The impossibility of atheism

The atheist objection must now be that the three persons of the Trinity are just three gods whose existence is brought into question. However, the persons of the Trinity are not beings in the ordinary sense of being or persons in the ordinary sense of persons. As I have often reiterated in these pages, God is known in his act, God is pure Act. Thus the first epistle of John names God as love. It is not so much that the persons of the Trinity are beings that have attributes, but that they are attributes. The Father is not a being who loves but is love.

This is different for the Son because Jesus was a man, a being, a person like us. However, we may say that he was pure grace, that his life was defined by grace and it was his grace - in obedience to the love of the Father - that is with us in the past the present and the future in his Spirit. The Spirit is the one who reveals the truth of the Son; he is the one who takes the scales from our eyes and unstops our ears so that we see the truth of the Father through the Son. The attribute that the Spirit is, is community. His action is not under our control, some see and hear, others do not. Thus the understanding of the Spirit puts paid to all individualistic Christianity; Christians can only exist in community, in the Church.

My point is, as regards atheism, is that a fully worked out theology of God that uses the language of the Trinity does not resort to a supernaturalism that relies on immaterial as opposed to material beings. God is not a spook, neither are the persons of the Trinity.

A further objection must come that Christian language posits God as a conscious immaterial being. Part of the explanation for this is that language has to be found to talk about God that uses the usual grammar of subject, object and predicate. Such objectifying language about God is inescapable. Second, many if not most Christians do think about God in an objectifying way. This is an example of the continuation of pagan thought forms about God. After all, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a natural idea as arguments from evolutionary psychology point out. Thinking of God as Triune requires some education and sophistication. That is why in the absence of this education belief will ready revert to the pagan forms.

A still further objection is that by forsaking God as a being in the sense of conscious immaterial monad we remove all foundations for Christianity. We are left instead with attributes; love, grace, community. We are back with the Beatles singing idealistically “All you need is love”. There is the real danger that faith is reduced to unsupported ideology. However, faith does have an object and that is Jesus Christ, a material being whose life and manner of death incarnates the attributes. Saying that we believe in God is saying that when we look to Jesus we see the essence of humanity whose fulfilment in us will change the social world. This is the one who will bring peace to the world.

So atheism is not as simple as it first appears, it is a rather darker animal than we could image. To be a real atheist you would have to decide after reading the gospels, say, that the life of Jesus was not about free grace and that it did not display the love that is the basis of all human life. To be a real atheist would be to find that this man Jesus is the enemy of life; to have a character that is pure darkness. To be a real atheist you would have to argue that the disciples of Jesus were bent on human destruction, were entirely self serving, and essentially mean. By any standard this is a tall order! This is why I assert that there are no real atheists. Perhaps there are instances in which human evil is complete in one person, but I doubt it. Certainly the self professed atheists of our time are tame pretenders compared with the real character of atheism.

This is quite a different picture to that of the atheist as the rational and brave searcher after truth and the prosecutor of superstition and barbarity. Self proclaimed atheists protest that only cold rationality can save us from irrationality of religion. But what is irrational about coming to the conclusion that this man Jesus in his life and death redefined what humanity is, so that he displaced all of our concepts of the good and the true and subsequently all the things we live by, our gods, and set us free?

Atheists come to different conclusions. They come to the conclusion that science and technology will set us free or that the state will save us, or that progress is inevitable. Are these rational conclusions? Are they supported by evidence?

It is time that atheists come clean and really enter the debate about God instead of triumphantly knocking over straw men and saying “See, it is all a myth!”