ATHEISM

Faithful to the Revelation that is made in Christ, the Church teaches that every human being is called to ultimate communion with the Blessed Trinity. The biblical teaching that man is created in the image of God (imago Dei) proclaims not only the truth about the origin of the human creature but also the truth about his destiny. In this life, communion with God through faith expresses the highest achievement that the human person can achieve; in heaven, the blessed enjoy the same communion with God, though they see God face to face, not as “in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor 13:12). In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the Fathers of Vatican Council II developed a rich teaching about the personal relationship that each member of the human race is called to enjoy with God. The universal call to holiness (Lumen Gentium, Ch. V) serves as a kind of apologetic for Christian belief, one based on the experience of the human heart, which the saints tell us is made for God. Subsequently, Pope John Paul II has made this theme a recurring element of his ordinary instruction. He brings us back again and again to the God who stands at the center of the human drama.

Still, many of our contemporaries “either do not at all perceive, or explicitly reject, this intimate and vital bond of man to God” (CCC 2123, citing Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 19). At Vatican II, the Church took a fresh look at atheism.
Human Knowledge of God • Earlier remarks by the Magisterium concerning atheism reaffirmed the classical position that man could come to a knowledge of God’s existence without the aid of Revelation. Thus, Vatican Council I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, anathematizes anyone who says that the one, true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason (cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, 3006). Of course the Church never officially included the proofs for the existence of God as developed by Thomas Aquinas and others into her official teaching, but she did encourage theologians to study these theological commentaries on Romans 1:20 as a starting point for theological investigations.

As a result, practitioners of theology, when confronted with the challenge of atheism, often explained a threefold division in the ways man can come to know about God. We move from what is common, though not innate, knowledge about God, to what can be learned by demonstration, and then on to what is revealed to those who believe. In this way, any believer is able to demonstrate that the existential situation of the atheist contradicts a truth human intelligence itself could attain, and thus atheism is founded on a position that could not be reasonably defended.

In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas clarifies the way that philosophical reasoning contributes to our knowledge of God: “Demonstration adds to our knowledge of God, and betters it, by enabling us to come closer to specific knowledge of him. For demonstration shows God to be unchangeable, eternal, not bodily, in no way composite, unique and so on; thus eliminating many attributes from him and so distinguishing him in our minds from other things” (Bk. III, Ch. 39). It should be recalled that this and similar uses of demonstration in apologetics contributed to a significant number of conversion stories in the twentieth century and before.

According to the traditional understanding, apologetics is the science of developing rationally persuasive arguments that are meant to dispose a person to accept the revealed truths of the faith. Because traditional apologists considered atheism intellectually untenable, they tended to approach the phenomenon in terms of the effects of original sin, either hardness of heart or blindness of mind. Theologians in turn accounted for the actual existence of self-avowed atheists by appeal to moral weakness or to the fact that the demonstrations involved in proving the existence of God required a certain philosophical acumen. Ludwig Ott reflects this tradition: “The possibility that there are also subjectively convinced theoretical atheists is founded in the spiritual and moral weakness of man, and on the fact that the proofs for God are not immediately, but only mediately evident.”

New View of Atheism • In the middle of the twentieth century, these reasons no longer seemed adequate to account for the large number of people who, even if they did not adhere to a speculative atheism, nonetheless lived as if there were no God. The Church was called upon to address a sort of practical atheism. This brand of atheism, so it appeared to the Fathers of Vatican Council II, described the condition of more than just a few members of an intellectual elite who considered it fashionable to adopt atheist airs. And so the Council addressed the reality of practical atheism, that is, atheism without speculative pretensions, as a central theme of its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

Since many modern thinkers no longer found the old apologetic persuasive, the Council aimed to develop a personalist apologetic for the existence of God. At least, this seems to be the implicit reasoning followed by the conciliar Fathers. For a variety of reasons, which owe much to major philosophical movements in the modern period, many educated persons in the twentieth century found the so-called cosmological arguments that classical theology had used to demonstrate the existence of God singularly noncompelling. Moreover, the experience of evil, oftentimes at the hands of fellow human beings who claimed to be Christian, provided a powerful, though largely unexamined, premise in an argument that denied the existence of an all-good God.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that at mid-twentieth century, atheism seemed an overwhelming challenge for the Christian Church. So in 1965, the Church affirmed that “atheism is to be viewed as one of the most serious of contemporary phenomena and merits close attention” (Gaudium et Spes, 19). (Thirty years later, that judgment perhaps should be modified in light of the wide and growing interest in interreligious dialogue.)
In Gaudium et Spes, the treatment of atheism appears as part of the discussion of the dignity of the human person, which is the central theme of the document’s first part, “The Church and Man’s Vocation.” Atheism is described less as a failure to recognize God in creation and more as the result of an excessive campaign to center the philosophical enterprise on the human subject. “Some so exalt the human as to empty faith in God of all content, being apparently more preoccupied with the affirmation of the human creature than with the denial of God” (19). Treating atheism as more a moral failure than an intellectual mistake, the Council even ascribes some of the blame for the fact that so many persons do not believe in God to believers whose behavior does more to conceal than reveal the reality of God and religious faith (Gaudium et Spes, cf. CCC 2125).

