Friendly and unfriendly atheists

This atheist says that for somebody who doesn't believe in God, Sam Harris sure does talk about Him an awful lot. HT. The problem with militant atheists is that they've allowed their lives to become defined by their arch-enemies. But on the contrary,

The point is that atheism compels you to nothing. It does not ask you to serve. There are no sacraments and no sacred duties, no commandments, no elect to bow to and nothing forbidden to avoid.

<snip>

Atheism is not a project.It has no purpose. It proceeds towards no end. It has no meaning beyond the simplicity of absence. It has as little negative presence as positive and demands no philosophy.

Turns out that intramural atheist debates are just as poisonous as the internecine Christian warfare in the blogosphere, for somebody archly observed that this guy must not care about the fact that religion compels people to crash jet planes into office buildings. Sigh.

In another post he argues that religious moderates do a better job of maintaining a secular order than militant atheists because all the latter do is throw gasoline on the fire. He has a tactical but not substantive disagreement with Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. 

Karl Rahner wryly noted that atheists keep the idea of God alive even when they deny his existence. If a day were to come when even the idea of God had faded from human memory, then human beings would no longer be human. They'd be very clever animals. That's because, according to Rahner, what is unique about humanity is our ability to mentally transcend the limits of our creaturely selves. Not only do we think, but we are aware of ourselves as thinkers. Our minds literally know no bounds. And in that mental act of transcendence, we touch the Transcendent One. For Rahner, the atheistic denial of God is doubly ironic, not only for the reason stated above, but also because the atheist denies God at humanity's point of contact with the Divine, an act of self-aware cognition.

Freddie is certainly a more likable atheist than the trifecta that dominate the headlines, and he's probably a more serious challenge to theism because he isn't resurrecting God to kill him again and again. He's ignoring him. That's how ideas, and the realities they represent, truly die.

If I read Rahner correctly (and who knows? of all the dead Germans, his prose may be the most impenetrable), he finds this sort of atheism mystifying, like a person on a deserted island who's so enthralled with the flora and fauna of his patch of sand that he never looks out upon that vast, limitless sea and asks any questions of it. Rahner admits that many unknowns are destined to become known, but the infinite capacity of the human mind to ask questions and consider alternatives indicates that there's a qualitatively different mystery out there that continually recedes before us like a horizon.

I find Rahner's argument interesting but a bit superfluous. Faith justifies. But in fairness to Rahner, and Thomas Aquinas and the whole Christian apologetic tradition, they aren't trying to replace faith with reason, but are trying to show the reasonableness of faith, and not from a position of disinterested objectivity but out of a commitment to Jesus Christ.

In the end I'm not an atheist because it seems like all that an atheist has to say to the anonymous and innumerable dead piled on the ash heap of history, "It sucks to be you." If each and every one of us aren't known by name, and if each and every evil isn't eventually put right, well then, we and they oughta be. Starting with that guy named Jesus that got nailed to a cross.

That's why I believe. Because even if it isn't true, it oughta be.

Comments

[Katie Scarvey]

Good post, Marvin!