My apologies to any readers who have patiently been waiting for me to carry through with my intention to write about the question of theism versus atheism. Today, at last, I shall try to make a start at this. As I said before, this is a long-term project. The current rise in popularity of atheism is the result of many misunderstandings, and they won’t be cleared up in a day.

Let me start with some fundamental misunderstandings about what faith and religion are. Today many presume, incorrectly, that religion and God are essentially and exclusively matters of faith. When this is compounded with the common presumption that faith is an irrational act, an act of pure emotion as opposed to reason, it can hardly be surprising when many conclude that atheism is the better alternative. So let me begin by briefly considering each of these assumptions in turn.

First: is affirming God’s essentially and exclusively a matter of faith? Obviously, one could beg the question about this, and hold that it must be because God is a fiction, and fictions can only adhered to by an act of faith. But then this could hardly be an argument for denying God’s existence, since it would be presuming what it intends to prove.

The beings of our experience are full of contingency. One day my friend is alive and well, and the next day he is dead and gone, from circumstances no one could foresee. One day we feel as if all is well, and the next day our world is shattered by acts of terror, or by illness, or by the destruction of an economic order which no one thought would be destroyed.

We could give a thousand examples of this sort of thing. On reflection, we realize that there was never any ground for thinking, in any of them, that what we took to be permanently enduring really was so. Indeed, on more careful and deep philosophical reflection, we can come to realize a very remarkable truth: There can be no such thing as a perishable being that exists forever. This proposition is not subject to revision upon further examination; it is an absolutely necessary truth, like the truth that 2 + 2 = 4. Being forever is a category which simply cannot be realized one day after the next; it will only be realized, if at all, through necessity, a necessity which is present either right now or not at all. Just as with 2 + 2 = 4, these are propositions which one can fail to understand, but one cannot fail to affirm them once they are understood.

A brief interlude: When thinking about this, I am always reminded of a great learning moment which took place in my childhood. It happened one day when I was reading about logical puzzles, and came across the question, “What happens when an immovable object encounters an irresistible force?” After I and my friends grappled with this question for a while, I took it home and posed it to my father. My father was no fool. But he looked at me as if I was acting like one, and said, in reply, “Well, obviously that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

What I understood at that moment is that our words refer to intelligible realities, upon which there follow consequences. If we fail to grasp this, we deprive ourselves of the wherewithal to judge anything. And I do mean anything. Perhaps some reader will want to suggest to me that the meanings of our words are up to us, so that logical consistency has no connection with real being. But such a claim will fall under the category of anything; it is a judgment about reality which cannot be made, once granted the very hypothesis it supposes. Or, if the judgment is made, it can have no significance, again by that same hypothesis.

Unfortunately, the doctrine of nominalism is everywhere today, and it is one of the most fundamental, but also thoroughly rotten, underpinnings of the contemporary atheism. I will say more about it in a future post.

For now let me go back to where I was. Once we undersand that what is contingent must pass away, the question forces itself upon us: why does anything at all exist? If the sum total of what exists is contingent, then there can be no accounting for the existence of anything. Or, to say it another way, there must be something whose being is not contingent at all, some being for which “to be or not to be” are not possible alternatives. Only on the basis of such a being can we answer the famous question, “Why is there something and not nothing?” This non-contingent being must be one which does not receive its being, but which has being from itself. This is the very being which God refers to himself as in both the Old and New Testaments: I Am Who Am. And Before Abraham was, I Am.

But note well, dear reader, that I have not used Scripture to argue to God’s existence. What I have done is argue from what reason can know, that there must be a God. And this is certainly not the only argument for showing that God exists. In future posts I shall suggest some others. And so the existence of God is not essentially a matter of faith. Neither indeed is religion the same thing as faith. Religion is natural, before it ever comes to be a matter of faith.

But it would be a mistake to infer that I mean to suggest that faith itself is not natural. Contemporary atheism rests on the largely unexamined assumptions that religion and faith are inherently and by definition outside the realm of what is either reasonable or natural. I shall say more about why these assumptions are false in my next post, beginning with what faith is.