that there are goodness and beauty in the world around him, he need first deny that it can be found in himself. And once he has done that, it is no wonder that he would deny it is the rest of the world, since he himself is the most wondrous creature of all.
But this is perhaps the point that I was seeking in the first place, namely, that the denial of the good and the beautiful, is not just a scientific resolution concerning matter, but that it is a denial of goodness and beauty in man, and therefore, in all things. And in a world such as this, what person would dare to believe that there was an all-good, all-beautiful God? If there is no foundation of goodness in itself, then there can be nothing that is good because of another, and all material things are good because their goodness has been caused in them by something else.
The point then is not for us to confound atheists in a solely rational manner, e.g., with the five ways of Aquinas, because logic is more than often not enough to convince a person of goodness where he sees none. The point is for us to show that goodness does exist, that beauty too exists, and that these are found quite visibly in man himself, in the works of his hands, and in the depths of his mind, where God's own voice waits for him in his conscience, speaking to him of goodness itself. For from where would we have learned to speak of goodness and beauty in the first place, if not from him whose Word gives form to all words?
Moreover, it is no surprise that atheism goes hand in hand with moral relativism, since the atheist, in his denial of goodness itself, by that very denial, denies also the existence of a transcendent conscience which is capable of judging between good and evil. This would also account for the distortion of freedom into license, since without conscience as a standard of goodness and evil, man is no longer free to choose between what he knows is right and what he knows to be wrong, his choices being reduced to his private interpretation of his feelings about what is to be done or not done. Moreover, it is no surprise that atheism has taken root in many hearts in our day because the emptiness of a world without values and without goodness and beauty, where children have grown up without moral norms, expectations, or responsibilities, does not easily lead to a belief in a God who is good, beautiful, and loving. Nonetheless, God is still present to His people, and to every human person, He has given the unreturnable gift of conscience, that listening to His voice in the depths of their heart, we might be led through the reasonable and responsible exercise of freedom to a trust in Him and in His goodness that is the key to unlock the fullness of the meaning of the goodness and beauty that each person seeks after and experiences in undeniable ways every day of our lives. AMDG
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