The Council also addressed what it called “systematic atheism.” Without mentioning communist governments by name, Gaudium et Spes describes the atheistic and antireligious suppositions of a political system “which looks especially to man’s economic and social liberation for his liberation, and claims that religion of its nature is an obstacle to such liberation in raising man’s hopes toward a future illusory life which would discourage him from building the earthly city” (20). In a clear reference to the practices of then-ruling totalitarian governments, the conciliar Fathers also condemn the practice of using the pressures of public authority to promote this systematic atheism.

The Council’s analysis of atheism points to a new initiative to remedy this sin. The person who gives himself or herself fully to the experience of being human will realize that it is impossible to live a satisfactory human life without a personal reference to God. Application to building the human city remains a worthwhile endeavor; but the heart of the Council’s analysis of a life lived without God rests on the conviction that the human heart only finds rest when it rests in God: “When the divine foundation and the hope of eternal life are missing, human dignity is seriously impaired, as frequently occurs today, and the mysteries of life and death, and of guilt and grief, remain unsolved, often resulting in man’s sinking into despair” (21).

For this reason, the response to modern atheism principally should be centered neither in moral exhortations nor on intellectual arguments. Instead, atheists should be extended an invitation to listen to the preaching of the Gospel “with open hearts” (21). It is highly significant that the most frequently cited passage of Gaudium et Spes, and perhaps of the whole body of Vatican II texts, follows the description of the modern spiritual malaise, which it loosely calls atheism. Gaudium et Spes, 22, declares: “It is Christ, the last Adam, who fully discloses man to himself and unfolds his noble calling by revealing the mystery of the Father and the Father’s love.” The Christocentric response to atheism is of course supported by a long tradition of evangelization, which begins with the very first Christian apologists.

Response to Atheism • Atheism represents a sin against God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church places the sin under the first commandment of the Decalogue, describing it as a way of honoring false gods. Atheism, then, constitutes an offense against the virtue of religion, which requires the human person, as a creature, to offer to God the worship and veneration that belong to the provident source of all being as his due. It is therefore fitting that the response to the person who lives as if God did not exist should include a call to worship him in the “one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ” (1 Tm 2:5).

Thus the theological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes invites us to discover God at the center of human existence. “For the Church knows full well that her message is in harmony with the most secret desires of the human heart” (Gaudium et Spes, 21). The personalist approach to apologetics responds to many important themes of twentieth-century philosophy, including the existentialist philosopher’s search for ultimate meaning in human existence. At the same time, the Church continues to hold that man enjoys the metaphysical capacity to come to a knowledge of God from creation.

As a perennial witness to the Christian Tradition, Aquinas offers a succinct account of the common knowledge (not to be misconstrued as innate knowledge) about God that is to be found in all men. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, he writes: “An awareness of God, though not clear nor specific, exists in practically everyone. Some people think this is because it is self-evident that God exists, just as other principles of reasoning are self-evident. Others, with more truth, think that the natural use of reason leads man straight away to some sort of knowledge of God. For when men observe the sure and ordered course that things pursue by nature, they see in most cases that somebody must be producing the order they observe, since rule cannot exist without a ruler. Such a consideration, however, is not yet specific enough for one to know immediately who this ruler of nature is, or what kind of being he is, or whether only one such ruler exists. Just so, by observing the movements and actions of a human being, we see that a cause of his behavior must exist in him such as does not exist in other things, and we call this ‘soul,’ though without yet knowing what the soul is (whether, perhaps, it is bodily) or how it operates” (Bk. III, Ch. 38).

As a step toward bringing all persons to a complete knowledge of the truth, which can only be had through Divine Revelation, the knowledge of God available to all those reflective enough to consider the world that exists around them is a solid and sure one. Not only does atheism leave one’s heart empty, but to deny the existence of God, whether speculatively or in practice, does violence to the dynamism of human intelligence. For “ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20).

See: Agnosticism; Evil, Problem of; God, Nature and Attributes of; Human Person; Imago Dei; Knowledge of God; Original Sin; Providence; Rationalism; Religion, Virtue of; Thomas Aquinas, Thought of.
Suggested Readings: CCC 2123-2126, 2128, 2140. Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 19-21. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. III. M. Buckley, Atheism. A. Nichols, O.P., “Chesterton and the Modernist Crisis,” Chesterton Review (May, 1989).

Romanus Cessario, O.P.




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 03:24:19 PM